HP reveled most of its tablet strategy yesterday at the Fortune’s Brainstorm conference. The Windows 7 HP Slate is headed to the enterprise sector this fall while the webOS-power Palmpad will go head-to-head against the iPad later. The plan itself really isn’t that surprising as I saw this coming shortly after Palmpad was trademarked. But what I didn’t expect was the outcry from consumers who actually want a Windows 7 Slate. It’s clear HP should take a long look a limited consumer market release for the Win7 Slate.

I’ve said it over and over and over. Windows 7 is horrible via a touch interface. It’s simply not meant to be used with your fingers. However, the HP Slate is said to come with a stylus and if said stylus is an active digitizer like Wacom tablets, it could be awesome and what’s been missing from Windows tablets for so long. I still believe webOS has a better chance to catch on as Windows tablets have been around longer than Apple has been making the iPod and have yet to sell well, but why not have both options available and let the market decide? At least our readers want it.

We’re big fans of Clicker, a comprehensive search engine for TV content on the web. Clicker, which made its debut at TechCrunch50 last fall, indexes over 650,000 full length TV episodes spanning 10,000 shows The startup also recently started indexing live programming on the web. Today, the startup is taking its online video guide to the next level with launch of Clicker Social, which allows people to discover, share, rate, discuss, and check-in to shows on Clicker and third party partner sites, and Clicker Mobile, which allows users to access Clicker’s service through free Android and iPhone apps.

Clicker Social aims to help people discover what's worth watching from their social circle. People can follow their friends' activities on Clicker, or follow users they don't know, but who share their tastes in television and movies. Clicker users establish their own Profile page to designate their playlists, friends, recommendations, interests and recent activities on Clicker. Similar to Twitter, users can “follow” other users to see their recommendations and playlists. Clicker also allows users to import their social networks via Facebook Connect (with Twitter OAuth soon to follow) so that they don’t have to recreate their own social graph on the site.

One of the most significant features Clicker Social is the ability to “check-in” to shows that users are watching, similar to a check-in to a restaurant or bar on Foursquare. While the check-in button will be available throughout Clicker.com, its mobile site and on apps, the check-in feature will also be available on partner sites. Partners include Break Media, Brightcove, Ooyala, PBS, PopSugar, Revision3, ThisWeekIn, The Onion, Vator TV and our own online video channel TechCrunchTV.

In addition to check-ins, users can comment on and rate shows and movies as well as create multiple playlists of shows, videos and movies. All of these actions are aggregated within an activity feed on the user’s Clicker profile. And as a bonus, Clicker users can now earn awards from content partners for sharing or interacting with their content. Award partners include Revision3, HBO, and PBS. Plus, the more users share and interact with content on Clicker, the more status they will gain within the Clicker community. Clicker says that these ‘experts’ will be rewarded with the ability to guide the content and discussions on Clicker.

Of course, timed with the release of Clicker Social is the launch of the startup’s iPhone and Android apps. The apps offer the same functionality as Clicker’s site, allowing users to search for programs to watch on their device, add shows to their playlist, manage their profile, check out their activity feed to see what friends are watching, check-in to shows and earn awards for things they're watching offline, discuss shows with other Clicker users, and more.

The apps will only serve content that can be watched on the phones (for example, the iPhone app will index HTML5, Quicktime, and H.264 formatted videos). Earlier this year, Clicker launched an iPad app as well.

For Clicker, both social discovery features and mobile apps makes Clicker more than just a destination to watch video; it actually makes the site a social platform that can be accessed even on the go. And the ability to use a Clicker check-in on a third party site is only going to help engage (and remind) users of the platform. As Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone says, “Clicker Social now gives our users the tools to assist each other in the discovery process – all centered around our uniquely comprehensive, unbiased, and structured guide to online programming – while Clicker Mobile gives them the ability to connect with Clicker, and each other, from anywhere.”

The recommendations and checkins actually reminds me of features social recommendation engine GetGlue just launched. Hulu, which has a somewhat similar model to Clicker (except it only features videos from partners), has also tried to socialize its online video platform, most recently launching Facebook’s Like button. Clicker, which just raised $11 million in funding, is wise to to start experimenting with social features early (the company only launched last November), to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Social media app developer Sobees, offers a number of impressive clients on the market, including a native Windows client, a web-based client and a Twitter app for Android phones. Recently, Sobees ventured into the iPad space with an $0.99 native Facebook app, that allowed for basic functionality on the social network from the device. Today, Sobees is launching a new, paid Facebook iPad app that offers a much more interactive experience for users. The app, called My Friends, costs $3.99 on the App Store.

While the older app allows you to update your status, comment and like a status, My Friends allows for additional interaction on the social network. With the new app you can view and upload pictures, communicate with your friends on Facebook Chat, access your Facebook events, and receive Facebook notifications. Plus you can update your status, comment, like and more.

In addition, My Friends gives you a choice of homepage for Facebook, letting you choose between the Sobees magazine view or traditional stream view. Sobees CEO Francois Bochatay says that the company is planning on adding the ability to filter and more to the app soon.

Sobees’ first Facebook app saw 65,000 downloads, so it should be interesting to see if this pricer app gains traction. Of course, Facebook has yet to release a native iPad app but the expectation is that when the social network does release an app for the device, it will be as popular as its iPhone app.

Not to worry, France.fr is still down - not much has changed on that front - but turns out French startups want to join in the fun and be the ones who get the last laugh. Which is perhaps why a couple of French startup guys got together and built the hilarious mock-site France.fr.has-failed.com (everything you need to know is in the URL). To cut a short story even shorter, Yoocasa co-founder Axel Cateland and some of his team (mainly Alexandre Delivet and Michael Jurena) threw the site together after the picture he sent to Michael Arrington via Twitter was published in TechCrunch on Wednesday. For all the non-French speakers out there, France.fr.has-failed.com is integrated with Twitter and essentially allows users to guess the date that France.fr will go live (if ever) and broadcast it to their Twitter followers. But hey, the site is so freaking straightforward that you don't need to speak French to connect via twitter and click a date on the calendar.

iPhone 4 owners? You may now order the free bumpers Apple promised everyone at the Antennagate press conference. It doesn’t have to be Apple’s option either. Apple enlisted the top mass-market case designers as well. You’ll be able to snag a free bumper from Bumper, Belkin, Griffin, Incase or Spek all the way through the end of September 2010. But you may not like the options. It’s probably not what you were expecting.

Looks like you’ll have to wait a little longer for the White iPhone 4. Apple just released a statement saying that the white model of the new iPhone won’t be available until later in 2010.

In late June, Apple released a statement saying that the white iPhone 4 will not be available until the second half of July due to manufacturing challenges. As with this most recent release, it is unclear from the statement what those challenges are. But we received an update last week during Steve Jobs’ ‘Antennagate’ press conference that the White iPhone would ship at the end of July.

It appears things have changed within a week.

Apple said that the shortage of the white iPhones will not affect supply of the more popular black models. But for those of you who were pining for a white device, you will have to wait until later this year. The iPhone 4 was available for pre-order in Black starting June 15. At that point, it was assumed you’d be able to purchase the white model of the phone in stores on June 24. But clearly, these “Manufacturing challenges” have prevented Apple from releasing large quantities of the phone to the public.

Here’s the full statement from Apple:

White models of Apple’s new iPhone® 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

Of course you can always try to build your own white iPhone 4 if you don’t want to wait.

So yesterday, I notice there’s a new article up on Google’s main blog, head on over there and see it’s merely a post featuring the latest video in the company’s Search Stories series, video ads which essentially aim to highlight how all kinds of people use Google Search. They’re nice and all, if pretty pointless in my book, but nothing particularly spectacular about them.

But this latest one, labeled ‘Brother and Sister’, caught my attention because of something entirely different than the narrative or the concept.

First, watch the video:

Did you take notice of the search results that are shown, and at times clicked upon?

Take a look at the screenshot below if you didn’t pay attention to them.

Here are the sites that are shown throughout the video:

1) TellMeHowTo.net – property of Clarity Media; an online community of users sharing hints and tips on how to do just about everything.

2) eHow (shown 3 times) – part of the Demand Media stable; an online community of users who publish how-tos, images and video clips and receive a percentage of profits earned from traffic and advertising.

3) Instructables.com – independent service; an online community of users who share what they do and how they do it, a place where people go to learn from and collaborate with others.

4) Teenadvice.About.com – About.com is part of The New York Times Company; the site banks on ‘guides and contributors’ to offer solutions and advice on, well, again, just about everything.

5) TheKnot – a listed niche media company that caters to brides and, to a lesser degree, grooms by serving just about everything you might ever want to know about weddings; while the main content comes from professional editors, a core aspect of TheKnot is its online community of users who actively share information, tips and whatnot on its message boards.

Notice a pattern here?

I realize full well it may not seem fair to everyone to be calling all these sites mere content farms – that all depends on what you think the term entails, or doesn’t.

But clearly, all these sites rely on users generating content to a certain degree, either in exchange for cash or other benefits, or simply for the sake of being part of an online community of like-minded souls who actively engage in content creation and curation.

In my mind, Google in its latest ‘Search Story’ perfectly highlighted that amazingly often content produced by non-professional writers tends to come out on top when one does certain types of searches on the Web (the same goes for Q&A sites, which also shows in the video).

That’s the whole point of course: companies like Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed thrive on throwing online masses of search engine friendly but often poorly researched or written content, produced by amateurs at low cost.

I mean, sweet Lord, did you read this?

You can debate if this is the future of online journalism or the definitive end of hand-crafted content all you want. What Google’s video inadvertently shows is that the strategy is clearly working – these sites are getting an enormous amount of traffic from search engines, all of which gets monetized quite efficiently in most cases (that’s what the whole business model depends on).

Thanks to Google for reminding me of Michael’s last sentence in his essay on the rise of (crappy) content farms: “Long live fast food content, it's here to stay.”

If all the rumors are true, Apple is preparing to totally overhaul its entire computer line from the MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and iMac. Apparently the retail supplies of iMacs are dwindling and and according to AppleInsider, Apple told at least one distributor not to expect any new shipments. The last time this happened, the new Mac Mini appeared shortly afterwards.

Hope you didn’t just buy an iMac. The next refresh should be nice. It might even come with a desktop version of iOS and a gigantic touchscreen.

Okay, after our last post on Darth Vader and the iPhone 4, we’re getting pinged way too fast with all the videos we left out but should have included. So behold: the best of the iPhone 4 videos.

If you have any others you know of, be sure to let us know and we’ll throw them in here.

Regardless of what you think about the whole iPhone 4 antenna debate, there’s no denying that it’s fueling a massive amount of creativity on the Internet. We’ve got the iPhone 4 antenna song (which Apple even played at its press conference), the cute “End Call” antenna covering stickers, the College Humor take on the press conference, and, of course, the Taiwanese animation for Antennagate with light sabers.

The Taiwanese video features Bill Gates (or some other Microsoft guy) as Darth Vader. Vader also plays a pivotal role in new video today by Russell Arch. No, it’s not as good as the Taiwanese one (nor the iPhone vs. EVO videos), but it’s still pretty funny. It starts off slow, but it gets good at the end.

The choice lines:

• “Are you seriously defending the new phone by saying that it almost performs as well as the old phone? Is that what the plan is?”
• “So everybody gets hit with 4 times the radiation just because these idiots can’t work together?”
• “Ha ha, and get what, the EVO? I mean those poor saps are having light leaks and their screens peeling off after a couple of days.”
• “And don’t even get me started on the Droid X. Uh, let’s see, you take the original phone, remove the physical keyboard, make it as big as a toaster, and still don’t add a front-facing camera? Yeah, that’s progress.”
• “Look, just level with me: it’s AT&T isn’t it? If it is just cough or something.”

See also: The Best Of The iPhone 4 Spoofs

In season 1 of AMC’s hit show Mad Men, Rachel Menken comes to the advertising firm Sterling Cooper because she wants to give her department store, Menken’s, a makeover, so to speak. She wants to transform it from a successful department store into an elite one. “What kind of people do you want [coming into your store]?,” Creative Director Don Draper asks Menken. “I want your kind of people Mr. Draper. People who don’t care about coupons — whether or not they can afford it. People who come into the store because it is expensive,” Menken replies.

Based on what we’re hearing, HP has been having similarly themed meetings in recent months. They want to transform themselves — from HP, the successful tech juggernaut, into Apple, the sexy one.

When you think of HP, what do you think of? For most consumers it’s either printers and sort of crappy, cheap computers that you get at Best Buy. But that’s not what HP aspires to be anymore, sources familiar with HP’s thinking are telling us. They want to be Apple. They want be the makers of high-quality consumer gadgets all connected by way of a digital ecosystem. An ecosystem they own and operate. One tied together by webOS.

While it should hardly be surprising to hear that any company wants to be Apple given that company’s recent success, HP is one of a very few — and actually maybe the only company with the required assets to potentially pull off such a makeover. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to — but it’s possible. And they know that, and that’s exactly what their strategy is going forward, apparently.

On the face of it, it may not seem to make a lot of sense. After all, HP makes nearly double the revenue that Apple does each quarter. But despite this, it’s Apple that actually makes more profit. And it’s Apple that has more than double the market cap of HP. In the eyes of investors, Apple is the up-and-coming rockstar, HP is the aging one. And they’re closely tied to their counterpart, Microsoft, who is also seen as aging.

And that’s what HP is trying to break away from.

WebOS is the key to all of this. It’s the software layer that HP’s hardware has been lacking — forcing them to go with Microsoft instead. But the Palm acquisition in April changed all of that. From the moment that happened, HP has made no secret that the reason for the deal was to “double-down” on webOS.

Just listen to what HP executive Todd Bradley had to say today at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, CO. “I think you’ll see us with a family of slate products, clearly Microsoft for the enterprise, and a webOS product,” Bradley said. “Our focus is working with still our largest software partner, Microsoft, to create a tablet, a slate, for the enterprise business,” he continued. What he’s doing there is carefully positioning HP’s relationship with Microsoft on new products going forward as being focused on the enterprise side of things. Previously, it was stated HP would do a Windows-powered slate for consumers. That is no longer the case. That tablet will be built to run webOS.

Does that mean HP is going to ditch Windows altogether anytime soon? Of course not. As the largest maker of PCs, HP is Microsoft’s largest customer. But for the new products HP is planning, it’s going to be all webOS. And on the desktop side of things, they’re working on webOS-syncing software that will run on Windows (and Macs), we hear. So again, they’re basically trying to recreate the ecosystem that Apple has.

HP executive Jon Rubinstein (the CEO of Palm) also confirmed at the same event today that webOS 2.0 is coming later this year. This new version is likely to be the first one that will start to tie all of these HP products together.

Speaking of Rubinstein, his pedigree here can’t be overlooked. He was the executive at Apple in charge of the iPod until he left in 2006. He’s the one who oversaw the framework for the ecosystem Apple has in place today. There was some talk leading up to the Palm acquisition if Rubinstein would stay or go — he’s apparently onboard with this new “let’s turn HP into Apple” idea. That shouldn’t be surprising given that this was the basic strategy at Palm with the Pre.

But Palm failed simply because they didn’t have the resources to do what they wanted to do (challenge Apple’s iPhone directly). HP does — and then some. And while HP is not a player in the mobile space right now, they plan to be once again with webOS.

From what we’re hearing, HP wants to create a seamless experience for all of their hardware. That’s PCs to notebooks to netbooks to tablets to mobile phones to printers. And they want to do so with a much more controlled product line than they’ve previously had. They want to move towards more premium products, ones with higher margins. That will make the profits go up, just as it has with Apple.

Of course, whether or not HP can make any of this happen is a pretty big “if.” One obvious problem with them being Apple is that they don’t have their own retail stores, like Apple does. HPs are sold everywhere from Best Buy to Costco, but those stores tend to attract people looking for bargains. And those that aren’t, buy Macs there.

Second, HP’s strategy in mobile phones will meet resistance not only from the iPhone, but from Google’s Android phones. But Google appears to be positioning Android as the sort-of Windows of the smartphone era. That is, they’re all about getting their software as widely distributed as possible. Like Microsoft with PCs, Google don’t make their own hardware for Android (though they had a hand in designing the Nexus One, which is all but dead now). HP would be making its own hardware to run webOS. Again, like Apple.

Android also poses a potential threat in the tablet field. But again, Google won’t be making this hardware. As I said at the beginning, because HP is a hardware maker that just happened to purchase a great piece of software in webOS, they have a shot at pulling off what Apple has. Whereas most other rivals, even Google, cannot. Android may be ubiquitous by this time next year, but the experience won’t be as seamless as it is within Apple’s ecosystem. And, HP hopes, their ecosystem. As Apple has proven, people are willing to pay a premium for that.

This is HP’s big bet on the future. They’re betting on the Apple way. And that’s the right way for them to bet because they’re a hardware company. With a shift towards mobile starting to take place, as well as new products like tablets starting to rise, HP seems smart to get ahead of this trend. They’re not Microsoft or Google where profits are in licenses and advertising, respectively. With the webOS buy, they’re much closer to Apple. The profits there are in premium products, buoyed by the seamless ecosystem.

That’s where HP is heading.

[images: AMC]

Disney and social gaming startup Playdom are in “very” late stage acquisition discussions, we’ve heard from, oh, about seven independent sources, including sources close to Playdom, over the last several days. Internally the two parties have referred to the deal as “Project Platinum” based on due diligence documents we’ve reviewed.

Some sources have said the deal is signed and in the closing process. Others say it hasn’t been signed yet and could still unravel.

Disney is already an investor in Playdom – last month we reported that Disney’s Steamboat Ventures participated in a new injection of $33 million into the company. Playdom has raised a total of $76 million, and the most recent valuation of the company was around $345 million.

We’ve heard a wide range of speculation on the price Disney is paying for Playdom but haven’t confirmed anything yet. It’s probably safe to assume it’s a multiple of that $345 million valuation, though. Zynga, Playdom’s much larger competitor, has likely been valued at more than $2 billion in recent financings.

Does the deal make sense for Disney? There are a number of arguments that it does. Disney is weak in the social space, and despite making investments in MMOs, such a the acquisition of Club Penguin in 2007, digital revenues continue to make up a tiny percentage of overall revenue.

Disney has exceptional brands, from characters to movies, that can benefit from having social games being built around them. Social games generate revenue, sometimes lots of it, and it’s also free marketing. Expect to see social games around movies being released in advance in the future.

Earlier this month Disney acquired Tapulous.

Reading over the press release for the new “Antenna Meter” application for RIM’s BlackBerry devices, I’ll admit that I was bored. Okay, so it’s exactly what it says it is: an antenna meter. But aha! The two companies behind the app, Xtreme Labs and Fixmo, know how to pitch it. It’s not an antenna meter, it’s a “death grip” meter. Immediately, I’m much more interested.

As you’re undoubtedly aware by now, “death grip” is the term given to smartphone signal loss when a phone is held in your hand a certain way (that covers the antenna). Notably, this has been an issue with the iPhone 4. But Apple called a press conference a week ago to basically say that the problem isn’t unique to their device. And in fact, they showed that it affects other devices by rivals as well. One of those was a BlackBerry device. And RIM was not too pleased about that.

But other than issue a stern statement citing RIM as a “global leader in antenna design” (and potentially taking down videos showing the death grip) we haven’t seen much out of them to prove how good their antennas actually are. That’s what this app intends to do. While the release doesn’t mention “death grip” specifically, it’s clear what this is aimed at. Fixmo’s co-founder Rick Segal cites the “noise and unfair implications leveled at Research In Motion” as the basis for this app.

The pitch to me was more straightforward, “We also have a feature that encourages you to try out different ‘death grips’ on the BlackBerry to see resulting fluctuations in antenna signal strength.”

Something tells me we won’t be seeing an app like this in Apple’s App Store anytime soon. But if you want to try it out for BlackBerry, you can go here on your BlackBerry web browser.

The Funded’s Adeo Ressi’s prediction that 2010 will be the year of the angel investor, seems to be coming true.

In the second quarter, venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion, an impressive 34% increase from the prior quarter. Not so impressive? The amount of money they pulled in. According to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, venture capital funds only raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter— a 48% drop from the prior quarter. While VC fundraising can be somewhat cyclical, $1.9 billion is far lower than any quarter during the recession.

In fact, that’s the lowest level raised in roughly seven years.

On today’s episode of TechCrunch NOW, Ressi and I discussed this growing gap between VC investment and their ability to raise funds and what that means for the market as a whole. “Venture capitalists are living on borrowed time, no matter how you look at it there’s going to be a reconciliation,” he says. “They’re spending money from ages old today and in the future they’re going to have a lot less money at their disposal to invest.”

According to Ressi, the investment landscape is dramatically shifting, as venture capital becomes a less prominent asset class and a new generation of entrepreneurs-turned-angel investors fill the power vacuum. Amusingly, he says, he knows more and more venture capitalists who are tackling smaller angel investments, as they adapt to this new paradigm. See video above.

We’ll be sure to get the other side of this debate on an upcoming episode of TechCrunch NOW.

(Note: Great news! You can now now subscribe to the daily RSS/Podcast feed of TechCrunch Now by clicking on these links: )

CloudCanvas, a startup incubated in the Founder Institute, has launched their free HTML5 image editing suite to the public today. The product aims to blend capabilities of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop into a single, easy-to-use web based offering.

CloudCanvas allows both novice doodlers and expert designers to create, store, edit and embed images into the suite. The suite, which supports both vector and bitmap images, includes a standard roster of simple image tools similar to offline image editing suites (i.e. Photoshop), including polygons, circles, painting, layers, brushes and others. And the suite includes more advanced editing tools such as bezier curves, blurring, drop shadow and bevel filters.

Additionally, CloudCanvas is integrated with Google Images search and DeviantArt libraries to import images into the suite and includes over 30,000 clipart and templates within the suite. The suite also includes 500 fonts ready to use on the web and support saving in PNG and SVG formats.

The virtue of CloudCanvas is that it supports HTML5; and doesn’t run on Flash. CloudCanvas even has an iPad optimized version for touch drawing and illustrating, allowing you to take images right from the desktop to your handheld and back seamlessly. While CloudCanvas is free, the site will eventually include premium features and media sales, such as fonts and stock photography, in the future. As a special incentive for trying the suite out, CloudCanvas is offering a prize of $500 for each of the best three original images created with the product by September 12th, 2010.

Of course, there are other powerful browser-based editing suites that CloudCanvas will compete against, including Aviary, and Photoshop itself.

Amazon announced today that it had reached an agreement with Andrew Wylie, head of the successful New York agency whose clients include such authors as Oliver Sacks, Salman Rushdie, and Philip Roth, as well the estates of William Burroughs, John Updike, W.H. Auden, and the like. Amazon and the Kindle e-book store will have exclusive rights to publish several books by authors Wylie represents, cutting all other players (such as authors’ paper book distributors) out of the deal. It’s a big win for Amazon, but the start of a painful period for consumers.

Picture all the e-books that are out there as being in a big pie. Amazon is cutting a piece of the pie out and putting it in their own pan. Pretty soon, the other players will be furiously cutting their own pieces out of the pie and isolating them in their own pans. The end result is a messy and fractured marketplace that’s difficult and confusing for consumers to navigate.

Continue reading…

Analytics is a crowded space, with plenty of services looking to help you turn your visitors into engaged, paid customers. KissMetrics is the latest to join the fray, and it’s offering a solution that’s both straightforward and powerful. As it comes out of stealth, the company is also revealing its funding: in 2008 it closed a $1 million seed round led by True Ventures, and in mid-2009 it closed a $3 million round led by Polaris Ventures. The company also has investments from SoftTechVC, Felicis Ventures, and Angels including Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Shervin Pishevar, Bobby Yazdani, and Nils Johnson.

At this point, KissMetrics is built around one type of analysis: the conversion funnel, which shows you how many users are dropping off during your signup flows (and can hopefully help you figure out why). You can customize these graphs by tracking different variables, but Cofounder Hiten Shah says that you won’t find a dizzying array of other options. The goal, he says, was to get this one key tool to work very well before branching out (though other tools will follow).

KissMetrics started off around two years ago as an analytics service for Facebook applications, but shifted to its broader current model after noticing how many companies were building their analytics tools in-house. That story may sound familiar: the founders of Mixpanel, another analytics company, drew similar inspiration from their time at Slide.

So how does KissMetrics differ from Mixpanel and the other analytics services that are already out there? Shah says that other services generally track clicks and events, but that they don’t track users. KissMetrics, on the other hand, can be used to track the activity of a user even before they’ve even joined your site — it essentially builds an anonymous history for each user, and then associates that history with their username once they create an account. For example, if you were to visit a site five times without converting, but then visited a sixth time and did convert, the site’s owners can use KissMetrics to look back at the history of the first five visits to try to identify where they went wrong.

While this technology could potentially be used for things like cross-site advertising, Shah says KissMetricsonly creates these user histories on a per-site basis (he explains that this minimizes privacy issues). In the future, he says that KissMetrics products will evolve toward helping optimize marketing and customer acquisition.

The service is free for the first thirty days, then offers tiered monthly pricing plans based on how many events you’ll be tracking. These plans begin at $149 a month and go up to $699, with custom plans for especially large sites.

KissMetrics’ advisors include Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Jeff Veen, Jeff Hammerbacher, and Ed Baker (CEO of Friend.ly), many of whom have extensive experience in analytics.

Make no mistake, we get some weird stuff sent to TCHQ, especially when it’s addressed to our Belgian reporter, Robin Wauters. Which is why I always make a point of opening his mail before it’s sent on.

Today, though, was a special day.

Today, wrapped innocently in tissue paper, came “Barbie Video Girl”: a genuine Barbie doll, featuring a hidden webcam in her necklace. It’s hard to get across in text alone how messed up this thing is, so I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear’s John Biggs in New York for the first episode of a new video segment I’m calling “What’s Fucked Up In Toys… With John Biggs.”

Slightly NSFW video below.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it will award up to $122 million to create a Fuels form Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub led by the California Institute of Technology. The Hub’s goal is to develop ways to convert solar energy into chemical fuels and scale the technology for commercial use.

The project is in part inspired by the way plants produce energy, and will use artificial photosynthesis to turn sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into clean fuel. Researchers will be charged with finding ways to use technologies like light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers and separation membranes to transform sunlight into fuel, and the DOE aims to quickly turn the research into a viable product in the form of fuel that can go directly into cars without any additional processing.

Artificial photosynthesis is not a new technology, and researchers at MIT and the University of Rochester have been seeking solutions for some time. The DOE hopes the Hub will spark collaborations to make more progress in the field.

The Hub will have two locations: One on CalTech’s campus in Pasadena and one at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Several other California universities will participate as well, including UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. Funding will be provided over five years, with $22 million awarded this year and up to $25 million per year thereafter.

Photo via Flickr by Jennifer Boyer

Here come the slates. Send in the slates. Todd Bradley, EVP, Personal Systems Group, for HP just announced that their Windows 7 tablets will arrive “this fall” — something we suspected after said slates showed up on HP’s website with SKU numbers and all. The rumored (and almost certainly real) webOS slates were touched on tangentially, with the non-answer that we can expect a “family” of slate devices. Jon Rubinstein pretty much confirmed that they’re coming out, but wouldn’t give any dates.

The Windows 7 tablets, supposedly called Slate 500s, will support pen and finger input, and according to Rubinstein are going to be targeted at the enterprise sector — a strategy we suspected after reports of the Slate’s death were shown to be exaggerated.

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With their Chrome web browser, Google has always been obsessed with speed. And now they’re speeding up another aspect of it: how often stable builds are released. The goal now is to release a new stable version of the browser every six weeks — about twice as fast as they currently do, Google says. In other words, get ready for Chrome 6, 7, 8, and 9 coming soon.

So why is Google doing this? Because they’re creating new features so quickly and they want to make sure all users get them as fast as possible. These quick iterations also will allow Google to have more firmly set schedules for Chrome. And as a result, project managers will be able to set realistic goals for amount of work that can be done by a certain time.

But the most important thing that Google highlights may be the easing of pressure off of their engineering team. Under the old, longer release model, engineers would be pressured into trying to finish new features before a deadline or risk having them cut and not showing up for months. With the new release schedule, even if something isn’t ready to go in one release, it will only be six weeks until it makes the next one.

Google is also trying to downplay the rapid iteration of versions that will be coming:

Since we are going to continue to increment our major versions with every new release (i.e. 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0) those numbers will start to move a little faster than before. Please don't read too much into the pace of version number changes – they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands!

Google does not that this six week cycle is “running under ideal conditions,” so it’s possible it may slip from time to time. Still, it’s pretty exciting how fast they’ll be iterating now. And even if the version numbers don’t mean much, the other browsers are going to have to make sure their users know that, or it may look like Chrome is running laps around them.

Microsoft has just reported its earnings for Q4 2010 (their fiscal calendar is a bit odd). Given Apple’s blockbuster quarter announced on Tuesday, there was a lot of talk that Apple would surpass Microsoft in revenue for the first time in recent history. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Microsoft had its best Q4 ever with $16.04 billion in revenue (Apple had $15.7 billion in revenue last quarter).

Microsoft easily beat Wall Street estimates that they would see about $15.3 billion in revenues. Microsoft largely credits strong sales within enterprise of Windows 7 and Office 2010. Net income was also strong at $4.52 billion. And earnings per share were at $0.51. Both of those beat Wall Street estimates as well.

Microsoft says it has sold over 175 million Windows 7 licenses to date so far. They also tout the fact that Bing has achieved its 13th straight month of market share gain.

Since this was Microsoft’s fiscal Q4, they reported revenue of $62.48 billion for the year — a 7 percent increase from the 2009 fiscal year. Operating income, net income, and earnings per share were all up significantly higher at 18 percent, 29 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The 29 percent jump in net income (up to $18.76 billion) is particularly impressive.

Investors, meanwhile, are giving Microsoft’s earnings more of a “meh.” So far in after-hours trading, the stock is down two cents (.08 percent). During the day today, the stock rose almost 3 percent ahead of earnings.

While some were predicting Microsoft revenues to fall behind Apple’s (though, for the record, I wasn’t), there was never a question that Microsoft would retain a big lead in income. As they’re primarily a software and enterprise company, Microsoft’s margins remain massive. Their $4.52 billion in net income easily beat Apple’s $3.25 billion.

That being said, it seems quite likely that next quarter Apple will surpass Microsoft in revenue. Assuming that iPhone 4 sales are huge and that the iPad continues to grow, Apple’s momentum in revenue is simply too great for Microsoft to keep up with. Apple may or may not hit $20 billion in revenues next quarter (they’re projecting $18 billion, but they always low-ball that number so they can beat it).

This past May, much was made of Apple passing Microsoft in market cap for the first time — giving Apple the title of most valuable tech company. That distinction is more ceremonial than anything else, however. But when Apple passes Microsoft in revenue, that will be significant. As I said, it will be more difficult for Apple to catch Microsoft in income because of Microsoft’s software margins (whereas Apple primarily makes money on hardware, which offer smaller margins, even though Apple’s are the best in the business). But the gap is closing there as well.

The Antennagate press conference won’t soon be forgotten. Good or bad, it’s now part of Apple’s history and will probably be remembered as the time Steve Jobs side-stepped an issue and instead pointed the finger at everyone else. No matter. College Humor put together a short video of what they think the press conference would have been like if Steve Jobs would have spoken his mind instead of trying to spin the situation. The best line? Oh, they’re all good especially the one about Gizmodo. Click through for the slightly-NSFW two-minute video.

Google Voice is great, especially if you’re on a mobile platform that offers a native Voice application (namely Android or BlackBerry). But if you’ve been using the service on a regular basis, you may have run into an odd issue: sometimes when you go to actually call someone there’s a lag, as if the phone isn’t altogether sure what it’s supposed to do when you tap on the ‘Call’ button next to a contact’s name. Today, Google is getting rid of that lag in its native applications.

As Google details in its blog post, that pause was due to Google Voice making a small data request to Google’s servers whenever you initiated a call, which would return the number the application was supposed to dial. That works well enough when you have a decent 3G or EDGE connection, but it can also lead to annoying timeouts and pauses when you don’t. The new version of the Voice applications fixes this by assigning a unique phone number to your contacts, bypassing the need to initiate a data connection. In other words, your outbound calls should be faster now.

Disclosure: The Google Voice team has ported my cell number over to the service, as they did with Michael’s number.

Perhaps you recall back in June when Apple CEO Steve Jobs laid the smack down on mobile analytics firm Flurry. He noted they were “pissing us off” because they were collecting device data about Apple’s products. Specifically, Jobs obviously cared because it uncovered some as-yet-unannounced Apple products. A change Apple made to their developer agreements then made this illegal. And that’s where MixPanel saw an opening.

MixPanel has been a popular analytics company for about a year now. In fact, they recently announced they were tracking a billion actions a month across a wide variety of applications on the web. But that was only web applications (including Facebook apps), now they’re going mobile.

The company is launching an iPhone SDK library. By inserting just a few lines of code into their apps, customers will be able to get MixPanel data in realtime. And realtime is the key, while other analytics services say they have realtime data, MixPanel claims their’s is the fastest. “We’ve built better plumbing,” Founder Suhail Doshi says.

They also believe it’s the most comprehensive. While they aren’t tracking device data per Apple’s rules, they are offering “hardcore type analytics” that services have grown accustomed to on platforms like Facebook. For example, in an iPhone game, you could track which users choose which weapon when they play the game on a certain level. Or in an app like Yelp, you could tell which types of pages men keep coming back to.

Doshi compared the current crop of analytics services on the iPhone to Google Analytics — that is, more topical. He says MixPanel offers more “sophisticated tracking.”

The team has already been talking to a number of top app developers about using their service, which launches today. One of those is fellow Y Combinator company Posterous.

MixPanel plans to charge app developers based on the amount of data they’re collecting. This means that more popular apps will be charged more, as it should be. They’ll also offer badges that developers can put on their site to be able to use a certain amount of data for free, if they’re a startup.

Find out more in the video below.