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• HTC Threatens Handset Hackers With Legal Action For Distributing ROMs
  

  Leaks happen — especially in the mobile world. There are just too many people involved in the process of creating a mobile device to keep things under wraps. Take any given new phone’s OS installation package (known as its “ROM”), for example; when something is as easily copied and distributed as any other piece of software, it’s bound to find its way out eventually.

  When these ROMs pop up on developer/hacker forums, it’s generally no big deal — in most cases, the manufacturer doesn’t notice or, if they do, don’t bother to do anything about it. Once someone makes an effort to gather up all these ROMs and distribute them from one unified outlet, however, things get hairy. Such is the case for the popular HTC ROM distribution site Shipped-ROMs, who allegedly just received a Cease & Desist order straight from the desk of HTC’s Legal Counsel.

• Facebook Also Said To Have A Deal With Localeze For Facebook Places
  On Monday, Twitter rolled out Twitter Places, its attempt to add a layer of actual venues to its geolocation data. This was made possible by a deal with Localeze, a local business listing service with over 14 million businesses in their database. Now we’re hearing that Facebook has struck a similar deal with Localeze to roll out their own Places area in the near future.

  Essentially, what we’re hearing is that Facebook will use this data to populate some new kind of fan pages for places, that businesses will be able to then claim on the network. This is in line with the information we uncovered back in May on Facebook’s mobile site. The code on that page (since removed) pointed to a previously unseen Places tab coming to Facebook.

• Like This Wouldn’t Happen: AT&T Canceling Orders Made “In Error”
  Reader Matthew just confirmed our worst fears: not only was the pre-order experience at Apple and AT&T a big pile of poopfail, they’ve started cancelling “orders made in error.” Why in error? Well, presumably because things have gotten so fouled with eligibility in their systems that folks are getting knocked out of the pre-order queue.

  Here’s the email Matthew got today:

  Your recently placed AT&T Premier order was cancelled. If you believe your order was cancelled in error, please call us at 1-866-499-8008 Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

  Web Order Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
  Thank you,
  The AT&T Premier Team

  

• At The World Series Of Poker Two Founders Are Betting The Company — Literally
  You’ve heard the term “betting the company,” but have you ever known anyone who has actually done that? I mean literally. As in, they’re playing poker with shares of the company on the line. Because that’s exactly what Yammer founder David Sacks and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis are doing at The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

  When Calacanis first tweeted about it, I thought it was a joke. He wrote, “Got a sick @WSOP Main Event Prop bet with @DavidSacks: 10,000 shares of Mahalo vs. 10,000 shares of @Yammer–whoever lasts longer #poker“. But I emailed Sacks to confirm, and sure enough, the bet is on. “Of course. Sucker born every minute,” Sacks wrote to us. He continued, “To be clear, these are personally-owned shares we’re betting.”

• Zoho Adds Workspaces, Access Controls, Widgets And More To Zoho Wiki
  Zohi Wiki, which originally launched in 2006, is getting an upgrade today, with additional collaboration features, access controls and more.

  Zoho has added workspaces within Wiki to allow teams to have their own groups within organization wikis. Each workspace has its own administrative and customization options and can serve as a separate portal. Zoho has also added more in-depth access controls to wikis, which allows administrators to set permissions for Workspaces, multiple groups, individuals, domains, public, and for users within an organization. Admins can also assign separate permissions for edit, view, create and delete functions.

• Droid X Lands In A Cornfield Near You
  We know that Verizon is launching Droid X on the 23 – at least when it comes to press access – but it looks like they’re announcing to the rest of the world as well, right now, via a Flash-rich teaser site that allows you to pop in your email for more info.
• Apptera Raises Another $10 Million For Its Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network
  

  Mobile advertising company Apptera has raised another $10 million in VC funding, we’ve learned via an SEC filing. The startup’s previous financing round dates back to November 2008, also totaled about $10 million and came from investors such as Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden International.

  The company has yet to publicly disclose the new capital injection, but these types of follow-on rounds typically come from existing backers, with maybe one or two additional investors.

• Google’s Commerce Search For Retailers Now Better And Cheaper
  For any e-retailer, product search is the foundation of a commerce platform. Many times, a consumer goes directly to the search box to find the object they want. And the ability to easily find products on a retailers site affects the consumer interaction and experience with their site and produces higher conversion rates. Google began powering search platforms for retailers last year, with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. Today, Google is launching the next iteration of Commerce Search which offers retailers a more powerful and less-expensive version of the product.

  The first version of Google Commerce offered a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion. The newest version builds on these features, by offering a more in-depth search experience for users and merchants. As Commerce product manager Nitin Mangtani tells me, version 2.0 focuses on enhancing navigation and the user experience.

• Forrester Projects Tablets Will Outsell Netbooks By 2012, Desktops By 2013
  

  The tablet era has just begun, but Forrester Research is already predicting tablet sales in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015. At the Untethered conference today in New York City, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps laid out her projections comparing tablet sales to netbooks, laptops, and desktops. She expects 3.5 million tablets (including the iPad and other tablets) to be sold this year, growing to 20.4 million in 2015. Meanwhile, she expects desktop sales to drop from 18.7 million units in 2010 to 15.7 million units in 2015.

  As a percentage of overall PC sales, tablets will grow from 6 percent this year to 18 percent in 2012 (when netbooks are estimated to account for 17 percent of sales. The next year, in 2013, tablet sales are projected to outstrip desktop unit sales, 21 percent to 20 percent. By 2015, tablets will make up 23 percent of PC sales in the U.S., while desktops will be 18 percent and netbooks will be 17 percent. Only laptops will sell more in the U.S., with a 42 percent market share.

• Internet TV Search Engine TVLinks Exits Stealth – Content Goes Missing
  What’s this, a European startup thinking global? TVLinks, an Internet TV guide and video search engine, exits stealth mode today, and says it wants to battle the big US search engines and TV listings sites.

  It currently houses a database of over 30,000 movies, and 2,000 TV shows consisting of 80,000 episodes. In total it indexes more than 2,000 content provider websites, some of which it has formal partnerships with – US-centric Amazon VOD, Netflix and Google – while others are, presumably, being scraped or spidered via open APIs. The result is that a lot of content that shows up in search results is likely to be housed on their respective video sharing sites with or without the permission of copyright holders and/or geo-blocked.

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• Rakuten Buys PriceMinister, Enters The European E-Commerce Market With A $250M Bang
  

  Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten this morning announced that it is buying France’s e-commerce website operator PriceMinister for about €200 million (roughly $250 million), reports the Wall Street Journal.

  The news comes less than a month after word got out that Rakuten moved to acquire US-based Buy.com for about the same price.

• Forget The Mayor, Gowalla Focuses On Serendipitous Deals For All
  We’ve all heard about mayor deals with Foursquare. That is, a person who is the “mayor ” of a venue (essentially, has checked-in there the most number of times) gets access to special deals, such free items or discounts. Gowalla goes about its deals a bit differently. Because there are no “mayors” in Gowalla, instead, they’re focusing on giving everyone an equal opportunity to earn special deals.

  One such deal launching later today is with Eye-Fi, the makers of memory cards that give devices WiFi capabilities. Starting in a few hours, when a person checks in through Gowalla at any U.S.-based Best Buy or Apple Store, they’ll automatically have a chance to win a free 4 GB Eye-Fi card. A message will pop up on their screen about the card post check-in. And a simple click on the “Did I win?” button below that message will reveal if you’re a winner of the $75 card the spot. There will be 500 winners for this particular promotion.

• InMobi Launches $2 Million Mobile Advertising Developer Fund
  Yesterday I wrote about InMobi’s bold plan to grab mobile advertising market share while the getting is good. Apple and Google are distracted in an ugly turf war over iPhone/iPad advertising; meanwhile, InMobi, one of the largest international mobile advertising networks and backed with U.S. venture capital, is just starting to make inroads into the U.S. They soft launched in the U.S. earlier this year, and turned things on formally a couple of weeks ago.

  Today they’re announcing a $2 million world developer fund to encourage application developers to use InMobi for in-app advertising. Developers on Android, iPhone and iPad are eligible.

• Ustream’s Live Mobilizer Gives Bands And Brands Live Streaming iPhone Apps
  Popular live video platform Ustream is adding a new product to its repertoire today: an iPhone application platform called Ustream Live Mobilizer that offers brands, celebrities, and bands a customizable iPhone application that features Ustream’s live steaming capabilities.

  Each Mobilizer app is branded to the artist’s specifications (in other words, they don’t look like generic cookie cutter apps). The biggest feature here is support for watching an artist’s live video feed through Ustream, but the app also includes support for sharing to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. It also has Ustream’s ‘Social Stream’ feature, which lets you submit questions to the artist during a live stream and syndicate it out to other social networks.

• TC Teardown: Pandora – The Tough Business of Webcasting
  This is a guest post from Michael Robertson, a 12-year veteran of the digital music business. He is the founder and former CEO of digital music pioneer MP3.com. He is currently the CEO of music locker company MP3tunes. Until recently he was an adviser to Google Voice following the acquisition of Gizmo5.

  Pandora is the widely popular web radio service. Publicly they have said that they turned the corner to profitability in the 4th quarter of 2009. Below I forecast the 2010 numbers for Pandora using information from Pandora, music royalty rates that all webcasters are obligated to pay, and standard expenses of running a California based technology start-up.

• Nadanu’s Fundraising Platform Streamlines E-Giving
  Now more than ever, fundraising for charities, campaigns and causes is taking place online. A variety of startups offer simple ways to power fundraising campaigns online, including GoFundMe and Facebook app Causes. Nadanu is another contender in this space, with its Push-K giving solution, offering non-profits a way to power fundraising on the web and mobile devices as well as social networking sites.

  Nadanu’s Push-K platform allows register and “drop coins” into a custom receptacle. It is modeled after a traditional charity coin box, and donors can click to drop virtual coins into their eCharityBox and watch it fill up. Once the box reaches a predestinated amount the box is emptied, their credit card charged and an automated tax receipt is sent via email. Payment options include Authorize.net and PayPal.

• Still Really Want An iPhone 4? Find $5,000, Head To eBay
  As you may have heard, Apple completely blew through its pre-order launch day iPhone 4s in less than a day (and that was despite major technical issues with the ordering process). It has now blown through the second wave (due in early July) as well. The current shipping estimate if you order right now is July 14. Ugh. But if you absolutely want one at or around launch day, the Internet, as always, provides an option.

  Scanning eBay right now, there are roughly 400 iPhone 4s for sale (between the 16 GB and 32 GB models). Sure, the device isn’t out yet, but people are willing to part with the device as soon as they get it on June 24. The question is: how much do you have to pay to get them to part with it? Currently, the cheapest ones are going for $550 — and that’s the $199 16 GB model. The cheapest 32 GB model? $799 — a full $500 over the $299 retail price.

• Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad
  Since April, Twitter users have grown accustomed to Twitter’s first ad revenue play: Promoted Tweets. Today, the second phase of that strategy is starting to be tested: Promoted Trending Topics. The first such topic? Toy Story 3, promoted by Disney/Pixar.

  As you can see in the right hand toolbar of Twitter.com, at the bottom of the Trending Topics area there is now an 11th topic, “Toy Story 3.” Next to it is a big yellow box letting you know that it’s a promoted Trending Topic. Just as with Promoted Tweets, the functionality for these Promoted Trending Topics is the same as the regular Trending Topics — clicking on it takes you to a search results page to see what people are saying about Toy Story 3.

• 50% Of Android Phones Now Running OS 2.1
  Every few weeks, Google’s Android team updates their Platform Versions page that breaks down how many Android devices are running each version of the OS, based on data from the official Android Market.  Today’s it’s reached a big milestone: exactly 50% of Android phones are running 2.1, the latest officially released version of Android (2.2, or Froyo, went live for a small number of users last month, but has not officially been deployed on a wide scale).

  This is a big change since early May, when only 32.4% of phones were running 2.1.

• The Playstation Move Is A Wii Clone – But It’s Awesome
  The Playstation Move is just what it looks like: a Wii clone. It feels the same, looks the same, and works the same. That’s a good thing, though. Everyone and their grandmother has played Wii bowling and knows how it works. Sony isn’t reinventing motion control with the Move. They are, however, seriously improving it.

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• Indian Startup InMobi May Be The Big Winner In Apple-Google Ad Brawl
  Mobile advertising network InMobi has come a long way since we first covered them in April 2008 (they were then called mKhoj). Today they are probably the second biggest mobile advertising network in the world, with nearly 17 billion monthly impressions combined on mobile apps and mobile websites. Google’s AdMob has 18 billion impressions/month).

  Most of InMobi’s ad impressions are outside of the U.S. The bulk – 10 billion – are in Asia where the company first launched. 2 billion are in the U.S., where the company has had limited operations since January 2010. Africa takes 2.3 billion, Europe 1.6 billion and the Middle East .5 billion. A full U.S. launch took place last week, and a Japan launch is coming soon.

• Flock Switches From Mozilla To Chromium For New Browser, But Is That Enough?
  

  Flock, the social Web browser company, has released a new and completely different version of its desktop browser client after nearly a year of silence. The news comes about a week after Apple released Safari 5 and around the same time Opera launched a beta version of its upcoming Opera 10.60 browser.

  In a perhaps surprising twist, Flock is moving away from Mozilla technology after 6 years and making the switch to Chromium. Google will also become the default search engine.

  Note: it’s only available for Windows today – a Mac version will be available later this summer.

• Opera 10.60 Beta Lands, Brings More Speed, Geolocation And WebM Support
  

  Fresh off the heels of the release of Safari 5, Norwegian software company Opera is today launching version 10.60 of its desktop browser. And yes, they promise it’s faster. Much faster. Like ’50% faster than its predecessor on selected JavaScript tests’ faster.

  Opera 10.60 (beta) also boasts a fresh UI, geolocation support and WebM support for HTML5 video, so it isn’t all about the need for speed.

• AT&T, Will You Please Sell Us Your Rip-Off Box To Fix Your Service That Doesn’t Work?
  AT&T has had a rough day. First there was the massive system failure during the iPhone 4 pre-orders. Then it was revealed that private customer data may have been exposed during the fiasco. So maybe we should give them a break, right? Nah.

  As you may have heard, TechCrunch recently moved into a new office. It’s a great spot in San Francisco; we love it. That said, it happens to reside on planet Earth which basically assures that we’ll have no reliable AT&T coverage. Sure enough, we don’t. I mean absolutely none — can’t place calls, don’t receive them. As an old pro in the SoMa area of San Francisco, I’m used to this. But some of my coworkers aren’t and would prefer to use their phones as actual phones from time to time. So we needed a solution.

• Even With Pre-Order Failures, iPhone 4 Sells Out In Under A Day
  Well that didn’t take long. Not even 24 hours after the iPhone 4 became available online for pre-order, it is completely sold out. Earlier today, reports had AT&T being out of the device. Now the Apple Online Store is out of them too. They’ll still let you pre-order one, but you won’t be getting it on June 24 (launch day). Instead, Apple is saying the next batch of phones will ship by July 2.

  The fact that Apple blew through their entire first run of iPhone 4s in something like 20 hours is impressive any way you slice it. But it also begs the question: how fast would the device have sold out if the pre-order system actually worked today? I don’t think it’s a stretch to think the iPhone might have been gone twice as fast.

• T-Mobile Rolls Out “4G Speed” Network In 15+ New Cities
  

  4G is in the air! Or, at least for T-Mobile, 4G speeds are in the air. While T-Mobile isn’t technically allowed to pitch their HSPA+ network as 4G, its speeds can exceed that of the networks that some carriers (read: Sprint) have been toting as 4G for the last few months.

  This morning, T-Mobile is officially debuting their HSPA+ network in 15 new cities, from Los Angeles, CA to New Orleans, LA.
  

• Come Work In Our Beautiful New Office
  

  So now that we have this big, amazing office in San Francisco, directly across from the Caltrain station (read: commuter friendly) and a stone’s throw away from AT&T Park (go SF Giants), we need to fill it with more great people. We’re hiring. Lots.

  Join us and our modest goal of world domination. We love what we do. You can too.

  Lots of other jobs around the world are listed on CrunchBoard.

  The top roles we’re currently recruiting at TechCrunch follow after the jump.

• Japanese Gaming Company DeNA Sets Up $27.5 Million Investment Fund
  On the heels of Zynga’s $150 million investment from Japanese media firm Softbank Capital, Japanese gaming company DeNA has announced a $27.5 million fund to make investments in the social gaming community. DeNA holds an 83.3 percent stake in the new fund, which is called Incubate Fund No. 1 Limited Partnership. Other investors include a number of private Japan-based investors.

  DeNA says the main objective of the fund is to find and invest in companies that merge social media with game development. The fund will seek to invest in ventures that are at the seed level or higher stages. DeNA will also invest in game developers that can be included in their mobile gaming platform, Mobage-Town. A few months ago, DeNA also announced a strategic partnership with Yahoo Japan with plans to launch a PC-based social gaming platform, called Yahoo Mobage, later this year.

• The Playstation Move Vs The Xbox Kinect, May The Best Motion Controller Win
  It’s officially on. That is the motion control wars and, don’t hate, but Nintendo isn’t one of the combatants. Nope, this war is clearly between Microsoft and Sony. It’s the Kinect vs the Move. Full body tracking vs 1-1 controller tracking. This is going to turn out great for you, me, and both Sony and Microsoft.
• Twitter Gives Itself A Yellow Card For Downtime; Warns Of More To Come
  As you may have noticed, Twitter had a rough night last night. It was completely down, mostly down, or just extremely buggy for several hours. And in fact, this entire month has been Twitter’s worst month in nearly a year, Twitter’s head of communications, Sean Garrett, writes on the Twitter blog today. Why is that? It’s a combination of factors, according to Garrett.

  First of all, as Twitter noted a few days ago, their internal network needs to be overhauled pronto — and they’re working on that. The problem is that they’re also seeing record usage numbers — in part thanks to the world’s fascination with the World Cup tournament currently going on in South Africa. “We were well aware of the likely impact of the World Cup. What we didn’t anticipate was some of the complexities that have been inherent in fixing and optimizing our systems before and during the event,” Garrett writes.

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• Late Night Fanboys Bring The iPhone 4 Pre-Order System To Its Knees
  You’d think 1 AM PT (4 AM ET) would be a pretty safe time to put something up for pre-sale. You’d think that — and you’d be wrong.

  As we’re seeing tonight with the iPhone 4 pre-sale, there doesn’t appear to be a safe time to avoid Apple fanboys. Apple and AT&T’s online purchasing system for the new phone has been a complete and utter failure for the past hour. Judging from comments, tips coming in, and personal experience, most people don’t even seem to be getting past the first step of entering their existing AT&T information when the system simply times out.

• Facebook Starts Prompting Users To Log On To Skype To Connect With More Friends
  

  To find more friends on Facebook, you can do a search for them or have the service go through your contacts on other communication platforms like your email account (e.g. Gmail) or instant messaging client (e.g. ICQ). One of the options is to log on to Skype and have your contact list cross-checked with Facebook’s vast database of identifiable users.

  Some time this morning, Facebook started actively prompting users on their homepage, up on top, to connect to Skype and to discover more friends. As you can tell from the screenshot above, sent in by an eagly-eyed reader, Facebook even makes things easy for you by already filling in your Skype handle (not to panic, that means you shared it on your profile page).

• Apple’s Midnight Surprise: A Redesigned Mac Mini With HDMI
  Most Apple fanatics have been counting down to June 15 as the date the iPhone 4 would be available for pre-sale. But Apple had another trick up its sleeve tonight as well. While everyone is distracted on the iPhone page, Apple has quietly refreshed its Mac mini line of computers. And it’s more than your standard spec bump.

  The Mac mini has been given an entirely new slimmer (1.4 inch) aluminum case made using the same unibody technique that Apple uses on the MacBooks. More importantly, the thing packs a powerful processor and supposedly twice the graphics performance. But the big news is that the device has an HDMI output for the first time. You know what that means: this thing just became a lot of people’s media center.

• iPhone 4 Up For Pre-Order — Black Only
  Henry Ford once famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” The same can now be said for the iPhone 4.

  Just moments ago, Apple’s latest mobile device was put up for pre-sale on Apple’s Online Store. But as was rumored, it’s only available for pre-order in black. As the store notes, “White iPhone currently unavailable for pre-order or in-store pickup.” They don’t give an estimate as to when the white one will be available, but it will undoubtedly be at some point this Summer.

• Skype Now Available For Sony Ericsson Symbian Phones (Satio And Vivaz)
  Internet communication service provider Skype this morning announced the availability of the popular service on three Sony Ericsson smartphones based on the Symbian platform. Users of Satio, Vivaz and Vivaz pro devices can now use Skype over WiFi or mobile data connection (that is: 3G, GPRS and EDGE).

  If that’s your smartphone and you like free calls to your Skype friends on the go, head over to skype.com/m or visit the Sony Ericsson Play Now arena later this month.

  Read on at MobileCrunch.

• Twitter Is Very Down, And Could Be Well Into The Night
  Earlier today, Twitter rolled out a pretty killer new feature: Place support for geolocation. With it, you can tag your tweets to a specific place you’re at, or pipe in your check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla to do the same thing. Tonight, Twitter can’t seem to find anything, let alone the new Places. The service has now been completely down for over an hour.

  For long-time users of Twitter, this type of downtime is nothing new. But for the majority of users who have signed up in the past several months, they’re likely accustomed to a pretty stable service. Well, welcome to our world. I don’t know what’s been going on the past couple of weeks, but Twitter has definitely been struggling to stay up.

• Who Wants To Be A Tech Star? (Awesome Video)
  Fans of the Richter Scales’ work will love this, too. Last year investment banker Terence Kawaja had a music video produced (to the tune of American Pie) celebrating the death of old media. This year he turned things up a notch and went upbeat – lip syncing entrepreneurs singing a song called Tech Star – a parody on Nickelback’s famous Rockstar video from 2007.

  I’ve embedded both videos below. And Kawaja has a gift for you if you think you know your stuff – guess as many of the entrepreneurs that you see in the Tech Star video and put your results in the comments. Whoever gets the most right will win a Flip MinoHD camera. I’ll start things off for you by pointing out Fox/News Corp. exec Adam Bain early in the video jokingly complaining about his boss.

• How the Chinese Internet Needs to Up Its Game
  Back in March I thought that Google pulling out of China would hurt Google’s Chinese employees and shareholders more than anyone. The search engine was a distant number two in the market to Baidu, and many of the people already using Google in China, I assumed, were doing so through VPNs anyway, meaning the government blocking it wouldn’t immediately change much in terms of users’ experience. Beyond that, I figured startups in China’s thriving Web scene would rush in to fill any void.

  But I underestimated one big thing: The impact the lack of Google would have on China’s Web businesses. By essentially handing Baidu a short-term monopoly on keywords, user acquisition costs have gone through the roof, infuriating many of the people who were originally sympathetic to Google’s case just a few months ago. “They should have just not come into the market to begin with if this is how they were going to act”—if I heard that statement once in the last two weeks I spent in China, I heard it a dozen times.

  This wasn’t all Google’s fault. Frankly put, the company didn’t have enough market share to wreck things on its own. But it was icing on the cake of an increasingly unsustainable situation.

• Picture This: Yahoo Finally Takes Control Of Flicker.com For Flickr
  As one of the most popular social sites on the planet, Flickr is also undoubtedly one of the most popular misspelled domains. Pronounced “Flicker,” Flickr decided to be all Web 2.0-cutesy with its name back in the day. That’s fine, except when someone else owns the Flicker.com domain. Yahoo, which bought Flickr in 2005, has finally done something about that — obtaining Flicker.com.

  As we noted a year ago, Flicker.com put itself on sale in a very visible way. Anyone who visited the page was greeted by a logo and statistics about how much traffic the site receives. So how much traffic was Flicker.com getting? 3.6 million unique visitors a year, according to them. Almost all of those hits were direct (95%) undoubtedly because people would misspell Flickr.com as Flicker.com.

• On The Xbox 360 Kinect Experiment And The Future Of Motion Controls
  Microsoft has been busy over the last year. It was during E3 2009 that Microsoft blew everyone away with what was then dubbed Project Natal. It promised to bring full body motion control to the 360. We’re getting our first real look at the system at E3 today after last night’s theatrical reveal and, well, it’s keeping that promise.

  That’s not what’s surprising, though. Project Natal, now called Kinect, was demoed extensively over the last year and most of the media had a chance to play with the early demos. The real surprise today is that Kinect isn’t a Wii clone like it previously seemed. It’s something entirely different that doesn’t target just families or casual gamers. This thing is for real.

  Update: Now with a pic of our hotel’s bathroom! You have to see this.

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• BrightEdge Debuts Powerful SEO Platform For Businesses, Signs MySpace And Others
  San Mateo, CA-based BrightEdge is today taking the wraps of its enterprise-class, on-demand SEO platform, after hammering on it for the past couple of years along with some early adopting key customers such as MySpace, Symantec and VMware.

  Originally founded in 2007 by former Salesforce.com exec Jim Yu and Lemuel Park, BrightEdge provides online marketers with cloud-based SEO software designed to help them increase revenue from organic search in a measurable way.

• We’re Awarding Goatse Security A Crunchie Award For Public Service
  This iPad security breach story from last week continues to spin way out of control, and in our opinion fingers are being pointed in the wrong direction. The FBI is investigating the incident, and a few hours ago AT&T finally communicated with customers to tell them about the breach (I’ve reprinted the AT&T email below).

  Here’s what happened: Goatse Security discovered a rather stupid vulnerability on the AT&T site that returned a customer email if a valid serial number for the iPAD SIm card was entered. An invalid number returned nothing, a valid number returned a customer email address. Goatse created a script and quickly downloaded 114,000 customer emails. They then turned all that over to Gawker, after, they say, AT&T was notified and the vulnerability was closed. Gawker published some of the data with the emails removed. Says Goatse: “All data was gathered from a public webserver with no password, accessible by anyone on the Internet. There was no breach, intrusion, or penetration, by any means of the word.”

• You’re Damn Right I’m A Fanboy.
  As we all know by now, comments on the Internet are a fascinating thing. My favorite involve the word “fanboy.” Generally speaking, it means you write (stories, tweets, whatever) about a certain topic with a positive angle. It’s meant to be derogatory, but the truth is that it’s so overused that it’s almost completely meaningless. But for the sake of this post, I’ll play ball. I have a confession to make: I’m a fanboy.

  Now, I didn’t say specifically what I’m a fanboy of, because there have been too many titles bestowed upon me over the years. At various points over just the past few months, I’ve been an Apple fanboy, a Google fanboy, a Twitter fanboy, a Facebook fanboy, a Foursquare fanboy, a Gowalla fanboy, and yes, even a Microsoft fanboy. Never mind that most of companies compete with one another, so it would be hard to be a true fanboy of multiple ones without misrepresenting your fanboydom of a few of the others. We’ll just say I’m a fanboy and leave it at that. And that leaves me wondering: why wouldn’t you want to be a fanboy?

• That Just Happened: A Survivor Of The Natal/Kinect Announcement Tells His Tale
  I get the feeling that we have just participated in a dare — or the indulgence of a delusion. What else could explain the utterly insane spectacle that just took place in Galen Center here in LA? We were promised an experience. I experienced something, all right. Not something I’m in a hurry to experience again, I’m afraid.

  Those of you who weren’t present for this indecipherable boondoggle are probably wondering what the fuss is all about. The fact is there’s no fuss at all; the Project Natal Experience was a complete non-event — and I’d have said that even if the device, name, and launch titles didn’t all leak a couple hours before the show. But the fact also is that this was just too weird not to share. In detail. Do you like to read? Good.

• Yelp Co-Founder And CTO Russel Simmons Is Out

  

  Yelp co-founder and CTO Russel Simmons, pictured here (left) with fellow co-founder and chief exec Jeremy Stoppelman, is leaving the company. Simmons will be transitioning to an advisor role and take some time off to travel, we’ve confirmed with the company.

  Stoppelman and Simmons were both early software engineering employees at PayPal and went on to brainstorm new Internet startup ideas at a business incubator not long after the company was acquired by eBay.

  Out came Yelp, which first started as an email recommendation service, was transformed to become a local business review site for the San Francisco area in October 2004 and has now grown into an international network that receives some 31 million unique visitors per month.

  Six years later, Simmons is now transitioning to an advisor role at Yelp, we’re told.

• Zynga Goes To The Mattresses With Mafia Wars Users
  This story fascinates me on so many levels. Here are the basic facts: Zynga has been moving its games off of the Tagged social network and encouraging users to migrate to Facebook. Earlier this month Zynga gave out a special code to Mafia Wars users on Tagged that would give them $120 worth of currency on Facebook when they completed the migration. But Zynga didn’t cap the number of people that could use the code, and the form for entering it didn’t give users much of idea what it was for anyway. So word spread, and tens of thousands of users entered the code and grabbed the loot. Somewhere around 100,000 people used the code.

  When Zynga realized what was happening they shut down the code. But then they went one step further and rolled back the accounts for every user who entered it at least 24 hours, removing the free currency but also deleting any actions the users took to move their accounts forward during that period. Users complained on the Zynga forum but those complaints were deleted. Zynga also posted the notice below on their forum and then later deleted that too.

• No, The Internet Won’t Make You Stupid
  

  Nick Carr is worried the Internet is making us stupid. It’s not so much our preoccupation with LOLCat photos or videos of fat girls flying off of swings that concerns him as it is the way we read and consume information on the Internet itself. He thinks the Internet is rewiring our brains, perhaps for the worse, and he’s written a book to warn us all about it called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr also finds links to be too distracting.

  Carr raises some good points worth contemplating, but his arguments also strike me as incredibly self-serving. After all, he is an author who makes money writing books. Of course he is going to argue that they make you smarter than the Web, with all of its neurological distractions. Carr is the master of technological alarmism. It sells his books and provokes debate, and this time is no exception. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in the New York Times on Friday that “cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk,” and NYT Bits blogger Nick Bilton marshaled some other counter-evidence as well. Carr then responded to Pinker’s Op-Ed at length, claiming that Pinker has an “axe to grind here” because Carr’s point that experiences can change the brain on a cellular level “poses a challenge to Pinker’s faith in evolutionary psychology.” Of, course, Carr as his own axe to grind. Remember, he’s the one pushing the new book.

  At the core of Carr’s alarmism is that the Web is simply at odds with deep, contemplative thought and reflection. It’s really a defense of book learning in its most basic form—again, not surprising coming from an author of books who values above all else the printed word.

• iOS 4 Is Going To Up The Ante For Location-Based Startups
  Yesterday, Robert Scoble wrote a post about “Foursquare’s Yelp problem.” It’s an interesting read, with some good thoughts about how Foursquare can withstand feature-copying from a much larger rival. He asked for my thoughts, so I figured I’d jot some down here. Most importantly, his post got me thinking about the next phase of location, which I think we’re just about to enter.

  First, Scoble’s thought that Foursquare might be in trouble because Yelp copied its check-in badge idea seems a bit premature to me. It was a much bigger deal when they added the whole check-in concept back in January, but the fact that Foursquare has started growing faster than ever since that point shows they have an advantage over Yelp in the realm. That advantage is that they have a social graph built for location, Yelp does not (yet).

• Jive’s New Features and Management: Finally a Serious Enterprise 2.0 Play?
  There are few people I would get up to meet on a Sunday morning after spending five weeks on the road and mired in China-to-SFO jet lag. There are also few people I would believe when they said they were building a great “Enterprise 2.0” company. Tony Zingale is one of those people.

  We’ll get to why in a moment. But first the news: Jive Software—a nine year old company that Zingale became CEO of in February on an interim basis—is launching two new products today and continuing a big press push that’s tantamount to announcing they are a serious, next-generation enterprise software company. (He’s also recently dropped “interim” from his title, the CEO equivalent moving out of beta.)

• This Is How You Do a Global Meetup [Video]
  From Bangalore, India, to Sofia, Bulgaria, to Los Angeles, California and back to San Francisco, our network of readers threw an unforgettable, global, TechCrunch birthday bash. According to Meetup, the final tally was 360 meetups on Friday, with more than 4,400 attendees. As a thank you and tribute to our readers, we’ve put together a brief video to highlight your efforts. Video ahead.

  

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• TechCrunch Gets A Birthday Gift From Jack Dorsey And SF Giants
  

  A handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (and one lucky blogger) enjoyed a San Francisco Giants baseball game this evening at AT&T Park. Twitter creator and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey had a surprise for us to celebrate TechCrunch’s fifth birthday – a big Happy Birthday message on the main scoreboard. Thanks Jack – it made our day.

• Protect Your iDevice from Theft. Sorta
  So you’re at the coffee shop, and you’ve walked over to the counter to order another half-frap-double shot raspberry no fat mocha, and left your iPad (or iPod) plugged into your laptop. Suddenly, that skeevy looking fellow who was sitting two tables away makes a grab for your iPad, and runs for the door! You don’t see him because you were looking away, but you still know your kit has been boosted! How do you know? Well, you had the PadLock installed.
• MOG’s Music Streaming iPhone App Is Caught In App Store Purgatory, Too
  Yesterday we reported on a music-streaming iPhone application called Rdio that has been waiting for weeks to have an update approved by Apple. Now we’ve learned that this may be part of a new trend: MOG, the music portal that offers an impressive on-demand streaming music service, is also having issues with the App Store. MOG submitted its iPhone application over a month ago, and has heard nothing from Apple since. Phone calls and emails have gone unreturned. And the company is understandably getting nervous that Apple may be thinking of blocking the app.

  MOG has a lot riding on its mobile applications — it just closed a new $9.5 million funding round, some of which is going toward expanding its mobile platform. At SXSW it held a press event to preview its iPhone and Android applications, and what it showcased was pretty impressive. For $10 a month, users can stream any song or album they want, and they can locally download entire albums to their phone (which will work even when they lose connectivity) in one tap.
  

• Andreessen Horowitz To Win The Foursquare Investor Badge
  A months long fundraising process for Foursquare is in its last stages, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and Andreessen Horowitz looks to be preparing to check-in to Foursquare to take an investor badge.

  The company has delayed committing to new venture capital as they considered buyout offers – negotiations went deep with both Yahoo and Facebook, and possibly Microsoft. The Yahoo discussions ended weeks ago, and Facebook passed on an acquisition earlier this week, we’ve heard.

• Is Entrepreneurship Just About the Exit?
  David Park and Eric Bahn are earning more at their startup, called Beat The GMAT, than they ever did in the corporate world. Every penny of profit from the business goes directly into their bank accounts. They enjoy being their own bosses; have become experts in sales, marketing, customer support, computer programming and graphic design; feel good about helping students gain admission to business school; and are grateful that they can spend their time doing things rather than discussing things—because they don’t answer to anyone. Why should they sell their business and be back to working for companies like Intuit or McKinsey & Co., they ask?

  Ryan Sit, who runs a website called Picclick.com, feels the same way. His visual sales site attracts 300,000 unique visitors per month and generates millions in product sales for eBay and Etsy sellers—netting him a healthy six-figure income. He works from home and spends as much time as he wants to with his two small children and wife.  Ryan cherishes the freedom to do anything he wants—like experimenting with new website ideas. The last thing he wants to do is to raise capital or merge with a bigger company. “You become a slave when you are funded, and having lots of employees is just a pain”, Ryan says.

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• Facebook: Calacanis Is Lying
  Well, this is getting more interesting. This morning, we reported that Jason Calacanis’ Facebook account was still active, despite his very public deletion of the account about 20 days ago. When he found out about this, Calacanis sent an angry email to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg (and copied us on it). According to him, third party sites were keeping this account active — a move which seems pretty sketchy. We reached out to Facebook to get a statement, and they’ve finally responded. According to them, basically, Calacanis is lying.

  Facebook engineer Mike Vernal left a comment on our original post this morning. Facebook VP of Communications Elliot Schrage then emailed us, pointing us to the comment. I’ll copy of those messages below, but first let’s recap what Calacanis said.

• Apple Hits 10,000 iPad Apps — Store Doubled In The Past Six Weeks
  During his keynote address at WWDC on Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs rattled off some key statistics. Among them was that there are 8,500 native iPad apps. Actually, at the time, Apple had over 9,000, but we’ll let that slide. How do I know how many app there were? Because unlike other stores Apple oversees, they actually posts the number of apps available for the iPad. And that number just hit 10,000.

  If you go to the App Store app on the iPad and click on the “Release Date” area, you can see the total for yourself. Along the top of that area, it will read “1 – 12 of xxxx” — “xxxx” being the current number of apps that are built to run on the iPad.

• Hulu Founding CTO Eric Feng Leaving For KPCB, Al Gore
  Hulu’s founding CTO Eric Feng is leaving the streaming video company he helped turn into one of the web’s most popular video portals. Feng will be joining Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a Partner focusing on greentech, and will also start serving as former Vice President Al Gore’s tech advisor.  He will remain at Hulu until July 16, when he will be replaced by Rich Tom, who will take over Hulu’s technology platform, and Eugene Wei, who will take over the “audience business” including the Hulu.com website. Christina Lee, Hulu’s director of corporate communications (and Feng’s wife), will be leaving as well.

  Feng and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar just announced the news on the Hulu blog.

• Join The TechCrunch Birthday Party NOW
  

  Just in case you haven’t heard, TechCrunch is turning the big 5 today. In honor of this celebration there will be 363 meetups with more than 4,440 people across 79 countries, including Australia, China, Israel, Malaysia and Romania. Here, at the TechCrunch headquarters in our new San Francisco office, we will be holding our own birthday bash, complete with cakes, tacos, an assortment of beverages and of course, a livestream. We will stream our event from 5:35 pm to 7:00 pm, featuring interviews with our guests and members of the TechCrunch family. Watch here.

  You can also check out our New York meetup here, featuring our co-editor Erick Schonfeld.

  Update: Closing time. Birthday cake consumed, favorite TechCrunch stories exchanged, but alas, all good things must come to an end. We’ve taken down the feed. Until the 6th!

• YouTube Teams With IGN To Broadcast E3, Continues To Ramp Up Live Streaming
  Next week, the world’s leading video game makers and throngs of fans and press will unite for E3, which is generally regarded as the most prominent annual gaming-focused news event. And this year, fans will be able to watch live, thanks to a live stream that’s being broadcast through a partnership between YouTube and gaming portal IGN.

  YouTube will be live streaming the main press conferences (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft) and content from IGN’s E3 booth which will include game demos and interviews. All of this will be available on the channel YouTube.com/E3.

  IGN has of course been covering E3 for as long as I can remember. But this is new territory for YouTube, which has been gradually ramping up its live streaming efforts in the last year or so.

• You Know Where Else It’s Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo
  With regard to his recent spat with Facebook we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye with Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis. But this morning, we did when an incident showed just how hard it is to delete your Facebook profile. But after reading that post, someone brought up a very good point. You know where else it’s hard to delete your account? Mahalo.

  Seriously, try to figure it out. You won’t be able to because apparently there is no option to do it on the site itself. In fact, according to these two pages you have to email someone at Mahalo to do it. At least Facebook has a (albeit hidden) button!

• Dogster And Catster Go To The Groomer, Come Out With Freshly Curated Fur
  When it comes to social sites on the Internet, Dogster and Catster have to be doing something right — they’ve been profitable for the past three years. But that doesn’t mean they should just sit back and not tweak the sites at all to offer a better user experience, and they know it. That’s why both sites have undergone a complete refresh. In what CEO Ted Rheingold is calling basically a “full reboot,” the logo, layout, taglines, and even the services have all been revamped.

  For those unaware of the obvious, Dogster is a social network for dog owners, while Catster is a social network for cat owners. But Rheingold started realizing that people weren’t just coming for the social aspects of the sites, they were coming for information and services. So this revamp puts an emphasis in those areas. It’s a mixture of community created content and professional content.

• Weekend Giveaway: An HTC Incredible from Skyfire
  You know you want it. You know you need it: A Droid Incredible running on Verizon of your very own. How can you get one? Well, our friends at Skyfire totally want to give you one. Click through for more information.

  Skyfire, the company that released the first Flash-video enabled Android browser last month want to celebrate the browsers success in style, watching some of their favorite videos on a mobile device. And, they’ll let you do the same thing, even for one lucky TechCrunch reader who might not be incredible enough to have an Android.

  This is an international contest, so get cracking.

• Google Voice Desktop App Launch Delayed, May Be Scrapped
  When Google acquired Gizmo5, a Skype competitor, in November Google Voice users rejoiced – presumably they’d be getting a much needed soft phone on the desktop for users to make and receive calls through Google Voice.

  We confirmed that the application had been rewritten and was being tested internally at Google in April. Some Google employees continue to use the app, we’ve confirmed.

  But don’t expect it to launch publicly any time soon, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Why? an internal religious debate about desktop software.

• Rdio Silence: Apple Delays iPhone App Update For Reasons Unknown
  

  Last week at the D8 conference, and again at Apple’s WWDC event, chief exec Steve Jobs said there was nothing inherently wrong with Apple’s review procedures for new and updated iPhone applications.

  Specifically, Jobs stated several times on both occasions that 95% of all incoming apps get approved for the App Store in seven days. Those that don’t, he added, tend to violate some ground rules: crashing often, using unpublished APIs, defaming real people, or by advertising an app differently than what it actually does.

  That may well be, but it makes the isolated cases where all those exceptions don’t apply stick out like a sore thumb. We hear Apple’s review process is actually getting slower again for some developers.

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• comScore Says Bing And Yahoo Gained Market Share In May. Or Have They?
  

  Audience measurement firm comScore has released its May 2010 U.S. Search Data report, and it shows continued market share gains for Yahoo and Microsoft.

  Yahoo and Bing/MSN each added approximately 60 bps and 30 bps to 18.3% and 12.1%, respectively. Google is down, claims comScore, declining approximately 70 bps for the second consecutive month to 63.7%.

  But that’s not the whole story, and investors need to caution when interpreting the data as presented by comScore, say analysts.

• Kosmix Unleashes Its Realtime Tweetbeat On The World Cup
  

  The problem with Twitter is that it is too noisy. Filtering the signal from the noise is still too burdensome. The founders of search engine Kosmix think they have an answer with a new product called Tweetbeat, which they are unleashing in a preview version designed specifically to filter all the Tweets about the World Cup soccer tournament. Tweetbeat ingests the entire firehose of 65 million Tweets a day, and spits out only those about the World Cup which are it deems to be the most popular and important. It tries to capture everything from news to teams, players and fan shout-outs.

  What’s more impressive, though, is that along the left-hand side are flag icons of 32 teams. When you click on a flag, you see Tweets only about that team. You can follow only Brazil, England, Nigeria, or whatever team makes you want to cover yourself with body paint. The name of the team or “World Cup” doesn’t even have to be in the Tweet. Tweetbeat recognizes individual player names such as Cole or Maradona, nicknames, teams, even stadiums, and it delivers all of these Twets in realtime. A slider at the top allows you to adjust the speed at which the stream flows down the page. Next week, Tweetbeat will be available as an iPhone app and desktop widget, and sites like MySpace plan to use the data in their own widgets.

• Apple Begins Urging Developers To Get Their iOS 4 Apps In For Launch
  Today, Apple has begun emailing iPhone app developers to let them know they’re now accepting iOS 4-compatible apps in the App Store. Just as it does each time before a new OS launches (such as earlier this year with the iPad OS, which was iPhone OS 3.2 — yes, it’s a little confusing), Apple wants to make sure it has apps to show off when the new OS hits on June 21 (three days before the iPhone 4 launch).

  And this launch is important because it brings the ability for third-party applications to run in the background for the first time. Earlier today, Pocket-lint noted that “massive delays” were expected for multitasking apps. But there were two major problems with this report. First, it seemed to suggest that the iPhone 4 was the key to multitasking. In fact, it is iOS 4 that brings the ability to multitask, and it brings it to the iPhone 3GS and latest generation iPod touch as well. More importantly, they noted that “in our initial testing, only Apple apps, like the Clock, Mail and Safari, can multitask. That’s it!” Um, that’s because there are no third-party apps available yet that have this built in. That’s exactly why Apple is sending out emails that they’re going to start accepting them now.

• WordPress Gives Us The VIP Treatment, Goes Down On Us Again
  Well, that was fun. If you tried to access TechCrunch any time in the last hour or so, you probably noticed that it wasn’t working at all. Instead, you were greeted by the overly cheery notice “WordPress.com will be back in a minute!” Had we written that message ourselves, there would have been significantly more profanity.

  The cause of the downtime is still being determined; we’re waiting for more details from WordPress.com, the hosted blogging platform that is home to over 10 million blogs. We’re hosted under their VIP program, as are other large sites like GigaOm and some of CNN’s blogs. As far as we can tell, all 10+ million blogs hosted by WordPress were affected by the downtime.

  Needless to say, we’re pretty upset. WordPress has a fairly reliable track record overall, but it was only a few months ago that WordPress suffered their worst downtime in four years, when all hosted blogs were down for around 110 minutes.

• Comcast’s Tunerfish Debuts To The Public With HBO’s True Blood Series
  Comcast’s Tunerfish is opening to the public today; and debuting a deal with HBO for their show True Blood. Tunerfish, which was demoed at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago, was incubated by the Plaxo team (Comcast acquired Plaxo in 2008) and is led by former Plaxo VP of Marketing John McCrea.

  Tunerfish allows people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice in real time. Much like Twitter does for tweets, Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends (in the last hour, 24 hours, etc.), which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with. The site also encourages people to check-in to shows on both its web-based app and iPhone app, much like you would in Foursquare or Gowalla.

• Tomorrow, There Will Be More Than 350 TechCrunch Birthday Parties Everywhere
  

  Tomorrow, TechCrunch turns five years old. We’ve grown up with the Web over that time from a one-man hobby in Michael’s home to an expanding media outfit of almost two dozen full-time staff around the world. Since all of you won’t fit in our new offices in San Francisco (as much as we’d like to invite you, especially the commenters on MG’s posts), we thought why not let readers throw their own parties around the world.

  A couple weeks ago, with the launch of Meetups Everywhere at our Disrupt conference in New York, we started with about 50 Meetups. Quickly, that grew to 150, then 250, and now the number is at more than 350 TechCrunch Meetups from Bangalore and Jakarta to Johannesburg and Miami Beach. More than 4,000 readers will be celebrating with us, and you can join them.

• B52 Media, Bookmarks.com Buy Single Letter Domain E.CO For $81,000
  Moments ago, a rare single letter domain name was auctioned off live over the Internet. The domain name is E.CO, and it was sold through Sedo for $81,000, as reported by several industry blogs.

  All proceeds from the first .CO domain auction goes to a charity of the buyers’ choice.

  The seller, .CO Internet, which operates the .CO top-level domain, will soon be announcing the winners of the auction, but we’ve learned the names of the buyers ahead of time.

• How To Make The Most Of The World Cup: Apps, Web Sites, Podcasts and More!
  Let’s get down to business. The World Cup begins tomorrow, June 11, 2010. The tournament kicks off with hosts South Africa against Mexico at 9:30am ET/6:30am PT on ESPN in the U.S. (International readers: you’ll have to consult your local listings.) Consider this post a general how-to on making the most of the tournament. Mobile Apps, helpful Web sites, podcasts, etc. Woo~!
• Kevin Rose To Leave Diggnation
  Digg founder and CEO Kevin Rose will be leaving his popular Diggnation show, we’ve heard from a source. This has not been confirmed by Kevin, but we believe it’s accurate. Revision3, which hosts the show, has not yet returned our request for comment.

  The show has been “aired” since July 1, 2005 and regularly attracts 200,000 or more viewers. It is the most popular show on Revision3, although new shows like Penn Point are starting to bring in real mainstream talent.

• A Look Behind The ‘Words With Friends’ iPhone Gaming Phenomenon
  Back in fall 2008 — an eternity by mobile standards — I wrote about a fun little iPhone chess game called Chess With Friends. The game hit the App Store at a time when there were at least fifteen similar apps on the market, but it had one key differentiator: it tapped into the iPhone’s network effect to let you challenge your friends at a time when the vast majority of applications ignored the iPhone’s Internet connection. Eight months later, the small company behind Chess With Friends released the next game in the series, a Scrabble-like app that has since gone on to become a smash hit. It’s called Words With Friends. I sat down with brothers Paul and David Bettner, two of the founders of ‘Words‘ development house Newtoy, to get the back story on how the game grew to such popularity and where they’re going next.

  The premise of ‘Words‘ is simple: you fire it up and are playing a Scrabble-like word game against one of your friends in seconds. There’s no single player mode — the entire experience is built around multiplayer. And that formula has proven to be golden: the app now has over 1.6 million daily active users who average a full hour of playing every day.

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• Spotify Launches On TVs In Sweden and Finland
  

  Is Spotify’s future in devices and services? Like “Intel inside”, it’s beginning to feel like Spotify – the hot streaming music service in Europe which is said to be prepping a US launch – may have a better future dealing with service providers and device manufacturers than trying to go direct to consumers.

  That at least is the impression as today it launched its streaming music service on TVs across Sweden and Finland as of today, partnering with a Nordic telecommunications giant to do it.

  TeliaSonera’s 120,000 digital TV customers will now get instant, remote control access to Spotify, so long as they are existing Spotify Premium subscribers.

• What Has Kai-fu Lee Done Since October?
  I visited Kai-fu Lee’s Innovation Works while I was in Beijing last week to see how things are going. When I last visited the ex-Google China CEO’s incubator, it was little more than empty, expensive office space. (Next to Google…prime poaching?)

  Now, the offices are teeming with more than 100 people, most of whom are clustered in a nine very early-stage startups. Most of them are targeting mobile, but everything else Lee told me was off the record. (Sorry.) Suffice to say, the incubator is bursting at the seams and Lee doesn’t seem content. Expect more news soon.

  Lee is well known in China—see if you can spot his book on sale above. I shot it in a train station of a second tier city. But there’s some healthy skepticism about how Innovation Works will do.

• Come On Yelp, Really? Dukes, Barons, And Kings Of Venues?
  Obviously, companies copy one another’s ideas all the time. If something is working, sometime it just makes a lot of sense. But sometime it’s just a little pathetic. Tonight, we’re seeing a bit of that from Yelp.

  The latest update to their iPhone app (4.2.1) includes a feature called Yelp Royalty. It rewards users with the most check-ins at a venue the title of “Duke” or “Duchess.” Those with the most titles in their neighborhood become the “Baron.” Those with the most int he city become the “King.” Sound familiar? Maybe you’ve heard of Foursquare.

• Google Adds A Background Image To Its Homepage By Default (At Least For 24 Hours)
  A few days ago Google got slightly more Bing-ified when it started allowing users to customize their backgrounds (Bing has featured a rotating photo as its background since it launched). Today, Google is taking that a step further: it’s now featuring a background image by default on its homepage, even for users who haven’t activated the new feature.  It sounds like the homepage will be rotating through images for the next 24 hours — this is obviously meant to help raise awareness of the new feature.

  It’s worth pointing out that there’s a possibility the current featured image seen above is depicting the BP oil spill tragedy (which The Next Web is claiming). But Google’s blog post doesn’t say anything about it. We’re guessing that it isn’t a photo of the oil spill, and will update once we’ve confirmed. Update: Looks like TNW pulled their post. Update 2: Nope, we’ve confirmed with Google that it definitely is not related to the oil spill.

  Google’s Marissa Mayer writes in a blog post:

  To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we‘ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage.

• What’s Missing From iPhone 4 Is Part Of What Makes It Great
  On Monday, Apple officially unveiled the iPhone 4. After playing around with it for 20 minutes or so after the keynote, I can safely say that it’s the most impressive mobile device I’ve ever seen. But plenty of people (many of which have never used the phone) disagree. Their arguments are mainly predicated on what Apple didn’t include rather than what it did. But what those people fail to understand is that this is exactly what makes the new iPhone (as well as the previous iterations) so solid.

  During his keynote address on Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that while Apple may not be the first to release features, they do so in a way that’s the best implementation. Many people view this as absolute bullshit. But what that implies is that they think Apple simply cannot get features done in time — or that they will not do them for some reason. I have a hard time believing either of those is the case.

• AT&T Security Breach Exposes Thousands Of iPad Owners’ Emails (But Luckily, Little Else)
  A security flaw in one of AT&T’s customer-identification scripts has allowed a group of 4chan-associated hackers to extract as many as 114,000 email addresses of iPad owners. AT&T has apologized and explained the flaw and data leaked. Essentially, a bit of open information (the SIM card’s ICC-ID) was tied to a piece of private information (the iPad owner’s email address) so that on encountering certain AT&T fields, it would automatically fill in the field with the appropriate email. Think the “Remember this password?” notifications that pop up when you register for a site, but a little more low-level.

  The hackers, a group known as Goatse Security (I’ll let you work out the reasoning for the name yourself), organized a brute-force attack in which they pummeled a public AT&T script with semirandom ICC-ID numbers, which would return nothing if invalid but an email address if valid. A few hours later, they had the ICC-IDs and email addresses of everyone from Michael Bloomberg and Diane Sawyer to a Mr. Eldredge, who commands a fleet of B-1 bombers.

• Hello, Can We Speak To Nokia’s Steve Jobs? … Hello?
  For the last few weeks I’ve become increasingly fascinated by someone at Nokia. That person is Anssi Vanjoki.

  Vanjoki is an interesting guy. Last year he was named as one of the 25 most influential people on the Web. Why? He is Nokia’s most visible advocate of what Nokia still, perhaps rather quaintly, calls its “multimedia computers”.

  And he’s not some grey executive. Back in 2002 he was awarded what was believed at the time to be the most expensive speeding ticket ever, $103,600, after being caught breaking the speed limit on his Harley Davidson motorcycle in Helsinki.

  But this week he hasn’t been quite so visible. As Apple and Steve Jobs unveiled the fourth generation of the iPhone in San Francisco, there appeared to be not a murmur from Nokia, still the world’s largest maker of cell phones. Where was Anssi’s thundering response? We called Nokia.

• Sideways: The First iPad-Only Magazine Is About . . . The iPad
  

  While the print magazine industry is hanging its hopes on the iPad to lead it to the digital promised land where people actually pay for digital editions, it is still stuck with adapting a product designed for paper to the screen. But what if you threw the paper out to begin with and started with a magazine meant to be read only on the iPad? If you do that, you get Sideways, a mag app that claims to be the first iPad-only magazine. Its first issue is on sale now in the App Store for $3.99.

  Sideways is an iPad magazine that covers, well, the iPad. There are articles about apps for the iPad and music for the iPad and training for a marathon with the iPad (my tip is you leave it at home). “You have a built-in demographic,” says CEO Charles Stack. “Who are the readers? The people who own an iPad.” There are also other articles which would appeal to that affluent, techy demographic. The first issue has a lot of World Cup themed articles, including one on World Cup apps, a guide with venues and dates, and a primer on how to fake your way through the World Cup.

• Robed “Prophets” March In Front Of Apple’s WWDC Heralding “The End Of Native”
  Minutes ago as I strolled down the streets of downtown San Francisco, an unusual sight caught my eye (which is saying something in SF): a man, decked out in what appeared to be Jedi Robes, was pacing the street in front of the Moscone Center with a large sign hoisted over his head predicting “The End Of Native”. One woman asked him if he was supposed to be a Jedi. “No,” he replied. “I’m a prophet.”

  The “prophet” in question was on the wrong side of the street, but it didn’t take long to figure out that he was protesting Apple’s WWDC developer conference, which is in full swing this week. Three other men are currently marching in front of the conference center dressed in similar garb, each of them holding a sign with a different slogan — things like “Do not try and bend 3.3.1. That’s impossible” and “No one can be told what the End of Native is. You have to see it for yourself.” Each sign instructs viewers to head to endofnative.com.

• Apple (Yes, Apple) Helps Fix A Couple Chrome Security Bugs
  Sure, Apple and Google are at war, but that doesn’t mean they can’t help one another out from time to time. Especially with regard to WebKit, the rendering engine that both use in their Safari and Chrome web browsers. That’s exactly what happened yesterday with the latest stable build of Chrome.

  According to this post on the Google Chrome Releases blog, Apple gets credit for two of the eleven security issues that were fixed with the release of Chrome 5.0.375.70 on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Google does these posts with each new release to the various Chrome channels, and gives credit to the people who find bugs. They even reward money to those who find critical bugs — for example, one person got $2,000 this batch of fixes, and another got $500 (and some have humorously gotten $1,337 in the past).

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• Google Calendar Caught In An Infinite Loop For Some Users
  

  Looks like a subset of Google Calendar users are running into the same issue when trying to load the service this morning. Based on a flurry of complaints vented on Twitter, it looks like the service gets caught in an infinite loop and keeps reloading for some users, regardless of which browser they use.

  From what we can gather, also from the Google Calendar Help forum, clearing cookies seems to fix things (but yelling doesn’t).

• Don’t Buy The HTC EVO, It Is A Seriously Flawed Device
  Let’s start things off with a disclaimer – I love Android phones. Last year I left the iPhone and switched to Android largely because of the amazing usefulness of Google Voice, and only Android devices truly let you take over your phone with a Google Voice app and have the perfect experience. I have extensively tested nearly all Android phones to date.

  Around TechCrunch I’m the die hard Android Fan (Jason Kincaid is a close second). MG Siegler irrationally loves the iPhone and it has become an important fashion accessory and self confidence crutch in his San Francisco hipster lifestyle. I’m pretty sure Apple could remove the iPhone’s ability to make calls entirely and MG would still find a way to love it. You can read his review of iPhone 4 here. Summary: “It’s Awesome.”

• Did Facebook Doom Chris Kelly’s Run For CA Attorney General?
  Did Facebook doom Chris Kelly’s run for Attorney General of California?

  According to early results, Kamala Harris won the Democratic primaries on Tuesday night, leaving the former Chief Privacy Officer in second place. At first glance, the idea of blaming Mark Zuckerberg for Kelly’s downfall seems absurd. Kelly, after all was the underdog, a less known candidate that had consistently trailed Harris (the San Francisco DA) in the polls from a comfortable distance.

  However, while the Facebook effect is an improbable theory, it’s still very plausible. Let’s look at the facts.

  

• An iPhone Lover’s (Initial) Thoughts On iPhone 4
  This morning, my colleague Jason Kincaid wrote a very good and very level-headed post about the new iPhone (and the new iOS 4 software) from the perspective of an Android user. I’m going to come at it from the other angle.

  Recently, I’ve written my takes on both the Nexus One and the EVO 4G from the perspective of an iPhone lover. Obviously, I don’t have an iPhone 4 yet, and so this isn’t a full review, but after the keynote yesterday we did get some hands-on time with the new device. So I figured I’d write down my initial reaction after playing with the new hardware for about 20 minutes or so. Before I go any further, I’ll save you the suspense: it’s awesome.

• Why Japan Matters: iPad Mania, Cloud Computing, And Social Intelligence
  

  Editor’s note: Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, really loves Japan. And if you are a startup founder or tech executive, he thinks you should too. He explains why in this guest post, culled from observations from his most recent visit.

  Thousands of people lined up last week to buy iPads. And, if you didn’t notice them, it’s because they were in Tokyo.

  I’ve been living in Japan for the past three weeks and couldn’t miss the madness around the introduction of the iPad here. I couldn’t believe the demand for this new “magical” computer. After all, this is the country that developed and built some of the world’s most popular PCs—and now the iPad, which was designed somewhere else, is revered. It’s bowed to. (Reportedly, about half of Japanese business and technology magazines are featuring the iPad on their covers.) I expect that out of the 10 million iPads sold this year, at least 500,000 to one million will be sold in Japan.

  Something else amazing in Apple-mania happened last week. Apple’s market cap passed Microsoft. I suggested in a post last April, “The end of Microsoft. A door opens to a new cloud”, that this seminal event was about to happen. Steve Jobs described it as being “Surreal”. I agree. It is surreal—both unbelievable and fantastic. This is a milestone that signifies a dramatic change of computing: Windows is on the decline, and new technologies such as iPads and iPhones, Android and Google Search, and Cloud Computing are on the way up.
  

• Winning The App Store Lotto: What A Week At No.1 In The App Store Looks Like
  Ever wonder what a week as the No. 1 free iPhone app in the App Store translates to in downloads and ad revenues? One of the employees at mobile ad management platform Burstly created an app called Air Horn, which simply makes a very loud horn noise. The app, which had been out for over 6 months and had zero marketing dollars spent to promote it, recently hit the No. 1 spot on the Free App list.

  Developed in less than three hours by Alex Miyamura, Air Horn was at the top spot for 8 days and just dropped to no. 2 this morning. Over the past week, Air Horn has made $20,000 from advertising (ad banners) and in-app purchases.

• Caffeine: Google Finally Brews Its New Pot Of Web Results — 50% Fresher
  In August of last year, we wrote about Caffeine, the codename for Google’s latest iteration of its search product. The idea behind it was simple yet encompassing: to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” Back in December, it looked just about ready, but never came. Today, it’s finally ready to roll.

  In a post on the Google Blog, the company is saying that the new web indexing system is complete. Significantly, it provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.” Basically, you’ll now be able to find more current links faster than ever before.

• Twitter Hints At Content Recommendation Service With New Link Shortener
  Today, Twitter has expanded the testing of its own URL shortner — which is now using the t.co domain. The expansion (which will eventually be available to all Twitter users) is interesting in terms of what it means for the URL shortening ecosystem. But it also should be interesting from a broader perspective to the entire ecosystem because it opens up some new possibilities, such as content recommendation.

  Twitter developer Raffi Krikorian notes as much in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group today. Specifically, he writes, “we want to be able to build services and APIs that can make algorithmic recommendations to users based on the content they are consuming.” This will be possible because Twitter will be keeping track of all clicks (as they note, “in aggregate and not identifiable manner”).

• Exalead, The ‘French Google’, Is Acquired For $162 million
  Exalead, the search engine that (no kidding) underlies Friendster and has been behind French government attempts to build a platform to rival Google (yes), has been acquired by Dassault Systèmes, a leader in 3D software for big company processes for about €135 million ($161.5m).

  Exalead was also key member of Quaero, a technology consortium with a five-year budget of €199 million, funded by the French government to develop multimedia search tools. Where is Quaero now?

• Twitter To Begin Wrapping All Links With Official t.co Link Shortener
  Big changes are coming to Twitter links. In a post just published on the Twitter blog, the company has announced that it will soon be using a new official link shortening service t.co to wrap all links shared on Twitter. Starting some time this summer, every time you share a link through either the Twitter web client or a third-party, it will be wrapped in a link with the format t.co/******.

  So what does this mean for the Twitter ecosystem? Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman says that the feature serves three purposes. First, it’s going to help Twitter crack down on spam, as the service will be able to accurately monitor the distribution of each link, and it can warn users when it thinks a link may be malicious. Second, it will allow users to better understand where links are going (more on that below). And third, it will help Twitter with analytics, which is related to its Promoted Tweets. Goldman says that Twitter is pre-announcing the feature, which is currently only active with three accounts, to give the developer community a heads up for what’s coming.

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