The all-electric RAV4 is set to make a comeback. But this time around Tesla Motors is going to provide the electric powerplant, rather than Toyota themselves. In fact, Tesla might even be doing the bulk of the assembling if this CNN Money report is correct.

Toyota announced that the Japanese auto maker planned to invest $50 million into Tesla after a successful initial public offering. That took place a couple weeks back on June 29 and this is the first we’re seeing from the investment.

On behalf of everyone behind the France.fr fiasco, I'd like to attract your attention to something way better (that works) : MyLittleParis.  The unique newsletters bring all of France's best insider tidbits (deals, concerts, restaurants, oh là là, etc.) to your email inbox. Definitely makes more sense than waiting for the day when the government's portal will be up and running. With over 200K subscribers, it's probably hard to imagine that the company came about by pure accident - but it just so happens that that's the case. Turns out the founder, Fany Péchiodat, was asked non-stop by friends for her creative ideas and insider information on the best places in Paris and eventually found herself with only one option: to launch an e-newsletter. But not just an ordinary fill-in-the-blank template-style email. Actually, Fany's famous newsletters are perhaps anything but that.

Virgin is looking to expand into the publishing market with a new magazine called “Maverick” that targets the upscale international audience with content on entrepreneurism, technology and travel. The kicker is that Maverick will be an electronic magazine only, first available on iPads and later available on iPhones and Android devices.

Unlike other magazine ventures — like WIRED’s dead tree media and iPad app — Maverick will be digital only, a move they hope will reduce costs substantially. The project is being spearheaded by Holly Branson, daughter of Virgin’s zillionaire founder Richard Branson, and scheduled to launch in October.

Deja vu, right? Yesterday a rumor surfaced stating that the MacBook Air was shrinking down to 11-inches and would contain a new CPU architecture. Today it’s the Mac Pro‘s turn at the rumor mill. We’ve got new connectivity options and more. Best of all, there isn’t one part of the rumor that seems way out of line and totally unlikely.

Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack.

A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.

Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”.

Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on).

The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together.

The user interface reminds me a lot of Pulse, another great news consumption app for the iPad. Hawthorne Labs plans to expand Apollo to the iPhone, the Android platform and in the form of a general Web application at a later stage.

The iPad app is priced $4.99, but will be $2.99 until Monday July 19. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes.

World domination plans aside, the startup does seem to have a great team with relevant experience on their hands.

The three Hawthorne Labs co-founders are Evan Reas, a self-declared ‘Stanford MBA turned Bizhacker’ and former Google News and Bing engineers Shubham Mittal (the top ranked student at IIT-Delhi and a Gold Medalist at the International Physics Olympiad) and Prasanna Sankaranarayanan (who was a Google World Code Jam finalist, twice, and has far too many ‘a’s in his name to be healthy).

Fun factoid: these guys built the app before the iPad was even released, and as soon the tablet computer hit the market they tried to provision iPads in stores to test the early versions, only to get yelled at a lot. How’s that for some bootstrappin’ persistence?

Engadget and InformationWeek are reporting that AndroLib, which gathers all kinds of statistics on the Android Market, pegs the number of Android applications in the store at 100,000. My question is: where are they getting that from?

It’s true that AndroLib estimates the total number of downloads has now exceeded 1 billion apps, like we reported a couple of days ago when AndroLib launched a redesigned website featuring the estimated number in near real-time. And as InformationWeek pointed out, that number is climbing fast, by 100,000 in the time it took their reporter to write his post.

But 100,000 total apps available in the store, as both state? Not just yet.

AndroLib also keeps a neat page of the distribution of both free and paid apps in Android Market on this page, where they say the total number of apps in the store is just above 84,000, much closer to the number Google itself shared yesterday in its earnings call (>70,000 apps). Still a discrepancy, but not by as big a margin as Engadget reports.

Update: AndroLib says they measure Android apps published throughout the world, and that Google probably kept a nice round number for their earnings call – and they also think they may sometimes count apps that have been recently removed from the Market. AndroLib also claims the number of available apps sometimes grows by 1000+ per day.

So will the total number of applications in Android Market soon surpass 100,000 in total, like the guys from AndroidGuys predicted earlier this month? Yes, almost certainly, in the next few weeks even. But again, not just yet.

In just a few hours, the world will know what exactly to make of the iPhone 4 antenna situation. Or maybe we won’t. But Apple is going to tell us something about the device. And hopefully everyone up in arms about the device can find some peace.

Until then, how about a song?

Our favorite jingle writer Jonathan Mann is back with a new song. And this time it’s about the iPhone 4 antenna. You may recall that Mann won a Bing jingle competition last August, which I promptly made fun of. He then wrote a song about me, which was much better. But actually, the guy is damn talented, and I can hardly believe that he has managed to keep up this song-a-day thing for so long.

Mann’s iPhone antenna song encapsulates the situation well. “If you don’t want an iPhone 4, don’t buy it. If you bought one and you don’t like it, bring it back.” Imagine if it were just that simple.

Join us tomorrow for our coverage of the Apple press conference. For now, enjoy the video below.

So it’s likely more than a few of you have seen the Paul Vasquez double rainbow video (if you haven’t seen it go watch it now, we’ve also embedded it below). We laughed. We cried. We laughed/cried simultaneously.

And then we thought of our own MG Siegler and how much he loves the iPhone. No one, not even Steve Jobs, loves the iPhone as much as MG does.

Well, no one except maybe John Gruber at Daring Fireball. We hear from reliable sources that MG and Gruber will be sharing a car to tomorrow’s iPhone 4 extravaganza at Apple HQ. Maybe they can argue about which one of them is, truly, the biggest Apple fanboy of them all.

In the meantime, here’s our tribute to MG Siegler’s iPhone love. And don’t worry about next year when the iPhone 4 is old news. The triple rainbow iPhone 5 will be even better, we hear.

The Golden State Warriors have a deal in place to sell for $450 million, the largest amount ever for an NBA franchise. That’s nice, but what does this have to do with tech? One of the key partners in the team that made the winning bid is also a partner at the famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. And they beat out a bid that was being made by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Specifically, Joe Lacob, a longtime partner at Kleiner Perkins, teamed up with Mandalay Entertainment CEO Peter Guber to buy the team from current owner Chris Cohan. “I am incredibly excited to have the opportunity to be the next steward of this storied NBA franchise. This is my dream come true,” Lacob told ESPN.

At Kleiner Perkins, Lacob is mainly involved with life science and greentech deals, but he has backed a number of websites. That includes Sportsline.com, which CBS bought in 2004 and renamed to CBSSports.com in 2007. ESPN also notes that Lacob was “the primary investor in the women’s American Basketball League in venture capital.“

Lacob is actually not new to the NBA at all. He’s currently a minority owner of the Boston Celtics — a stake which he’ll have to sell off before this deal gets approval from the league. The group he was a part of which bought the Celtics contained several other VCs from firms like Highland Capital, TPG Capital, Bain Capital, and Accel Partners.

But the Celtics are good — Lacob saw them win their 17th championship in 2008, and they made the finals again this past year. The Warriors have been one of the NBA’s worst-performing franchises, as they’ve only made the playoffs once in the past 16 years. But Lacob, who has been a season-ticket holder, sounds committed, “Peter and I intend to do what we do best — innovating and building. It is our passion to return the Warriors to greatness and build nothing short of a championship organization that will make all of us in the Bay Area proud,” he tells ESPN.

ESPN is also reporting that Ellison, who had been considered the frontrunner, backed out of the bidding as he didn’t want to go as high as $450 million, which again, is the highest amount ever paid for an NBA franchise. Ellison is worth around $30 billion, but he also also didn’t make that money by simply outbidding everyone on deals like this.

Ellison’s Oracle owns the naming rights for the arena that the Warriors play in in Oakland. But the team has long been rumored to be looking for a site for a new arena, perhaps even one in San Francisco, near AT&T Park where the San Francisco Giants play.

If nothing else, at least the Warriors have gotten rid of those awful lightning bolt-man uniforms. Their new logo is more of a retro one (above).

[thanks Joe]

Venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion in 906 deals in the second quarter of 2010, according to a MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data provided by Thomson Reuters. Quarterly investment activity increased 34 percent in terms of dollars and 22 percent in number of deals compared to the first quarter of 2010 when $4.9 billion was invested in 740 deals.

In the first half of 2010, VC investments totaled $11.4 billion in 1,646 deals, a 49 percent increase in dollars and a 23 percent increase in deals from the first half of 2009, in the mist of the recession, when $7.7 billion was invested in 1,340 deals.

The Software industry had the most deals completed in Q2 with 229 rounds, representing a jump of 43 percent from the 160 rounds completed in the first quarter. In terms of dollars invested, the Software sector was in third place, increasing 43 percent from the prior quarter to $1 billion in the second quarter of 2010.

Internet-specific companies received $879 million going into 212 deals in the second quarter, flat in terms of dollars and a 25 percent increase in deals over the first quarter of 2010 when $891 million went into 169 deals. 'Internet-Specific' is a discrete classification assigned to a company with a business model that is fundamentally dependent on the Internet, regardless of the company's primary industry category.

Investments in the clean tech sector doubled in the second quarter compared to Q1 of 2010. The sector saw a 107 percent increase in dollars over the first quarter to $1.5 billion in 71 deals compared with 70 deals in the first quarter. The life sciences sector jumped 52 percent in dollars and 36 percent in deals from the prior quarter to $2.1 billion going into 234 deals. Biotechnology again received the highest level of funding, rising 59 percent in dollars and 34 percent in deal volume in the second quarter with $1.3 billion going into 139 deals. Medical device investing also increased 40 percent in both dollars and deals over the first quarter with $755 million going into 95 deals in Q2.

The Industrial/Energy industry received the second highest level of funding in the quarter with $1.3 billion going into 61 deals, representing a 95 percent increase in dollars but a 13 percent decrease in deals compared to the first quarter when $658 million went into 70 deals. In all, 11 of the 17 sectors experienced dollar increases in the second quarter, including Computers and Peripherals (48 percent increase), Consumer Products and Services (44 percent), and IT Services (28 percent). Sectors which saw decreases in dollars included Semiconductors (40 percent decrease), Financial Services (22 percent) and Telecommunications (27 percent).

Seed and early stage deals also increased in Q2 from prior quarters, rising 54 percent in dollar value to $2.3 billion. The actual number of Seed and Early stage deals increased 32 percent to 429 from the prior quarter. Seed/Early stage deals accounted for 47 percent of total deal volume in the second quarter, compared to the first quarter when it accounted for 44 percent of all deals. The average Seed deal in the second quarter was $7.1 million, up from $5.1 million in the first quarter. The average Early stage deal was $4.7 million in Q2, up from $4.4 million in the prior quarter.

Expansion stage dollars increased 48 percent in the second quarter, with $2.7 billion going into 277 deals. Overall, Expansion stage deals accounted for 31 percent of venture deals in the second quarter, down slightly from 32 percent in the first quarter of 2010. The average Expansion stage deal was $9.7 million, up from $7.6 million in the first quarter of 2010.

These numbers create an optimistic view of the venture capital sector that is not reflected in another recent National Venture Capital Association study that showed that most U.S. venture capitalists expect their market to contract. And while, fundraising is on the rise, long terms returns are hurting.

Good news, iPhone toting Firefox fans. A few weeks ago Mozilla submitted a new application called ‘Firefox Home‘ to the App Store. No, this isn’t a new Firefox browser for iPhone (which would be blocked by Apple). Instead, it’s a syncing application that gives you access to all of your Firefox bookmarks, history, and even the tabs you have open on your PC’s Firefox browser.  Tapping on one of the links will open the page in iPhone’s Mobile Safari Browser.  In short, it’s a great addition for regular Firefox users.

Seeing Firefox on the App Store is still sure to raise a few eyebrows, but there was never much doubt that this would be approved (we predicted it would make it through the approval process just fine).  The application works using Firefox’s Sync add-on, which lets you upload your Firefox profile to the cloud.

Ze Frank, the video blogger and performance artist, is getting $500,000 from a band of super angels and VCs to play games. His stealth startup Ze Frank Games (there isn’t even a Website for it yet) just raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, betaworks, Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital, CrossCut Ventures, Joshua Schachter, and Gary Vaynerchuck.

In additiona to his playful video podcasts, starting with The Show and more recently his video contributions to Time.com, Ze Frank also designs games such as Memory (also available as the iPhone game Memari) and social games like Twitter Color Wars.

Details are spare about what Ze Frank Games will create. Ze Frank writes via email:

The company is still in stealth mode – but it will involve social gaming and will be influenced heavily by what I’ve learned about play and participation over the last ten years with projects like The Show and Color Wars.

Fellow video blogger-turned-entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk says he invested because “as someone who was there when he started Color Wars on Twitter and watching him from afar build his show and brand through gaming mechanics this became a no brainer for me. This is more about Ze than the product and at times that is the right call.” Chris Dixon of Founder Collective (and CEo of Hunch) concurs: “Ze is a genius and he’s going to do amazing stuff.” He won’t tell me what Ze Frank Games is either.

Some other clues about the direction Ze Frank Games might venture can be found on Ze Frank’s blog, which has a post with a video on the future of gaming. It is all about turning life into a game and infusing game mechanics into the real world (a concept that another recent Andreessen Horowitz investment, Foursquare, is taking to the races).

But don’t expect another Foursquare. Ze Frank is way more conceptual than that. Just read some of the job descriptions for the positions he is trying to hire. For instance, here are some of his requirements for a front-end developer:

You should be awesome at making JavaScript do things it wasn't designed to do. . . . You should know how to interact with a database in a healthy, grown-up, passive-aggressive way. You should tell your coder friends that you are a designer and your designer friends that you are a coder. You should have friends but it is okay if you don't. You should find an exhilarating beauty in finding a simple solution to a problem. The word "iterate" should roll off of your tongue like a mantra.

And for a graphic designer:

The phrase "Please make that look more like a Muppet vomited SteamPunk." should seem like satisfactory art direction, and to be honest there was no need to use the word "please". You should feel slightly anxious when you see something that isn't properly aligned.

I don’t think even Ze Frank knows exactly what Ze Frank Games is going to be, but whatever it is, it won’t be boring.

If you’re running a website, you’ve probably heard of A/B testing, which entails running multiple versions of a site at once and tracking which one performs best with users. But there’s also a pretty good chance that you haven’t actually gotten around to running those A/B tests — the prospect can be daunting, and if you aren’t tech savvy, existing solutions can be confusing. Enter Optimizely, a Y Combinator-funded company with a great pedigree that’s launching today in private beta. The service is looking to make all aspects of running an A/B test as easy as possible, and it looks quite impressive. In fact, when I showed it to our lead developer, he responded “This is brilliantly simple. Can we get an invite?”.

If you’d like an invite of your own, head to Optimizely’s homepage, enter your email address, and use the invite code TECHCRUNCH on the survey you’ll receive. Optimizely will be giving out invites to the first 100 readers, with more to follow.

Getting started with Optimizely is surprisingly easy. After logging in and hitting the ‘Create Experiement’ tab, the service asks you to choose which website you want to run an A/B test on. Optimizely will then load that site, but with a key change: as you move your mouse over each part of the page (text, images, etc.) you’ll notice a light blue cursor highlighting each element. Click an element, and you’ll see a menu that lets you modify the element’s position or size, its image or text, or its Javascript.

Optimizely makes it easy for novices to tweak their pages. Want to make an image bigger? Just drag its edges. Want to move a widget that showcases your most popular posts to the other size of the screen? Drag it over.  When I tested this I found the widget editing to be a bit finicky at times, but it’s clear that this has the potential to be very powerful.  And it also lets experienced developers directly edit the page’s code, so they can adjust multiple items at once, or make other more sophisticated edits. You can create multiple experiments for the same page at once.

Once you’re ready to run your tests, adding Optimizely to your site is also simple; you just need add a special snippet of code to each page you want to test out. When a visitor hits your site, Optimizely sends them a small package of Javascript that will tweak the site based on how you’ve set up your experiments. If for some reason Optimizely fails to load, users will simply see the ‘normal’ version your site.

Optimizely tracks the performance of each experiment in a control panel, allowing you to compare the engagement rates of each experiment side by side (there’s a rating showing how confident Optimizely is that your changes made a difference in user engagement). By default Optimizely will pay attention to all user actions, like clicking links, but you can also tell it to analyze how often users are clicking through on specific links.

Optimizely’s founders have some pretty impressive credentials, too. Dan Siroker was a product manager for Google Chrome who also served as the Director of Analytics for the Obama campaign (the campaign did quite a bit of A/B testing, which resulted in an extra $60 million in donations). And founder Pete Koomen was the product manager for Google’s App Engine.

Also see VisualWebsiteOptimizer, which also has an editor that lets you edit elements on your site.

Facebook is about to announce that they’ve hit 500 million users — a milestone that cements (as if it hadn’t already) the site’s status as one of the web’s biggest successes ever. Of course, at Facebook’s growth trajectory it hasn’t been a matter of if the social network would be hitting 500 million, but when it would (in fact, the movie poster for the upcoming movie The Social Network uses the 500 million stat in its tagline). Still, it’s finally about to become official. So how do we know?

As part of its celebration, Facebook is apparently asking many of its employees to upload photos of themselves celebrating and giving thanks to users. And all of those photos are being hosted on one Drop.io account. In the interest of not totally raining on their parade I’ll hold off on sharing all the photos (Facebook will undoubtedly make the Drop.io folder private anyway), but we’ve included a couple of them.

Facebook’s announced 400 million users only five months ago, as it celebrated its sixth birthday. And it took only five months to go from 300 to 400.

Famous rock band Guns N’ Roses released their latest album, Chinese Democracy, in November, 2008. It had been in development for an astonishing 15 years. That’s partially why Kevin Cogill got into so much trouble. You’ll recall that he was caught uploading tracks from the then-unreleased album in June, 2008. While he managed to dodge jail time, Cogill was given a year of probation and two months of home confinement. He was also supposed to take part in a public service announcement on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America&mdas;public enemy number one in the eyes of young people around the country.

So here we are in July, 2010, and we’re left wondering: what happened to that PSA?

People sure love clobbering virtual snakes. Social gaming powerhouse Zynga has just released the latest stats for its new game FrontierVille, and it’s clear that it’s off to a solid start: around five weeks after launching, the game is now up to 20 million monthly users, with around 6 million Daily Active Users (DAUs). That’s up from 5 million DAUs on June 22, when the game had around 12 million monthly users.

Zynga has also released the following stats about what people are actually doing on their virtual frontiers:

6.3 million people have built their frontier cabins
3.3 million people have built a general store
2.3 million people got married
1.1 million people have had a kid
10 million people have clobbered a snake (snakes were clobbered 252 million
times)
3.6 million people have scared away a bear (bears were scared away 128 million times)

So why is this significant? Zynga’s games hit a slump earlier this year and its top game FarmVille has been steadily losing users — the company needs to prove that it can keep pumping out hits. FrontierVille is already ranked as the company’s third most popular game, after FarmVille and Poker, and its monthly active stats are still growing nicely. Still, some of these users may simply be making the switch from FarmVille to FrontierVille (the games share many similarities), and it remains to be seen if FrontierVille has the same staying power as FarmVille has displayed.

I still believe that Zynga needs to launch some truly innovative, different games if it wants to score another hit on the same level as FarmVille in its hayday.

As we’re now less than a day away from Apple’s surprise iPhone 4 press conference, speculation is at a fever pitch. Depending on what you read, Apple is either going to recall the device, offer users to trade it in for a new version, offer free bumpers, offer gift cards, simply explain the problem — or do something else entirely. But now it seems that we may be able to rule out one of those scenarios: the recall.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple will not be recalling the device. Normally, this type of one-source report may not seem too concrete — except that WSJ has an interesting history with these type of Apple rumors. That is, they often seem as if they come from Apple itself.

The most recent example of this was in January, when speculation was swirling about Apple’s then-unannounced tablet device. WSJ not only confirmed it, but confirmed that it would ship in March (it eventually slipped to April, but close enough). They also had some funny wording in that story, which was later altered. The wording originally definitively stated the device would be around $1,000. But then they altered the wording to say that some analysts were predicting that. As I noted at the time, I thought this may have been Apple pushing WSJ in a certain direction to set expectations. That is, if WSJ reports the thing will be $1,000 and it comes in for $600-$800, people are going to be pleasantly surprised.

In fact, the iPad was announced with a starting point of just $499. The audience erupted upon hearing that. Mission: accomplished.

Of course, that alone isn’t proof of Apple leaking anything to WSJ. But consider that a couple days later, a former senior marketing manager at Apple came forward with the same claim. According to him, Apple would often let information out that served the company’s interest. “That's how Apple does controlled leaks, and the WSJ article from yesterday was a classic example,” is how he summed up his post on the matter.

Then, of course, there’s the whole matter with Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ liver transplant. The WSJ broke that story too — and did so at what is hard to see as anything other than a very advantageous time for Apple. The company had just launched the iPhone 3GS the very same day the story broke. And the stock soared that day as a result. But the news of the transplant (which had happened months before) didn’t come out until that evening — after the markets were closed. This gave everyone plenty of time to settle down before the market opened up again on Monday.

I mean, the WSJ broke one of the biggest stories of the year on a Friday evening on the launch day of Apple’s most successful product. Weird, huh?

If you think that’s all purely coincidental, consider that the lead author of each of these stories is the same WSJ reporter, Yukari Iwatani Kane. Guess who is the lead on the no-recall story today? Yep.

It’s worth noting that today’s report also says that: “Apple engineers were aware of the risks associated with the new antenna design as early as a year ago, but Mr. Jobs liked the design so much that Apple went ahead with its development.” That’s certainly not favorable to Apple. But consider that the source on this seems to be an entirely different source than the one giving the no-recall information. After all, “a person familiar with the matter” is cited twice in two consecutive paragraphs, rather than “the same person said.”

Further, later in the story, Apple specifically gives a comment to WSJ denying the Apple engineer report (which first appeared this morning in BusinessWeek). “We challenge Bloomberg BusinessWeek to produce anything beyond rumors to back this up. It’s simply not true,” Apple told WSJ.

Does anyone really think it’s likely that Apple would deny that rumor to WSJ while at the same time letting them run a rumor that there will be no recall? I don’t think so. It’s likely because it’s not a rumor. There will be no recall. And that very well could be coming directly from Apple to set expectations for tomorrow.

It looks like Twitter’s notification emails that are sent when you have a new follower are getting a much-needed makeover. A search on Twitter has confirmed that the new emails are being rolled out to users.

The new emails have a cleaner interface and now include the follower’s location and bio. This should help users easily detect if a follower is a spammer. You can also click to send an @reply to the follower or a direct message. In addition, you see if how many lists the follower is on. Clearly this information is much more useful than what Twitter was serving before.

We are assuming that this update is also going to be extended to direct message notifications as well. Twitter updated its email notifications last May, which also contained more information about the person sending you the message or following you. We noted at that time that these messages would be a lot more useful if they included bio info. Looks like Twitter took our advice.

As a few of our commenters are suggesting, it would also be useful to show users mutually following/followers.

Hat tip to Jeff Epstein.

You know you’ve got a viral marketing hit on your hands when the CFO of Google mentions it in an earnings call. Yes, I am talking about the Old Spice YouTube Tweetathon where the bare-chested Old Spice Man addresses people on Twitter via personalized commercials on YouTube .

At the tail-end of a long, very long, 90-minute earnings call in which I dozed off at least three times, Google CFO Patrick Pichette perked me up when he made a reference to the Old Spice social media marketing campaign. “It just gives you a glimpse of where the world is going,” he said with a touch of awe in his voice.

That begs the question, one day will all ads be made like this? The Old Spice Man has already answered this, it turns out, and he warns of the cataclysmic effects which might result if he were to do ads for all the world’s products.

The United Nations Environment Program and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century today reveal in a pair of new reports that despite an overall financial downturn in 2009, global investments in sustainable energy increased worldwide. Core clean energy investments from private and public sources totaled $162 billion.

Policies that favor the development of a green economy and businesses in the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency also increased: more than 100 countries enacted some type of policy target and/or promotion policy related to renewable energy by early 2010.

Thirty eight developing nations had policy targets, and 41 developing nations had a policy of promoting renewable energy. Some segments declined, while others shined of course. Highlights from the clean energy 2009 reports follow below.

Shined: China
Declined: United States

China surpassed the United States for the first time as the country with the greatest investment in clean energy.

Shined: U.S. growth in renewable energy
Declined: U.S. growth in traditional energy

Domestic power capacity increased through clean energy sources more than non-renewable sources like coal, gas and nuclear in 2009.

Shined: Rooftop solar photovoltaics
Declined: Large, utility-scale solar photovoltaics

Investments in large-scale solar photovoltaics dropped dramatically worldwide. Why? The cost of solar PV technology also dropped dramatically. Record investments in small-scale, namely rooftop solar photovoltaics offset that, partly.

Shined: Spending on wind, power storage and electric vehicles in China
Declined: Spending on biofuels (like sugar and corn ethanol) in the U.S., Brazil and Europe

Biofuels saw $18 billion of financial investment worldwide in 2008, but ended up with just $7 billion in 2009.

Shined: Private sector investment in clean energy in Asia and the Americas
Declined: Private sector investment in green energy in Europe

For the first time, private sector green energy investments in Asia and Oceania, some $40.8 billion in 2009, exceeded that in the Americas, at $32.3 billion. But private sector investment in Europe was down 10% at $43.7 billion.

Shined: Private equity and venture capital investments in power storage and energy efficiency
In decline: Public, government spending on clean energy

Around the world, venture capitalists and private equity investors spent $4 billion on energy-smart technologies like storage and efficiency. That's more than they spent on any other clean energy sector in 2009. By spring 2010, government spending on clean energy began to slow, somewhat, thanks to a new phase of the economic downturn, volatility in the market and governments facing pressure to cut their deficit

For more information about the global clean energy economy in 2009, read the entire report at the UNEP website.

Earlier today, we noted that Google SVP Marissa Mayer had written a post responding to suggestions that perhaps the government should regulate Google Search. The problem with this follow-up post was that it was behind a paywall — or technically, a registration wall, since you can sign up for free. Still, that’s a huge hinderance to content — and Google agrees. They’ve now copy and pasted the entire post onto their Public Policy Blog.

As Google’s senior manager of public policy communications, Adam Kovacevich, notes:

Google's Marissa Mayer wrote in the Financial Times today about the impact for consumers of governments potentially regulating search results. Because the article is behind the FT's paywall, we thought we'd share the complete text here.

He also takes the opportunity to link to Danny Sullivan’s take on the matter — which is very good. Mayer’s response is also pretty good. I’m glad we can now read it.

Thank you for listening, Google. Enjoy the rest of your day.

During Google’s Q2 2010 earnings call today, one of the things Google’s executives were clearly very excited about was the Android platform. They noted that there are now 70,000 apps in the Android Market — up from 30,000 in April. They also reiterated the company line about how important openness is to the platform. But during the Q&A session, an interesting question was raised: how much investment is Google putting into Android for this open platform?

“Android cost isn’t material for the company,” Google CFO Patrick Pichette noted. He said that it’s important to remember that perhaps the key products for Android — the phone hardware — isn’t developed by Google at all. Droid X, for example, was entirely an investment by Motorola to make the device. “The entire ecosystem is exploding,” Pichette said.

“I think the most important thing beyond the growth is that the most popular app is a browser,” Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s SVP of Product Management, added. And what do people do there? They search — more than they ever have, Rosenberg continued. In fact, he says that search on Android devices grew 300% in the first half of 2010.

Rosenberg also added that mobile search growth across the board is up some 500% in the past two years from a traffic perspective. “Android is an accelerator of that,” Rosenberg concluded.

When another question wondered if the Android strategy was more defensive (presumably against Apple), Pichette said that Android is being done for “offensive reasons, not defensive reasons.” He reiterated the importance of an open ecosystem and said that smartphones are creating a new set of activities for search and transaction.

“I don’t think of this is defensive at all,” Rosenberg chimed in. He noted that all of this was in its nascent stages and that Google is investing heavily.  ”We see this platform as winning. It lets us build the mobile Internet,” he said.

In terms of making money off of Android’s software (beyond search), Rosenberg said it was too early to answer that. “We’re mostly focused on building out the platform with Android.“

How much did Google spend to fend off Viacom’s $1 billion copyright lawsuit? On today’s earnings call, CFO Patrick Pichette revealed that Google’s legal bills for the case amounted to $100 million, and that was before it went to trial.

The legal bill could have ended up being many times that amount, but last month the judge threw out the case, and Google declared victory. Viacom will reportedly try to appeal, but the summary judgement was pretty harsh. As I wrote at the time:

The fact that the judge granted YouTube's summary motion to dismiss the case sends a clear message to media companies: Live by the DMCA, Die by the DMCA. The "safe harbor" provision in that Act is what protects YouTube and other Websites from being sued for the copyright infringement of their users as long as they take down infringing material. The judge found that while there were a huge number of infringing videos on YouTube, the site did take them down when notified. In fact, he points out one instance in 2007 when Viacom gave YouTube a single takedown notices for 100,000 videos. By the next day they were down.

Unless Viacom can find a judge who interprets the DMCA more liberally, this lawsuit is going nowhere. YouTube is here to stay, as long as Google has billions of dollars of cash in its war chest.

If Google spent $100 million on lawyers, I wonder how much Viacom spent.

Google has just announced its second quarter earnings for 2010. Of note, revenue stood at $6.82 billion, which is an increase of 24% year-over-year. But this only represents an increase of 1% over Q1 2010. Google has a history of seeing small growth from Q1 to Q2, however.

More interesting may be that net income actually fell in Q2 versus Q1 of this year. A big reason for that is likely because paid clicks fell by 3% from quarter to quarter. Another factor is that network revenues (those off of Google.com) fell by 1% this quarter compared to last quarter.

Non-GAAP EPS was 6.45, below the consensus estmate of $6.52.

All that said, Google now has $30.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term securities — which is up nearly $4 billion from last quarter. Google also has about a thousand more employees now (21,805 full-time) versus what it had a quarter ago.

Below find some live notes from the earnings call:

Patrick Pichette, CFO

- “Overall we are very pleased with Q2 results”

- We noticed that more and more traditional brand advertisers are embracing ways to expand their brands online. Like P&G.

- Campaigns across display, mobile, and search — it’s all being integrated.

- Growth in display was very strong. Display network includes YouTube — it’s growing rapidly.

- We entered into agreement with Omnicom this is significant

- YouTube is seeing impressive growth with regard to ads.

- Very pleased with courts decision to rule in our favor for Viacom case.

- We invested $100 million to win this case.

- Mobile ads continue to grow. And now AdMob is here.

- 160,000 Android devices activated daily — 2 every second.

- The world is moving into the cloud.

- After Q3 we won’t recognize the sales from Nexus One — as we announced, we’re stopping selling them.

- International revenue is 52% of our revenue.

- $3B credit facility

- Capex up as they ramp up data centers

Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP Product Management

- “Now the web is much, much, much more complicated.”

- We introduced Caffeine, a new way of updating our index

- 50% fresher results than before

- And we’ve had a bunch of UI and UX updates.

- “The ads have to get better too.”

- “People would click on fewer ads — that would be bad”

- “You have to make ads that people want to watch.”

- When you search from your phone, you’re much more likely to click if they have a clickable address in them.

- Display is going really well. The ultimate goal is to designate a particular audience on our network.

- And we’re doing remarketing.

- “We want to be open in everything we do.”

- Android is a leading example of being open. Most of these devices are developed independent of Google.

- Android Market now has around 70,000 apps — up from 30,000 in April.

- People spent 4.8 million hours playing Pac-Man on our main site when it was up.

Q&A

Q: Were bonuses a part of operating expenses?

A: That had a small impact. It was about headcount, marketing and acquisitions.

Q: How much of paid click is coming from mobile?

A: Mobile is growing faster than other clicks. There is a larger range of mobile clicks, but we don’t detail.

Q: Where are the headcount increases coming from?

A: It’s 1,200 new people, but 300 are from M&A. Most of the headcount is in engineering and sales. It’s in the four core areas: search, mobile, apps, display.

Q: CPC mobile vs. desktop.

A: Not really enough data yet to say. It’s really a different beast.

Q: How much investment is going into Android? Is it all just to compete? You’re not charging for it, how do you monetize it?

A: Android cost isn’t material for the company. Some of the key products have not been developed by Google at all — like the Droid X. The entire ecosystem is exploding.

JR: I think the most important thing beyond the growth is that the most popular app is a browser. What do they do there? They search more than they ever have.

Q: Is search activity really strong on mobile devices? What a

A: Android search grew 300% in the first half of 2010. It’s exploding. Mobile has grown 500% in the last 2 years in traffic. Android is an accelerator of that.

Q: How’s the macro environment going?

A: For Google it has been a great quarter. There has been no impact from the larger economy problems. We’re really pleased. Cash breakdown is 50/50 U.S. vs. International.

Q: Returning cash to shareholders?

A: Commercial paper is a great opportunity for us. We have made no decision about share buybacks. It’s a topic that is regularly debated, but nothing to announce.

Q: Android and mobile is a defensive strategy?

A: We did it for offensive reasons, not defensive reasons. We think an open ecosystem is incredible important. And we know that smartphones create a new set of activities for search and transaction. It’s both defensive and offensive.

Q: Android ecosystem support is less than what some would like.

A: We’re investing heavily. Search advertising is nascent in this space. And we’re doing a lot of innovation in cloud computing in other.

A: This is in its nascent stage. “I don’t think of this as defensive at all.”

Q: Profitable on YouTube?

A: We don’t comment on YouTube. But we are incredibly pleased by its trajectory. It’s 2 billion views per day. It’s a billion monetization views a week.

Q: Talk about Android and Chrome OS in terms of revenue. Is there any in the software?

A: It’s too early to answer that. We’re mostly focused on building out the platform with Android. With Chrome, it’s still too early.

A: Contextual search losing market share?

Q: There has been a lot of debate for people’s methodologies. Be cautious about those numbers.

Q: Do you feel you’re losing market share?

A: No.

Q: Update on China? Are they okay with the new method?

A: The good news is we have our license renewal. Revenue from China is not material from our revenue though. We had decent revenues for Q2 though. I hope you understand why I won’t talk more about it.

Here are all the slides:

Editor's note: Guest author Steve Cheneyis an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.

Leading up to Apple’s press conference tomorrow, there's been endless speculation about the iPhone 4 antenna issue. Amidst all the wrangling, both sides have been pretty bipolar about the solution—suggesting either a complete recall, or a hand-waiving session, free bumpers, and a general denial of the hardware issue.

The best solution lies in between both of those extremes: a full admission of the hardware issue, together with a voluntary recall and an immediate manufacturing fix. Here's why:

The antenna issue is not only very real, but it's also open-ended. To date, only 3M iPhone 4 units have shipped. PC World estimates that 40M units will ship by 2011.

This staggering forecast quantifies the true issue for Apple—it will never really go away. With each iPhone 4 sold, the installed base grows. And since the issue appears to be fairly fickle, presenting itself differently depending on location and signal, the potential for problems grows geometrically as shipments increase. And continued negative mainstream press could actually expand Apple's woes exponentially.

There is a simple solution:

ODMs (original design manufacturers) in Taiwan are incredibly deft at making quick changes to their manufacturing runs. In my visits to Foxconn and Taiwanese ODMs, I was always completely blown away by how they made changes in the middle of product cycles. Most people aren't aware that components inside consumer electronics equipment change as often as every 3-6 months. And these are component and software level changes, which are much more difficult than simple changes to the industrial design.

A person only needs to think of HTC (part ODM, part OEM) to witness this. If HTC is capable of producing entirely new models of phones every 1-2 months on average, then it's very clear that Foxconn and Apple should be able to implement a mid-run manufacturing tweak to modify the design of the antenna.

What would this tweak constitute? It's fairly straightforward: An insulating coating should be applied to the stainless steel antenna. Surely Apple design God Jonathan Ive has an arsenal of materials at his disposal which could coat the steel, yet retain the look, feel, transparency, and hardness of the stainless steel band.

Together Foxconn and Apple should be able to complete this in a month or less. Foxconn can stage the runs of new iPhone 4's, and switch the manufacturing line over as soon as new antennas are ready. Since there is no shortage of stainless steel (unlike Retina displays for instance), this solution would only be gated by how quickly Apple and Foxconn can move.

Considering the antenna issue is quickly becoming the worst gaffe in Apple's history, mobilizing the required resources should be Apple’s No. 1 priority.  In fact, if Steve Jobs announces tomorrow that such a fix is already under way, it will go a long way towards silencing the uproar.

This is imperative for Apple, since the installed base is rapidly growing, and since Apple's lack of attention to quality assurance threatens to become a permanent blemish. Both the lack of testing and Job's email response were extremely sloppy. The antenna issue stands in complete contradiction to Jony Ive's recent interview in which he boasts about Apple's command of materials—it doesn't take an RF engineer to know that stainless steel is conductive.

It's much better to fix the antenna now. Apple can then do a "voluntary recall" after a certain date once manufacturing has hit its stride. For example, the voluntary recall is announced now, and starting September 1st, customers can exchange their iPhone 4 at a genius bar for up to three months.

Such a voluntary recall would only produce a modest financial hit since it would be spread between two quarters (the September and December quarters), muting any hit to earnings. And since many newly-educated customers will be using bumpers or after-market cases by that time, plenty of people won't even bother with the recall.

Fix the antenna Apple. Or the issue will damage your brand and become much worse. By the way, I talked to iFixit, the self-repair site, and they think Apple is using some sort of coating.