Slowly but surely, Twitter is taking control of all the key features that make it such a powerful communication medium. Today, it is introducing the Tweet button, a way for Websites to get visitors to share stories and links with one click. Of course, this already exists in various forms, the most popular of which is the Retweet button created by TweetMeme, which is on so many sites (including ours) that it currently generates 750 million impressions a day. Well, that is all very likely going away. “We expect people to switch,” says Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead, “and we support that.”

Twitter is killing TweetMeme’s Retweet button, but with love. It is licensing some of the technology developed by TweetMeme to power the new Tweet button. TweetMeme Pro will continue o exist for Websites that want more customized solutions and analytics, but TweetMeme is shifting is business to a new product that has yet to launch called Datasift, which will focus on curating different realtime streams.

In addition to the the ability to Tweet out links, Twitter’s new button also has another feature. It allows the sites which install them to suggest Twitter accounts to follow, perhaps each site’s official account or the accounts of different writers at blogs and news sites.

The Tweet button is just the latest example of Twitter filling holes in its product by poaching the best ideas from the eco-sytem of startups which have built successful businesses on top of Twitter. The same thing happened with bit.ly and short links and when it decided to create its own official mobile apps for the iPhone (by acquiring Tweetie) and Blackberry.

The message this sends out to Twitter developers is that if they create a successful product, Twitter will absorb it. That is not necessarily a bad thing. At least in this case, Twitter worked with the company it will displace to soften the blow. Halstead says it is not really an issue. “The buttons were never our core business, we make our money from selling filtered data – not from buttons. If buttons made you money we would be very rich.” The value is in the data, which he still gets from Twitter via the firehose, which will power his new product.

Many of you may have heard about TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington’s harrowing experience on a recent Delta flight. Since then others have emerged complaining about poor service on the airline. Although it doesn’t appear that Mike has received his lost bag yet, it looks like Delta has been hard at work on something else: its social media strategy. Today, the airline announced a new initiative that allows users to book flights directly on Facebook.

Called the ‘Ticket Window,’ the feature allows anyone to book a flight directly from Delta’s Facebook page. It looks like they are one of the first airlines to allow a full travel booking on the social network. And Delta says that it will expand the Ticket Window, which is powered by Alvenda, to other social media sites, including online banner ads to allow full booking capabilities within the airline’s advertisements. It’s unclear if Facebook gets a cut from any of he flights booked on the platform.

While it’s commendable that the company is looking to social media to boost sales, Delta is not the first airline to use the social web to reach consumers. Southwest, Virgin and event JetBlue have been communicating deals and information to customers via Twitter and Facebook for some time. I’d expect these airlines to start rolling out a similar sales feature to Ticket Window soon. And perhaps Delta should be focusing it’s efforts on actually improving customer service before bringing more customers on board flights.

Canadian startup Empire Avenue has raised $200,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors, including Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures.

Empire Avenue, which launched to the public earlier this year, people to buy and sell shares in each other. A person's influence score is their share price, which is calculated using share-trading activity on the site, as well as the Influencer's offsite contributions to their own blogs, websites or social-media networks.

Since February, Empire Avenue has attracted over 15,000 registered users and businesses to the market, including Sears, OREO, WestJet, Motorola, and others. Empire Avenue says that over 750,000 virtual share trades have occurred on the site in the past three months with a total value of over half a billion Eaves, the site's virtual currency.

The new funding will be used towards marketing efforts and product development, including the impending launch of its rewards and advertising programs. The startup faces competition from Klout.

Facebook offers a simple search portal that allows you to search a keyword for public mentions on the network. Booshaka is taking Facebook search and adding a few bells and whistles to allow users to segment search by topic and provide trending topics around what people on Facebook are talking about.

So on Booshaka, you can segment search by topics, such as music, sports and politics. For the topics, Booshaks indexes popular Facebook pages, semantically organizes them, and then ranks their posts according to its proprietary PostRank algorithm. PostRank is based the popularity, buzz and recency of a post; the number of likes and comments of a post; how popular something is in relation to the poster’s social media reach and the recency of a post. Of course, you can also do a regular search on Booshaka, which returns the same results as a search under ‘everyone’ on Facebook’s own search portal.

Of course there are other search portals that index Facebook content, such as OneRiot and OpenFacebookSearch. While we don’t expect Booshaka to replace Facebook’s search portal any time soon, it does provide another layer and additional context for search results that could be useful.

Airplanes release greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere and require enormous amounts of fuel to fly. A Boeing 747 can consume up to five gallons of fuel per mile. But what if planes could be powered by electricity? Though they won’t replace passenger airliners anytime soon, small, zero-emission, electric planes are flying today.

Engineers have been pursing electric flight for decades. In 1979, the Solar Riser became the first manned electric aircraft to fly. It used photovoltaic cells to charge a battery that powered an electric motor, but could only fly five minutes, at which point it could either glide or land.

Many enhancements have been made since, and several models of electric planes are showing signs of promise. Two of the most interesting planes to fly recently are the E430 and the SkySpark.

Yuneec International‘s E430 won the Lindbergh Electric Airplane Prize at the World Electric Aircraft Symposium last month. Yuneec opened a 260,000 square foot factory in China and was the first commercially available electric aircraft, with a price tag of $89,000.

The E430 seats two people and flies up to 95 miles per hour, or 60 miles per hour when cruising. Without passengers the plane weighs 561 pounds, which includes its 184-pound lithium polymer battery that needs three to four hours to charge.

This video from Yuneec shows the plane in action:

The SkySpark set a record for electric airplane air speed when it reached 155 miles per hour last year. It also runs on lithium polymer batteries, though its manufacturer, the Italian startup DigiSky, wants to try hydrogen fuel cells next.

Here is a video of its record-setting flight:

Electric planes capture the imaginations and ambitions of many, including Tesla founder Elon Musk, who has said he’s interested in building an “electric super sonic plane” in the future.

NASA is also behind the cause, helping run Centennial Challenges for Aeronautics competitions to encourage aircraft innovation. Next summer’s competition, the Green Flight Challenge, will center around efficiency: the minimum bar for entry will be for aircraft that can surpass the equivalent fuel-efficiency of 200 miles per gallon per passenger.

The technology is improving, but that doesn’t mean it’s near developed enough to green up 747s. One of the main things prohibiting passenger planes from going electric is battery technology. Batteries with enough juice to power a plane are heavy and large, but airplanes need to be light to take off and stay in the air.

Solar powered airplanes have the advantage of being lightweight in comparison to battery-powered planes. Earlier this summer, a solar powered airplane set a new record by flying for 26 straight hours. Its 12,000 solar cells charged batteries that took over when the sun set. This solar/battery combination can theoretically keep a plane in the air for years, though its size and weight capacity is still limited by battery technology.

Wireless power transmission has also been tested, though far less than battery and solar. The technology sends microwave energy or lasers through the air to an airplane’s receiver. NASA has demonstrated the technology works with small, unmanned solar craft, but has yet to try it on larger aircraft.

Another concept that could help longer flights become more feasible is regenerative soaring, in which a propeller acts as a wind turbine to generate energy when the plane flies through an updraft. The Electraflyer C‘s propeller can be turned into a wind-powered generator at a flip of a switch to charge its lithium-ion-polymer batteries. The plane weighs 380 pounds and can fly about 90 minutes, reaching speeds of up to 80 miles per hour. Once drained, the batteries require a six-hour charge.

It’ll be a long time before your next commercial business flight is green, but those considering a pilot’s license have a few greener birds to choose from.

I've often found myself countering the argument that the Internet is making us dumber by citing Google as a second brain: the search engine lets us remember stuff that we didn't actually know, which is sort of true as connectivity becomes ubiquitous. But what if there was a service designed specifically to retrieve information that we have already come across but didn't explicitly log for future use, perhaps because at the time it didn't seem relevant or useful. At a higher level, that's the concept behind Sentimnt, a personal and social search engine that at its simplest aims to answer the question: "Where did I read that?". It does this by connecting to a user's Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail and Delicious accounts, indexing all of the updates, articles, and resources that are referenced so that they can be recalled later. The site is in private beta but we have a limited number of invites (see below).

Flattr, the micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, has opened to the public today. No longer will you need an invite in order to add the Flattr button to your web site as a publisher or to give support to the sites you visit with real money. Flattr's micropayments business model is based on the idea of people tipping content they like, Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons – but this time with real money. Users can "Flattr" content by setting up a Flattr account which sets a a monthly fee — a minimum €2 — that they are willing to contribute for any kind of online content. When the user finds something they like that has a Flattr button, they can click the button to "reward" the content provider. At the end of the month, the user's monthly fee is split equally among the holders of the content that they "flattered".

They say nothing is certain except death and taxes. And, maybe, you could be certain that no matter how many design fads come and go on the Internet, Craigslist would pretty much look the same as Craigslist has always looked. Designer types get downright pissy that the site’s design has stayed static. And makeover recommendations abound – Wired even dedicated several print pages to the idea last year.

“Craigslist is frustrating and claustrophobic,” said Matt Willey of Studio8 Design in that Wired article, who recommended pull down menus and lots of images. But Craigslist had trudged along, racking up 50 million unique visitors a month and 13.4 billion page views (Comscore, July 2010). Not bad for a site that has looked almost exactly the same for over a decade.

But parts of Craigslist are now sporting a somewhat updated design. It hasn’t rolled out on all of the geographic sub-sites, particularly bigger cities. But many of the smaller city sites are now showing something that’s a little different.

There are a number of small changes, like removal of the boxes around the left navigation bar items, and slightly bigger main section headers (community, personals, etc…). But the most useful change is the right sidebar, which now defaults to show other cities close to your current site. In the old design, you had to click on your state or country and then select the other area. This saves a lot of hunting and clicking.

That right side bar also uses a little JavaScript to let you toggle to see other cities, countries or worldwide instead of just the sites closest to you.

Never say never, I guess. And with the Singularity coming, perhaps the only thing we’ll soon be able to say is certain are all those taxes.

Get Satisfaction has a goal of satisfying users of various services across the web by connecting them with people who actually work for those services. But are they themselves satisfied? Yes, according to co-founder Lane Becker. Though you’ll forgive our slight skepticism as Becker is saying that on his way out the door.

Becker, who co-founded the service alongside Thor and Amy Muller, has stepped down as President of the company, we’ve learned and confirmed with Becker. Becker says that the move is “all good and positive” and notes that the reason for the move is that the company is “doing well enough that i can afford to take a break.“

He says he has no plans for what he’ll do next just yet.

When asked who will replace him as President of the company, Becker says that no one is and joked that’s because he is “irreplaceable.” But he reiterated that the strong management team they’ve built out is one of the reasons why he feels okay stepping back.

That team includes CEO Wendy Lea who took over for co-founder Thor Muller in early 2009 (Muller stepped into the CTO role). The service raised a new round of funding earlier this year that likely totaled between $2 and $3 million, so they should be doing fine money-wise.

Still there’s some concern out there that Google or even Twitter (a longtime Get Satisfaction user) or Quora might step in to compete with the company. Speaking of Quora, there seems to be some discontent among users and potential clients of Get Satisfaction there — some pricing changes earlier this year likely didn’t help that.

So we’ll believe Becker for now that everything is just fine and he just wants to take a break. But someone feel free to raise this question in Get Satisfaction.

The fun’s over, folks*. About a week and a half ago, iPhone developers TapTapTap pushed an updated version of their Camera+ photography app to the App Store, and all seemed well. Just yesterday, however, they revealed (via a message on Twitter that was pulled about 30 minutes after it went out) that this latest build had a hidden feature: by visiting a specially formatted URL in Mobile Safari, one could make the volume buttons on the side of the iPhone instead act as a camera shutter button — something which Apple had already said was a no-no.

Hidden features and tricks that circumvent Apple’s rulings generally don’t fly for very long — and sure enough: as of right around midnight this morning, Camera+ has been pulled from the App Store.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch>>

It used to be that folks overseas would get their mass pop culture fix from old episodes of “Baywatch” and “Friends. Now that the Internet has replaced television as culture’s primary mode of discourse, our currently most prevalent cultural artifacts (the “Like” button, LOLcats, @oldspice) have also permeated the arts on a global scale, most recently in the shockingly slick “N’Importe Comment” music video from French rappers Orelsan and The Toxic Avenger.

Watch as the artists walk down the Venice Beach boardwalk “adding” attractive members of the opposite sex as “Friends,” real life “Poking” people and eventually ending up in something ominously called “Danceroulette.”

[h/t Europopped]

Former President Bill Clinton is looking to turn his 64th birthday into an opportunity to counter malnutrition in Colombia, reduce childhood obesity in the US, and improve lives around the world. And to do it, he’s turning to Birthday Wish, a service powered by Causes that makes it easy to ask your friends for charity donations in honor of your big day. Clinton will be sharing his Birthday Wish with his 366,000 Facebook fans, making this the most widely shared wish on the platform to date (and the first time a major celebrity has used it). You can find his Wish here.

Clinton has good timing — Causes cofounder Joe Green says that the service has been revamped in the last few weeks to better take advantage of Facebook Connect. Before now, Birthday Wish was used through a Facebook Canvas application — now it’s primarily hosted on birthdays.causes.com. Green says that offering the page through a website makes it more intuitive for users to share, and Connect sites also afford more flexibility than a standard Facebook app.

Green also shared some interesting stats about Birthday Wish. The service has raised nearly $6.5 million, and around $5 million of that has been raised in the last year alone. Also impressive is just how successful these wishes can be: Green says that if a Wish Creator (i.e., the person having the birthday) follows the service’s recommendations, the majority of the time they will generate an average of $100 in donations. Unfortunately not everyone follows the prompts (which entail thanking people who have donated, marking milestones, etc.), so some Wishes don’t fare that well.

Green says that Birthday Wish works because it efficiently taps into the viral nature of Facebook’s News Feed, and prompts your friends to donate in a way that isn’t too awkward. Rather than asking your friends repeatedly to donate money, Birthday Wish instructs you to call out each of your friends who donates with a Thank You update (and as your friends see those thank-yous, they’ll hopefuly donate too).

Here’s Clinton’s Wish List:

· Reduce malnutrition of Colombian students by 10 percent
· Give more than 20000 farmers in Malawi the tools to improve their lives
· Provide 5000 hours of expert help to support small businesses in underserved US communities
· Enlist 10000 US schools to create healthier environments for students & staff
· Reduce lighting energy use in major cities by up to 70 percent
· Improve lives around the world.

Those of us who have been on Twitter for several years remember the good old days fondly. Things were nice and quiet back then. There was no @aplusk, no @britneyspears. Oprah’s arrival was a couple years out. Instead, it was a service that early-adopter geeks used to follow one another. You know, like Foursquare is today.

As we all know, Foursquare is now growing at a rapid pace. That said, it’s still a relatively small social network and a lot of people have no idea why they’d ever want to use it. Of course, that’s the same thing that was said about Twitter back in the day, and Facebook before that, etc. But a tweet sent by Snoop Dogg today indicates the tide may be starting to shift in a more mainstream direction for the service.

“Who got a foursquare?!?!,” Snoop tweeted a few minutes ago. I’m going to assume he doesn’t mean the actual childhood game.

Uh, oh.

According to this list by Osnapz, the most-followed people on Foursquare are all big brands like Bravo. Noticeably absent are any Hollywood celebrities. Of course, given that they have to accept you as a follower — and that would mean you knowing where they actually are, would any of them actually want to do that? If Snoop’s tweet is any indication, maybe.

(Also remember that Foursquare has a “Celebrity Mode” to allow users to follow famous people but not see their actual check-ins — unless they specifically broadcast it to all. You can still see their tips though.)

Might this be the first warning shot of a massive Hollywood Foursquare influx?

What do you do when you hype up a relatively nascent video technology that is intrinsically unpopular because of the anti-social tendencies foisted upon its customers as well as the perception that it’s “Just a gimmick?” Pretend it never existed and add on another gimmick!

CES is coming up in January and expect the run up to include almost no talk of 3D TV and plenty of talk about “apps” for your TV. Why? Because rather than try to upsell on hardware, CE manufacturers can now gain through affiliate deals with content providers and try to create their own app stores.

Read more…

List making platform Ranker has officially left beta after 10 months, with today’s launch of the Community Lists feature. A service for “ranking anything in the universe,” Ranker has a database of over 6 million items for list inclusion, with over 10,000 lists being created during Ranker’s beta. The site now has over 500k monthly unique visitors and hopes that will grow exponentially after today’s launch.

List making is so hot right now, with Shawn Fanning and Dave Morin’s stealth PATH.io also incorporating social features. Also in the list making technology space is Listal.

Ranker’s “wisdom of crowds” feature allows users to contribute to aggregate lists and see how their opinions stack rank on any topic, in realtime. While the current most popular community list is unsurprisingly “The Best TV Programs of Recent Memory” and of course “The Hottest Celebrities,” founder Clark Benson’s eventual goal is to dominate with product related lists i.e. “Top 10 Digital Cameras.”

Benson is also working on making the Ranker interface cleaner (some of the community features were difficult to suss out) as well as offering a portable version of Community Lists that can be deployed on third party sites. While Ranker currently monetizes via ads and affiliate ecommerce, a platform play is next um, on the list.

Benson sums up his vision for Ranker, “‘What is the best ________?’ There isn’t really a site that does that, until now.”

Reading over the comments on our post (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?) about the Apple patent diagram fiasco last week, you would have thought Apple was the most evil company in the world. Many believed that Apple was attempting to patent ideas that third-party developers came up with. Essentially, the thought was that Apple was trying to steal from their own developer community — and were doing so that blatantly. I mean, people actually believed that.

As we noted at the time, this was not likely the case. Instead, Apple was probably just using diagrams of existing third-party apps for examples of other things they were actually trying to patent. Lo and behold, today comes word from the third-party developer at the center of all of this confirming this to be the case.

FutureTap, the app house behind the app Where To? confirms that Apple’s Senior Patent Counsel reached out with the following statement:

As discussed, Apple is contemplating steps to attribute the screenshot in the patent application to FutureTap. The patent application in question does not claim as inventive the pictured user interface nor the general concept of an integrated travel services application. We appreciate your taking time out to discuss the matter and will keep you updated.

In other words: no we’re not trying to patent your idea. We just needed an example app to use and chose yours. Sorry we didn’t use attribution in the filing, in the future, we’ll try to figure out a way to do that.

In response, the developer notes, “We feel honored over this mention and appreciate that Apple is looking into a proper attribution of the screenshot. In retrospective, I can say we wouldn't ever have considered the story alarming had the screenshot included a short attribution notice.”

So there you go. Case closed.

Still, it’s rather amusing that people actually did believe that Apple (or any other company) would attempt to do this. That’s not to say companies never do malicious things (perhaps even bordering on evil), but come on — if Apple had actually been doing this, no developer in their right mind would ever develop for their platform ever again. It wouldn’t be a gray area. It just wouldn’t happen. All developers would walk away. And as a result, all customers would walk away. Apple would be screwed.

Further, other diagrams in the same patent depict apps by established big companies like Ralph Lauren. Does anyone really think that Apple would so blatantly try to steal from them as well? I mean, one of the diagrams says RALPH LAUREN in huge letters.

I hear that Apple has a killer Spring 2011 line of designer dresses in the product pipeline. “Killer” is the key word there.

Back in March, Google launched an experimental new app for Android called Gesture Search. It’s an awesome idea: you can search for anything on your device simply by writing a letter with your finger on the touchscreen. Today, they’ve made it even more accesible thanks to a new flip-to-activate feature.

With Gesture Search 1.2, all you have to do is turn your phone to the side and then move it back to the regular position to activate Gesture Search. You can fine-tune the sensitivity in the settings as well to make sure you don’t, you know, activate this every single time you move your Android phone.

Google is smart to play up these types of features as they’re something Apple is unlikely to allow with the iPhone (granted, it was Google who made this particular app). Between this, voice search, and Swype, the awesome keyboard replacement app, Android is getting some really innovative ways to interact with your phone.

Currently, Gesture Search is only for your Android contacts, bookmarks, applications, and music (you need Android 1.6 or later to run it) — hopefully Google can come up with an effective way to let it search the entire web.

You can find the app here.

Google Ventures, the VC arm of the search giant, has made an investment in popular iPhone/iPad game developer ngmoco, say multiple sources. The company, which is already profitable, took the money as part of a new round of funding — probably in the $3-5 million range. ngmoco currently has some very popular games on iOS, including ‘We Farm’, which is currently the second most popular game on the iPad. The investment valued ngmoco well above $100 million, we’ve heard. This comes on top of a $25 million Series C round ngmoco closed in February.

This is not an investment being made by Google itself, which has been fleshing out its social gaming strategy with a $150 million investment in Zynga and acquisitions of Slide and social payments company Jambool. Rather, it’s being made by Google’s VC firm, which has repeatedly made it clear that it is a distinct entity from the search giant and that it doesn’t make strategic investments.

Still, it’s hard to take that entirely at face value — Google CEO Eric Schmidt previously said that companies that received funding from Google Ventures would have 20,000 Googlers there to help them. Don’t be surprised if we start seeing an abundance of Android games from ngmoco in the near future. And ngmoco has been a conspicuous underachiever on the Android platform to date. Expect that to change.

Android still has relatively few high quality games available and is ripe for a few more established developers to join the fray. But this could still prove to be a double-edged sword for ngmoco — Apple may not take kindly to having its enemy Google take a stake in one of the iPhone’s top developers.

It’s also worth pointing out that ngmoco competitor SGN, which has a number of popular titles on the iPhone including Skies of Glory, recently began offering some of its titles on Android. SGN closed a bridge round led by Eric Schmidt’s firm Tomorrow Ventures in June.

What do you do after you become an internet meme?

After you capture the hearts and minds of every disgruntled worker in America, after you inspire a string of flattering (and not so flattering) Facebook pages, and after you fool a bevy of mainstream media outlets (aside from that sly Peter Kafka- oh, you’ll get him next time)— well, logic dictates that your next move is a splashy debut on TechCrunch TV. Savvy thespian Elyse Porterfield, aka Jenny, aka that hot piece of expletive with the dry erase board, did just that on Wednesday afternoon.

See our video above with Elyse and theChive co-founder, John Resig. They explain how the guys at theChive lured her in and she answers some of your most pressing questions from Twitter, like “if she thinks this will be the year Linux finally becomes a viable consumer desktop/laptop/pad experience” (hey, I’m just the messenger).

Highlights:

-The script was written about a month ago. According to Resig, “I wanted someone to quit their job in a spectacular fashion because I think a lot of people can relate to hating someone at their workplace…That’s where we started but I wanted a vessel with which to tell a story and I wanted to create a heroine out of that, a workplace hero if you will.”

-For the casting call, approximately 20 women applied. “There was actually a lot of good candidates. And I remember then Elyse walked in and my brother stopped chewing his food and we all kind of stared at her. And when she left one of the interns who was helping orchestrate this whole thing, he was like 17 years old high school student came in and he hadn’t said anything all day and he said, if you guys don’t cast her I’m going to move to Canada because everything I know is wrong.”

-The shoot took 2 hours (mainly because they had to wait an hour for the camera’s battery to charge).

-What’s next for Elyse? Beyond her newfound Facebook popularity (3,500+ friends and counting), she has received far more marriage proposals than job offers but she will follow a few leads once the dust settles.

-Skip to the 6 minute mark, to see the beginning of the Twitter questions.

Fun fact: As expected theChive saw a huge surge in traffic on Tuesday, with 2.5 million unique visits, there was another 2.5 million uniques today. For comparison, on any given month the site generally attracts 2.5 million uniques. And according to their numbers, Facebook is the new vehicle for viral— the social portal was responsible for nearly 1 million uniques (thanks to the 421,000 users who shared the story on FB).

It seems that Apple’s iPhone 4 case refund policy isn’t quite as cut and dry as they initially made it seem. A number of people have written us recently to say Apple has rejected their request for a case reimbursement. And most of those people are obviously very unhappy about it. But Jordan Linville has taken the most interesting approach in following-up with Apple about it.

Linville has sent Apple’s Rebate Center a humorous email response (below) to the rejection letter he received. Attached to it, he included two photos. One features his iPhone 4, his iPhone 4 case, and a copy of the Wall Street Journal as proof of the date. The other shows Linville himself dressed as a terrorist (or bandit, hard to tell) holding up all of the said items. Yes, it’s a proof of life.

Why is Linville sending Apple these pictures? Because his rejection letter said the following:

Thank you for your recent Apple purchase.
After reviewing your Apple rebate claim submission XXXXXX received on 7/30/2010, we have determined that you do not qualify for our promotion for the following reason(s):

One or more of the products used to claim the rebate does not qualify, or

Our records indicate that the product was returned. If this was an exchange for another eligible product, please respond to this email with all receipt or web order numbers related to your transactions

If you have questions about the Terms and Conditions for this promotion, visit our website athttp://www.apple.com/promo.
You may check the status of your other claims at http://www.apple.com/promo/rebate/status.html.

While we have to assume the actual problem is that the bumper Linville bought isn’t eligible for the reimbursement, the wording of that email is odd and confusing. And it has Linville sending his proof of life to prove he did not return the case. It’s also a little ridiculous that the case reimbursement doesn’t apply across the board. For example, at AT&T stores, you have to have bought an actual iPhone 4 bumper (the ones made by Apple) to get reimbursed.

Here’s the email Linville sent back to Apple alongside the pictures:

Apple Rebates,
I received the email below regarding my rebate claim submission XXXXXX for an Apple iPhone bumper.  The email below seems to indicate that either 1) the case is not eligible, or 2) I returned the bumper.  Since this case was purchased at the AT&T store, it should definitely be eligible.

I have not returned the bumper.  It’s very difficult to prove that you did NOT do something – it’s like having to prove that you did NOT have Cheerios for breakfast, or that you did NOT ever secretly wish Danny Tanner was your dad.  Apple has given me no documentation to refute.  So, I have attached pictures of my iPhone with the two bumpers purchased from the AT&T store and today’s Wall Street Journal.  This should prove that the case is still in my possession, and I will continue holding it against its will.

Please send me my $29 for the case that I need to protect me from the poorly engineered antenna that is wreaking havoc, dropping calls, and possibly causing cancer.

If Apple can’t come through with the reimbursement, maybe they can offer up Danny Tanner as a consolation prize.

The next version of the Apple TV is coming soon. There’s been a few rumors over the last month that the next version will be around $99 and feature some sort of cloud-based streaming. But that’s about it. Well, the crazy kids over at Engadget apparently have it on good authority that those two rumors are correct and the next Apple TV, or as it will be called, the iTV, is right around the corner. Like it or not, this might be the device to finally spring media streamers from a niche market to the mainstream. Just in time for the Boxee box and the Popbox to swing in and steal the show.

Over the years, we’ve covered quite a few startups that have sought to let users annotate and comment on webpages, usually with the help of a browser plugin. Few have gone on to gain traction (even Google’s own SideWiki has failed to make waves). But that isn’t stopping a new startup called Marginize from taking a stab at it. The company has just raised $650,000 from Atlas Ventures, Longworth Venture Partners, eonBusiness, SOS Ventures, and angels including David Cohen (you can see a fill list on CrunchBase). Marginize was previously part of the Boston TechStars class of June 2010.

The service is pretty simple: visit a website, and you’ll see a persistent frame on the right hand side of the screen displaying comments and tweets from other users (there are also options to share which page your browsing and what you’ve written). There’s also a Foursquare-like check-in component, which lets you show your friends how often you’ve visited a certain website. If you’d like to see it for yourself, here’s the Marginized link for this page.

Marginize founder Ziad Sultan is well aware of the many past attempts (and failures) in this space. But he thinks that he’s identified the common problems and how to fix them. First, he says that many other comment/annotation services suffered from a chicken-and-egg problem, where users would arrive at a site and see that nobody had left any content yet (which would make them less likely to fire up their commenting plugin in the future). Second, because these services generally rely on plugins, there’s often a high barrier to entry which can make them difficult to grow virally.

To solve the first problem, Marginize populates the ‘margin’ of every page with tweets that have linked to the site you’re viewing, which means many popular sites will already have supplementary content available. To address the barrier-to-entry issue, Marginize doesn’t require you to have a browser plugin to view content that’s been left by other users. Say, for example, I tweeted out a link to TechCrunch using Marginize — my followers would be directed to a version of TechCrunch that featured the Marginize sidebar, including tweets and comments, rendered in HTML.

Unfortunately, that HTML version will only work for a single page — click a link on that TechCrunch site and your Marginize sidebar will disappear. In order to keep it there persistently you’ll need to download one of the startup’s browser plugins (available for Chrome and Firefox, with Safari coming in the near future). You can alternatively use the less-convenient bookmarklet, which should work for any browser. Hitting it will add the HTML version of the Marginize sidebar to whatever page you’re currently viewing, but, again, if you click a link to another page, the sidebar will disappear until you activate the bookmarklet again.

Marginize may have identified some of the problems that hampered its predecessors, but it still has a long road ahead of it. Any service that requires a browser plugin has a fairly steep barrier to entry (even with the HTML-based preview). And while I certainly see the appeal of being able to communicate with other people in the margin of a website (there’s a reason so many startups have tried this), perhaps users simply aren’t keen on communicating this way. Then again, perhaps this space is poised to explode, just as soon as one of these services can get some traction (and if that’s the case, I think Facebook is poised to play a big part in it).

The Pew research center put out survey results today on broadband adoption and Internet use in America. There was one data point that I found startling. According to the survey, 21 percent of American adults say they don’t use the Internet. One fifth of all Americans.

This isn’t just people who do not use broadband (which is 66 percent of American adults). It also includes people who don’t use dial-up (another 5 percent). These people don’t use the Internet at all. That is like not using the telephone.

The number is a bit inflated because a third (34 percent) of these self-described non-users live in a house with Internet access or have family members who use the Internet regularly. They just don’t think the information on the Internet is relevant to their lives (48 percent), are uncomfortable with computers (60 percent), and are not interested in getting online (90 percent).

Who are these people? I can understand why elderly Americans who didn’t grow up with computers not seeing the need for them. And that is certainly reflected in the broadband numbers. Only 31 percent of people 65 or older are on broadband, compared to 80 percent for those 18-to-29 years old. People without a high school education, with low incomes, or who live in rural areas also are less likely to use broadband. It is likely that these demographic groups also make up a disproportionate number of the non-users.

At least race is becoming less of a factor. One of the fastest growing groups of broadband use is among African Americans. More than half (56 percent) use broadband (compared to 67 percent of white users), up from 46 percent of African Americans last year. And most people (53 percent) don’t believe the government should get involved in making broadband more broadly available. They think the market is doing just fine on its own.

Well, except for those 21 percent of Americans who are apparently still communicating by telegram.

This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is with the originator of the modern Batman movies and creator of the Batman franchise, Michael Uslan.

I’ve found that you never know where or when you’re going to receive amazing entrepreneurial advice. You have to keep your eyes, ears and heart open and then you’ll stumble into some amazing people who have extraordinary stories to tell that you can learn from. Entrepreneurial advice for tech companies doesn’t need to come from someone who’s been in our trenches. Businesses are businesses and we can all learn from each other, no matter what industry we’re in.

Michael Uslan’s story is the typical story of success. From the outside, it seems like an obvious win, but from the inside there was a long and painful struggle to get to the other side. It took Michael 10 years of pitching a dark and serious Batman in order to get it made into the first movie. It was written up as an “overnight success”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here is one of my favorite parts of our interview:

“I’m a blue collar kid from New Jersey. My Dad was a mason, my mom was a bookkeeper. I couldn’t buy my way into Hollywood. I didn’t know anyone in Hollywood, didn’t have any relatives in Hollywood. My last name isn’t Warner. I only have one brother and for me its the story of how I, at every opportunity, tried to put my foot in the door and tried to make a path – carve a path. If I had said when I was a kid, “Oh, I’m going to produce the greatest Batman movie ever – dark and serious”, might have well as said I was going to jump across the Grand Canyon. You can’t do it. But, if you keep taking steps that lead you on a certain path, and don’t let anyone – friends or anyone else veer you off course, you can, if you have the passion. If you have a high level for frustration, you can do it. That’s how I did it. These dark serious Batman movies, the Batman franchise, was built on my bloody knuckles.”

Michael tours colleges and universities to share his story and is releasing his autobiography, “The Boy Who Loved Batman” on Chronicle Books in fall of 2011.

Last month, Google let people know that the pace at which they deploy builds of Chrome would be greatly increasing. The thought is that work is happening so quickly in Chrome but much of it is stuck in the developer channels (or in Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based) because of code freezes and long waits to deploy the stable versions — so why not just speed the whole process up? Google is wasting little time doing that as the latest version of Chrome, version 6, is being released into beta today.

So what do we get with Chrome 6? As users of Chromium and the dev channel builds of Chrome will know, the entire browser UI has gotten a facelift. The buttons (back, forwards, reload, etc) are now seamlessly integrated into the toolbar. The two menu drop-downs have also now been consolidated into one. And the Omnibox has also been tweaked to make it a bit simpler.

But the biggest changes in Chrome 6 come in the JavaScript speed increases, Autofill, and the syncing capabilities. With the latest version, you’ll finally have full Autofill capabilities that you’re likely used to with other browsers (though Chrome’s version is pretty slick). This means that anytime you have to enter your name, address, phone number, or credit card information, it can all be automatically inserted by the browser. Google notes that your credit card information is never saved without your explicit permission. It’s also worth noting that your credit card data is not included in the browser sync, which has also been updated with Chrome 6. Other Autofill data is now included in sync, as are extensions.

In terms of performance, Google says Chrome 6 is 15% faster than Chrome 5 beta in both the V8 benchmark test and the SunSpider benchmark test (two JavaScript tests).

With Google now saying that new stable builds of Chrome are due every six weeks, you can expect Chrome 6 to go stable quickly. And then in the Fall we should probably be on the look-out for Chrome 7, as well.