Atoms and bits are coming together in interesting ways. A slew of geo apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt let you leave digital markings in the real world whenever you check into a location. Stickybits lets you put barcodes on physical objects which invokes a message, photo, or video which can be passed around with the object. And now we are beginning to see startups figuring out ways to control real-world objects with people’s phones and computers.

Of course there is AnyBot, the $15,000 remote-controlled robot. But even that is too complicated and expensive for the masses. Yesterday, one of the 11 TechStars companies that launched called GearBox showed an early version of an iPhone app that can control a robotic ball (see video below). GearBox wants to wants to help developers build games which involve players controlling a real robotic ball with their phones.

In a post for us, Don Dodge wrote:

GearBox is a smart toy company that has created a robotic ball which is controlled via a smartphone. Applications can be built on the smartphone via a simple API which requires minimal coding. Early applications include "Sumo," where two people attempt to knock each other off of a table, "Golf," where you swipe the phone to shoot the ball at the hole, and "Kittens," in which users can earn points by playing with their cat and causing certain interactions.

GearBox is starting with Android, and will also support iPhone apps. The video below is just a very early prototype. The ball is way too slow for any reflex-type games. “It’s not fast enough, yet,” says founder Ian Bernstein, “but we are in the process of greatly increasing the speed (~5x) and vastly improving the accuracy of the control system so a reflex type game will be possible.”

His plan is to get a few hundred of these faster prototype balls into the hands of developers within the next few months, then quickly move into a larger pilot of “tens of thousands” of balls distributed from its Website starting in 3 to 5 months. He wants developers to make create different games and GearBox will sell the balls. After a year of feedback, Bernstein thinks GearBox will be ready for the masses by Christmas 2011.

I’m not sure I can wait that long. I want one right now.

Short Version: If you know how to plug in a lamp, you can probably set up the new Logitech Alert 750i indoor camera. Luckily, the 750i is much more useful than a lamp when it comes to home security and monitoring.

The new Alert series from Logitech offers extremly easy monitoring set-up with a few very cool features but it’s Windows-only right now and the motion detection software still leaves a little to be desired.

Read more…

It’s no secret that advertisers are flocking to social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to connect with users. In fact, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that the social network’s advertisers have increased spending by “at least 10-fold” over the past year as Facebook crossed the 500 million member mark.

But advertisers are moving beyond Facebook. Adapt.ly is entering the field to allow marketers deploy ads simultaneously on multiple social networks ad platforms. The startup, which was incubated by DreamIt Ventures, is in private beta. We have invites for TechCrunch readers; enter the code ‘techcrunch’ here.

While there are a number of startups that offer self-serve ad platforms for search, Adapt.ly is hoping to gain marketshare for social advertising platforms as opposed to search engines. Adapt.ly allows businesses and marketers to deploy ads simultaneously on a number of social networks and platforms including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter ad platforms Ad.ly and 140proof.

Adapt.ly’s self-service platform lets you create a single ad and syndicate the advertising campaign on multiple social networks. The startup will also monitor all the relevant ad data in real time and give users analytics, including CTRs, and insight into how campaigns are performing.

But Adapt.ly is not the only product to help advertisers manage advertising campaigns on social networks. AdKnowledge also offers a centralized platform to deploy ads on social networks, called Cubics. Adapt.ly is hoping to stand out from its competitors with its simple, easy-to-use interface that can attract both big and small businesses.

Apple's iPod has been singled out as the reason for more than 17 accidents per day in the UK. The situation has been dubbed "iPod Oblivion": people so "into" what's playing on their iPod that they ignore the world around them, necessarily leading to accidents.

Having launched in eleven locations worldwide The Founder Institute, set up by Adeo Ressi as a sort of global-wide bootcamp for tech entrepreneurs, is launching two new locations today across Europe: Brussels and Berlin. The other location already up and running in Europe is Paris where a second semester launches this Fall. There is an August 13th admissions deadline for the European programmes. The Berlin and Brussels programmes will be the last expansion for the Founder Institute until the end of the year, when they plan to announce two more cities for a total of fifteen locations.

To the left, a recent diagram included in a travel app patent filed by Apple. To the right, the homescreen interface for existing third party travel app “Where To,” which has been in the app store since 2008. Apple’s diagram accompaniments to their recent travel, hotel and shopping patent applications were made public on July 30th, but no one made the “Where To” connection until Dan Wineman highlighted the similarities between the two on his blog Venomous Porridge.

Intellectual property law is murky when dealing with online properties (you can’t throw a stone without hitting an internet startup violating some kind of patent), but when taking into account Apple’s history of stamping out third party apps it views as threatening, it’s easy to turn a compelling visual like the one above into a stampede of online rabble rousing. From Unwired Review:

“Damn, but this is one scary development. Imagine if back in 1994-96 someone decided to sit back, think about what kind of web services can be provided via the internet, and then decided to patent them. You know, things like – shopping for books online, buying plane tickets, reserving a hotel, providing shopping comparison services, online auctions, online e-mail services, etc;”

But the above pictures need way more than a thousand words of explanation. Artwork in a patent application does not necessarily mean a company is trying to call dibs on that particular area of IP. The image above left is one of many existing third-party app screens in the patent application, used to illustrate apps where the invention in question (location-based notifications relating to travel, hotels, and fashion retail) might be used.

Taking a closer look at what other homescreens were copied by Apple lends more validity to an argument brought up by Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment; Most likely the images of “Where To,” “Ralph Lauren,” and “Guide You Amsterdam” were used as examples of apps related to a much larger concept that wouldn’t put the developer out of business.

Despite the fact that this patent application alone is not proof that Apple is gearing up to quash “Where To,” copying an app homescreen verbatim is clearly not the best way to ease fears about developer job security. FutureTap, the makers of “Where To” issued a confused response on their own blog.

“We're faced with a situation where we've to fear that our primary business partner is trying to "steal" our idea and design. So how to deal with that?”

The best way to deal with it, until you can sic your (hopefully) pro bono patent lawyer hounds on Apple, is to not jump to conclusions.

After all, I can’t really picture Apple trying to kill off GuideYou Amsterdam let alone Ralph Lauren.


We’ve contacted Apple for a response and have yet to hear back.

Top image: Dan Wineman

I interviewed Elon Musk on stage at the Founder Showcase. He may have saved his best line for last: "Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. …So if that sounds appealing…" Followed by his trademark James Bond villain cackle.

Musk's career as an entrepreneur has been hugely successful—in addition to co-founding PayPal, he started SpaceX, which has a $2 billion NASA contract, and Tesla, which just went public. But that journey has been anything but smooth. In his first public appearance since the IPO, Musk spoke about a range of things. A particularly human moment came when Musk said that December 2008 was one of the worst times of his life: SpaceX's launch failed, Tesla's funding fell through and he was mired in his way-too-public divorce. It was a reminder for the audience that even those entrepreneurs who we think have it all are still flawed and still struggle.

Here are some other highlights of our discussion. The full video is below.

1. Musk had kind words for the venture industry—except for one firm. He wouldn't spill who it was but he did list all the ones he'd worked with that it wasn't, leaving it pretty obvious that the barb was aimed at VantagePoint Venture Partners, an investor in Tesla. I couldn't get more out of him on stage than that, so either party, feel free to call me if you want to dish.

2. So far his best return in terms of multiple hasn't been Tesla or PayPal—it has been SolarCity.

3. Musk has said before that being the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX is unsustainable. He confirmed that it's “beyond the fun point”, but says he'll keep both jobs for while.

4. Musk and Adeo Ressi—of the Funded—started a nightclub when they were in college and Musk was the sober one who always talked to the cops when they came calling. "He was the biggest dork I’ve ever met," Ressi said from the audience.

5. Musk still plans for his next company to focus on electric vertical-take-off planes. He says he thinks it'll work, but the question is how long they can fly. But between his rockets and electric cars, it'll be a while before he can get to it.

6. Musk still wants to retire on Mars, but admits some other things have to happen to make that possible. It's worth noting that while SpaceX has turned into a viable business of shuttling astronauts between space stations, Musk's dream is still to facilitate inter-planetary life. He noted that a Martian colony would be by definition an entrepreneurial, engineering focused group, because only risk-taking geeks would self-select to move to Mars. That sounds like a place a lot of our readers would also like to retire.

Since the dawn of mankind, and probably even a while before that, parents have been asking themselves the same question: “Where are my kids?” In modern times they’ve come up with a few, imperfect ways to answer it, like instructing their children to send them a text message whenever they arrive at soccer practice — which works well once or twice, until the child completely forgets about it.  Now Whereoscope, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today, may have a solution that’s more reliable and easier to use than most other kid-tracking solutions on the market.

Whereoscope consists of an iPhone application that runs in the background (you’ll need iOS 4, which enabled background apps). During an initial setup process, you designate a handful of key locations, or geofences, that your children often visit — their school, home, a best friend’s house, etc. You can elect to receive a push notification whenever your child leaves or arrives at one of these areas. Your child doesn’t have to actually do anything to check in, so there’s nothing for them to forget. And, if your child were to “accidentally” disable the application, Whereoscope can send you a warning giving you a heads up.

Of course, plenty of other iPhone applications can use your GPS to track the device (navigation apps do this), but most of these will drain your battery quickly. To conserve battery life, Whereoscope has some built-in intelligence to figure out when to activate your GPS, and when it does, it only does so for a few moments. This involves paying attention to when your child’s cell phone swaps between cell towers, and also when they’re in the proximity of one of the locations you’ve set up alerts for. The Wherescope team says that the app should have a relatively small impact on your battery life.

Wherescope will be competing with AT&T’s own child-tracking service FamilyMap, which allows parents to monitor where their kids are. But the Whereoscope team says that FamilyMap only uses cell tower data, and not the phone’s GPS, yielding less accurate results. They also say that FamilyMap doesn’t allow for the use of geofences, where parents can receive an alert whenever their child gets to school or back home (instead, you have to set up a schedule).
Update: Joel Grossman, who runs FamilyTabs, the platform that powers FamilyMap, points out in the comments that AT&T does use GPS when it is available, and it works on multiple phones without needed extra softwore (full details here). However, it looks like GPS isn’t available on the iPhone.

It’s also worth pointing out that while there are other location tracking services available, like Google’s Latitude, most parents will probably prefer a dedicated service where there’s no concept of a social network or the possibility that a child might change their privacy settings to something more public.

Wherescope was formerly called ChildPulse, and an older version of the application is available here on the App Store under the old name. The old version has a few limitations: you can only set up two geofences (the final version will let you monitor as many as you’d like), and it only lets you monitor one child at a time (the new version will allow for up to four users). The company says the updated version is currently awaiting Apple’s approval. The service will eventually charge on a subscription basis, but anyone can get it now for free and will be grandfathered in under the free plan, even once Whereoscope starts charging.

This is a good idea, and it obviously has a huge market. It does come with one caveat for now, though: the current system requires that both the parent and the child be using iPhones running iOS 4, though it will eventually be possible for the parent to set up the system and monitor their child from a web app. However, the Whereoscope team says that according to their initial data, most of the time children who have iPhones have at least one parent using an iPhone as well.

Whereoscope is part of a new surge in location-based applications that was spurred by the launch of iOS4. One application that includes similar functionality is Family Tracker, and an application called Locate My Phone will be hitting the App Store soon as well, though the latter has a broader focus and isn’t geared exclusively towards parents and their kids.

Last week, Twitter started testing out a “Who to follow” feature. Basically, it’s a recommendation engine for who you should follow, similar to ones that Facebook and others use. At the time, I noted it was a good idea and should bulk up their social graph. But today I actually got the feature activated on my account — I believe I vastly understated what this feature could mean.

The main way most users will interact with this new feature is in the sidebar. There, right below your tweet stats, you’ll see the two users that Twitter is suggesting that you might like to follow. How do they determine this? If you click the “view all” link (or go to the Find People area) you’ll notice this is all based on the people you’re already connected and who they follow. Again, this is like the feature Facebook has.

But I think Twitter’s implementation may be even more effective than Facebook’s.

Facebook continues to be more about people you actually know. Just because a friend of yours knows someone, it doesn’t mean you will. If it’s a lot of friends that you share in common, that’s a good indicator, but that whittles down the possibilities. With Twitter, people often follow other users they don’t know at all. In fact, I’d bet that’s the case most of the time.

That’s why this is massive. The first two user suggestions Twitter served up to me were both solid. I followed both. A page refresh brought two more. Also good. I’ve already added about 15 people — and normally I’m fairly controlled about that. These suggestions are just very good.

And the fact that you can follow the people right from this sidebar with one click is the key. Everyone is going to see these every time they hit Twitter (unless they use the awesome new Twitter User Streams clients). And it’s two new ones each time (though, obviously, they cycle through).

And if you want more that just the two suggestions, you can follow the “view all” link and find dozens of people suggested for you to follow in one list. And here you can also hide certain users you know you won’t want to follow. They will no longer appear in your suggestions.

Beginning last week around the time Twitter started testing this feature, I started to notice that I was gaining followers much more quickly than usual. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected it had to do with this feature. Now I’m almost certain that’s what it is. Again, this is going to greatly strengthen Twitter’s social graph. It’s seriously like social steroids.

But.

One problem Twitter has always had is noise. It’s easy to follow as many people as possible — until you actually see them making your stream noisy beyond use. That’s why I’ve loved tools like ManageTwitter, which make it easy to see who you should no longer follow.

So we have two forces potentially working against each other here. Luckily, Twitter now has a filter feature: Lists. They allow you to follow people without actually following them.

If Twitter included a super quick way to add certain people to lists, that would be great. Currently, you can click on their profile and add them to a list (without having to follow them) — but again, it’s all about the sidebar widget. A nice little List drop down would work nicely here, I think.

Noise or not, my bet is that this feature is going to be huge for Twitter. Most people should be seeing it now. Watch your follower counts.

What this means for third-parties doing these kind of recommendations, remains to be seen. Interestingly enough, the most popular of these, Mr. Tweet, is apparently undergoing a major overhaul which was due to be completed in July — it’s now August. And again, the main killer aspect of Twitter’s solution is that it’s on Twitter.com front and center. That will be hard to compete against.

As an interesting side note, with the Who to follow widget now placed so prominently, Twitter has shoved the small promotional ad unit to the bottom of the right sidebar. Hopefully no one is paying for those (which, as far as I know, they aren’t) because they’re about to get clicked on a lot less.

Update: And one more “But” — Twitter definitely needs to add an option to make the area collapsable, just like the other areas in the sidebar.

Zynga just officially confirmed their buy of Tokyo-based startup Unoh , which we reported on yesterday. Japanese business publication The Nikkei estimated the price at several billion yen. When contacted, Zynga representatives declined to comment on financial details.

The Unoh offices in Tokyo will be the base of Zynga Japan's mobile initiatives, a joint venture between Zynga and the SoftBank Group which recently invested $150 million into the social gaming company.

Former Unoh CEO Shintaro Yamada will helm Zynga’s foray into the Japanese social gaming market. Zynga has yet to confirm a reported $150 million investment by Google. Its most recent press release below:


ZYNGA ACQUIRES LEADING SOCIAL GAME DEVELOPER UNOH,


ACCELERATING ZYNGA JAPAN'S MOBILE GAME DEVELOPMENT

SAN FRANCISCO and TOKYO – Aug. 5, 2010 – Zynga today announced that it has acquired Tokyo-based Unoh, one of Japan's leading social games companies.  Unoh will be part of the foundation of Zynga Japan's mobile product efforts, which will be a joint venture between SoftBank Group and Zynga, accelerating Zynga Japan's entry into the Japanese social gaming market.

Unoh is one of Japan's pioneering social game companies, founded in 2001, with top hits Machitsuku!, Band Yarouyo!, and Kaizoku Chronicle.  In addition to maintaining Unoh's games on mixi, Mobage-town, and GREE, Zynga Japan will also localize Zynga games and develop new games targeted at the Japanese market.

"Zynga is delighted to welcome the Unoh team, one of the pioneer Japanese social game developers, to the Zynga family,” said Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder, Zynga.  “They have a great track record of producing innovative, successful games and are a perfect complement to the top-notch team we have already begun to assemble in Japan.”

“We're very excited to join Zynga to help extend its reach to Japanese consumers,” said Shintaro Yamada, founder and CEO, Unoh.  “We're looking forward to being an integral part of Zynga Japan's leadership and growth, and are happy to support bringing the best social games to Japan's cutting edge mobile and web technologies."

Yamada will help lead Zynga Japan's mobile efforts.

About Zynga Japan

Zynga Japan is a joint venture between SoftBank Group and Zynga to develop, distribute and support social games in Japan. It plans to bring together the worldwide leader in social gaming and the mobile technology visionary of Japan.

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/

About Zynga
Zynga is the world's largest social game developer. More than 230 million monthly active users play its games.  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.

In the battle of Foursquare versus Gowalla in the location space, Gowalla is often thought of as “the pretty one.” But Foursquare has been attempting to improve their look and feel recently with a number of changes. The latest comes today with new profile pages.

As you can see, the new user pages have a much cleaner design. Just as with the recently redesigned venue pages, Tips are now more clearly labeled and To-Dos are explained better. It seems clear that Foursquare is trying to move the service beyond the check-in and attempting to provide more utility to users with their other features.

Badges and mayorships are also now look much nicer in the sidebar. And the key stats: Days Out, Check-Ins, and Things Done have been moved into a profile card that’s front and center.

Previously, profiles showed “Total Nights Out”, “Total Checkins”, “To-Dos Now Done”, and “Total Things Done.” This has been simplified to the new metrics, and each of those would come into play in a revamped Foursquare game.

The “Things Done” aspect is particularly intersting. It would seem that this could be a key new metric in the upcoming Foursquare 2.0 gaming features. We already know that part of that will likely include a “choose-your-own-adventure” aspect. Getting things done may be a part of that.

Of course, Gowalla also just recently revamped their profile pages, and now allows users to customize them.

Foursquare’s director of business development Tristan Walker credits developer Mike Singleton with this profile work.

Below, find the new Foursquare profile. And below that, find what Gowalla’s currently look like.

Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with a group of reporters after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA. He said he was open to taking any questions, so I decided to ask him about Foursquare.

It’s a particularly interesting question for Schmidt because back in 2005, Google bought Dodgeball, the company Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley previously started that was similar to Foursquare. Crowley and Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert famously left Google in a huff in 2007. A couple years later, Foursquare was born.

“Yes, I remember it quite well,” Schmidt said of Dodgeball with a smile. “Shockingly, founded by the same two people [as Foursquare],” he continued. That’s not technically true, Crowley co-founded both, but he started Foursquare with Naveen Selvadurai, who wasn’t involved in Dodgeball. That said, Rainert is now with Foursquare as well and was a seed investor, so we’ll cut Schmidt some slack there.

“Dodgeball was a good company,” Schmidt said defending Google’s purchase. He also praised the co-founders, saying that “the market proves how clever they are.”

“Would Google have built Foursquare earlier? I don’t know. Those are always sort of missed opportunities,” Schmidt continued.

“Foursquare and Gowalla are pretty impressive. They show you the power of mobile/social/local,” Schmidt said. “Google will play in that market in a lot of ways.”

That’s a particularly interesting comment when you look back at the note Crowley left on his 2007 Flickr picture when he and Rainert quit Google:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

So, if Crowley is to be believed, he tried to convince Google about the importance of that same mobile/social/local space back in 2005. But they wouldn’t listen.

“I think it’s going to be a very large business for us,” Schmidt said yesterday referring to the space. Perhaps it could have already been.

Schmidt affirmed Google’s strong commitment to both Places and Latitude. And he noted that the location capabilities built into Google’s website on smartphones such as Android phones and the iPhone “will freak you out. That’s how accurate it is.”

He also said that thanks to the success of Foursquare and Gowalla there will be 20 new similar companies that get venture funding. And I’m going to bet Google is a big player in snatching up some of those. Foursquare seems off the table given the Dodgeball history. But I’m going to go on record here with a prediction:

I bet Google is going to buy Gowalla at some point in the future. This isn’t based on anything concrete (well, I guess other than Schmidt bringing it up a few times). But that team’s commitment to design, gaming, and location seems to be a great fit for what Google is looking for.

Expect a lot of gloating if I’m right, and no further mention if I’m wrong.

Below, find the full video of Schmidt talking Dodgeball/Foursquare.

More from Schmidt:

• Google's Schmidt Doubts Company Will Get Into "Significant" Gaming
• Schmidt: Google Now Activating 200,000 Android Units A Day [Video]
• Schmidt Talks Wave's Death: "We Celebrate Our Failures." [Video]
• Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are creating immediate, unfiltered connections between celebrities and their fans, but where do celebrities (or aspiring celebrities) go when they want to connect with talent agents or other people in the entertainment industry? Facebook is for fans. LinkedIn doesn’t really let them showcase their talents. And niche sites for models, actors, and musicians like ReverbNation or NewFaces are too limited (every model or musician thinks they can act).

Talent Maven, which is launching publicly today after a few months in private beta, wants to become the social network for the entertainment industry. “We try to fill the void between Facebook and LinkedIn for talent,” says co-founder and CEO Jeremy Levanthal. A former investment banker with Morgan Stanley, Leventhal and his co-founders started the company almost two years ago in New York City with a $250,000 seed investment from their own pockets.

Like any social network, Talent Maven lets embers set up profiles, make connections with other members, upload photos, and videos, and share updates through a news stream. The design borrows many elements from Facebook. It is clean and well-organized. There are tabs for managing media, upcoming events like music performances, and opportunities to find other talent (auditions, vocalists needed, etc.). But there is one main difference: exclusivity is built in.

“Unlike Facebook, you can prevent people from contacting you,” notes Leventhal. That is actually very appealing to all the agents and other industry professionals who feel too exposed to every model with an Internet connection looking for an acting job. Members can become fans of other members, but they only get to see public updates and media. To connect to a member you need to know somebody who knows that person and get an introduction. And in your privacy settings, you can specify which groups have access to your feed.

People who work in the industry are verified as industry professionals through their work email. Particularly well-connected or well-known members can be designated “mavens,” which is the highest class. Members can set their profiles to private, but only let verified members see it, or mavens. Talent Maven is all about access, just like Hollywood.

The site is really built for talent agents. Already about 1,000 industry people have been testing the site, including 30 agents at William Morris alone and the head of casting at MTV. Already, rapper Timbaland’s production company is in discussions to sign two new singers discovered on the site.

Aspiring actors and musicians can upload their headshots, photo spreads, music mixes, videos, or other examples of their work to the site and create an online portfolio, or electronic press kit. When somebody gets a recommendation, it comes with a link to their profile where the talent agents can quickly check them out before deciding how, or if, to respond. Hey, it’s a Darwinian world out there, the Web is only making it more efficient.

The only way Talent Maven will survive is if it somehow attracts the right talent, and the people who want to employ them.

Well here’s a first; the creative folks at Plannr have come up with this hypothetical “What would the world be like if the cast of MTV’s Jersey Shore used our mobile scheduling product?” promotional video, above. Suspend your disbelief about the Jersey Shore crew caring about schedule management and login to Plannr as Snooki (password: “abc”) , join Ronnie and Sammi as they “discuss things” and get roped in with “The Situation,” DJ Pauly D, and Vinny as they “be single” (Note: Enlarge video to full screen for full effect).

The boot-strapped Plannr hard launches this week, and is aiming for a small but crowded niche, attempting to trump email, SMS, and phone calls as existing but somewhat disorganized scheduling tools. Plannr founders and former Microsoft employees Ben Eidelson and Jason Prado are targeting plans made specifically within small groups of friends, less than 10 people. Plannr for the iPhone can sync geo-locational data simultaneously with your calendar software, and is compatible with iCal, Outlook, etc.

While there is some overlap between Plannr and Google Calendar, Tungle.me, and Doodle, it might be the perfect substitute for those rambling plan related email threads between friends, the ones that people are too lazy to post to Facebook. Eidelson and Prado provide a solution to a personal pet peeve, “If you’re making plans with a group over email, you can forward or CC us the email. Plannr will email everyone involved with a link to the new plan, and even try to parse out the time.”

Plannr suffers from the same chicken egg problem as all services that necessitate multiple connections and user adoption, plus people tend to be more rigid about organizing business planning as opposed to social (why corporate planning tools like Microsoft Exchange work in the first place). I could easily see this as a useful addition to an existing service and the heavy Google Maps and Yelp integration hearkens to this aspiration.

Like RULE.fm the spare app interface is specifically appealing to those with hipper sensibilities. And like the RULE.fm guys, they sent us a picture of themselves, below.

Plannr is available in the App Store and on the web here.

The Japanese gaming company DeNA, which is traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, reported robust first quarter earnings today.

For its fiscal first quarter DeNA’s revenue reached $279 million, up 175% compared to the same quarter last year. Its operating profit increased by 282% to about $138 million over the first quarter of 2009 (according to the company's own currency conversion from yen to U.S. dollars).

Of total revenue, 84% was derived from social games which the company defines as games that have social sharing, leaderboard and related features, including those that are played over mobile phones. (DeNA did not break out revenue from sales of in-game advertising, ad-supported games and paid game sales.)

By comparison, a top competitor to DeNA in the U.S., Zynga is rumored to have first half of 2010 revenue of $350 million (half of which is operating profit) and projected revenue of at least $1.0 billion for 2011.

DeNA has plans to introduce games for PC use via its partnership with Yahoo! in Japan.

Its Yahoo! Mobage (pronounced yahoo moe-buh-gay) games channel is due for release on October 1st. But the company plans to focus on sales of games for smartphones, including via its MiniNation store and the iPhone in the U.S. in the near-term. It has not struck a partnership with Yahoo! in the U.S. (yet).

DeNA’s first quarter earnings were fueled by its entry into the American market and debut on iPhones in 2010, an increase in the number of social and mobile game titles it sold, and ongoing growth in its sales of social and mobile games and avatars in Japan.

Last year (fiscal 2009) DeNA reported revenues of $517 million and operating profits of $228 million. If the company’s 2010 first quarter results are any indication, it is on target to become a billion dollar revenue (or more) mobile and social gaming business.

Preparing to sell its games in the U.S. this year, the company took a 20% stake in the gaming platform company Aurora Feint in 2009 to prepare to do so, and speed distribution.

Aurora Feint’s OpenFeint platform, a DeNA spokesperson explained, is almost like an X-box live for phones. The company created a mobile community of gamers in North America that resembled gamer communities DeNA previously created in Japan.

DeNA also acquired IceBreaker, a U.S. game developer and publisher in 2009.

Competitors to DeNA in the U.S. include Zynga, and the mobile and social gaming divisions of technology, entertainment and gaming giants.

In the past year, Google, Disney and Electronic Arts, respectively, acquired social gaming companies Slide, Playdom and Playfish.

In a company earnings statement, Tomoko Namba, the chief executive of DeNA said, "Becoming the premier [global] social gaming company appears extremely feasible,” lauding the company’s duality as a game developer and platform operator.

DeNA also plans to promote mergers and acquisitions, and make investments through its approximately $27.5 million Incubate Fund No.1 Limited Partnership, a venture capital fund focused on social gaming.

DeNA’s most popular game titles in the U.S. are all free mobile games: Bandit Nation, MiniNation BalloonHunt, Mini Solitaire and Mini NumberPlace.

It’s funny — I know Twitter is down. I know it has been down for about an hour now. And yet, I can’t stop visiting the site to see if just maybe it’s back up. And I’m hardly alone.

I’m sitting here at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA and Twitter’s current downtime seems to be what a huge number of people are talking about. And they’re talking about it in person, because they can’t on Twitter.

The problem is that there is no good substitute. We used to have FriendFeed back in the day which was essentially a conversation layer over tweets, but with its own independent messaging capabilities. This kept the conversation going if Twitter went down (which it often did back in the day). Now we have Buzz, Facebook, and a few other things. But no one seems to use them in the same way.

We need a backup plan. One we can all agree on.

I’m perfectly fine with it being the TechCrunch comment area. But it needs to be some place where everyone will gather. Maybe Google Wave?

Oh. Shit.

Seriously though, it’s not just about killing time. Twitter is increasingly a way many of us consume news and media. And just in the past hour I wanted to go to Twitter to find out why I was getting so many Quora follow notifications recently. I also wanted to know what people thought of the latest Techonomy panels. And I just can’t. And there’s nowhere else I can turn for that type of information.

It sucks. It’s annoying.

Last year, I made the humorous list of alternative things to do when Twitter is down. Things like “go outside” or “think about Twitter being down.” But we really do need a backup alternative we can rely on.

Update: Here’s Twitter’s statement on the matter:

Twitter is currently down; the site has been down for approximately an hour. This outage is due to an internal failure; it is not a capacity issue. Our team is working on a fix now. We will update Twitter’s Status blog soon with more specific info.

Update 2: Twitter is currently in the process of getting back up to speed and Twitter says it should be within the hour. That said, it’s still mostly down.

Last October, YouTube decided to venture into the concert broadcasting business when they showed a U2 concert in Pasadena, CA all around the world. And they did it live. The result? 10 million streams on a Sunday night. Now they’re expanding on that idea with their “Unstaged” concert series. And the first of those takes place tonight with the band Arcade Fire.

Tonight at 10 PM ET/7PM PT if you visit this YouTube page, you’ll be able to see an entire Arcade Fire show streamed live from Madison Square Garden in New York City. This is excellent both because Arcade Fire just released their first new album in three years this week — and also because Terry Gilliam is directing the broadcast for YouTube.

You may know Gilliam as the director of Hollywood films such as Brazil, The Fischer King, 12 Monkeys, or Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas. Or maybe you know him better as a member of Monty Python, and as the director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yes, this should be interesting.

And this aims to be more than just a concert. The idea behind the “unconcert” is to allow viewers to interact with the show from their computers. For example, you can choose your own camera angle. And since Arcade Fire’s new album is called The Suburbs, they’re asking fans to participate by submitting pictures of their own suburbs which will be shown during the show.

You can find all the details here. If you miss the show, the page will also host highlight clips of the concert after it’s over.

YouTube says other upcoming Unstaged concerts will include John Legend and The Roots. This is part of their effort with Vevo (the joint music video venture between Google, Sony Music, and Universal Music Group) and American Express.

The whole YouTube/Vevo live music thing is still a bit confusing — which service is in charge here? — but whatever, free live Arcade Fire concent!

Google Books is one of the most straightforward projects in the Google meta-project of cataloguing and indexing every piece of data in the world. The human race has, after all, only been literate for around five or six thousand years, which makes the task measurable, if not easy. The project is also interesting for many other reasons — social, technological, and logistical. The impact of all of the world’s literature being searchable online is incalculable, but the methods being used by Google to accomplish that are a fascinating convergence of legacy and high tech systems.

The project blog has just put up a fascinating (to me, at least) post about the way in which they’ve calculated what they believe is a reasonably accurate count of every book in the world. The number is 129,864,880 — until a few more get added, or an obscure library’s records are merged, or what have you. It’s a bit awe-inspiring to be confronted with a number like that — a number far more comprehensible than yesterday’s deceptively complex statement about the amount of data we’re producing daily. I have another post percolating on that subject (working title: Get Thee Behind Me, Data) but the Google Books thing has a much more immediate and understandable interest.

Continue reading…

The controversy surrounding Wikileaks continues, as you always expected it would. All branches of the Unites States military are now banning their personnel from having anything to do with the site, primarily to avoid "electronic spillages," a phrase I have never heard before. The Pentagon told the Washington Times that those in the Navy should avoid accessing the site so as to prevent the introduction of "potentially classified information on unclassified networks."

If Silicon Valley has an angel, it's Ron Conway, the legendary early stage investor who has backed many of the greatest Internet start-ups including Google and Facebook. Last week at the Social Currency Crunchup at Stanford University, I had the good fortune to sit down with Conway for a few minutes
to talk about technology, entrepreneurs, investors and the next big thing in the Valley.

In his avuncular selflessness, in his apparent concern for everything and everyone but himself and in that reassuring thick shock of silver hair, there's certainly something angelic about Conway. But dig a bit into Ron Conway and you get a sense that behind all that reasonableness there's a remarkably shrewd operator who has minted a fortune for himself, his investors and his entrepreneurs. My sense – for what it's worth – is that the guy has multi-million dollar eyes. He is a brilliant watcher, an acutely sophisticated observer of the tech space, a remarkably perceptive businessman who doesn't miss a trick. That's where his unique talent lies and that's why he is amongst the greatest early stage investors of our times.

Conway talks about "pattern recognition" being his most potent weapon in determining whether or not to invest in companies and people. But that pattern recognition has come from watching the successes and failures of entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg, Fanning and Parker. So my advice to entrepreneurs is to watch Conway closely, here and elsewhere, so that when you pitch him, he gets to see what he wants to see. And you better make that impression quickly. As Conway confessed to me last week, he can make up his mind about the value of entrepreneurs in under five minutes.

Part I – Ron Conway on the next big investment opportunities: On social, real-time data, social currency and why there's still opportunity in search.

Part II – Why anytime is a good time to be an entrepreneur: On success rates for technology entrepreneurs, what failures teaches and why the 2001 bubble was "catastrophic".

Part III -Why an entrepreneur is always an entrepreneur: On the genetics of being an entrepreneur, why entrepreneurs are all a little edgy, and why Mark Zuckerberg was destined to be an entrepreneur.

Part IV – What makes a good investor: On his huge rolodex, how he reads people and why he was born to be an investor.

Part V – What comes after social: On 10 years of massive growth for social, on the cloud & CRM, and why he never worries about the future.

Booyah's MyTown, a location based service that recently launched a feature allowing users to check in to products via bar code scans, just announced an expansion to the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. MyTown is the first location based service to support global check-ins through Google’s Places via the Google Maps API.

Recently picking up $20 million in a C Round of financing lead by Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, real world gaming network Booyah is in the realm of services like Hot Potato and Miso which allow users to move beyond location and check into products like movies, TV shows, etc.

MyTown boast more than 2.8 million users in the United States and the company soon plans on expanding further internationally, “Our launches in the UK, Australia, and Canada are just the beginning of bringing real world gaming  to players across the globe,” says Booyah CEO Keith Lee.

You can download MyTown for the iPhone and the iPad here.

Aviary’s Michael Galpert noticed something rather interesting in the East Village area of New York City this morning — all of the cars in the area had their windows tagged with the decal above.

Of course, Zynga is promoting their new game crime-themed game, Mafia Wars Las Vegas. The decal reads: “A heist went down in your hood today. See it at MafiaWarsLV.com.”

From a bit of a distance it sort of looks like someone shot all these cars with a giant gun or threw a baseball through the window. The point is, a lot of people are looking to see what on Earth is going on with these cars. If nothing else, it’s great brand recognition.

Zynga has been doing a number of things recently to add to the viral effect of their games. For example, it’s hard to walk into any 7-Eleven now without seeing Farmville Slurpee cups. The social gaming company is smart to make these moves as Facebook has made it harder to virally spread on the network itself.

Let’s just hope these decals are easy to remove or we may have people going all Mafia Wars on Zynga itself.

[photo: @msg]

Yesterday, the New York Times published a story that detailed an agreement in the works between Verizon and Google that would effectively kill off net neutrality by allowing “Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content's creators are willing to pay for the privilege”. The news sparked outrage in the tech community, because Google has a long history of advocating net neutrality. Now both Google and Verizon are coming out to claim that the New York Times story is incorrect.

A report in The Guardian cites a Google spokesperson as saying ” “The New York Times is quite simply wrong. We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open internet.”

Verizon’s policy blog has posted a statement as well:

“The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an Internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect.”

Google’s own public policy blog doesn’t have anything on the story yet, but its Twitter account did comment on the matter:

“@NYTimes is wrong. We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet.”

Obviously Verizon and Google are talking to each other about how best to deal with the backlash, and Google is making it clear that it’s still an ardent supporter of net neutrality. Still, it’s a bit odd that it took so long for Google to respond to this in any way (the NYT article came out last night, and literally dozens of stories were written about it before Google tweeted about it).

Bloomberg has published a related story that says Verizon and Google have reached an agreement, but that it only allows Verizon to selectively slow mobile traffic:

“The compromise as described would restrict Verizon from selectively slowing Internet content that travels over its wires, but wouldn't apply such limits to Internet use on mobile phones, according to the people, who spoke yesterday and asked not to be identified before an announcement.”

Don’t be surprised if we see a lengthy explanation/rebuttal from Google on one of their official blogs later today.

Poor old Spotify. Less than a week after Billboard magazine reported that the music-on-demand service had “rebooted” its negotiations with US labels, rival service Rdio has just opened its doors in both the US and Canada, proudly boasting deals with many of those same labels.

So what gives? What does Rdio – another European startup boasting unlimited music, anywhere – have that Spotify doesn't?

Two words: faux humility.

But I'll get to that in a second. First there is a convention – so widely adhered to that it might as well be a law – that if you're going to write anything critical about Spotity, you have to first acknowledge the amazing slickness of its product.

So here we go: Spotify is amazingly slick as a product. Really it is. You want to listen to a song – almost any song ever recorded – just type its name into Spotify and it plays. For free. If you want to listen to unlimited songs without obtrusive ads, or if you want to download the songs for offline listening, then you pay ten Euro a month and it's all yours. It's a thing of beauty.

But here's what would also be a thing of beauty: a magic ATM that, using a slick point and click interface, handed out free dollar bills, printed with tiny ads. A magic ATM that, for a small monthly fee, would allow you to upgrade from withdrawing ad-supported singles to withdrawing unadulterated fives.

Like that magic ATM, Spotify's app is writing checks its business model can't cash. In Europe the company claims that it's racing towards profitability: subscription numbers are climbing – with founder Daniel Ek (pronounced ‘Eek’) telling a South by Southwest audience in March that they have 320,000 paying customers. And yet according to persistent rumours, the company is in the midst of frantic renegotiations with European labels due to the founders' over-confidence when they first agreed licencing terms. In short: Spotify was so convinced that it would be successful that it agreed to a deal where it would pay a significantly reduced royalty in its first couple of years of operation, with payments stepping up after that launch period to reflect the huge cash cow that the product would become. A deadline that expires right about now, with the company still barely a cash calf. Uh oh.

And yet to read the European business press – or what passes for it – you'd think that all is well at Spotify. So desperate is Europe to have another dot com success story – to stick it to the Valley – they they unquestioningly print any bullshit that Spotify's spin machine churns out. When Billboard ran their story about the company's stalled negotiations with US labels, Ek simply picked up the phone to a journalist from the Telegraph in London and reiterated that "Spotify will launch in US by end of 2010". That claim became the story's headline across much of the UK and European press, despite the company's numerous missed deadlines and their history of – yes, I'll say it – deliberately misleading the media. It's clear that Ek passionately believes that Spotify is the future of music online and that sooner or later the world will realise that fact. If his spokespeople have to bend the truth slightly in the meantime to buy the company a few extra months then – meh – it's for the greater good. They'll see. THEY'LL ALL SEE.

Unfortunately while Ek's balls-to-the-wall style of doing business might play big on the old continent, it has precisely the opposite effect in the US. Put bluntly, America wants Spotify to fail. Or rather, unlike Europe, America – represented by music labels, journalists and anyone else with a vested interest in the space – doesn't have any reason to want Spotify to succeed. And they certainly have no time for an arrogant European demanding that they have to change how they do business just because he says so.

"Sure," say the labels, "if Spotify wants to talk about launching a fully subscription based version of their cute little European service, perhaps with a very short trial period, then we'll take the meeting. We'll even promise not to laugh at their quaint accents. But if they won't play by our rules, we're quite happy to continue working with Rhapsody, Mog, Napster — and now Rdio."

Oh, yes, Rdio. Founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom – formerly of Skype – Rdio offers much of the same functionality as Spotify — but with a waaaay crappier interface. Really it's bad: so bad that it's actually a challenge to figure out how to make it play music. Even when you get the thing working, the service is only free for a very short amount of time – three days! – before users are asked to stump up $10 for a subscription. In no universe is three days enough time to get users hooked on a new music service, particularly when it takes two-and-a-half of those days to figure out how the hell it works.

And yet, despite sucking harder than Divine Brown trying to pick up a golf ball with a hosepipe, Rdio's launch has been welcomed to America with open arms. How did Friis and Zennstrom manage where Spotify has failed?

By playing the colonials like a violin.

From the start, Rdio has pandered to the US music industry's every demand: launching as a subscription-only service that barely allows a note of free music out before users are shaken down for money. It's pandered to reporters too: cleverly positioning itself as the approachable antidote to arrogant old Spotify by talking to every reporter who called, not lying to them, and even dishing out free invitations to sites like – uh – TechCrunch to share with their readers. Of course America lapped it up. Screw you, Ek, these Europeans are OK. They know their place.

As a European living in the US, I understand Rdio's strategy completely: after all, it's exactly the same one that any sensible Brit, Swede, Frenchman or Spaniard should take if they want to get on the good side of the Yanks. Clearly Daniel Ek didn’t get the memo so, in the interests of Euro-American relations (and in the interests of being able to keep listening to Spotify over here), I'm willing to do what I can to help him. Because I’m a nice person. Really I am.

(If you're American, please stop reading now; perhaps go and look at these pictures of Scottish castles or Norwegian fjords.)

Daniel,

You and I can agree on one thing: Europe is better than America. We speak more languages. We made stronger, tastier cheese. Our money is more colourful. We embrace the letter "u" in our words.

Like all good Europeans, we are at heart socialists, not capitalists: we think music – like healthcare – should be free. And we also have a healthy contempt for journalists who would question our ability to pay our bills.

Most importantly, though, like all good Europeans, we also know that Americans are – to a man – suckers: albeit with far more than one born every minute. What's theirs – including their money – is rightfully ours, Daniel. After all without us they'd all be speaking – well – American.

And yet, trying to conquer America with arrogance is like trying to conquer a sheep with wool. Rather, the secret to victory is to to play into their ego, not to fight against it. I realised this when I moved here: by playing the unemployable drunken Brit card I was able to get a job writing anti-American diatribes like this for TechCrunch ("oh, the Brit sense of humo(u)r") and to start charming their women with my accent. Rdio understands the need for faux-humility too: they've used it to beat you to launch here, despite a far inferior product.

Life is good on this side of the Atlantic, Daniel, and Spotify could be living it too. All you have to do is start telling America what it needs to hear. Swallow your ego and do whatever deals you have to do to get Spotify US launched, even if it's as a full subscription product. Yes, it will be an embarrassing climb down but, while you're stubbonly sticking to your guns, Rdio is romping away with your market share. If VHS vs Betamax has taught us anything, it's that the clear superiority of your product doesn't matter a damn if Rdio has all of the users by the time you finally launch in 2095.

Once you've launched here, everything will change. Once every man, woman and child in America is hooked on Spotify (which they will be, because it's the best music service in the world, right Daniel?) then you can start to show your true colours. Slowly extend the trial period – first to a week, then a month, then get a bit lax with paying your licencing fees; maybe a contract renegotiation or two to tip the financial balance further in your favour. By that point the labels will need you, Daniel, and you can do whatever the hell you like. Oh, yes, Daniel, they'll see. THEY'LL ALL SEE.

Alternatively keep playing the same old broken record, telling the world that you're launching your fremium service in the US before the end of 2010. And in the meantime, I'll keep enjoying your free magical musical ATM until the cash runs out.

No matter how big your company is, maintaining platform parity — that is, keeping all of your apps functionally identical across multiple smartphone platforms — is tough work. Even Facebook can’t seem to get their Android app quite up to par with their iPhone app.

Later today, PayPal will be introducing version 2.0 of their Android App, which seems to be aimed at bringing it up to speed with its iPhone counterpart.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>