eBay has made it fairly clear that mobile is the future for e-commerce. And the numbers only reinforce this strategy- mobile payments are poised to reach $200 billion by 2012, according to Juniper Research. So, of course, eBay is wants to make its crown jewel, PayPal, the leader in the mobile payments space. In fact, PayPal’s mobile transactions have grown as smartphone usage has increased, from $25 million in 2008 to $141 million in 2009. In 2010, PayPal expects more than half a billion dollars in mobile payment volume with more than 5 million members regularly using PayPal from their mobile devices. Today, PayPal is making it easier for merchants and consumers to pay for goods on their smartphones with the launch of Mobile Express Checkout.

Mobile Express Checkout is the mobile version of PayPal's Express Checkout service, which is a one-stop payment option streamlines the checkout process for consumers. A buyer will not have to reenter shipping, billing, or payment information for a PayPal payment, expediting the checkout process. All they need to do is enter their PayPal account login. It’s similar in theory to Amazon’s one click ordering option.

Merchant Express Checkout has been optimized for smartphone screens and also features strong fraud detection, says PayPal. Mobile Express Checkout is initially being rolled out on the iPhone and Android 2.0 (and higher) devices by a few retailers, including Nike and Buy.com, over the next few weeks. The technology will eventually become available to all retailers in the next few months.

PayPal sees this new mobile technology has an opportunity to allow the company’s 85 million members to easily buy goods on their phones using PayPal’s technology versus inputing a credit card. The company is sure to be on to something with this strategy-inputing your credit card, shipping and billing info on a phone is an arduous and time consuming task.

Automating this process is surely the future of mobile payments and shopping. Of course, it’s safe to assume the credit card companies, like Mastercard and Visa, will also be heading down this road soon.

Are you ready to pay $9.95 a month for more TV? Hulu Plus, Hulu’s subscription offering, essentially offers more TV for $10 including full seasons of many shows including Glee and everything else on TV that isn’t Glee.

The program is available for iPad and iPhone and will soon be available for PS3 (with a $9.95/month PSN subscription) and Xbox 360.

Read more…

The beloved, endangered IPO is showing signs of revival, or at least survival. In the second quarter of 2010, there were 15 venture-backed IPOs in the U.S., which raised a total of $899 million, according to data released today by Dow Jones VentureSource. The amount raised is nearly four times as much as the same, admittedly moribund, period a year ago, when there were only 3 IPOs and $232 million in exits. So far this year, the total number of IPOs (23) and exit dollars ($1.6 billion) already surpasses the totals for each of the last two years.

Of course, the IPO markets are coming back from a near-death experience so the comparisons look great. The numbers got a big boost from the Tesla IPO on Tuesday, which raised $202 million. (The shares are trading at $24 this morning, 41 percent above the IPO price).

But the IPO market still has along way to go.  The total number of IPOs and money raised is still a fraction of what it was even in 2007, when there were nearly 80 IPOs and more than $7 billion raised.  It’s also never taken longer for a company to go public (at least over the past 18 years since VentureSource has been keeping track).  The median time between founding and IPO for the 15 exits last quarter was 9.4 years.

Meanwhile, in M&A land the number of venture-backed deals in the quarter were down slightly to 79 from 82 a year ago.  But the amount raised through acquisitions was up 48 percent to $4.3 billion.  However, the number of acquisitions and amount raised was lower than in each of the two previous quarters.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/venture-backed-exit-activity-is-picking-up-again/

The iPhone 4 antenna issue is real. The leaked Apple troubleshooting documents and job posting confirms what a lot of iPhone 4 owners are stating. Worse yet, a lot of owners are finding that bumpers -- DIY or official ones -- don't totally solve the problem. The world is quickly crashing down around Apple fans everywhere. But Steve Jobs has some advice, "Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it." That's what he supposedly emailed to one very irate iPhone 4 owner who, along with a few friends, are finding the iPhone 4 has major problems. Steve first tells the owner to calm down, then blames his problems on signal strength, and then finally states "[Apple] is working on it."

As if Nokia needed yet another wake-up call, self-declared ‘Nokia fanboy since 1999′ Ricky Cadden, aka Symbian Guru is so utterly fed up with the company and the products it releases that he’s quitting his blog (via Mobile Entertainment).

Cadden has purchased himself a Nexus One and seems well on his way to become an Android fanboy.

Anyone with the slightest interest in the mobile industry should read his goodbye post, which is a scathing analysis of why Nokia and Symbian are in the corner where the punches are being served.

Particularly people at Nokia and Symbian.

Here’s a teaser:

I can't continue to support a manufacturer who puts out such craptastic 'flagships' as the N97, and who expects me to use services that even most of Nokia's own employees don't use.

I also can't continue to support a mobile operating system platform that continually buries itself into oblivion by focusing on 'openness' while keeping a blind eye towards the obvious improvements that other open platforms have had for several iterations.

As on his decision to put Symbian-Guru on permanent hold:

And so, after 3 years and 8 months, Symbian-Guru.com is officially done. Thanks to Nokia's consistently piss-poor hardware choices and Symbian's lack of ability to even remotely compete in terms of features, abilities, and overall experience, I've lost my passion for both.

Ouch. Double ouch.

(More on MobileCrunch)

(Image courtesy of Barrett Hall / popofatticus on Flickr)

IBM is making another acquisition today, buying up computer security software company BigFix. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. BigFix security software identifies all of a company's PCs, laptops, server and then monitors and flags IT administrators when devices are not in compliance with corporate IT security standards. BigFix's software promises to make security fixes across at least 500,000 machines in a matter of minutes.

As widely expected following the approval by Palm shareholders, the acquisition of the company by Hewlett-Packard for roughly $1.2 billion has today been announced closed.

The price, as previously announced, is $5.70 per share of Palm common stock, paid in cash.

Once again, HP repeats that it intends to double down on the innovative webOS platform and Palm’s line of smartphone. The company neatly points out that it has also just bought itself a bag of intellectual property.

Under Jon Rubinstein, former Palm chairman and CEO, the Palm global business unit will report to Todd Bradley, EVP of the Personal Systems Group at HP.

The Palm division will be responsible for, and I quote from the press release, webOS software development and webOS based hardware products, from a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks.

I, for one, look very much forward to what comes out of the merger.

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic investment firm, Omidyar Network, has announced three new grants today, all to non-profits that are helping to add transparency and accountability to government institutions.

In total, the Omidyar Network has given $2.3 million in grants to the three organizations, Global Voices, mySociety and The XYZ Show.

The network has granted the largest amount, $1.2 million, to Global Voices, an online citizen-media platform. Global Voices aims to create and online newsroom for citizen journalists for developing countries, translating citizen journalists’ blogs into more than 20 languages, helping people speak out online in places where their voices may be censored, and helps marginalized communities use technology. The non-profit will use the funds to support citizen voices from underrepresented regions around the world.

UK-based mySociety will receive $575,000 to help organizations in Africa develop digital tools and websites to help hold their governments to account. mySociety helps power a number of democracy and transparency websites in the United Kingdom.

The XYZ Show, a Kenyan political satire TV program, will receive $500,000 to expand reach and engagement via web and mobile channels and to support an upcoming season of the show.

Some of these investments could be part of Omidyar’s $30 million pledge towards backing high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Sex.com, considered to be one of the world’s most valuable domain names for obvious reasons, is up for sale at domain broker Sedo along with two related USPTO trademark registrations.

Sedo has entered an exclusive agreement with Sex.com owner Escom to privately broker the sale of the domain name.

Sex.com was sold to Escom in January 2006 for a reported $14 million price, widely cited as the highest priced domain sale in history. As of February 18th, 2010, the domain name has been ordered to be sold at a foreclosure auction.

As of March 18th, 2010, in a last minute twist to the story, the foreclosure auction looked likely to be cancelled as creditors of Escom filed an involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition against the company in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California. This action was taken by creditors to prevent a possible loss of value by selling the name as a foreclosure auction.

The Central California Bankruptcy Court earlier this month issued an order approving a settlement between the managers of Escom, which basically meant that the company could move forward with trying to sell the domain name via Sedo.

If you’re interested in getting your hands on it, you can email Sedo at consult@sedo.com.

Local business directory and search engine Local.com this morning announced the acquisition of the assets of OCTANE360, a technology startup based out of Los Angeles that provides domain-based local advertising solutions to small businesses, domain portfolio owners, agencies and channel partners.

Under the terms of the agreement, Local.com is paying $5 million in cash and stock with an earnout of up to $5.9 million if certain performance criteria are met in the two-year period following the closing.

OCTANE360 will become a wholly-owned division of Local.com Corporation.

Founded in 2008, OCTANE360 offers a number of services to its client base, which consists mostly of small businesses and agencies, on a direct, wholesale or private label basis. The services it offers include targeting and registration of geo-category based local website domains (examples), website creation, hosting and management, an ad exchange system to manage the selection and deployment of ad inventory and a content marketplace for the management of geo-category content.

Following the acquisition, OCTANE360 will be managed within Local.com’s Sales & Ad Services business unit, and its products and services will be utilized by the company's Owned & Operated and Network business units. OCTANE360 CEO Adam Rioux will become Local.com's vice president, leading the newly added division.

Finally, Local.com also announced the closing of a $30 million revolving credit facility with Silicon Valley Bank. The facility, secured by all of the company's assets, is expected to be used primarily for general working capital and to fund more ‘strategic growth initiatives’.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is showing early signs of a ‘comeback’, reversing a practically constant slide in browser usage over the past few years for the month of June, according to figures just released by Net Applications.

Still the dominant browser in terms of market share any way you slice it, Internet Explorer appears to be reclaiming share at the expense of Mozilla Firefox, specifically, with Google Chrome and Safari also showing decent growth for the first part of the year.

According to Net Applications, IE had already reversed its trend in the U.S., gaining usage share. In June, the trend reversal has apparently become global.

Internet Explorer gained .57% in June across all operating systems with Internet Explorer 8.0 gaining .66% worldwide. The gains for Internet Explorer were the largest in Europe (+.88%) and Asia (+.81%).

Mozilla’s Firefox, meanwhile, dropped in usage from 24.3 percent to 23.8 percent, while Chrome saw modest growth climbing from 7.0 percent to 7.2 percent from May to June 2010. Usage of number four, Apple’s Safari, increased from 4.8 percent to 4.9 percent, while that of Opera’s browser slipped from 2.4 percent to 2.3 percent. The latter browser just got a significant update with the release of Opera 10.60.

Net Applications attributes the increase in usage to Microsoft’s ‘Confidence’ campaign, but other factors may be involved as well, like the success of Windows 7 and the browser choice screen that now turns up with new Windows installations in Europe (I think a lot of people choose to install IE8 out of familiarity with the browser’s name and logo).

Microsoft was quick to gloat over the increase in usage in a blog post by Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing. Gavin points out that Internet Explorer 8 grew faster than Google Chrome last month, calling the trend ‘encouraging news’.

He’s cautious enough to say that he and his team don't judge business on just two months of data, but goes on to write that the future is looking bright for Internet Explorer. Indeed, the previews we’ve been shown of Internet Explorer 9, the next version of the browser, seem very promising.

Who said IE was dead?

A mere two weeks after releasing the beta version, Opera Software has just announced that Opera 10.60 is now available in its final iteration.

The desktop browser client, as mentioned in our earlier post, comes with geolocation (see an interactive map with downloads of the Opera browser in real time here), a fresh UI, WebM support for HTML5 video and speed improvements.

In fact, with the final version of Opera 10.60, the browser scores more than 50 percent faster than its predecessor, the company claims.

This should translate into a faster browsing experience for users on JavaScript-heavy sites like Gmail and Facebook, so it shouldn’t be too hard to do some rudimentary speed testing to see how it stacks up against the likes of Chrome, Firefox and IE.

Give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

Arguably a little late to the party, Yahoo! today announced the release of their very first Android apps for Messenger and Mail, a Yahoo! search widget for your home screen and some HTML5-optimized sites for the iPhone. The Messenger app does pretty much what you'd expect: it allows you to chat with your Yahoo!/MSN friends, and can run in the background (with push notifications) for that always-on availability. If you live in Canada, Indonesia, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Thailand, United States, or Vietnam, you can also use the app to send SMS to friends, which will appear in the current conversation.

San Francisco based Samasource is on a mission to help women, refugees and young people in developing countries earn a living wage on the Internet. The model is straightforward – Samasource works with companies that need certain types of relatively simple tasks done, like database cleanup, translations, transcriptions, etc. Samasource charges companies on a per action basis, and then pays workers in Kenya, Uganda, India, Pakistan and Haiti to do the work.

The tasks are generally more complicated than Mechanical Turk stuff, and the company pays a minimum of $1/hour to workers who were previously living on less than $3/day. Some workers, who build up to more complex tasks, make as much as $10/hour.

And what’s more important is that these workers develop a long term relationship with Samasource. They work via local companies that organize and hire the workers and do quality control, and that model seems to work. Today the company has 800 workers in various countries and wants to scale that up significantly. CEO Leila Janah says there is an infinite amount of labor available at a few dollars per hour, and that these jobs make a huge difference in the lives of the workers. There are 4 billion people living on less than $3/day, she says, and $1.4 billion living on less than $1/day.

They are building slowly because they don’t want to lay people off if there’s no work, so part of their job is to find long term customers with a steady work flow. They recently signed a $450,000 contract with a new customer that will allow them to hire another 200 or so workers, for example. To date Samasource has made $1.2 million in gross revenue, and all but 15% or so of that was distributed to workers.

Samasource is, like Kiva, a non profit organization. What this company really needs is to get a large government or other grant to try to scale their work. A large part of Janah’s time seems to be spent on chasing that money, and a few million dollars as a grant would go a long way to providing thousands of people with work. Or, Samasource could turn into a for-profit entity and raise more traditional venture capital for growth. But that would limit a lot of the goodwill the entity now receives as a full fledged non profit. We discuss all of that in our interview. And we also discover that Janah believes in her company so much that she had it tattooed onto her wrist.

I actually didn’t know much about Samasource before meeting Leila last weekend at Foo Camp. But we’re already likely to become customers – we have a huge need for data massaging on Crunchbase as well as transcriptions for TechCrunchTV.

The interview is below (the tattoo is at the end, if that’s all you want to see):

Amazon continues its revamping of the Kindle line. Fresh off of big price cuts for the traditional model, a roll-out of picture/video software for Apple devices, new social media features, and a new Android app, Amazon today announced a new version of its larger model of the Kindle: the DX. The key differences? It’s cheaper, sharper, and available in black (or as they call it, graphite).

The Kindle DX is particularly interesting because of its 9.7 inch screen — the exact same size as the screen on the iPad. And now, with the new black trim around the screen, the Kindle DX looks more like an iPad. Of course, the key difference is that the iPad’s screen is both in full color, and it’s a touchscreen — the Kindle DX still has neither of those features. What it does have, is a more attractive price: it’s now $379.

The price cut is also interesting. Previously, the Kindle DX was $489, which is only $10 cheaper than the cheapest version of the iPad. Undoubtedly, that was a very hard sell for Amazon to make. It’s still going to be a hard sell, but Amazon is pushing hard for the reading crowd with 50 percent better contrast and darker fonts on its e-ink screen.

Not surprisingly, Amazon is also playing up the Kindle’s access to a huge digital library — one larger than the one the iPad has access to. Amazon says that over 200,000 titles have been added to the store in just the past six month (in other words, since the iPad was announced). And they now have over 620,000 books in the store to buy — on top of 1.8 million free, out-of-print books.

It’s still not clear why anyone would get a Kindle DX when they can get the iPad for a little bit more — or a regular Kindle for much less. But it’s clear that Amazon it willing to try different things to see what, if anything works.

The Kindle DX is available for pre-order now. It ships July 7.

Embed Anything is a recently launched startup that blends image sharing with an ad network. The startup’s technology allows allows anyone to quickly grab a code to embed a publisher’s image directly from the image. The image, once embedded on another site, will be displayed with an overlay ad, a follow link back to the original image’s site and will be clickable back to the source.

Embed Anything shares ad inventory revenue the image owners, giving them complete control on what they want to display in the ad space, which can be sourced by the ad network of their choice, for 50 percent of the impressions. For the other 50 percent of impressions, Embed Anything can display an ad of their choice, which is powered by Google AdSense. Eventually Embed Anything will allow for an RSS feed or Twitter feed to be displayed within the ad space as well. An example of a sample publisher site can be found here.

The startup also provides an interface that gives publishers stats on where their images are being embedded, the number of impressions they’re receiving, as well as the ability to remove any unwanted image embeds. The technology is free and fairly simple, involving a single piece of code into a template or through a WordPress plug-in.

The idea is to help publishers profit off of image theft, which Embed Anything says happens often. While this may be ideal for publishers, some of the people who are embedding these images may not want an image with an ad in it on their sites.

The startup competes with GumGum and Image Space Media.

Lookout, a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, has reached a significant milestone: the startup now has one million users for its security application after only six months in operation.

Lookout, which just raised $11 million from Accel, Khosla and others, says the growth in smartphone adoption, mobile app downloads and increased consumer awareness of mobile security threats have helped make the offering a popular and necessary option for users. While smartphone use is growing rapidly, there are security risks associated with the increased data and application usage on these devices. Similar to a PC, users need to protect their phones from malware, viruses, data loss and more. Lookout's web-based, cloud-connected application indentifies and block threats on a consumer's phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer.

For now Lookout, which is on more than 400 mobile networks in 170 countries, is only available for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Lookout has over 80% of its users on Android and BlackBerry with the remaining users on Windows Mobile. And 70% of users are in the US.

Over the past six months, Lookout has seen the number of malware and spyware threats per hundred devices double to nine in every 100 devices being affected annually. Lookout has helped find more than 130,000 lost or stolen phones, backed-up over 87 million photos, and backed-up over 300 million contacts.

Lookout’s CEO tells me that the next step for the company is to start looking at monetization angles with product development. While the application is free, Lookout sees potential in offering an enterprise version of its software.

Earlier this afternoon, Mozilla submitted what would be its first iPhone application to the App Store. No, it’s not Firefox — well, not exactly.

Mozilla has submitted an app called Firefox Home for approval. While it’s not the native Firefox web browser, it is an app that lets you easily move your Firefox browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs to the iPhone. You can then either open these within the app or with mobile Safari.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: no way Apple accepts a Firefox app. But actually, I’m pretty sure they will.

Again, this app is not a new web browser, it’s just a tool for moving your data from your desktop to the phone. The browser that is built-in to the app is a WebKit-based one built with the tools Apple includes in the SDK. On its FAQ page, Mozilla says the following about Firefox for the iPhone:

Does this mean Firefox will be available on the iPhone?
No. We do not have plans to ship the Firefox browser for the iPhone. Due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users Firefox for the iPhone.

Apple did allow Opera to put its browser on the iPhone to the surprise of some. But there’s some talk that the only reason Apple did that as a way to quiet critics — because they knew the app wasn’t that great. After an initial surge in downloads, you don’t hear too much about it anymore. Mozilla, which is the world second most popular browser (well ahead of Safari), might be a different story. And Mozilla apparently knows it.

This app also isn’t Firefox Sync. Sync is a two way syncing of information between Firefox browsers on different machines. Firefox Home is a one-way push to the iPhone. “We only sync changes since the last update for bookmarks and open tabs. And history is limited to about 2000 items. And there is no auto-sync. The median disk space used by Sync users is about 2-3 MB total for all of their Sync data and Home only has a subset of that.,” Mozilla says.

Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler seems worried that Apple may not approve the app. But as long as it’s not using any undocumented APIs, I can’t see a reason why Apple would reject it — at least not without a lot of outrage, once again. And the app looks good, it should be very useful to users of Firefox.

Yesterday, Wired published a report detailing an issue with Foursquare privacy, whereby a program could effectively harvest Foursquare checkin data by constantly refreshing venue pages and looking to see which users were showing up in the “Who’s Been Here” section, which shows a grid of users who recently checked in at that venue. According to the article, white hat coder Jesper Andersen was able to log around 70% of all check-ins in San Francisco — or 875,000 checkins — over the last three weeks.

Today, Foursquare has addressed the report with a post on its official blog outlining the issue. As data breaches go I’m not sure this one was especially “sophisticated”, as Foursquare keeps calling it, but they apologize and explain what they’ve done to fix it.

From the Foursquare blog:

A little over a week ago (on Monday the 21st), our developers were alerted to a problem that enabled sophisticated users, by continuously scraping venue pages from our website through anonymous gateways, to capture private check-in information that users didn't intend to share with the general public. Three days later, our team began rolling out a number of solutions to this problem. First, we ensured that any user that had opted out of appearing in the "Who's Here" lists no longer appeared in the "Who's Been Here" photo mosaics on our site (this fix went live last Thursday). Second, we updated the language on our "Settings" page to clarify what opting into the "Who's Here" feature entails. Third, we randomized the order of the photos being posted under the "Who's Been Here" headings on our venue pages to prevent anyone from scraping this data to try to estimate check-in times of various users.

This won’t be the last time we hear about privacy issues with location-based services, where security and privacy are going to be key. That said, the privacy concerns for Foursquare, where users are explicitly checking into venues, are less worrisome than if this had happened with one that constantly monitors your location, like Google Latitude. And privacy hasn’t really been Foursquare’s big selling point, either — don’t expect to see much of an uproar from its users over this.

Wesabe, an online personal finance site that looked to help users better keep track of their spending trends, is shutting down. The startup’s homepage now consists of a letter to Wesabe users instructing them to download their account information by July 31, at which point nearly all of the service’s features will be taken offline and data deleted. The lone feature that will remain online indefinitely is the site’s ‘Groups’ page, where members can trade advice about their finances (this part of the site is being taken over by one of Wesabe’s current customers).

In the letter, Wesabe CEO Marc Hedlund writes that the site has been operating on a shoestring budget lately, which has led to both some poor customer experiences and the potential for security issues, which is why they’re pulling the plug:

In recent months Wesabe has been operating on a shoestring budget, with support from some of the developers and operations people who made up our core team. While the site has remained online and we continue to hear from people who find it helpful, we have not been able to provide the support people need to use it for something so central as financial management. I’ve felt especially terrible that some members have a good initial experience but then hit a problem, often after investing many hours, and aren’t able to get help with it. That’s obviously a bad experience, and not what we want to offer. Also, because Wesabe stores such highly sensitive data, continuing to operate the service with shoestring operations and security staff is not acceptable, and we do not want to continue accepting new accounts if we cannot guarantee the security level we believe our service requires.

Wesabe was showing some growth in April 2009 when it launched its iPhone app, but traffic has dropped steadily since then. The site has largely been overshadowed by competitor Mint, which launched at (and won) TechCrunch50 and later went to on be acquired for $170 million by Intuit.

We’ve been covering the site since 2006. In Feburary 2007 it raised $700,000 from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later that year raised $4 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures.

Wesabe has been added to the Deadpool.

It’s summer and that time of year that August Capital graciously hosts us on on their fabulous deck so we can throw a roaring party that sends the VCs running from Sand Hill Road for the month of August. Actually, this year marks our 5th annual summer outing at August Capital and we can’t thank David Hornik and the other August Capital partners enough for keeping the traditional alive.

It’s also time for our summer CrunchUp, a one day conference held before the party. We started putting these together when we realized that people were traveling in from around the country just to attend a party. We decided we wanted to spend the whole day with entrepreneurs. First it was the Mobile Web Wars, then the Real Time Stream. This year, we’re really excited to announce that Stanford’s Arrillaga Alumni Center will host our conversation.

This summer, we’re hosting the Social Currency CrunchUp. As early adopters of technology, we’ve all grown accustomed that our opinions and product uses are not indicative of the average consumer. So what happens when we hit an inflection point and the masses matter? Do we really know what local merchants / SMBs need to support their businesses? What do we need to know about consumer psychology so our digitally delivered discounts resonate with consumers? What retail rules of the road do we need to honor to close a sale? How do we blend the best of virtual and real currencies to entertain consumers? That’s what we’re going to explore at the Social Currency CrunchUp. We’re going to mix up real-world consumers and traditional retailers and marketers alongside the hottest new startups to shake things up and debate the future.

The CrunchUp event during the day will max out at around 500 people. The party is for a larger crowd but sells out extremely quickly. CrunchUp attendees also get a pass to the party.

About the Social Currency CrunchUp:
July 30, 2010
9 am – 4:00 pm
Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University
326 Galvez Street, Palo Alto, CA 94305
Get CrunchUp-Party Combo Tickets Now @ Eventbrite: $295 INCLUDES admission for one (1) to the August Capital party and expedited fast-pass door entry. You DO NOT need to purchase a separate August Capital Party ticket if you purchase a CrunchUp ticket. Tickets are non-transferrable, based on availability. Capacity limited to 500 attendees.
All details here.

Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for sponsorship opportunities to help support one of the most popular tech fests of the summer.

Contact Laura Boychenko to request a press pass.

We’ll release the first batch of August Capital summer party tickets on Friday at 9 am pst. The August Capital summer outing is 5:30 – 10:00 pm on Friday, July 30. Tickets will be released weekly in batches. Stay tuned, they sell out quickly.

Photo credit: SiliconValleyBlog.

Well, it took a bit longer than other iPhone apps that aren’t, you know, the most downloaded apps of all time, but Facebook has finally today updated its iPhone app to be iOS 4-compatible.

A couple weeks ago, I ripped Facebook for releasing an update without this support (and a broken UI to boot). Competitors like Twitter and LinkedIn were iOS 4-compatible either before or immediately after the launch of the new OS on the 21st. Facebook version 3.1.4, which has just gone live, finally gets Facebook up to speed.

All indications are that adding fast app switching and support for high resolution icons is relatively easy, so it was odd that Facebook, again, the most popular app, was taking so long. But that may have something to do with the service’s relatively new iPhone team after developer Joe Hewitt decided he wanted to work on other projects.

Facebook still has no native iPad app despite that fact that tons of people continue to search for one, and it would undoubtedly be one of the most popular apps on that platform too.

Facebook for iPhone 3.1.4 also brings “minor bug fixes” (the UI has been fixed), and support for Korean and Russian localizations. You can find the free app here.

A bizarre Tweet sent by video streaming technology company Move Networks have prompted many to wonder if the company is close to shutting down. The Tweet reads: “Want some slightly used company assets and some amazing video streaming IP rights? $150,000,000 and it’s yours! Foosball table included.” NewTeeVee reports that the company’s CEO Roxanne Austin, the former president and COO of DirecTV, is resigning and that the majority of Move Networks’ entire staff was laid off.

Move Networks allows broadcasters to deliver live and on-demand high-quality video to PCs and other web-enabled devices. As of early last year, Move powered HD video streaming for a number of major media properties, including ABC, Fox, the Discovery Channel, and Animal Planet and even acquired Inuk Networks.

It’s unclear what went wrong at Move. The company has raised a considerable amount of money, over $90 million, from prominent investors such as Steamboat Ventures, Cisco and even Microsoft. While the company also suffered from layoffs last year, many startups were forced to trim the fat due to the recessionary economy.

As NewTeeVee reports, Move has lost a number of big clients over the past year and failed to raise a significant amount of funding. And it could be hoping to follow in the footsteps of fellow troubled video startup Veoh, which was sold to Qlipso earlier this year. From the Tweet issued today, it looks like Move wants to sell its assets completely in addition to folding. While Veoh and Move have very different businesses, both models reside in the online video space, which seems to be changing rapidly.

Update: Move Networks has confirmed that it is exploring the sale of its business, the change in management and that it suffered layoffs.

Move Networks, a global provider of comprehensive solutions that deliver live, multi-channel television over the Internet, announced today that it intends to retain a financial advisor to assist the Company in evaluating strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the Company. No timetable has been set for completion of the review and there can be no assurance that any transaction will occur. During this process, Move remains committed to supporting its IPTV customers in the U.S, Europe and the Middle East….In order to conserve cash on hand during this evaluation process, Move announced a reduction of its workforce.

We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

These words from Microsoft serve as the epitaph for the Kin series of socially-oriented handsets and their ecosystem. It’s been less than two months since the handsets and service were announced, and rumors of incredibly low sales had us questioning the lifespan of these little guys not long after. Add to that the weird interface and inexplicable pricing, and it’s clear in retrospect that the Kins never had much of a chance. In fact, we heard the project was canceled before it was even officially announced.

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After months of testing, today Google News is unveiling “the biggest redesign since the beta launch in 2002,” says director of product management Ben Ling. The main new elements of the page include new navigation by trending topics in the left pane, a personalized news stream in the middle pane, and localized news and weather in the right-hand pane.

The whole idea is to make Google news more personal and relevant. The trending topics, which Google calls topic links, will sit under Top Stories and be tied to keywords related to hot stories of the day. We spotted these trending topics in the wild earlier this year during the beta test period. And yes, that is similar to a very popular discovery feature on Twitter. But these topic links will also appear just above headlines and if you click on them you get a stream of related stories.

The biggest change, though, is shift to a personal news stream. One of the sections on the main page is now called “News For You.” It shows all the sources and topics which you tend to read. News can be viewed in a section view or a new list view, which is basically a reverse-chronological stream (like a blog or Twitter/Facebook stream). There is also be a new tool available under “Edit Personalizations” which lets you specify which news sources you trust the most. News items from those sources will be given extra weight in the “News For You” column. Go ahead and select TechCrunch. (We’ll wait).

Local news and weather, as well as news somehow deemed relevant to you, will be in the lower right hand corner. I think of that as the Geo section.

Social sharing is quickly becoming a key way that news travels. Google News also has new sharing options. Every story can be shared via Gmail, Google Reader, Google Buzz, Facebook, and Twitter. You can not only share stories, but entire story clusters. Google is boosting the sharing features across its products, so this one was a natural.

The Spotlight section, which is like an Editor’s pick collection of longer-form and longer-lasting stories, is getting more prominence on the main page. Finally, Google News is adding keyboard shortcuts such as “n” for next story, “p” for previous, “/” for search, and “s” to star a topic.

In many ways, Google is learning what Yahoo and others learned long ago. Making the news personal, makes people come back more often. But Google is wrapping this personalization in the new vocabulary of social streams and sharing. The new design will begin rolling out in the U.S. today.