I trust by now you’ve read Apple’s letter claiming that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the antennae on the iPhone 4, and that any real reception issues are inexistent and merely a result of faulty displaying on Apple’s part, which it intends to fix in the coming weeks.

Unimpressed by that statement? You’re not alone.

Mason LLP, one of the multiple firms that have filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of customers who recently purchased the iPhone 4 alleging that the antenna on the phone is in fact defective by design, isn’t terribly impressed either.

The firm, which filed the lawsuit seeking an order requiring Apple to ship a protective case for the iPhone 4 to all consumers who purchased one as well as monetary damages, provides us with the following statement after reading and analyzing Apple’s letter:

Our investigation revealed that users lost reception when gripping the phone in a conventional manner. We believe that the problem is not merely how the signal strength is displayed but involves a physical blocking of the antennae which cuts off calls.

In other words, don’t expect those lawsuits to go away now that you’ve written up your version of the truth, Apple.

We’ve written about Allvoices, a citizen journalism platform that is seeing fast growth internationally. In fact, the site, which was launched in 2008, is even approaching CNN’s iReport in terms of worldwide traffic.

According to comScore’s May data, Allvoices saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide compared to 3.6 million unique visitors for CNN’s iReport. But in the U.S., CNN still has a huge market share of traffic. For the same time period, comScore reports 3.3 million unique visitors for iReport, with Allvoices only seeing 730,000 visitors in the U.S. in May. According to Quantcast, Allvoices saw 6.5 million unique monthly visitors in May. The site has also grown its registered number of citizen journalists to 375,000 users from 275,000 in January. CNN has just under 500,000 registered “iReporters.”

Allvoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site's proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high.

While CNN appears to have a foothold in the U.S. for citizen reporters and traffic for iReport, Allvoices seems to be thriving internationally. It is impressive that a bootstrapped startup is successfully competing with large media corporations like CNN. Over the past few months, Allvoices has been ramping up its the presence of its platform internationally, launching global news desks in 30 different cities around the world, where both professional and citizen journalists will provide regular in-country reports from the ground. This is clearly one of the reasons for the site’s continued growth over the past few months.

The company has also recruited talent to help further growth. Allvoices recently brought on Ask.com’s co-founder David Warthen as the startup’s Chief Technology Officer. Interestingly, Allvoices also includes a syndication program that allows media companies and image buyers to license images and content from the platform. The site also offers incentive programs health reporter, including health care for citizen reporters.

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It’s free agency season in the NBA, and the only people who are more excited than the fans are the nation’s sports reporters. How easy it is to be a sports reporter in 2010! Thanks to Twitter, you’ve got guys like Chris Bosh dropping morsels of information all day long. For example, Bosh tweeted the following last night, sending the sports world into a tizzy:

It’s been exactly one month after Diaspora, which aims to become an open Facebook alternative (much like OneSocialWeb and others) raised just over $200,000 in funding from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others through Kickstarter.

Since then, it’s been quiet, but the team of four NYU students has been making some progress in actually building the system.

In a blog post, Maxwell Salzberg updates the world on its progress, including the fact that they’ve set up their offices inside the Pivotal Labs building (and gotten some product advice from the company as well).

More interestingly, the guys have been coding, too.

What have we been working on?

During June, we have been focusing on developing a system for passing different forms of information in between seeds. When you post a status message on your seed, it gets pushed over HTTP in real time to all of your friends.

We have also started to build the latest and greatest in web standards into Diaspora. Websockets are already in the Diaspora core, and any Diaspora plugins will be able to have rapid two-way functionality, (think chat, games etc) almost effortlessly!

Understandably, they still have a long way to go to turn its vision of a completely decentralized social networking platform, as you can tell from the rest of the blog post, although they say they’re already ahead of schedule.

This is what’s planned for the near future:

June

Real Time Message passing between seeds
Building the core of the application

July

OStatus/Standards compliance
Encryption Layer
Implement awesome user interface

August

Plugins
Services(including FB) integration
API Refator

September

Prep for source code freedom!

(Thanks to Len Kendall for the tip)

Here are two early videos and some screenshots that show how far they’ve gotten since their fundraising session closed.

According to the Blog of Record, Apple is bolstering its collection of engineers dedicated to the Apple TV. The sources, who “refused to be identified,” naturally, said ATV may be getting an OS update to iOS instead of the stripped down OSX kernel it is currently running.

The rumors are pretty much what you’ve already heard: that the new Apple TV will be an entirely new animal, a $99 box will be more in line with the current Roku or Western Digital video sharing devices than the original Apple TV. The expectation, in fact, is that this new device will not have a hard drive and will instead stream from the Interworld.

Read more…

Apple is finally stepping up to the plate and acknowledging that there’s a problem with the iPhone 4′s reception and states the fix is on its way. The problem they claim isn’t in the external antenna design, but rather with the iPhone 4′s formula to calculate signal strength bars.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

The fix that’s supposed to be released in “a few weeks” will then employ AT&T’s recently recommended formula for signal strength bars. This will not, however, improve the iPhone 4′s signal strength, but rather how it displays it on the phone. Yeah, in other words, it won’t fix some of the problems.

SAP today announced that it has extended the expiration of its cash tender offer for all outstanding shares of common stock of fellow business software company Sybase at a price of $65.00 per share or $5.8 billion in total. The tender offer was previously scheduled to expire at 9:00 p.m., New York City time, on July 1, 2010 and has now been extended until the same time on July 16, 2010.

Remember Pulse, the awesome RSS reader application for the iPad built by a couple of Stanford grads? The app that was mentioned by Steve Jobs himself on stage at WWDC, got pulled from the App Store after a complaint from the New York Times, but was reinstated pretty quickly? Well, it was no secret that a Pulse iPhone app was coming, too, and we just got word that it’s available as of now (iTunes link).

Sure, there are plenty of RSS readers out there, but you might still want to try this one (even if the price – $2.99 – is perhaps just a little steep).

As you can tell from the screenshots below, the app is visually pleasing even on a smaller screen. It lets you swipe through 20 of your favorite RSS-enabled sites from the home screen, and when you click through to an article a small dashboard pops up that lets you check out the headlines for other stories that appeared on that site.

As with the iPad app, Pulse News Mini, as the app is called, only lets you add 20 sources. Some of them come recommended upon first launch (including TechCrunch, which was an independent decision made by the app’s makers for which we are grateful) but you can also log into your Google Reader account to select sources, or do a search for others.

Pulse News Mini boasts offline sync reading capabilities, so you can stay updated on what’s happening even when you’re offline. The app also enables you to easily share posts with your friends on Facebook or Twitter, by email or via Instapaper.

I think it’s a solid application, but it remains hard to argue $2.99 isn’t a bit much to ask for an app that only lets one manage 20 sources.

Luxury products giant LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) has reached an agreement to acquire a 70%, controlling stake in Sack's, a Brazilian online retailer of fragrances, cosmetics and toiletries.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

With the acquisition, LVMH aims to expand its Sephora subsidiary into the Brazilian perfumes and cosmetics market, reportedly one of the largest and fastest-growing beauty markets worldwide. Initially online only, but also in physical stores over time, according to the press release.

Founded in 2000, Sack's carries over 270 brands, which it is able to sell to a client base that spans more than 830,000 customers. Sack's is one of the top-three most frequently accessed pure-play e-commerce sites in Brazil, with 4 million unique visitors each month.

Carlos André Montenegro, co-founder and CEO of Sack's, and his partners, Albatroz Participações and Marcelo Franco, will continue to hold a 30% stake in Sack's.

The current management team, led by Mr. Montenegro, will remain in place and Sack's will continue to be based in Rio de Janeiro.

Blogger, Google’s blog publishing platform, has just been given a useful new feature many a Blogger user will appreciate: near real-time statistics (via Louis Gray).

Dubbed Blogger Stats, the feature is available for all non-private Blogger blogs. The only catch is you’ll only see the new ‘Stats’ tab when you go to draft.blogger.com.

On the new Stats page, you’ll see a tab that says ‘Now’, which gives Blogger users an almost real-time overview of which articles are most popular right now, and where those visitors are coming from (both in terms of source and geographical location).

The elephant in the room is of course that Google offers free, robust Web analytics software with Google Analytics that doesn’t boast real-time statistics as it only updates them every few hours. Perhaps this is a first sign of imminent changes on that front?

We love real-time stats around here (we use Chartbeat, but there’s also Clicky, Woopra and many more – and of course Twitter just acquired Web analytics startup Smallthought), so we’re wondering out loud why Google Analytics doesn’t have this feature.

Obviously, there’s no technical limitation, and from what I can gather from issues raised in forums and the Google Analytics Help Center, the company believes most users are simply not interested in seeing real-time stats rather than a good overview of 24-hour traffic and longer periods of time.

Which begs the question: if that’s really the case, why add real-time stats to Blogger?

Cyan Banister is CEO of Zivity. The first episode of her new show, ‘Speaking of…’ has just aired on TechCrunch TV and is now available on demand. In this guest post, she previews the first episode, and explains the concept for the show…

I’m extremely excited to bring the TechCrunch community a new show that features the human side of business.  Speaking Of… explores the side of entrepreneurs you’ve never seen before. It’s an organic show that will grow from episode to episode and build on concepts throughout the year: one guest will inspire the invitation of another guest and theme, which will in turn inspire the next… and so on.

The first episode of Speaking Of… was shot at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York and features the disruptive jazz musician, Eric Lewis (aka ELEW). Eric’s an amazing musician: he’s played at TED, won the Thelonious Monk competition, toured with Wynton Marsalis and played at the Whitehouse for the First Lady and President Obama. He tells us the story behind how chess hustling helped him become a better business person in the music world.

In the spirit of building on each episode, ELEW has created the ongoing theme music for this show and you’ll see it in future episodes during the pre- and post- credits.

The first episode is embedded below, and future episodes will be posted every Thursday over at http://www.techcrunch.tv

One of the greatest things about the Firefox browser is that any developer can expand its features and capabilities with a simple add-on. There are add-ons for everything—Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, feed readers, price comparison, photos, music, and more. Today, every browser supports plug-ins and extensions.

Yesterday, cumulative add-on downloads passed the 2 billion mark. It passed the first billion downloads back in November, 2008. The first billion took three and a half years. The second billion took about 20 months. Many of those are never used again, but a full 150 million add-ons are used every single day at least once.

To celebrate the milestone, Mozilla has put together a collection of the 25 best add-ons. They include StumbleUpon, Glue, Cooliris, Xmarks, Kidzui, Firebug, GreaseMonkey, Adblock Plus, and Destroy the Web (it turns any Web page into a video game). Inexplicably, the list is missing Feedly, the best feed reader of all time.

What else should be on that list?

When Google acquired Skype competitor Gizmo5 in November 2009 it wasn’t much of a stretch to anticipate a soft phone application for Google Voice to be coming soon. A few months later we heard that Google was dogfooding Google Voice Desktop internally. But then last month we learned that Google was delaying any launch of the product, and may be scrapping it entirely, because Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't want Google to be in the business of creating software outside of the browser.

We’ve asked our sources for screen shots of what Google Voice Desktop looks like. We didn’t get those, but we did get something better – the actual application. We’ve taken a video (above) showing what the application looks like, showing both outbound and inbound calls. This is mostly still branded Gizmo5, although the sign up screen says “Gizmo5 by Google,” and it is fully integrated with the Google Voice service, address book, etc. The Desktop application was also automatically added as one of my phones in the Google Voice for the browser. We don’t know if this is the current internal release or something more dated.

The test calls in the video above were done without a headset, I just used the internal microphone and speakers. I also left in the random Skype call I received in the middle of the video that I thought was Google Voice just because I was thoroughly confused for a minute.

We continue to urge Google to release this software. It gives people an extra way to use Google Voice and is particularly useful when traveling overseas, where Google Voice doesn’t yet work. You can use Skype and buy a Skype-In number for €50/year to duplicate much of this functionality, but that’s just a ridiculous price to pay for a soft phone in our opinion.

My first request to Google is not to block me from using the application. My second request is to reconsider their decision to delay or scrap the project and give the people what they want – Google Voice Desktop.

Earlier today, Boy Genius Report published an exclusive “conversation” in which Apple CEO Steve Jobs allegedly told an iPhone 4 customer upset by the phone’s antenna issues to “Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” That response and the rest of the email thread predictably sent the tech press into a tizzy, spawning dozens of articles and blog posts. Thing is, Jobs apparently never said it.

After the initial flurry of resulting blog posts, BGR amended their report to say that the last “Retire, relax” email message didn’t come from Jobs, but was actually sent by the upset iPhone customer who was apparently mocking Jobs’ tone (oops). Now Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog is reporting that Apple PR says that the entire exchange is a fake, and that Jobs didn’t send any of the messages.

To make matters even more interesting (and bizarre) AppleInsider reports that someone was actually shopping this email exchange around before it appeared on BGR.

Of course, Jobs frequently does engage in email exchanges with customers, and he has said some pretty condescending things about the iPhone 4′s reception issues — last week he told one upset customer to “Just avoid holding it that way“.

The iOS 4-compatible apps continue to roll-in. The latest is Foursquare which now includes fast app switching and high resolution artwork for the iPhone 4′s retina display. And this latest version, 1.9, includes a little bonus: a new map view. One thing not included, however, is background location.

The new map view allows you to see avatar representations of your Foursquare friends overlaid on a Google Map. You can also hit the locator button to show off where you are and see which friends are actually closest to you. Clicking on their images brings a pop-up that shows their current location (which you can click on to go to that location’s page in the app).

This view is a welcome addition as it’s a better way to see who is actually near you. The traditional list view doesn’t really mean a lot unless you know an area really well. Rival Gowalla offers a similar map view on its iPad app. Other rivals like Loopt and Latitude have had this map view for a while.

This new version of Foursquare also feels significantly faster than previous versions of the app.

As I said, one thing not included in this version is background location. That’s a new feature of iOS 4 that other apps, like Loopt, are already taking advantage of. Foursquare has said they’re waiting to see how users approach this new functionality, as it will open a whole other door beyond check-ins. I do know that they’re working on version 2.0 of the app — which will undoubtedly be a pretty significant upgrade. They have to do something with all that money, after all.

You can find the latest version of Foursquare here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

By now it seems like just about everyone has seen the iPhone 4 vs. HTC EVO video (and the rebuttal video). The video portrays an electronics store employee trying to convince a person looking for an iPhone 4 to buy an HTC EVO 4G instead. It’s hilarious — like all good humor, so funny because it’s at least partially true. But you know who didn’t find it funny? Best Buy. How do I know that? Because they’re trying to fire the kid who made it.

The video in question was made by Brian Maupin, a 25-year-old based in Kansas City, Missouri. For the past three and a half years he’s been working at Best Buy selling mobile phones. He’s probably not going to be doing that anymore as Best Buy has suspended him indefinitely and is currently taking the steps to terminate him, Maupin tells us. The reason? The video.

The video became so popular (it currently has nearly 1.3 million views on YouTube) that someone at Best Buy corporate saw it. They then put two-and-two together that it was an employee at one of their stores that made it, and the hammer came down. “They felt it disparaged a brand they carried (iPhone/Apple) as well as the store itself and were fearful of stockholders & customers being turned off to Best Buy Mobile,” Maupin says.

What’s ridiculous is that nowhere in the video does Maupin have anything indicating the fictitious store the iPhone buyer is walking into is a Best Buy. At the beginning, the cartoon employee identifies the store as “Phone Mart.” The character isn’t even wearing the signature Best Buy blue polo shirt — and they’re standing in an outdoor field with a pink tree.

In other words, nothing about this video seems to imply Best Buy in anyway. In fact, the only reason it will be tied to Best Buy now is thanks to this story.

Maupin says he was asked to quit, which he declined to do, and so they suspended him this morning telling him that he would most likely be terminated after they review it with HR. He expects the decision in the next day or two. “I issued a statement to them explaining that the video was intended to be comedic and hence, not taken seriously by them or all these stockholders & customers they are worried about [being] turned off to buying from them due to the video,” Maupin says in his defense.

Maupin isn’t sure how exactly Best Buy corporate knew to tie the video to him, but believes they did so because a couple other videos under his Tiny Watch Productions (a little indie film group he made with his friends) YouTube account featured videos referencing him and Best Buy. Maupin says he removed those videos at Best Buy’s request, but refuses to take down the EVO vs. iPhone videos because, again, they in no way reference Best Buy.

Regardless of whether he keeps his job or not (which he doesn’t expect to), Maupin is optimistic. “I see it all as a blessing in disguise. I’ve wanted to start my career in graphic design/animation for so long, I see this as my kick in the pants to go get it,” he says.

And now, for an encore:

Google is now in the flight information business. The search giant just announced it is paying $700 million in cash for ITA Software, an essential provider of flight information to airlines, travel agencies, and online reservation systems. ITA raised a massive $100 million series A back in 2006 from Sequoia, Battery Ventures, and General Catalyst.

Travel is a huge segment of search and online commerce. Purchasing ITA signals Google’s intention to build out its travel search in a major way. A consortium of rivals including Microsoft, Kayak, Expedia, and Travelport tried to counter Google’s offer last Spring because they all rely on ITA’s data and wanted to keep the company out of Google’s hands. ITA was reportedly holding out for $1 billion, but Google got the deal at the original $700 million price it put on the table.

If you search for flights on Google today, all you get is links to results from the big online travel sites. Bing, on the other hand, offers a much richer Travel experience, complete with comparison prices for the same flight from the different travel engines, as well as predictive charts and graphs from Farecast (which was acquired by Microsoft for $115 million in 2008). Bing also gets a lot of its flight and fare data from ITA.

Google will use ITA’s data to create “new flight search tools” and promises to honor its existing agreements with partners. But can you imagine Bing paying Google for flight data? When that contract comes up for renewal, the negotiations will be anything but straightforward.

Analytics giant comScore has just acquired the products division of Nexius, a mobile analytics and data networking compant. Nexius’ products provide analytics that mobile operators can use understand consumer behavior, and to build better networks and experiences. The technologies essentially allow mobile operators to make sense of the enormous amount of data available.

comScore tells us they paid $24 million for the products division of Nexius, with $18.6 million paid in cash. comScore has high hopes for the acquisition, stating the the release that it anticipates that the acquisition will add $4 million to the company’s 2010 revenue. That’s actually a pretty significant amount for the company; for the entire (fiscal) year 2009, comScore reported revenues of $127.7 million, up from $117.4 million the year before, an 8.8% increase.

comScore, which just went free for startups, has been growing both in revenue and acquisitions. The company acquired Latin American Web Measurement Company Certifica and advertising research agency ARSGroup earlier this year.

Tesla unveiled its newest electric sports car today, the Roadster 2.5, just two days after its IPO. The Roadster 2.0 was released only a year ago, and existing customers will be able to buy upgrades to 2.5 features where feasible.

Pricing starts at $101,500 after a federal tax credit of $7,500.

The company says most of the updates are based on customer feedback.

Here’s Tesla’s rundown of what’s new in the 2.5:
• A new look, which includes a new front fascia with diffusing vents, and rear diffuser reflecting the future of Tesla design
• Directional forged wheels available in both silver and black
• New seats with improved comfort, larger more supportive bolsters and a new lumbar support system
• Power control hardware that enables spirited driving in exceptionally hot climates
• An optional 7″ touchscreen display with back-up camera
• Improved interior sound reduction including new front fender liner material make the cabin even quieter

Mixpanel, an analytics-focused startup whose backers include Y Combinator, Michael Birch, and Max Levchin, has hit a big milestone: it’s now processing over 1 billion actions per month. To put that in perspective, a year ago the company had recorded 80 million actions cumulatively.

Mixpanel was built by former Slide employees, who took their experience with that company’s extensive analytics tracking and built tools that other developers can integrate into their own applications. These datapoints can include pretty much anything a developer wants to track, from the number of pages a user has viewed to how many virtual cows they’ve thrown in a Facebook app. Cofounder Suhail Doshi says that the volume of data the site tracks grew 185% last month alone (you can see the growth chart below).

Earlier this week, Mixpanel launched a new feature for its funnel tracking system, which allows developers to identify exactly where in their applications users are engaged, and where they’re leaving. Before now in order to take advantage of Mixpanel’s funnel tracking developers would have to write code themselves — the new system offers a control panel interface that lets even less technical users implement funnel tracking. The service will also soon be releasing a native Flash library that will appeal to the many Flash game developers who want to integrate analytics.

One of Mixpanel’s competitors is Kontagent, which just raised another $4.5 million. Kontagent is reportedly tracking around 60 million daily active users across all of its customers’ applications — Doshi says that Mixpanel is tracking significantly more than that, in part because Kontagent is focused exclusively on tracking Facebook applications, whereas Mixpanel is used more broadly (for example, Justin.tv uses it for their analytics).

iTunes in the cloud. We all know it’s coming, it’s just a question of when, and with what capabilities? A story from Boy Genius Report today appears to answer at least one of those questions, and vaguely answers the other.

If BGR’s “reliable” Apple source is to be believed, Apple’s iTunes cloud strategy will consist of three parts: 1) Streaming content from Apple’s servers to your devices 2) Streaming content from your computers to your devices 3) Wirelessly syncing content to your devices. If true, that would obviously constitute a major push into the cloud by Apple. It would also likely elevate their war with Google.

Currently, Google basically owns the cloud, at least with regard to consumer apps. But one of their major weak points there is entertainment content. They’re hoping to change that this Fall with the launch of Google Music (or whatever it will be called), which will take on iTunes directly.

The big selling point of Google’s planned offering (which they talked about at Google I/O this year in little detail) is cloud syncing with devices. In other words, exactly what Apple is planning to offer (again, if this BGR report is true). But Apple has a huge advantage: millions of pre-existing iTunes customers. iTunes customers that are unlikely to leave because so much of their content (the protected variety anyway) is tied to that ecosystem.

Google will basically be starting from the bottom, while Apple will be starting from the top of a mountain. One of those will be much closer to this cloud, in that regard.

Of course, Google has a proven massive cloud infrastructure, while Apple only does in minor way with MobileMe. But all indications are that they’re working on bulking that up. There’s the massive data center they’re building, and, of course, the Lala acquisition.

And they need to. It’s inevitable that iTunes moves to the cloud. The amount of content and storage space needed is simply outpacing storage on devices. For example, if I download a full season of a television show in HD, it takes up dozens of gigabytes. A device like the iPhone only has he option of storing 32 GB currently.

Obviously, most people don’t keep all their content on these devices. But going forward, these devices (like the iPad) are more likely to be used as primary content viewers. The only way that’s really feasible is with a cloud streaming and/or syncing service.

And this is about more than just music, movies, TV shows, etc — it’s also about apps. From the looks of it, Google won’t be starting from complete scratch with the content offering because they’ll be building it on top of (or adjacent to) their Android Market ecosystem. This means that they’ll also have a potential base of millions of users thanks to those who use apps on Android. (Still, it’s nowhere near the numbers that use iTunes overall.)

From BGR:

For wireless syncing, we are told it will work pretty seamlessly. Any apps you buy for instance on your iPhone will immediately sync to your computer, changes to your calendar, or notes, or contacts will also automatically update on your computer as well.

The first part is exactly what Android is promising with their 2.2 release — so clearly Apple is going to answer that. The second part is a bit odd because that’s already exactly what MobileMe does. Might this new syncing service be built on top of MobileMe? If so, maybe Apple finally is preparing to make it a free service, as it’s unlikely a massive amount of people will pay for it if Google is offering the same things for free.

In terms of timing, all BGR will vaguely say is “soon.” At the end of the report, they hint that the new service might come alongside an event in the Fall (or before it). A report earlier this year indicated that iTunes.com (the obvious name for the web-based version of iTunes in the cloud) would launch this Summer. That report said June was a possibility — but obviously that’s already come and gone.

Regardless of exact timing, this Fall is shaping up to be very interesting with regard to Apple and Google. Google TV will be out to take on Apple TV. Chrome OS will be out to take on iPads. iAds will be out to take on AdSense. And these new cloud media streaming services now look to be battling as well.

[photo: flickr/dirtymansam79]

Tapulous has been acquired by Disney. The iPhone gaming startup with several hits on its hands was founded by Bart Decrem, who will join Disney as a senior VP. COO Andrew Lacy is also joining Disney as a senior VP. Disney is very interested in social and mobile gaming, having recently invested in Playdom’s $33 million round.

Tapulous is a hot iPhone gaming startup which has raised only $1.8 million from angel investors including Marc Benioff, Jeff Clavier, and Andy Bechtolsheim. Legendary Silicon Valley mentor and Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani, who passed away last year, was also an investor. Its flagship game, Tap Tap Revenge, has numerous versions which have been downloaded millions of times. The basic game, which lets players tap to the rhythm of songs with their fingers is free, but players must pay for new songs. Its latest game is Tap Tap Radiation for the iPad.

Tapulous’ music-oriented games appeal to a younger crowd in particular. The company puts out versions of Tap Tap Revenge featuring the songs of specific artists such as Justin Bieber Revenge, Lady Gaga Revenge, Nickelback Revenge, and Nine Inch Nails Revenge. Its other mobile music, Riddim Ribbon is also a hit.

Disney Interactive Studios sells a slew of video games built around Disney movies and characters such as Toy Story, Cars, and Hannah Montana. Most of these games are for consoles like the Xbox, PS3, or GameBoy. Buying Tapulous gets it into the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad gaming platform and gives it a strong presence in music-related games.

Update: And here is the Tapulous blog post by Decrem confirming the deal.

Today, we announced that we are joining Disney. We will be a key part of Disney Interactive Media Group, spearheading their drive to be the leader in mobile entertainment.

As part of Disney Interactive Media Group, we'll develop more games, more quickly and with the resources of the world's leading entertainment company. We will continue to develop apps that live at the intersection of music and gaming, but we'll also push into new and exciting areas of mobile social entertainment.

He also notes that Tap Tap Revenge has been downloaded more than 35 million times and played 1 billion songs. The price was not disclosed.

Update 2: I spoke with Decrem on the phone. He will be the GM and senior VP in charge of mobile for Disney Interactive’s gaming group, but will remain in Palo Alto.

“We will be at the center of Disney's mobile strategy,” he says. “They have 40 apps in the app store today. There is Disney, Marvel, ESPN, Pixar—the idea of combining what we know about games in the app store with Disney's brand and ID is exciting. It is exciting to be in the driver's seat.”

Decrem’s charter is to add social elements to all of Disney’s games over time. For now, he is focussing on keeping Tapulous humming, but he will influence mobile games across Disney Interactive’s portfolio. It also sounds like he is ready to hire in Palo Alto “We really want to build a big footprint here in the Valley,” he adds, noting that there is a lot of empty office space in the old Facebook headquarters.

Clean technology remains one of the hottest areas of venture funding. In the second quarter, cleantech venture investments worldwide totaled $2.02 billion across 140 companies, according to market research firm Cleantech Group and Deloitte. The numbers are in line with last quarter’s $2.04 billion, but 43% higher than one year ago.

Exits for the quarter totaled more than $8 billion globally, with $6 billion in cleantech M&A and $2.3 billion in cleantech IPOs. Tesla‘s $202 million IPO has been in the spotlight recently, but globally, the cleantech IPO market is concentrated in China, which grabbed $1.7 billion, 75 percent of the $2.3 billion raised worldwide in the past three months, and 12 of the 19 IPOs, though not all of those are venture backed. The biggest IPO of the quarter was China’s Origin Water on the Shenzen Stock Exchange, which raised $330 million. As a point of comparison, in the U.S. alone, IPOs across all sectors totaled $900 million in the second quarter.

On the M&A front, there were 160 cleantech deals worldwide, including Switzerland’s ABB buying utility enterprise software maker Ventyx for more than $1 billion, and chip company Maxim buying smart-meter chip maker Teridian Semiconductor for $315 million.

In terms of venture funding, the most active cleantech investors in the quarter were Carbon Trust Investment Partners (6 deals), Kleiner Perkins (4 deals), Angeleno Group (3 deals), Draper Fisher Jurvetson (3 deals), and Khosla Ventures (3 deals). Mega-deals of $100 million or more are on the rise, with four such deals in the quarter, including $350 million for Better Place, $189 million for Fisker Automotive, and $115 million for BrightSource Energy.

The industry sectors drawing the most dollars were solar, biofuels, and smart grid. Solar is one of the industry’s brightest shining stars, grabbing $811 million to mark its third highest quarter in history.

Investment in biofuels was also strong, soaring to $302 million since the the first quarter.

Spurred by the recession, investors are spending money on companies that can save money. Energy efficiency boasted 31 rounds of funding, trumping solar’s 26 and biofuels’ 13 deals.

Smart grid investments in particular experienced their highest quarter ever.

Is the world ready for a 3TB hard drive? Seagate thinks so and announced the 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external hard drive a few days back. The FedEx man just dropped one off on my doorstep so let's see what this thing is all about. 3TB, wow.

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Welcome to the CrunchGear Death Grip Support Group. We are going to be telling each other stories about how horrible our iPhone 4 reception has been. We’re going to clear the air, really dig deep, and really vent. A lot of you may not even have iPhone 4s, but don’t worry. I have something for you, as well. How – and what – can you win?

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