Last year we found out Reevoo, the online customer reviews startup which had looked like it was slowing down, was actually signing up partners and getting traction. Today it announces a Series B round of funding from existing investors, though terms were undisclosed. The funding has been secured from existing investors Eden Ventures, Banexi Ventures and business angel Andrew Phillipps. The expansion capital will be used to grow faster across Europe and adding social functionality. A Series B funding is usually in the range of £8-10m. Prior to this Reevoo had raised over £7m. That means Reevoo is clearly confident of making it in the long term and becoming a pretty big business, although there is also the chance this is a "down round", which is never great for the founders.

Flash has faced a bit of controversy recently with Apple’s continued ban of the rich media technology in its products, including the iPhone and iPad. Because of this, many advertisers and media companies are looking to other technologies, such as HTML5, to serve video and rich media on these devices. Rich media ads are known to elicit higher CPMs, so advertisers and publishers are looking for ways to serve rich media ads on all devices. Today, comScore is releasing an online advertising report that shows that Flash and rich media ads represent 40 percent of all U.S. online advertising.

ComScore’s Ad Metrix Creative Summary report is designed to provide data on size, formats, and types of display ads being used by advertisers on publisher sites. For May, the report showed that JPEG display ads led the market with more than 42 percent of impressions in the U.S., while “leaderboard”-style banner ads (728 x 90 in dimension) were the most commonly viewed display ad by size.

In May, nearly 60 percent of U.S. display ad impressions were of the standard GIF/JPEG variety. JPEGs accounted for 42.4 percent of ad impressions, while GIFs accounted for 14.1 percent. Flash and rich media ads combined to represent 40.3 percent of all display ads viewed.

In terms of size, banners represented 23.1 percent of impressions, followed by rectangles (22.7 percent) and non-standard units (22.1 percent). The most common specific ad sizes were medium rectangles (300 x 250 in dimension) at 18.6 percent, leaderboards (728 x 90) at 18.3 percent, and buttons (120 x 90) at 14.7 percent.

Apparently, pop-ups and pop-unders now represent less than 1 percent of all display ad impressions, thanks to pop up blockers. ComScore says that new ad formats, such as the 970 x 418 pushdown and 468 x 648 XXL box, account for only 0.1 percent of impressions.

These types of metrics will no doubt be useful to advertisers and publishers that are looking to boost their CPMs and CTRs. Revenue for online advertising is on the rise, so serving the optimal type of ad could bring advertisers more money.

So far, an estimated 82 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. Everything BP has tried to stop the largest oil spill in history has failed. The company has tried everything from “junk shots” to “top kill” to containment domes, and is still spending $100 million a day to try to cap the well and clean up the mess. The company is even open to suggestions.

Whether they are submitted to BP or not, lots of smart people are sharing solutions their own solutions. Below are some of the suggested cleanup solutions, with videos explaining the technologies.

Oil Cleanup Ideas

For instance, actor Kevin Costner (remember Waterworld?) has funded and deployed devices designed to separate oil from water. The separated oil can be reused after it is collected.

Another approach, from Mobius Technologies, uses an oil-absorbing powder to trap oil molecules in a cake-like trap. The company claims it can provide a million pounds of the substance every two weeks, enough to absorb 25,000 barrels of oil. But with oil spilling at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day, this solution alone would be like slapping a band-aid on an amputation. The other issue would be how to collect the caked-up oil from the surface of the ocean—perhaps with a fleet of boats dragging huge skimmers.

Texas Tech’s Fibertect wipe slurps up oil from water surfaces, and possibly oil-drenched animals as well. But again, how many yards of this cloth would be needed to make a difference and is trawling an effective clean-up method?

One proposed solution is using oil-eating Oyster Mushrooms to gobble up oil that washes up on the shore:

While these ideas hold promise for helping to clean up the mess, it doesn’t plug the gushing pipe. Some are discussing ways to stop the spillage on independent forums and media sites, while others illustrate concepts with animations for a conical stopper:

and freezing the oil with liquid nitrogen to weld the pipe shut:

Brad Feld of the Foundry Group in Boulder, Colo. wants to see brilliant minds inspired by this quick-thinking solution from the movie Apollo 13 (“Let’s build a filter”):

Feld proposes gathering the smartest MIT students for a massive brainstorming session.

Incidentally, MIT has its own plans going, including an oil-eating self-propelling robot, mentioned yesterday at the TEDxOilSpill conference in D.C. Think you could do better? Enter the X-Prize competition for a chance to be an environmental superhero and win a cool $3 million.

We knew that Samsung had a winner on their hands with the Samsung Galaxy S, and we knew that a US version would probably be popular, but we didn’t think we’d end up with 5 versions across 5 US carriers.

If you’re stuck deciding on which variant would best suit you, we’ve compiled this handy list outlining the main differences, prices, and launch dates for the next Android super phone, as they compare to the original non-US model.

Read more…

So Barnes & Noble just let loose its financial results for the last year (ending May 1), and things are looking pretty rosy, at least if you take their view of them. The main point is that the e-book store is gaining popularity and online sales are solid, while brick-and-mortar sales are, predictably, in decline. B&N’s CEO, William Lynch, chose to highlight this little statistic:

In fact, in just a brief 12 months since we launched the Barnes and Noble ebookstore, our share of the digital market already exceeds our share of the retail book market.

Good for them… I think.

Read more…

Over 1 million of users have purchased and downloaded the MobiTV iPhone app, propelling it to number two on Apple’s Top Grossing apps list.

The application (iTunes link), which was released in April 2010 and is only available to users in the United States, features live TV programming and video-on-demand content from every major network, and many of the most popular cable channels.

But the real reason it has now surpassed 1 million downloads on the App Store is the planet’s largest football event, the World Cup – all the games can be watched via MobiTV for iPhone.

Since the beginning of the tournament, MobiTV has seen a 47 percent increase in downloads and a staggering 250 percent increase in paid subscriptions. Furthermore, the MobiTV app has delivered a more than 12 percent purchase-to-download conversion rate, from the free app to the premium upgrade, the company says.

Finally, users have been watching content through MobiTV’s app for an average duration of 30 minutes, almost twice the previous average in session length.

Founded in 1999, MobiTV was one of the pioneers in bringing live and on-demand TV to mobile devices, and the company boasts partnerships with a number of carriers and content providers such as NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, Warner Music and more. The company has to date raised approximately $115 million from a wide range of investors.

Let’s file this one under “potentially frivolous.” Kershaw, Cutter, and Ratinoff are a legal outfit best known for filing against Zynga regarding the notorious Farmville offers, may be filing for a class action lawsuit against Apple. Unlike the Zynga case, this one seems less than legit. That’s assuming they even deem it worthwhile; they’re just collecting data right now:

“KCR is currently investigating potential problems with the release of iPhone 4.

If you recently purchased the new iPhone and have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls and weak signals, we would like to hear from you.”

Seems to me that this whole debacle falls under the “caveat emptor” exclusion from seller responsibility.

Read more…

Music licensing company Rumblefish last week announced a new music program for YouTube users, enabling them to buy a lifetime, worldwide music license on a selected music track at $1.99 a pop and fully edit the music into their videos.

The online store, dubbed Friendly Music, has just been pushed live.

YouTube users can use the website to access Rumblefish's catalog of copyright-cleared songs (about 35,000 tracks strong), which they can use to create soundtracks for their videos.

As I mentioned, songs can be purchased from the Friendly Music site at $1.99 per video, and users can edit them using which video-editing application they prefer. Buyers receive an official license for every song they use, so when they upload their finished video to YouTube they can be confident it will not be blocked or deprived of its audio.

FriendlyMusic offers royalty-free songs by artists in styles ranging from rap, reggae and R&B to country, pop and techno, as well as full orchestral recordings of classical compositions.

New music is said to be added to the catalog on a daily basis, and in the coming months the company says the Friendly Music catalog will expand to include “handpicked collections of name artists”.

Ladies and gents, this is a 3TB hard drive. Let that sink in. Three effin terabytes. That's a whole lot of data on one hard drive. Seagate previously stated that the drive would be out by year's end, but here it is and it's barely summer. The FreeAgent GoFlex family is Seagate's first product line to sport the gigantic hard drive. USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 via Seagate's GoFlex adapters are tasked with the job of transferring the data to and fro the connected computer. The USB 2.0 flavor is available right now with the MSRP $249. The real story, however, isn't that Seagate managed to stuff 3TB into one 3.5-inch hard drive. It's that Seagate is actually bringing it to market amid so many potential problems.

Small companies clone big companies all the time. And by clone I don’t just mean steal a basic idea. I mean clone almost literally – they just plain rip off every single feature and hope for the best. It certainly saves time on user testing.

Big companies, particularly big tech companies, don’t do this as much. Pride and ethics come into play at an individual and team level. Pure copying just isn’t how things are done.

Instead they tweak a little here, add a little there, and launch it as a variation of the original. That’s evolution, not stealing.

And most of the time it doesn’t work very well. Facebook’s users just don’t seem to want to behave like Twitter users, for example, no matter how hard Facebook tried to get them to change. And Google Buzz, besides the privacy snafus in the beginning, is just a little too complicated to get people using it wildly. Plus, I’m not convinced that people want all that junk in their email inbox.

But pure clones work well. Microsoft crushed Netscape in the 90s by simply building their own web browser and giving it away for free. Webmail and instant messaging services across Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and AOL are all largely the same, and that market is fragmented among all of those companies. If there’s a better way to do mail and messaging, no one has figured it out yet and gotten all the users to switch to them.

And that’s why it’s time for Google to just plane clone Facebook. Enough with the fancy pants Google Buzz Twitter-Facebook-Yelp killer. They need to raise the white flag and just copy Facebook right down to the details. Otherwise the war is over before Google even got to the battlefield.

So I’m not surprised to see that Google appears to be working on exactly that – a new social network that isn’t Orkut and isn’t Buzz but that will be 100% focused on being as good as or better than Facebook.

Why do they need to do this? Google is, after all, firing on all cylinders. Google continues to grow fast and has $24 billion a year in revenue. They dominate search marketing, possibly the most profitable business in the history of our species if you don’t include taxes, drugs or prostitution. Facebook has a long way to go to catch up.

Or do they? Facebook’s self serve ad business is exploding, say our sources, and may be significantly more robust than even the most favorable third party forecasts predict. Google let’s self serve users target ads based on search queries, and that works extremely well. But Facebook knows much, much more about its users than Google does, and allows self serve ads targeted to extremely relevant and timely user information. And with Facebook’s strategy of organizing the Internet through Facebook Platform has created a big open door for them to later insert ads on those sites, too. Facebook could be challenging Google’s revenue lead much sooner than people think. It’s not outrageous to think that the two companies could be in a dead heat by 2015, for example. See The Age Of Facebook for more of my thoughts on the rise of Facebook and why I think they’ll dominate the next decade.

Facebook is already bigger than Google in many ways. Not in total unique visitors per month – Facebook’s 550 million is still a lot less than Google’s 900 million. But Facebook has more page views: 250 billion v. 165 billion per month. And total minutes spent on Facebook is more than 2x Google: 150 billion v. 73 billion. (All stats are Comscore worldwide, May 2010).

Google needs a horse in the social networking race to be able to defend itself against Facebook over the long run. And the only way they’re going to be able to compete effectively is to just clone the darn thing. Original? No. Honorable? nope. But people have very short memories, sadly, and it’ll all blow over shortly.

There is one area where Google can gain a quick advantage – in truly open data with simple export tools and easy to understand privacy settings. I’d recommend going with the Twitter model on privacy – it’s all public or it’s all private (for approved friends only). It’s not hard to understand, and very few people actually choose the private option.

What Google shouldn’t do – must not do – is try to tie the service to other Google products for the wrong reasons. Microsoft’s web properties are constantly hobbled by the strategic decisions of a parent company that must protect an aging Windows and Office revenue stream, for example. Google must avoid that pitfall. And Facebook’s Twitter experiments, as well as Google bolting Buzz onto Gmail, show that users don’t like having the fundamental way they use products change very much. They need to flock to Google Me, or whatever it’s called, simply because they like the service.

This will be the great battle in consumer Internet over the next few years if Google does it right. And while I don’t like seeing clones, there’s really no other choice for Google. And at least the users will win – one thing Facebook needs right now is a little competition.

ps – Next up would be the Google Twitter clone. An exact copy, except with an open protocol that would let anyone run the service on their own server. They should call it Glitter.

ProgrammableWeb, a well-known repository for Web APIs, has been acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in a surprise move. Terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed, but according to the press release, ProgrammableWeb will continue to operate as a separate entity and the site’s founder John Musser will be making the move to Alcatel-Lucent.

The repository, which was launched back in 2005 and now contains some 2,042 APIs (we covered when it hit 1,000 back in November 2008), will be maintained by its new owner.

Alcatel-Lucent says it bought ProgrammableWeb to help foster an ecosystem of service providers, enterprises, and developers to drive the creation of applications at present and in the ‘new world of broadband mobile’ through LTE (Long Term Evolution). The company adds that it will provide support and resources to promote the growth of the API, mashup and developer ecosystem, and facilitate service providers’ participation within it.

The acquisition also gives Alcatel-Lucent access to general API usage patterns, allowing it to build API Bundles for its own Open API Service. ProgrammableWeb’s API monitoring services, API trial services, and automated API updates will be integrated into Alcatel-Lucent’s Developer Platform.

One thing home solar startup SunRun doesn’t seem to have a problem with is getting access to lots of capital. The three year old company has now raised $85 million in venture capital – including a new $55 million round led by Sequoia Capital. Previous investors Accel Partners and Foundation Capital also participated in the round.

But that’s not all. The company also has $90 million from US Bancorp and $100 million from PG&E to finance home solar installations.

At its core SunRun is a finance company. They offer attractive solutions to home owners to add solar panels to their roof, or in their yard. Customers can choose to pay up a single up front fee for the systems – which average around $25,000 – or pay nothing up front and make monthly payments over the decades-long useful life of the system. Either way customers are likely to save money versus their normal grid electricity largely thanks to federal tax credits and state and local incentives to go solar.

Most states allow solar users to sell excess electricity back to the grid, decreasing costs further. During the day you sell your electricity back to the utility, and in the evening you take some of that electricity back. That also reduces the need for costly batteries to store energy as its produced.

SunRun is one of the leading companies in home solar with around 17% market share. They have 5,000 customers in California, Colorado, Arizona, Massachusetts and New Jersey. They’ll eventually launch in other states as energy prices increase and/or state and local incentives become more widely available.

I spoke to CEO Edward Fenster yesterday about the company and the solar market in general. He says on average customers reduce their electricity costs by around 2/3 if they go solar. As energy costs rise, the attractiveness of solar will only increase. And for their part, Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth says that SunRun “puts solar within reach of the average American home owner."

Good news, MOG fans. The online music streaming service, which allows users to listen to as many songs as they want for a flat monthly fee, has had its iPhone application approved by Apple after spending well over a month in App Store purgatory. The application isn’t available for the iPhone quite yet (MOG says it will launch in the next few weeks), but it’s been given the green light by Apple, which is important considering that the company was worried it might be blocked. In addition to that news, MOG has also announced a new partnership to put MOG on Roku media players.

Roku makes an inexpensive set-top box for streaming media to your TV; this marks the first hardware integration for MOG. The service is included as part of MOG’s existing premium plan, which runs $4.99 a month and lets you stream as much music as you’d like from the site (and now, your Roku box). MOG CEO David Hyman says that this is the first on-demand music service that’s on Roku, noting that Pandora’s Internet Radio is available as well (Pandora doesn’t let you choose what song you want to listen to).

MOG’s iPhone app, which we got a preview of in March, lets you download an entire album to your phone in one tap (it looks quite nice). It also includes a radio feature that lets you stream songs that sound similar to a few seed artists or songs, as you would with Pandora. Apple’s approval of the application has to have the company and investors)breathing a sigh of relief — a big part of MOG’s premium strategy involves its mobile applications, and for a while it was looking like Apple might block it because it stands to compete with its own upcoming cloud-based music service.

All-you-can-eat access to MOG’s mobile applications will cost $9.99, which includes access to the aforementioned web and Roku service. Hyman says that we can likely expect the iPhone application in July, and that it will launch alongside an Android app.

Cloudera, which is backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, commercially distributes and services Hadoop. The startup is announcing its first paid software today: Cloudera Enterprise. Cloudera Enterprise is next generation data management software to help companies leverage the Apache Hadoop platform. Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology.

A day after Amazon made it abundantly clear it’s gunning for world domination in the e-reading space by lowering the price of the Kindle from $259 to $189 – following competitor Barnes & Noble’s decision to slash the price of its Nook e-reader down to $199 – chief executive Jeff Bezos sat down with Fortune’s JP Mangalindan for a fairly interesting interview.

One of the things Bezos talked about was the iPad, Apple’s tablet computer that is selling like hotcakes and unequivocally poses a genuine threat to Amazon’s burgeoning ebooks and ereader business (and, as some claim, to reading in general).

According to Apple, it’s already taken about 22% of the U.S. ebooks market, with iPad owners having downloaded some 5 million books in the first 65 days of the iBooks store alone.

But Bezos does not seem terribly impressed.

Here’s the key part of the interview (which you should read in its entirety):

Fortune: Obviously, the Kindle’s price drop was in response to Barnes & Noble’s price cut on the Nook. Did the iPad and its overnight success play a role, too?

Bezos: No. The iPad… I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It’s really a different product category. The Kindle is for readers.

Fortune: So far you’ve been capturing consumers. Amazon accounted for about 80% of all electronic book sales last year. How has it grown so fast, and can you keep it up?

Bezos: It’s hard even for us to remember internally that we only launched Kindle a little over 30 months ago.

Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle.

His words ring true, because this strategy is visible in the field too.

We now have a Kindle reader app for Android phones, a Kindle app that includes fresh support for video and audio for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and versions for BlackBerry devices, PC and Mac computers via a desktop client and of course the company’s own Kindle, which Bezos says has been purchased by “millions”.

Furthermore, Amazon boasts more than 620,000 ebooks in its catalog, significantly more than Apple, despite the latter’s agreements with 5 of the 6 top publishers in the United States.

Finally, I think Bezos is right about the fact that there will be many tablet devices making their way to the market in the coming months and years (according to Forrester Research, there will be 59 million tablets in use by 2015) and that Amazon should be focusing on being able to shift ebooks on as many platforms as possible.

But does all that mean Bezos should be dismissing the iPad for being a different product?

Cross-platform ebook selling strategy aside, with the Kindle Amazon has stepped into the hardware arena, and the reality is price doesn’t always make the difference. The iPad can simply do a lot more than the most recent model of the Kindle can, and the next-gen iPad is undoubtedly already in the works.

ZDnet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes put it best when he wrote:

The problem with the Kindle (and Nook) is that it's a one-trick pony. One-trick ponies are cool in an ecosystem where there are no other ponies doing tricks. Add more ponies doing more tricks, and the one-trick pony gets long in the tooth real fast.

Maybe Amazon’s problem is that the iPad really is a different product category?

(Image via TechCN)

Back in January, with big balls, Google wrote the following:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

In March, Google backed that talk up by redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk, writing the following:

Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

The Chinese government has finally responded (at least in a more formal way), and they’re clearly not happy — no surprise there. But what is kind of surprising is that Google is sort of backing down now. Well, maybe not so surprising. But a bit disappointing.

Tonight, David Drummond, Google’s top legal executive, has written a post outlining Google’s “new approach” to China. Basically, they’re ending the redirect from google.cn to google.com.hk — and restarting the Chinese Google page. But instead of being the full (and fully censored) site that it once was, Google is making it into a completely degraded search engine (think: music and text translation), and instead providing a link to the Hong Kong Google site (which is not censored at all).

Google’s position is clearly that’s they’re not ready to fully give up on China just yet. While they’re still refusing to censor (which Chinese law requires), they are willing to stop the redirect which China finds “unacceptable.” Why? Because if they don’t, China won’t renew the Internet Content Provider license — google.cn will cease to be.

On one hand, I obviously understand why Google is making this pivot and slightly going back on their powerful action. On the other hand, as I noted above, Google clearly knew the risks it was taking with their actions — they did them anyway. That’s what made the move seem so ballsy and brilliant. But, of course, that was before the first real punch was thrown. Now that it has been, and they’re flinching — no matter how slightly — the actions seem less ballsy, less brilliant.

Would it be wise for Google to simply let google.cn be shut down? Or for them to fully pull out of China? Of course not. But this wasn’t supposed to be about what’s “wise.” This was supposed to be about what’s “right.”

Google’s take now is that this is “right” because the shut down of google.cn is a “prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users.” Okay — but what are those users really getting with this new google.cn? A music search engine? A text translator? Are any of these things likely to be a big help to anyone over there? Why does Google even want to put its name on that neutered product?

The power was all in the redirect. It was a big “fuck you” to China. They were saying: “You know everyone that goes to our Chinese site expecting censored results? Well, now we’re going to send them to an uncensored site. Do something about it.” Well, China did. And now Google’s reaction is to change that “fuck you” into a more docile “we don’t like you very much” with that link to google.com.hk from google.cn.

The link is weak. It’s moving responsibility for uncensored searches away from Google and putting it into the laps of Chinese users. “No, I swear, they got to that site themselves.”

What will be interesting to see next is if China demands Google remove that link. And if Google does…

Again, this is all easy for me to say without having to worry about Google’s business prospects and their Chinese user base. But the power of Google’s initial message was anchored by the fact that they said they were ready to leave China and shut down google.cn if it came to that. Now that it has come to that, and it’s clear they’re not going to do that anytime soon, it’s just a little disappointing.

Is giving Chinese users access to a neutered search engine and a link a more powerful message than having them go to google.cn and finding it not working thanks to their government? I don’t think so.

Yesterday, Digg CEO Kevin Rose tweeted that he’d heard a “huge rumor” that Google was planning to launch a Facebook competitor called “Google Me”, sparking off a wave of speculative reports (Rose has since removed the tweet). Now Adam D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s CTO for years and is now founder of hot Q&A service Quora, is weighing in with more details. And from what he’s hearing, Google Me is indeed very real, and it’s gunning for Facebook.

D’Angelo shared his thoughts as an answer to one of the questions on Quora. Here’s his response:

Here is what I’ve pieced together from some reliable sources:
• This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
• They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
• Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
• They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.

You can read more responses to the question on the Quora thread here.

This obviously has the potential to be huge, and Facebook needs a strong competitor. But even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done — nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they’ll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor. Not to mention the fact that Google has had shortcomings with its social sites like Buzz, Wave, and Orkut. This could be a very interesting battle.

We’ll keep our ear to the ground for more about Google Me.

Back in May, Google showcased the next version of Android, codenamed Froyo. Chuck full of new features like Flash support, the ability to turn your phone into a Wifi hotspot, and huge speed gains, Android users have been eager to try it out for themselves. Some of them already have — Google rolled out Froyo to a small number of Nexus One years in late May, but most people didn’t receive the update. Now, Froyo is finally rolling out to all Nexus One users over the air, with plans to have it deployed to most people by the end of the week.

From the Nexus One blog:

Starting today, Nexus One users will begin to receive the Android 2.2 (codenamed Froyo) over-the-air software update on their phones. This update provides some great new features including support for making your handset a portable hotspot and support for Adobe Flash within the browser. For a complete list of everything we've included in Android 2.2, please see the Android 2.2 Platform Highlights.

In order to access the update, you will receive a message on your phone’s notification bar. Just download the update, wait for it to install, and you should be all set. This update will be rolled out gradually to phones – and most users will receive the notification by the end of the week . We hope you enjoy these new features.

Some Nexus One users have been running the build that was sent out to a small batch of users in late May (even if you didn’t actually get the update over the air, it was possible to download it elsewhere). I’ve been running this build for the last month, and have found it to be a huge improvement over 2.1.

Of course, most Android users will still have to wait a while (months, in many cases) until their devices will get 2.2. That’s because it’s still up to hardware manufacturers to port the OS over to their devices — a process that can be further complicated by ‘skins’ used by some companies, like HTC’s Sense.

Electric car manufacturer Tesla is pricing its IPO at $17 per share, according to a release issued this evening. We just wrote today that one day before its scheduled IPO, Tesla Motors increased the allotment of shares that will be sold to the public from 11.1 million to 13.3 million, according to an amendment to its S1 filing.

The $17 pricing per share is well above the expected range of $14 to $16. With the pricing, the electric car maker will debut with a $1.5 billion market cap (based on 93.5 million total shares outstanding after the IPO and a concurrent $50 million private placement with Toyota). Of the shares in the offering, 11,880,600 shares are being offered by the company and 1,419,400 shares are being offered by selling stockholders.

Tesla has already raised $783 million in venture capital and government loans. Tesla is expecting to raise about $210 million in the IPO, bringing the total raised to just over $1 billion.

Tesla’s stock will start trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol TSLA tomorrow morning.

What is the Internet doing to our brain? According to Nicholas Carr, the author of the controversial The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, today's always-on web is a perpetually distractive medium that is undermining our ability to think deep thoughts, read deep books and engage in deep conversations. So is Carr correct, or is his nostalgia rooted in a romanticized vision of a world that never really existed?

To discuss what the Internet is doing to our brains, Andrew Keen is joined – in the first episode of his new TechCrunch TV show, ‘Keen On…’ by both Nicholas Carr and BT's open-source evangelist Kevin Marks, for what we hope is a deep debate about The Shallows.

Watch the full show here.

The iPhone 4 vs. the EVO 4G. It’s the battle of our time. Or, at least, it was until Verizon unveiled the Droid X, thus continuing the cycle of Android phones one-upping one another from week to week. But regardless, iPhone 4 vs. EVO 4G is an interesting battle — at least among fanboys of the iPhone and Android platforms. And now there’s a great video to personify it.

The video below may look familiar to those who saw the awesome I Will Honor The Embargo video (created by TechCrunch Europe Contributing Editor Steve O'Hear) — both were made using the Xtranormal text-to-movie technology.

Without further ado, an iPhone shopper walks into a store… (Warning: the video has plenty of NSFW language — especially towards the end)

[thanks Aditya]

On the 5th floor of 36 Cooper Square, the Foursquare team works alongside Curbed and Hard Candy Shell. There are no offices in the cramped room, just rows of thin desks, monitors, a couch, a couple of classroom chairs stacked in the corner and a small conference room off to the side.

At the center of the room, Dennis Crowley presides, sitting a few feet away from his co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. Because the 5th floor doesn’t fit the entire 25-person staff, a handful have set up ad hoc work stations a few flights below.

This is the guts of Foursquare, the widely acknowledged front runner in the red-hot location based service market.

The young startup, launched in 2009, is on a tear, accumulating high profile partnerships with the likes of Bravo, Wall Street Journal, Zagat and quickly growing beyond its member base of 1.8 million users. As evidenced by an over-the-top UK Wired cover, which anointed Crowley the “New King Of Social Media, press has come easy. However, the team, which has grown from a party of 6 to 25 in the past year, is still adjusting to the pains of growing up.

“Because we’re growing so quickly, it’s not just me and Naveen hammering out features day after day… now there’s a product team, now there’s an engineering team and so you know I think every organization goes through this but like we’re growing very quickly and this is getting all the pieces to play nice together,” Crowley says. “The thing we’re struggling with is where are people going to sit, Tristan is over there sitting on a bench, Harry moves to a different seat every day, we’re shuttling up and down three flights of stairs.”

Many of those logistical issues should dissipate, as the team relocates to a far more expansive space on the 6th floor, but Crowley understands its a long slog ahead. With so much attention focused on the LBS market, the success of Foursquare is always discussed in the context of its closest competitors, like Loopt and Gowalla. Crowley acknowledges that they are indeed rivals, but he says his true competitors are “those above us,” specifically identifying Twitter and Facebook (a rumored suitor). More from Crowley and his co-founder Selvadurai in our video above.

Our video feature on Foursquare is the first in our series of company profiles. Under the TechCrunch TV banner, I’ll be visiting the top startups to get you inside the office, the culture and up close with the founders and CEO. Comments, suggestions? E-mail me at onair@techcrunch.com.

It’s finally here. After months of planning and building and learning and fixing and hiring and spending, TechCrunch TV goes live right… NOW.

Broadcasting daily from our fully-featured San Francisco studio, TechCrunch TV will be packed with some of the most recognizable and inspiring faces in tech. The entrepreneurs, the investors, the developers — everyone in fact who is helping to change the world, one start-up at a time.

We’ll also be travelling the country (and the world), livecasting major events, visiting start-up offices and generally poking our cameras into every corner of the tech globe.

TechCrunch TV will be littered with familiar TC faces – Mike Arrington, Sarah Lacy, MG Siegler, Jason Kincaid – either as show hosts or regular guests, plus we’re thrilled to have signed up some amazing names from outside of TC to host their own shows, including author Andrew Keen (whose debate show, Keen On, airs every Monday) and entrepreneur/investor, Cyan Banister (the first episode of her interview show ‘Speaking Of…’ airs Thursday).

Behind the scenes, TechCrunch has invested big in the project, reflecting Mike and Heather‘s vision of a multi-platform TechCrunch. Not only have we built an awesome studio – connected to our distribution partners Brightcove and Ustream – but we’ve also hired Jon Orlin (below, right), previously at CNN and Yahoo, as Production Director (welcome Jon!). Jon joins a team which includes Evelyn Rusli (previously at Forbes) as breaking news anchor/producer, Producer Sophia Kittler and TCTV Intern Shirin Ghaffary.

(On a personal note: the whole team – along with TC lead developer Andy Brett – has been working day and night to get everything ready for launch – their dedication to TCTV is both inspiring and terrifying. Thanks guys.)

My official role is Creative Director which means, as well as being responsible for pulling together all of the various elements into one coherent channel, I’ll be on the look out for new show ideas and ways we can improve our current line up. Your suggestions, as always, are very welcome.

In true start-up style, we’re launching with a limited beta service: about 40 minutes of original programming a day, supported by a wealth of previously recorded shows so there’s always something interesting to watch at TechCrunch.tv. The ‘live’ channel is also available on mobile, right here.

And of course all of our shows – along with just about every video TechCrunch has ever made – will be available on demand; fully embeddable and sharable. Right now our on demand catalog includes highlights from TechCrunch Disrupt and TechCrunch 50, plus a variety of keynote interviews and profiles, with more being added every day, including new shows as soon as they’ve aired.

There’s plenty more to say about TechCrunch TV, but if video really is the future then a blog post doesn’t seem the right way to do it. Instead I sat down in our brand new studio with TCTV’s own Evelyn Rusli (who is anchoring our daily news discussion show, as well as producing a variety of special feature segments) and explained some of the thinking behind TCTV before giving a tour of our new studio to explain – sort of – how it all works.

Enjoy! And don’t forget to send us your feedback: onair@techcrunch.com, or via twitter – @techcrunchtv.

Welcome to the future.

(Update: a few would-be viewers have emailed to ask about an iPad version of our player. It’ll be live in about a week)

When it comes to local advertising, everybody wants to replace the Yellow Pages, which makes money hand-over-fist from local merchants across the country. Seeing Interactive, A Y Combinator startup which launched last March, just raised a seed round of about $1 million from some high-profile investors to help local newspapers take more of those local advertising dollars away from the phone directories. The investors include Baseline Ventures, Lerer Ventures, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, and Alex Moore (an early employee at Palantir).

In small towns across the country where many people still haven’t heard of Yelp, the Yellow Pages is the only game in town for local business advertising. Seeing Interactive goes to the local papers and gives them a white-label service for selling online ads and services to local businesses. They are already selling these businesses print ads for $200 or so. Now for an extra $5 or so, they can turn those exact same print ads into online ads. They can also get listed in an online SEO-optimized directory of local businesses, and even get their own simple Website (via Weebly). In other words, Seeing interactive creates an online presence for local businesses and leverages the existing salesforce of local newspapers to sell those ads.

Each directory is different and tied to the newspaper. For instance, here is a local business directory created by the Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, MD. Each directory page has a map, address, phone number, description, and business hours. People can leave reviews using Facebook Connect. Seeing Interactive is currently working with 87 newspapers. iPhone and Android local directory apps are in development. It could also make deals down the line with local online-only news sites.

Lerer Ventures, Baseline (Steve Anderson), Paul Buchheit, Joshua Schachter, and Alex Moore (Angel, Early Palantir employee).

1.7 million iPhone 4s sold in three days. It’s a massive number any way you slice it. But it’s perhaps even more impressive when you consider the initial pre-order system failures, the device shortages (which Apple apologized for in their release), and the fact that half of the family isn’t even available yet (the white iPhone 4). And most impressive may be that those who bought it in the U.S. were willing to sell their souls to AT&T for another two years.

But GigaOM’s Kevin Tofel gives the beleaguered network credit for the launch today, citing the network as a “huge reason” Apple sold so many iPhones. On one hand, he has a good point. If AT&T hadn’t advanced the upgrade eligibility time (in some cases by as much as six months), it would have been much more expensive for many of them to upgrade from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4 — and many likely wouldn’t have.

The fact that at least one survey suggests that as many as 77% of iPhone 4 buyers were people upgrading from older iPhones may make this idea even more potent (though only 600 or so people in three cities were surveyed — again, of 1.7 million phones sold).

But first of all, let’s remember that included in the 1.7 million number are four other countries not tied to AT&T that saw the iPhone 4 launch on the same day as the U.S.: UK, France, Germany, and Japan. Still, while Apple doesn’t break down iPhone 4 sales by countries, it’s likely safe to assume the majority were sold in the U.S.

So let’s say that Apple sold over a million of those iPhone 4s in the U.S. Now close your eyes and imagine a world where the iPhone wasn’t tied to one carrier in the U.S. (it’s easy if you try). I don’t think I would be going out on a limb at all to guess that Apple would have doubled that sales figure. Hell, even if they just added Verizon, I bet they would have doubled it (provided Apple produced enough phones in first place, of course). And even in that scenario, doubling the number may very well be modest.

At this point, the biggest inhibitor of iPhone growth in the U.S. is AT&T. Period.

I believe Apple knows this. But, as they so often do, they’re taking the side of profits over market share. They have a very sweet deal with AT&T. A deal that makes the iPhone their largest source of revenue. If they have to give up those exclusive terms, the subsequent deals with other carriers would likely be less sweet — particularly a Verizon deal, as they have some leverage being the largest carrier in the U.S. and one closely aligning itself with the competing Android platform.

So while AT&T may deserve some credit for the 1.7 million iPhones sold this weekend, they also deserve a significant amount of credit that more weren’t sold. And don’t think they don’t know that either.

PR bullshit aside, the reason AT&T allowed some iPhone users to upgrade to the iPhone 4 early is purely a business decision. In order to get the new phone, those customers also have to sign a new two year contract, tying them to the network for that timespan. Obviously, AT&T will be getting paid for each of those months by each customer. It will only take a couple months or so of your new contract for them to recoup the cost they ate so you could upgrade. So let’s not pat AT&T on the back too much here.

Further, while few people outside those at Apple know the terms of the exclusive AT&T agreement, at least some of those people work at AT&T. They have an advanced look at the writing on the wall. If they know that Apple plans to move the iPhone to other carriers, say, next year, AT&T would want to start maneuvering now to make sure customers can’t abandon ship so easily. How do you do that? Lock them into new contracts. New contracts with more expensive early termination fees.

I’m not saying that’s for sure what is going on here. But it makes a lot of AT&T recent maneuvers make a lot of sense.

So, yes, the number of iPhone 4s is impressive. But the number of iPhone 5s Apple sells next year may be out of this world.