Amazon announced the Kindle 3 last night, and it doesn't look too shabby at all. The most important part is the inclusion of the next-generation E-Ink display, previously only found in the too-big-for-casual-use Kindle DX. (The low price, $139 for the Wi-Fi version, certainly doesn't hurt.)

Immediately following the announcement, I saw something that confused me. For whatever reason, it seems plenty of people are comparing the Kindle to the iPad, almost as if these people want the Kindle to be the iPad. Why is that?

How’s this for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?

Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0.8% of market share and Microsoft’s Bing barely touching even half that, according to recent data from StatCounter as relayed by Pingdom.

This graph, made by Pingdom, puts it all in perspective:

As you can tell from the graph, put together using global visitor stats for more than three million websites, Google's near-100% piece of the mobile search pie is even a good deal larger than their still impressive share of the overall search engine market. Note that the red bars represent non-mobile search market share, not a combination of both.

As for Yahoo, Bing, and the ‘others’ – good luck taking on Google on that front.

App store analytics provider Distimo in its latest report once again focuses on in-app purchases across a variety of mobile application stores, Apple’s App Store in particular.

According to Distimo, the percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the App Store for iPad (10%) compared to that for the iPhone (2%).

One of the main reasons for that, still according to the startup, is the fact that the App Store for iPad became available after in-app purchases were introduced, contrary to the App Store for iPhone. Another reason to take into consideration is that the iPad may currently be used more as a media consumption device than the iPhone, with magazine and newspaper publishers selling much of their content as in-app purchases.

Evidently, the fact that there are more applications available for the iPhone than for the iPad also skews the numbers.

(Click image for full size)

In any event, the Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of applications with in-app purchases available, the startup posits.

The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone were MobiTV and ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup, which isn’t surprising considering there was this little event called the World Cup going on.

As for paid applications: the apps that saw the strongest level of monetization with in-app purchases this month in the App Store for iPhone were Guitar Hero, TomTom U.S.A. and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II.

Pages and iBooks (both apps are published by Apple) are both, again, the number one paid and free applications on the Apple App Store for iPad in terms of total download numbers.

Netflix for iPad, introduced back in April, is the second most popular free iPad app, while RSS reading app Pulse comes in at second place in the paid applications ranking.

"All I’ve done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis." So says the man who is being called the Facebook hacker. Ron Bowes, a security consultant who's also an nmap developer, is under fire from certain sections of the Internet for creating and uploading a torrent that contains more than 100 million Facebook users' information. The thing is, all of this information was already publicly available in the Facebook directory. So to call him a "hacker," well, would be incorrect.

Elon Musk certainly hasn’t been on the down-low lately. Well, with the Tesla’s IPO and then Toyota huge investment and manufacturing deals. Then there’s the lawsuits and his devoice. So yeah, it’s no wonder that Jon Favreau modeled his Tony Stark character after Elon — or so says Wikipedia.

But last night he had a friendly fireside chat with Stephen Colbert, where it was really nothing more than reading of the man’s resume and talking about his ventures. Of course Colbert talked circles around the PayPal co-founder as he tends to do. It’s not like The Colbert Report is known as a hard-hitting news program anyway. That’s more the style of The Daily Show. Click through for the video.

According to GetJar, its eponymous mobile app store is now seeing three million downloads per day. GetJar reiterated that its stats put it second only to Apple iTunes, with over 1 billion total downloads to date. At current (self-reported) growth rate, the company should hit 2 billion downloads in about a year, if calculated on the back of a virtual envelope.

Lovefilm, the Netflix-of-Europe, looks set to beef up its multi-platform play via a newly signed agreement with DRM and adaptive streaming technology provider Widevine. The deal will see the US-based company become Lovefilm's "preferred provider of digital rights management and video optimisation solutions", enabling the video subscription service to continue to break out from its 'DVDs by post' legacy into the video-on-demand market, ensuring that its digital content is "playable on many new devices."

Motorola has just announced its financial results for Q2 2010, reporting total sales of $5.4 billion, which is slightly below what it recorded in the same period last year. Earnings came in at $162 million or $0.07 per share, compared to GAAP earnings of $26 million or $0.01 per share in Q2 2009.

Non-GAAP earnings per share were $0.09 compared to earnings of $0.03 per share in second quarter 2009. Analysts expected the company to have earned 8 cents per share on revenue of $5.19 billion.

Zooming in on its Mobile Devices unit, Motorola reported sales of $1.7 billion, down 6 percent compared with the year-ago quarter.

The company shipped a total of 8.3 million handsets last quarter, 2.7 million if which were smartphones – its line-up consists of 12 such devices, including the Droid and Droid X.

GAAP operating earnings for the Mobile Devices business were $87 million, which included income from a significant legal settlement of $228 million (presumably with Blackberry maker Research In Motion), compared to an operating loss of $287 million in the same period a year earlier.

Double rainbow awesome. There’s no other modern way to describe this.

I won’t spoil it too much, but whatever you do today, visit this website and select some of your closest friends from your Facebook graph when prompted. You won’t be disappointed.

From the looks of it, this was put together by Swiss telecoms provider Swisscom to promote its TV offerings. Hat tip to Ouriel Ohayon.

Awesomeness in a bottle.

Mobile phone maker HTC this morning announced a series of executive promotions and newly created management positions.

The Taiwanese company said it had poached two senior execs from rival Sony Ericsson and that it had promoted three others to its management team. Buried in the press release, however, is that a senior executive of its own has quit the company.

In a statement, HTC announced that it appointed Ron Louks as chief strategy officer, a new position that will oversee HTC’s strategic planning and technology development. Louks was previously CTO at Sony Ericsson. HTC also appointed Kouji Kodera as chief product officer, putting him in charge of the company’s global product planning and management. Kodera was also previously a senior executive at Sony Ericsson, where he was head of products also.

HTC added that it had promoted David Chen, previously vice president of product development and the second employee ever to have been hired by the company, to chief engineering officer.

Previously VP of HTC North America, Jason Mackenzie has been promoted to president of HTC North America and Latin America, while Florian Seiche has been promoted from VP to president of HTC EMEA.

As mentioned before, HTC has also lost a key senior executive. Jason Juang, formerly executive vice president at the company, has apparently quit to “pursue other opportunities”.

We’ll be very curious to find out where he’s headed next.

We’ve updated HTC’s CrunchBase profile to reflect the changes.

Zynga issued a press release tonight confirming the more than month-old news of an investment by Softbank – $150 million – and are announcing a joint venture to “develop and distribute social games across Japan.”

Zynga didn’t talk about the other $150 million they took from Google in connection with a partnership over the new Google Games property. Although they soft-confirmed it to the New York Times in a recent article about the company.

Zynga has raised a whopping $519 million in venture capital, including that chunk from Google. Here’s the press release:

ZYNGA AND SOFTBANK CORP. LAUNCH JOINT VENTURE TO ACCELERATE SOCIAL GAME INDUSTRY IN ASIA

SOFTBANK INVESTS $150 MILLION IN ZYNGA

SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYO – July 29, 2010 – Zynga and Softbank today announced a joint venture that will develop and distribute social games across Japan. The new joint venture, Zynga Japan, brings together leaders in social games and consumer technology to offer millions of new users the ability to play social games anytime and anywhere. In conjunction with today's announcement, Softbank has completed a $150 million investment in Zynga. With this agreement, Zynga and Softbank will tighten their relationship as business partners.

The joint venture extends Zynga’s reach to a wider global audience and marks the company’s first foray into the rapidly growing internet and mobile market in Japan. Based in Tokyo, Zynga Japan will tap into Japan’s rich history of gaming and leverage Softbank’s cutting edge mobile and Web technology to produce the best social games in the market.

"Zynga is a leader in social games and I am delighted to partner with them to introduce their social games to Japan," said Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank. "We share the same vision as Zynga in social games and look forward to working together to create a social game powerhouse."

“We’re excited to partner with Softbank to bring Zynga’s social games to Japan and gain insights from the Japanese market,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder of Zynga. “As one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Softbank is bringing the mobile internet to consumers making the social web more accessible to people everywhere.”

###

About Zynga
Zynga's games include FarmVille, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Café World, FishVille, PetVille and FrontierVille. Zynga games are available on Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone. Through Zynga.org, Zynga players have raised over $3 million for world social causes. Zynga is headquartered in Potrero Hill in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.Zynga.com or www.Zynga.org.

About Softbank
Softbank is a leading technology company connecting consumers through its broadband infrastructure, fixed-line telecommunications, and mobile communications services. Softbank has invested in overseas companies with high potential to provide next generation services using the internet, including Oak Pacific Interactive (which operates China’s largest SNS site), and Ustream, Inc. (which is the operator of the Ustream.TV website), a broadcast platform offering live video distribution service via the Internet (video streaming service). By leveraging this investment in Zynga and through its other efforts, Softbank continuously aims to generate synergies among various content and services within its group. For more information, visit http://www.softbank.co.jp/en/.

People don’t send postcards anymore. Why bother when you can photo MMS a friend? Attempting to restore some of the social experience behind photography, SwingVine has created SwingVine Gallery, an app that attempts to bring back some of the mystique and enjoyment of social photo sharing.

Using your iPhone’s camera and GPS, the SwingVine Gallery app allows you to send a photo to a friend “secretly,” a photo that they are unable to see unless they also participate by sending a photo back, sort of like a mobile game of photo tag.

While both the idea and the app interface are simple, SwingVine gallery does have its appeal, as it’s pretty hard to resist wanting to see whatever photo postcard is under wraps. I genuinely felt a level of excitement as I waited for my “secret” postcard to be revealed (It was, of course, a photo of the Eiffel Tower).

The app, expected to arrive in the app store within the next 24 hours, also functions as a photo album, with all the secret photos you receive being saved alongside your own personal photos. “Our goal is capturing people’s lives visually” says co-founder Ling Bao.

For those that can’t wait until it drops, you can try out the feature on the web here.

Amazon’s Kindle has always been an interesting device to me. When I first heard about it in late 2007, I was sure I wouldn’t want one. It was awkward looking and at $399, way too expensive. But when the second iteration came in 2009 with a sleeker look, I decided to buy one to see what all the fuss was about. I quickly learned to love it.

That said, I still didn’t see any real future for such a product. At $359, it was still absurdly expensive. And with all the rumors swirling about Apple’s impending tablet device, it seemed like it was a temporary niche product, at best. But on the eve of the unveiling of the third iteration of the device, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is making things more interesting.

Specifically, Bezos seems to understand that he cannot compete with the iPad. And he doesn’t want to. “Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets. Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution,” he continues.

Whether you believe that or not, it goes against reports from last year that Amazon was trying to figure out how best to compete against more advanced tablets by offering features such as color screens. Bezos even said that they had them in the laboratory to test out. But he also said that they weren’t ready for prime time, so color Kindles were at least a few years away.

But his new statements seems to indicate that Amazon may never go in that direction with the Kindle. If their goal is just to focus on making the best reading device, why go with color and video, is his reasoning. Here’s his killer quote from the WSJ piece:

For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.

That’s a smart position to take — for now. From a consumer hardware perspective, Amazon was never going to be able to compete with Apple — they simple lack the experience. So instead, Amazon is going to forge ahead with this dedicated device in hopes that it will catch on with mainstream consumers before the more expensive tablets do.

Naturally, the key to all of this is the price. The new Kindle will come in two flavors: a 3G one for $189 and a WiFi one for $139. The latter price is almost a full third less than the original Kindle was. It’s also a much, much cheaper than the entry-level iPad at $499. $99 still seems like the ultimate sweet-spot for the Kindle, but it’s hard to argue with $139.

The problem here is that I’m not convinced Amazon really wanted to go that low. Remember that it was only hours after Barnes & Noble announced their Nook would be $199 (and $149 for the WiFi version) that Amazon dropped their price from $259 all the way down to $189 — exactly $10 cheaper. Undoubtedly, Amazon has lowered the costs associated with the making the Kindle over the past three years, but $399 to $189 is pretty dramatic.

Everyone felt the Kindle was far too expensive at $399 or $359 but Amazon still resisted the pressure to lower the price quickly. The reason? They had complete control of the market — they didn’t have to. It was only when the Nook, Border’s Kobo, and the iPad came out that the prices truly started to fall fast.

So the question now: is Amazon making any money on selling these devices? Some may think that doesn’t matter because they’re Amazon’s way to move their content (pretty much the anti-Apple approach). But as Bezos points out, the Kindle store and the Kindle hardware are completely separate entities within Amazon. “Internally, we view them as two stand-alone businesses that have to succeed on their own merits,” he tells WSJ. Can selling the Kindle hardware at such a low price fulfill that?

The larger problem remains for Amazon as well. While the Kindle is undoubtedly easier on the eyes than reading with the backlit iPad, the wide range of things that the iPad and other tablets can do will eventually win the day. Amazon’s price cuts have extended that day quite a bit, but it’s still inevitable.

So is Amazon content to rule the space for a couple of years while not making a lot of money on devices? Or is Bezos simply bluffing on Amazon’s future Kindle aspirations?

Also, does anyone really think Hemingway would have been pleased with his work on a Kindle?

[image via]

Local deal goliath Groupon is launching a major new feature today: deal personalization, giving the site the ability to send you the deals it thinks you’ll be most interested in. Before now, Groupon has always offered one or two deals per city per day to its users. That’s still going to be true, but with a twist: the site will be sending different deals to users based on criteria like their gender, buying history, and their interests. The change may sound fairly minor, but it will likely have a big impact on Groupon’s bottom line.

Groupon’s simplicity has no doubt contributed to its success, but this is one case where it has some very good reasons for introducing a few extra options: personalization will help the site fend off the 500 clones that are gunning for it, it will allow Groupon to offer an unlimited number of deals, and the site can now offer deals from businesses located outside of large cities. Local personalization is rolling out to six cities for now (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle), with the rest on the way.

CEO Andrew Mason says that one reason why there are so many Groupon clones is that the site simply hasn’t been able to accommodate all of the businesses looking to serve up a local deal, leading the businesses to turn a competitor. Deal personalization changes this, because Groupon can now distribute multiple deals in the same city on a given day. Where Groupon was previously limited to one deal (and maybe a second so-called “side deal”) per day, it can now offer as many deals as it has eager businesses.

Again, to users, this won’t be readily apparent. When you sign up you’ll be asked for your zip code and gender, and Groupon will also allow you to specify if there are any particular types of deals you’re interested in. But there’s a good chance most people will have no idea that they’re receiving a different deal than their neighbors — they’ll still receive their daily deal in their inbox, and there won’t be a button to see the dozen other deals that might be available in that city. Deals will be distributed based on a personalization algorithm (Mason said they hired someone from Netflix to build it).

Of course, that could introduce a problem: you may ask a friend if they’ve gotten in on the latest Groupon, only to find that you’ve both got different coupons. To remedy this, Mason says that you’ll still be able to send any Groupons you receive to your friends.

In addition to allowing for an unlimited number of deals, the new system gives Groupon more flexibility behind the scenes. First, it can allow companies to stagger their deals, offering it multiple times over the course of a few months to different buckets of users.

It also allows the site to offer deals to businesses from smaller cities. Groupon has historically only offered deals to businesses in major metropolitan areas — San Francisco, New York, etc. But plenty of users who might sign up for San Francisco deals live in a suburb, like Palo Alto. Now Groupon can identify which users live in those suburbs based on their zip codes, and send them deals from businesses in Palo Alto. This is going to be part of a broader trend for the site, which is shifting from “What’s your city?” to “What’s your zip code?”.

And all of this has one other nice side effect: the deals landing in your inbox should be more relevant to what you’re actually interested in.

Security specialist Ron Bowes has once again proven how easy it is to glean valuable user information from Facebook, by spidering Facebook’s online directory and compiling it all into one neat little torrent that could be downloaded off his site, SkullSecurity.com.

Bowes created a torrent containing over 171 million entries with links to profiles that provide access to the names, addresses and phone numbers of 100 million users, one fifth of Facebook.  Bowes accessed Facebook’s directory, which has the default dictum “Anyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings.” Yeah, but should they have to?

These kinds of security breaches will only encourage more hackers desperate for attention. Now would be a good time for Facebook to set their default search to “Friends Only.” Why? Because most people are aren’t quite aware that check mark next to “Everyone” includes a hacker who can grab your personal info, package it up and sell it to the highest bidder.

According to Bowes the torrent contains (at 2.8 GB, our torrent is “still downloading”) …

• The URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile.
• The name of every searchable Facebook user, both unique and by count (perfect for post-processing, datamining, etc).
• Processed lists, including first names with count, last names with count, potential usernames with count, etc.
• The programs [Bowes] used to generate everything [which makes it easy for other hackers to replicate the process]

While the advice to an individual user to change your privacy settings may be moot at this point, the suggestion that Facebook make it profiles unindexable by default isn’t. Especially when you read the more ominous statement from Bowes further on in his post on the breach, “So far, I have only indexed the searchable users, not their friends … I’d like to tackle that in the future.”

Photo: Bejealousofme/Flickr

This morning, Reuters published this article. On their site, it seems fairly innocuous, with the title “RIM stock jumps as market eyes revamped BlackBerry” but that wasn’t the original title. And it’s not the one Reuters syndication partners are picking up. That title is “RIM seen unveiling ‘iPhone killer’ next week“. Yep. Here we go again.

If Reuters is to be believed, the BlackBerry 9800 set to be unveiled next Tuesday will destroy the iPhone. I’m not sure how yet. But it just will. Nevermind the fact that it’s at least the tenth or so phone to earn such a moniker — and the iPhone is not only still alive, but thriving — it just will.

Now look, generally I don’t have a major problem with declaring something a “XXXXX-killer” in headlines. Sure, it’s lazy, but it’s also an easy way to get readers to understand what a product is attempting to be. And it’s a hell of a lot sexier than saying something is a “XXXXX competitor.” That’s boring (and longer, to boot).

The problem with the term “iPhone killer” is that it has lost all meaning. Crying it has become the modern day equivalent of crying “wolf”. The G1 was an iPhone killer. The BlackBerry Storm was an iPhone killer. The Palm Pre was an iPhone killer. The Nexus One was an iPhone killer. The list goes on. All of those devices are now dead or dying.

Sure, you could argue that the various iterations of the iPhone are all different so the original iPhone is now dead too. But the key is that it wasn’t any of the aforementioned devices that killed it — it was Apple. It was simply the natural product cycle that killed the older iPhones, not a competitor.

And the iPhone hasn’t yet killed any competitor either — or at least not directly. You could argue that the device has had a hand in the death (by sale) of the Palm Pre, as well as the struggles that Nokia, and now LG are having in the smartphone space. But the larger point is that the entire space is growing so quickly that it would be nearly impossible for one device to actual kill off another one. Instead, it’s poor decisions and execution by the company in charge that kill the devices (see: Microsoft Kin).

And specifically with “iPhone killers,” there’s a problem because while they may be created with the intention of competing with the iPhone, most actually don’t from the outset. Apple has a unique way of doing things where they control the hardware and the software for their devices. Most companies don’t (though BlackBerry parent RIM does), so instead they end up competing with one another.

People buy the iPhone because they want the full hardware plus software experience and access to the contained Apple ecosystem. People buy the “iPhone killers” for other reasons. Some because they are cheaper. Some because they have have physical keyboards. Some because they are more open. Those products aren’t competing with (or “killing”) the iPhone because Apple doesn’t offer any of those things.

So perhaps it would be better to label “iPhone killers” as “killers of iPhone killers” — or, even sexier, “iPhone killer killer.”

The fundamental question here: is the BlackBerry 9800 going to kill the iPhone? No. Is it going to hurt the sales of the iPhone? Probably not. Is it going to be a popular device? Probably, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the iPhone.

Yesterday, I noted that the mouse was going to die. But if you read those posts carefully, I didn’t say the Magic Trackpad (or any single device, for that matter) was going to kill it. Instead, it’s a combination of new devices and time that will kill it.

The same is true for the iPhone. One day it will die. But the killer holding the knife will be Apple — either because they’ve mismanaged the product, or because they’ve moved on to something else.

[image: Lions Gate Films]

Amazon today unveiled the new Kindle e-reader, though it was not personally revealed by Bezos, as we heard rumored. The new device has a 6″ display like the old Kindle, but is the newer type of E-ink display found in the Kindle DX Graphite. There are other differences, but the main one would be price: the brand-new Kindle will be sold at $139 for the Wi-Fi only version, undercutting even the bare bones readers out there.

Continue reading…

Every big publisher on the Web wants to be able to serve up ad-friendly videos, but creating them can be a pain. But there are already plenty of high-quality videos out there in every subject imaginable. With that in mind, Answers.com has quietly launched Video Answers with about 200,000 videos from video distribution network 5min on everything from home repair and fashion tips to cars and travel.

5Min is already one of the largest video networks, with more than 110 million video views a month and 30 million unique visitors across 800 partner sites. But Answers.com will become its biggest partner by far. 5Min syndicates videos from about 1,000 online video producers, including CBS, Hearst, Scripps, and WatchMojo. Anytime one of 5Min’s videos matches a question asked on Answers.com, WikiAnswers, or ReferenceAnswers, video results will show up and they will play on the new Video Answers page. Advertising revenues will be split between Answers.com, 5Min, and the video publisher, with roughly a third going to each.

“What we are really building here is ability for every publisher to have their own video section without producing because I think there is no ROI for production,” says CEO Ran Harnevo. The videos in his network are all in highly-targeted, evergreen niches like yoga or food videos with low double-digit CPMs. Video producers ca extend their reach beyond their own sites by syndicating with 5Min and make some extra cash.

5Min’s model contrasts with Demand Media’s, which produces its own videos at $50 or so a pop and shows them on eHow and its portfolio of search-friendly niche sites. AOL also wants to get into this game with its recent acquisition of Studio Now. But 5Min’s philosophy is to let others produce the best videos, and focus on distributing them at scale, while splitting the downstream revenues. “Destinations are just not big enough today,” he says.

For some time now, Twitter has been working on a new API: the Twitter Streaming API. The idea behind it is to allow third-party Twitter clients to receive continuous tweet updates in realtime. As developer advocate Taylor Singletary notes today on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group, limited testing of this new feature (also called “User Streams”) for desktop clients has now begun.

Currently, TweetDeck and Echofon, two popular Twitter desktop clients, have access to the new API for testing. Singletary notes that not all users of these clients will see this new tech in action at first. Instead, there will be a more gradual roll-out with each app. Once that occurs, Twitter will start opening up the Streaming API to other clients as well.

Twitter first started talking about this new API this past April at their Chirp conference. Others have already been internally testing it for some time as Twitter is also testing out its new Annotations feature through the API.

While the feature is very cool and makes third-party clients much more interesting, the Streaming API also helps Twitter significantly. As Singletary notes, “The transition to User Streams should return considerable capacity to the
REST and Search APIs, increasing stability for Twitter users & developers alike.” With their recent scaling problems, one of the aspects hurt the most by limits Twitter had to impose is the API. Services like TweetDeck and Seesmic rely heavily on the Search API for their various windows — so obviously, this was a problem. The Streaming API should alleviate that quite a bit.

And there’s more. Singletary notes that:

Additionally, several interesting new event types are available: Favoriting, retweeting, following, and list additions are also streamed along with direct messages, mentions, the user timeline and the home timeline.

Again, all of this should help ease strain on the rest of Twitter’s APIs. The only question is: how long will it take to roll-out in a meaningful way? Twitter says that an open beta is tentatively scheduled for Q3 or Q4 of 2010.

At the end of the message, Singletary also hints at a new API product called Site Streams:

Application developers needing to consume multiple, simultaneous user streams will be served by an upcoming Streaming API product called Site Streams. Stay tuned for more information on that when we’re ready.

[thanks Richard]

It seems that all Kindle orders have been frozen and, it seems, that Jeff Bezos is hanging around New York right now and will speak on Charlie Rose tonight. While I seriously doubt that Bezos will whip out the Kindle 3 on the Charlie Rose show (he’ll probably talk about ebooks outselling hardbacks) it seems there is definitely something afoot.

Read more…

We broke the news yesterday on Facebook’s most recent acquisition – social activity service Hot Potato. Like most of Facebook’s acquisitions, this deal looks to be mostly about getting a great team of engineers on board, not about the product.

And like many of these acquisitions, investors in the acquired company don’t stand to make much money. Facebook is paying around $10 million in cash for Hot Potato, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. Employees will also be getting stock options which could prove to be very lucrative down the road. But investors aren’t getting any stock in Facebook.

This is very similar to Facebook’s very first acquisition, Parakey, back in 2007. That deal gave shareholders just $4 million or so in cash to split – giving them their initial investment back plus a small return. All the stock went to employees.

Hot Potato raised around $1.4 million in a single round of financing prior to the acquisition.

Most investors won’t balk publicly at deals like this, they’re way too concerned that they’re seen as entrepreneur-friendly so that they can get access to future deals. But privately they gripe (in general, nothing specific to this deal). Putting money to work for only a 1x or 2x return is a great way to go out of business for startup investors, when so many of their deals never pay anything back at all.

In fact some of these deals could theoretically be a violation of various corporate and securities laws that require shareholders of a given class to be treated equally in an acquisition. But without investors actually complaining, it’s unlikely any lawyers will ever get involved.

Also, stock options are clearly being granted for future services of the acquired employees, not for past work done at the acquired startup.

Another way investors can “complain” is by simply scuttling the deal – they usually have veto rights over an acquisition baked into their deal agreements when they invest. But that, again, would be seen as completely anti-entrepreneur and would kill future deal flow.

So for now investors will simply grin and bear it. But as these types of deals become more and more common we may see changes to various state corporate laws in the future that put limits on how much consideration might be given in cash to investors in an acquisition v. how much is given to active employees in stock options on an acquisition.

Knol, Google's platform for sharing articles about specific topics, appears to have been shutdown. It’s unclear if this is a temporary or permanent situation. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

We’ve long been speculating as to when Google will shut down Knol. The knowledge-sharing site has essentially been reduced to a “Craigslist wannabe.” The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Unfortunately, no one seems to be reading anything on Knol and the product never really panned out.

Eventhough this outage may be temporary, it may be time to put Knol out of its misery. Google has previously shutdown other under-performing projects such as Lively and Google Notebooks.

Update 2:49 PM PDT: Google informs us that this down time is in fact temporary, “We’re working on restoring it for users as soon as possible.”

Unless someone at Research In Motion is taking the time to screw with all of us, it looks like we might have an official name for their long-rumored BlackBerry tablet project: BlackPad.

Word of the name comes not from a disgruntled employee, nor from a prototype left at a bar; this one’s straight out of a good ol’ fashion WHOIS lookup on a domain. According to registration records, RIM purchased BlackPad.com just days ago.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

If we’re hearing any one thing from developers that is scaring’em away from Android, it’s that Android apps are just way, way too easy to pirate. Hell, you don’t even have to go through shady third party download sites; just buy an app, copy it to the sd card, and refund the application. Ta-da! (Read: Don’t do that.)

Google’s been talking for some time about a new, considerably more secure system for protecting applications from pirates and dishonest refunders. Today, that system goes live.

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Facebook’s worst-kept secret is finally ready for its closeup: the company is starting to roll out Facebook Questions, a Q&A service that allows users to poll all of Facebook. Facebook has been inviting users to apply to join a sneak peek of Questions for months now, so we’ve seen much of this before, but this marks the first time that it will begin rolling out to users who didn’t apply for the beta program. Facebook says that this is intiitally rolling out to 3-5 million users, with plans for a broader rollout down the line.

The motivations behind the launch are clear: millions of people already use Facebook status updates to poll their friends — it’s only natural that the site would offer a dedicated mechanism to do this (and it’s also likely to be a boon for page views, especially once Questions are syndicated to search engines). But if you were hoping the new product would incorporate Facebook’s extensive privacy settings, you’ll be disappointed: everything in Questions is shared with everyone else on Facebook, and every question you ask is tied to your real name; likewise, anyone who answers will have their response tied to their account.

Of course, having all questions set to public does have one nice side effect: you’ll be able to poll from Facebook’s massive audience of 500 million users. Facebook obviously isn’t going to ask your question to everyone else on Facebook; instead, its system is going to try to analyze a user’s interests to determine who would be best able to answer your question. The service will also show the question to some of your friends, so ideally you’ll receive answers from a healthy mix of friends and experts (we’ll see how well it actually works).

You’ll be able to ask a question from a few places: the Questions tab that appears in the site’s left navigation area, the publisher that appears at the top of the page (where you typically post things like status updates), and, most interestingly, the search box. When you start typing a question into Facebook’s search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site. If yours doesn’t pop up, or you really want to re-ask the same thing, you can ask it directly from the search field.

Questions can include photos and polls, and you can also tag questions with topics. If you come across someone else’s question that you’d also like to know the answer to, you can opt to follow it. And the site also supports keyboard shortcuts, which should make the soon-to-be Questions addicts happy.

This could be a big, big deal for the site. Given its size, it won’t take long for Facebook to build up a massive amount of data — if that data is consistently reliable, Questions could turn into a viable alternative to Google for many queries. Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages that launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates. Finally, this is a big SEO opportunity for the site, though a Facebook spokeswoman said that there are no plans to include the content in search engines yet.

Of course, some of this success will lie in how well Facebook’s matching algorithms work, and how good typical answers are — I’m not going to use this at all if the quality is on par with Yahoo Answers. Facebook will be competing on this front with Quora, a Q&A service that was cofounded by Facebook’s former longtime CTO, and has been widely praised for the quality of its content (though whether or not it can maintain that quality as the site scales remains to be seen). Still, even if the quality isn’t quite up to par, the massive built-in userbase means Facebook Questions will be a success regardless.

One other thing to note: Facebook does not offer any way to ask a question anonymously (remember, everything is tied to your name). While I see the benefit in forcing responses to include a user name (you can better tell if the person answering knows what they’re talking about), I’m less sure that this is a good policy to enforce on the people asking the question. There may well be times when you may have a question that might appear a bit less than professional (“Best place to get my friend hammered for his bachelor’s party?”), or perhaps a little embarrassing to admit to your peers (“Why does my microwave popcorn always start smoking?”).