Over the weekend it was reported that Apple hired Benjamin Vigier, an expert in near field communication (NFC), a short range wireless protocol most synonymous with contactless payments. This key Apple hire is perhaps the strongest public signal yet of Apple's intent to use NFC to build on its micropayments franchise and disrupt traditional point of sale using a mobile commerce model.

There is no doubt that Apple wants to enable native support for mobile payments and authentication—its myriad of patents and installed base of 100M active iTunes accounts with credit cards on file make this a no-brainer.

But I've learned of an even more revealing sign that Apple will integrate the technology—sources tell me that Apple has built NFC-enabled iPhone prototypes using hardware from NXP Semiconductor, and is testing mobile payments today (NXP is the market leader in NFC and just hired Goldman Sachs to run its IPO).

The existence of prototypes would almost surely suggest that Apple will include NFC in iPhone 5, or whatever Apple decides to call its next iPhone. Nokia is also slated to include it on all 2011 smartphones, and NXP recently announced an Android-based reference platform and open-source SDK to facilitate payments.

Short range wireless also has compelling use-cases beyond commerce, and it's clear Apple is thinking of integrating NFC into its Apple TV and MacBook lines to transfer data between devices at high speeds. Imagine freshly-snapped photos from an iPhone 5 transferred instantaneously to a new iTV device by placing the devices close together for a few seconds.

In fact, Apple's patents say a lot about its "hardware network-effects" strategy and how NFC could accelerate sales for Apple—iPhone 5 users would be more likely to buy an iTV and vice versa. In this way, this strategy mirrors what FaceTime has done as a selling point for iPhone 4.

FaceTime can only be "unlocked" when both callers have an iPhone 4, and therefore becomes a feature which spurs people to upgrade. This perfectly exemplifies how Apple could leverage creative proximity-based applications to promote synergies between product families and accelerate new hardware adoption.

Proximity-based integration with iAd is another potential gold mine for Apple. Think of the power of serving ads, coupons and loyalty awards based on presence. Shopkick recently announced plans for localized promotions and engagement (likely using proprietary point to point Wi-Fi). NFC would enable a standardized contactless method for merchants to promote consumer engagement, and it's clear Apple wants in on this market.

And though my sources say Apple is currently testing NFC chipsets from NXP, it's highly possible that Apple chooses technology from Broadcom, who currently supplies Wi-Fi and GPS on iPhone 4 and who recently acquired an NFC company to make multi-function chipsets combining all of these technologies.

It's pretty clear Apple is aligning all the pieces to include NFC in iPhone 5. But non-core components aren't locked up this far in advance of a product release, and iPhone 5 has a ways to go until device verification test (DVT) and pre-production, the stage at which the Verizon-based iPhone appears to be, as indicated by Apple’s orders for millions of CDMA chipsets.

Nonetheless, it appears increasingly likely that iPhone 5 will usher in a whole new world of mobile commerce and short range wireless applications, which makes perfect sense based on Apple's highly converging hardware, software and platform strategy.

_________________________

Contributor Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.

Telecom giant China Unicom, which exclusively carries the iPhone in China today, will be selling Apple’s iPad in the world’s largest mobile market starting very soon, an unnamed company insider told Chinese media company Caixin.

That is in line with earlier reports, which foresaw an August launch for the tablet computer in China, although admittedly a definitive launch date for the iPad in China has not been announced yet.

According to Caixin’s source, China Unicom will be the sole distributor of Apple’s iPad in China, which had a total of 776.9 million mobile subscribers at the end of March 2010, the largest number of any country on the planet.

The carrier is also reportedly scheduled to carry a WiFi-enabled model of the iPhone 4 in early September, although no definitive launch date was detailed either.

China Unicom, which services a staggering 315 million subscribers, has the exclusive right to distribute the iPhone in China, where it is the second-largest carrier after China Mobile. Just recently, the carrier kicked off sales of the WiFi-enabled iPhone 3GS in the country, which is unequivocally a major growth area for Apple.

Until recently, the Chinese government did not allow the sale of WiFi products altogether in an effort to promote an alternative WAPI wireless networking standard, but recently decided to lift said restrictions.

In related news, Apple’s South Korean distributor KT Corporation earlier this week said it would start taking pre-orders for the iPhone 4 in the next couple of days, before its official launch next month. Apple has sold more than 850,000 iPhones in South Korea since its introduction in the local market nine months ago.

It will be interesting to see how big of a deal its sales efforts in the Asia-Pacific region will become for Apple’s bottom line, but my educated guess is that it won’t be negligible.

Marin Software, a startup that creates search engine management software for advertisers and agencies, is now offering advanced applications for advertising on Facebook. Marin's Search Marketer platform now offers advertisers and agencies the ability to manage Facebook Ads alongside paid search programs on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Advanced solutions for Facebook include algorithmic bidding, audience segmentation, and ad rotation features. Campaigns on Facebook can be segmented by gender, age, geography, or even likes and interests of audiences.

Entrepreneurship is getting younger - even in France ! I just learned that a 17-year-old French high school student, Andrés Talavera, is developing a TechCrunch mobile app for the Windows Phone 7 competition hosted by Microsoft France. Andrés is going into his final year of high school in Strasbourg, France, where he's currently specializing in information systems. Apparently, he's been passionnate about everything Microsoft since the age of 14. As a Microsoft Student Partner since October 2009, he's also been in the process of puting together his own startup, Crésus. The website, www.cresus.net, should go live on September 1st and the company will most likely be a service provider and distributor for various Microsoft products. Go figure.

The Web is dead, or at least in decline, declares Wired editor Chris Anderson in the magazine’s September cover story. The article is anchored by the startling infographic above, which shows the proportion of different types of traffic on the Internet. The Web, HTML traffic visible though a browser, is only about a quarter (23%) of the overall traffic, down from about half a decade ago. It’s been pushed down by peer-to-peer (23%), video (51%), and other types of apps which use the Internet for transport but are not browser-based. It’s not clear what exactly Wired is counting as video, but presumably it is not all of the Flash video on YouTube which is very much part of the Web.

Setting aside whether Wired massaged the numbers to make its chart look pretty, Anderson’s larger point is that increasingly we are consuming information via apps other than the browser. He writes:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule. And it's the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they're rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don't have to go to the screen).

That may be true for now, but don’t count the browser out just yet. These shifts happen in waves. First the browser took over everything, then developers wanted more options and moved to apps (desktop and mobile), but the browser will eventually absorb those features, and so the leapfrogging continues. The ubiquity of the browser overcomes most of its technical deficiencies. Even in mobile, people will become overwhelmed by apps and the browser will make a comeback.

You can’t escape Twitter anymore. It’s everywhere including in some of Panasonic’s Viera Cast Plasma TVs and eventually, in a few Panasonic Blu-ray players as well. It’s just the latest app available in the already-loaded Viera Cast IPTV offering. Twitter joins Netflix, Pandora, Fox Sports, Amazon Video-on-Demand, YouTube, Icasa, Bloomberg, and Skype’s Video calling service.

Sure it’s no iOS or Google TV, but these Panasonic TVs were doing the app dance three years ago and continue to gain new features. Is 3D the future of HDTVs? Nope, it’s apps. Click through for the release and list of compatible models.

Read more…

The B&N eReader iPad, iPhone, and PC apps are no more. Instead, B&N now has brand new apps, complete with updated features, but more importantly, new branding. From here on out, it will be called Nook for iPad, Nook for iPhone and lastly, Nook for PC. See what they’re doing there? Replacing the B&N branding with that of the Nook just like on the Nook for Android app. Here’s a pic of the previous iPad version. Clever, eh?

In the wake of former CEO Mark Herd’s sexual harassement scandal, HP is announcing that it is acquiring Fortify, a software security company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Fortify's Software Security Assurance products and services protect companies from security threats in busines software applications. The company’s software evaluates and test software code for security flaws while programs are actually being developed. Fortify has previously collaborated with HP, integrating its software with HP products in June 2009.

HP says that it will operate Fortify initially as a standalone entity but the company will eventually be folded into HP’s Software and Solutions business. Fortify’s products will become part of the Business Technology Optimization application portfolio, available through HP’s sales and service channels.

Fortify has raised venture funding from DAG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sigma Partners

Clearly the Fortify acquisition is more of an enterprise play. HP’s last two acquisitions, Lala competitor-Melodeo, and smartphone manufacturer Palm, have been in the consumer and hardware space.

If your social graph on Facebook and/or Twitter happens to consist of people who speak many different languages, it’s not always easy to make sense of their status updates.

I know it can be a pain when people I follow constantly switch back and forth from English to Russian, Italian, Hebrew and so forth – because I don’t speak any of their native tongues nearly well enough to get what they’re saying, even though at times I wish I did.

Enter the new version of XIHA Life, a social networking service that allows people to easily connect online even when they speak different languages, thanks to its real-time translation capabilities of chat sessions and update streams.

With the latest update to the XIHA platform, you can connect to both Facebook and Twitter and gain the ability to translate status updates and comments from your friends on those two major social networks with a single click.

The new buttons allow XIHA friends to translate content to over 55 different languages (courtesy of the Google Translate API), making it possible to read updates, polls and interests in one’s native language regardless of the original language of the status update.

XIHA says the feature should prove to be particularly helpful for expats and travelers who tend to meet with people from different cultures but still wish to stay connected despite of those pesky language barriers.

Look at the image above. There are three services listed on the San Francisco Giants’ scoreboard during a baseball game. Twitter. Facebook. Foursquare. The first two are ubiquitous. Each has hundreds of millions of users and a firm place in pop culture. The third has about 2.5 million users. And much of the world has no idea what it is.

But is it on its way to entering that pantheon of great services?

This is a particularly interesting question given that on Wednesday, Facebook is expected to unveil its initial push into the location space. Earlier, BoomTown cited sources stating this would be the case. We’ve since heard from multiple sources as well that location will be at least a part of Facebook’s event (which we’ll obviously be at).

With location, Facebook has long been seen as the 800-pound gorilla in the room. And now they appear ready to check-in for the first time, as it were.

So Foursquare is dead, right? Don’t count on it.

As we’ve been saying for months, it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location. That is, they’re more likely to federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s) while they themselves remain fairly cautious with their own location services. You can probably expect a bare-bones check-in functionality on their mobile apps (as we spotted months ago).

But just as with their status updates, many people may populate that with location data via third-party services (again, like Foursquare).

That’s not to say Facebook won’t be competing with Foursquare at all. My guess is that a big part of their location play is involving places — that is, real world venues that they can get on Facebook in a major way. As we first reported back in June, Facebook likely has a deal in place with Localeze to build out a massive place database that they’ll then populate with all this data they’re federating and creating on their own.

The potential problem for Foursquare here is if Facebook decides they want to be the ones that partner with all these venues on loyalty deals and programs. Obviously, that would be a problem for just about every location player as this is how most of them are working on monetizing their products. It would also likely be a problem for Yelp. And even Google, increasingly.

That said, Facebook could also choose to promote a service like Foursquare as their check-in partner. The two sides were talking a few months ago when Foursquare was trying to decide whether to sell or raise more money. And while the idea of an acquisition kept coming up, so did other partnership ideas, we hear.

Of course, Facebook could also go with Foursquare rival Gowalla for such a deal. After all, the company behind Gowalla, AlamoFire (they’ve since become just Gowalla), got their start doing Facebook games. And early on, many Facebook employees were known to be active Gowalla users rather than Foursquare users. They’re also still undoubtedly on the acquisition radar as Facebook continues to scoop up talent, such as the Hot Potato team.

Anyway, back to Foursquare. Assuming Facebook doesn’t kill them (which again, isn’t likely to happen), do they have the momentum now to keep growing and rightfully stand alongside Facebook and Twitter?

I already know that all the commenters are going to scream “NO” but let me tell you what I think.

I remember very well when it seemed like just about everything I read on the Internet said that Twitter was the dumbest service ever imagined and it would never go anywhere. I disagreed from day one. I didn’t know exactly what Twitter would be useful for. But I knew something was there.

Believe it or not, the same was once true of Facebook too. People were already on MySpace, so they couldn’t figure out why they would want to use the boring, more closed version: Facebook. Again, I disagreed. There was something there.

With Foursquare, (as should be obvious given how often I write about them) I again believe there is something there. But it’s still in that early Twitter-like stage where I’m not positive what it is yet. (And yes, complete with Twitter-like downtime too.)

The problem is that the initial attraction, the game aspect, lost my interest a long time ago already. Now, i mainly keep using it to see where my friends are, to let them know where I am — and maybe most of all, to keep track of my location history. (I think this is going to be something very cool to have in the future.)

That combination of things would probably keep me using it indefinitely. The problem is that those things likely won’t keep the rest of my social circle using it. And that’s the glue that holds any of these apps together — the social graph. So Foursquare needs to come up with something else to keep those people using it.

I’ve been hearing talk about people getting sick of using Foursquare for some time now. But in recent weeks the talk has gotten louder. It’s not the same check-in fatigue issue that I wrote about several months ago. Instead, it’s a more focused check-in fatigue because many of them just don’t see the point of constantly checking-in place after place — especially if they frequent the same places.

Sure, there are check-in deals and mayor deals, but most people I know (many of whom are heavy Foursquare users) never use those deals. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough of them. And the best ones are mayor deals which are basically impossible to get in a big Foursquare city like San Francisco.

So instead, everyone is simply checking-in because that’s what their friends are doing. That’s a precarious position. Any number of things could stop that. And a chain reaction would occur.

Simply put: Foursquare needs to change their game and needs to do it soon if they want to keep the momentum alive — if they want to reach the pantheon.

They obviously know that, and are working on it. And it sounds like they have some of the right ideas. At least part of the upcoming Foursquare 2.0 is said to be about “choosing your own adventure.” And Foursquare has talked about making the service easier to use by doing things like checking you in if you swipe a loyalty card at a store. That’s a genius idea.

That’s also probably the idea that is a viable business model for Foursquare in the long run. It’s something that may subsidize the whole social location aspect of the service.

But for right now, that social layer is all that matters. They need to keep users engaged or they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location. They’re coasting right now because most of the users are still new to the service and don’t have any fatigue just yet. But they’ll get there unless Foursquare keeps things interesting. Photos and comments in the stream couldn’t hurt (yes, like Gowalla). And neither could the ability to “like” check-ins. And a completely reworked point system would be good — maybe more closely tied to just your social graph. And one can never have too many badges.

Foursquare is still a very young company. The fact that they were able to secure so many deals with huge brand names early on has perhaps elevated them a bit prematurely. Twitter and Facebook have proven themselves to be indispensable.

With Foursquare, there’s still just something there.

[photo via Tristan Walker]

It looks like Google wasn’t lying when they said they planned to more rapidly iterate their Chrome web browser. Today brought the initial release of version 7 of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on. If all goes as planned, this latest iteration should begin to trickle into the Chrome stream in just a few weeks.

It wasn’t even a week ago that version 6 of Chrome hit the beta stage. While the stable build of Chrome is still stuck on version 5 (5.0.375.126, to be exact), given the rate at which Google is refreshing the beta channel (just about daily), you can probably expect 6 to go stable shortly. Once that happens, builds of version 7 should start making their way into the dev branch of Chrome.

Google has stated that they hope to ship a new version of Chrome every six weeks now.

So what’s new in Chromium version 7? Not too much as far as I can tell right now. Google continues to tweak the UI of the browser a bit, but all of the major features seem the same. That said, version 7 of Chromium does feel noticeably snappier than the latest builds of version 6 of Chrome. Both the beta and dev channel versions of Chrome 6 have seemed slightly buggy over the past week or so. Chromium 7 feels much more solid.

One thing still not enabled by default in Chromium 7 are Chrome Web Apps. While you can get them to work by enabling the appropriate flag, Google clearly doesn’t feel they’re ready for prime time yet. The promise at I/O was to have them ready for “later this year,” so here’s hoping it’s something Google does choose to turn on in version 7 eventually.

But if not, it may only be another few weeks until Chromium 8.

Dear Mark E. Zuckerberg Harvard ’06,

It’s me Alexia, from the future. Just wanted you to know that you’ve come a long long way from The Harvard Crimson’s seminal piece “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website” which you probably think is a really big deal right now.

Just an FYI, in about six years or so you’ll be counting your accomplishments in the millions and billions, just as long as you listen to whatever Sean Parker says. Trust me, there’s going to be a Hollywood movie where you’re played by a hipster actor and everything.

In case you get discouraged on your way over here, the kind folks at www.website-monitoring.com have made this impressive infographic which you should probably print out and fold into your wallet. And just a heads up, it might be a good idea to put a kibosh on the hoodie.

Best,

Alexia

Buxfer is a social payments service that launched in 2007 as part of that class of new Y Combinator companies. The site is still live and working, but a user, Sean Leather, emailed us to say it’s a bit of a ghost town.

The blog has been taken down and was last updated in 2009. The last tweet was on October 9, 2009, six days after their first tweet. And users are wondering if the site is dead over on Get Satisfaction.

So what happened? The two founders, Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe, took jobs at Facebook. Bhramabe joined Facebook way back in October 2008, as noted on Buxfer’s About page. But according to Pandit’s LinkedIn profile, he too left the company in June and has been full time at Facebook since late 2009.

So is Buxfer dead or just walking dead? And does it really matter?

Yes, in my opinion. Buxfer also raised a $300,000 angel round of financing. I haven’t been able to speak to the investors yet, but it seems like they’re a lot less likely to see a return on their investment with the founders working at Facebook full time and no other employees around to run the site.

There’s likely a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, and the investors, I’ll assume unless they say otherwise, are probably resigned to a capital gains writeoff. It may be that the founders made a valiant effort at making Buxfer work, and simply took other jobs when it was clear that it wasn’t. And there’s no real reason to shut the site down as long as people’s financial information isn’t jeopardized, I guess. But, generally speaking, you don’t walk away from a startup, and your investors, when there’s still a pulse. It’s just bad form.

This looks like (it might be) another example of a trend we’ve been seeing for some time – Facebook and Zynga “acquiring” startups for their engineers, giving those engineers rich stock options but leaving investors with little more than their money back. Investors don’t balk publicly because they want to maintain an entrepreneur-friendly reputation. But behind the scenes they’re livid.

I described the issue recently:

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

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

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

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

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

Entrepreneurs need to remember that they have a reputation, too. They need to treat investors fairly, or the next time they go to raise a round for their shiny new startup they may find nothing but closed doors. At least one recent Facebook acquisition almost erupted into a lawsuit when investors said they didn’t like the deal, we’ve heard. Sometime soon we may see things turn ugly.

The above video reveals exactly why Precise Path Robotics just received $4.5 million in funding. Once you’ve seen the RG3 Robotic Greens Mower, or as I like to call it “Hat-Wearing Golf Course Roomba,” in action it’s pretty hard to imagine a golf course being mowed in any other way.

Did you know there were 32,000 golf courses in the world? Neither did I, but the RG3 is the quickest and most stylish way towards significantly slashing the amount of money each and every one spends on lawn mowing. That’s two billion dollars worth of mowing annually! Serious business for the world’s first robotic mower.

But why stop at mowing? The RG3 technology, which is actually superior to a Roomba because it can travel in straight lines, can be applied to almost any outdoor grooming endeavor.

Says Jason Zielke, Precise Path's President and COO. "Mowing is the first in a long list of applications we have envisioned — from spraying to snow removal to carving advertising logos in lawns."

There is such a thing as the perfect job for a robot.

Here’s a video of two RG3s mowing together, peacefully at dawn.

An insane number of searches on the web involve people asking questions. Sometimes they’re good questions, sometimes they’re stupid questions, sometimes they’re insane questions. Just start typing something into Google beginning with the words “How” or “Why” for proof of this — the auto-suggest speaks for itself. Sadly, Google isn’t great at answering questions because they’re a search engine that mainly returns hyperlinks. Sure, your answer may reside on one of those pages, but that requires another click and some browsing. A new service launching out of stealth mode tonight, Swingly, wants to perfect this task.

Of course, there are many other players in this space all of whom have tried to do the same thing or something similar. Answers.com, Ask.com, and more recently Aardvark (which Google acquired earlier this year), Facebook Answers, and Quora. Swingly says it has all of them beat because machine-drive Q+A services are too shallow while human-driven ones are too esoteric — Swingly aims to take the best of both worlds. And so far, they’ve mined the web for over 100 billion question and answer pairings to link up.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the Texas-based startup is that they’re not pretending to be perfect. They claim to be about 75 percent accurate right now. But just in case they can’t back that up, they show related Q&A pairing below their best match to make sure you get what you’re looking for. And that’s actually smart because apparently in their alpha testing of the product, people have proven hungry for knowledge and keep coming back for more. “Our engagement numbers are phenomenal,” the company says.

Again, Swingly’s big claim is that no other Q&A service has yet been able to operate at the scale at which they are right now. The team behind it has 10 years worth of experience building these type of semantic web systems. And we’re told that the parent company, LCC (Language Computer Corporation), has finished with 10 consecutive first place finishes in the annual TREC Question-Answering Evaluation (apparently, the ultimate nerdy Q&A systems challenge).

But really, all that matters here is how useful the service actually is in the real world. So Swingly is giving us 500 invites to dish out to TechCrunch readers. Simply use the code ‘techcrunch’ when you sign up and you’ll be granted access to the service when it’s fully live (which should be soon).

Swingly has also created a side-by-side comparison site so you can see how your questions are answered on their service versus how they are on the competitors. You can find that here (but you need to be logged in for it to work).

Need help thinking of some good questions? Here are some of the most excellent suggestions Swingly sent along:

• What do zombies eat?
• Where are Ballmer’s grandparents from?
• Who graduated from Haverford in 2002?
• What school did Lady Gaga go to?
• What director made A Clockwork Orange?
• What product did Novartis Medical Nutrition make?
• Which politicians died in 2008?
• How much was the first time homebuyer credit?
• Who directed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
• How many copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were sold?
• What killed the crocodile hunter?
• When did Steve Irwin die?
• Who is the highest paid player in Major League Soccer
• Who was the Mayor of Dallas in 1963?
• Who has Lindsay Lohan dated?
• What is the fastest animal in the world?
• What do llamas eat?
• What jobs has Martha Stewart had?
• Who did January Jones work for?
• What is January Jones height?
• Who is the coach of the Dallas Cowboys?

Also be sure to check out the videos below. Yes, they’ve smartly made a Facebook trailer spoof for their launch video — and one about how to kill zombies.

When AOL bought hyperlocal news site Patch in June, 2009, it covered five towns in Connecticut and New Jersey. On Tuesday, it will open its 100th Patch, and by the end of the year it plans to open 400 more for a total of 500.

I recently visited AOL’s headquarters to learn more about what Patch is all about. “We look at what we are doing as digitizing towns,” says Patch president Warren Webster (see video interview below). Patch was first founded and funded by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong when he couldn’t find a resource on the Web for volunteer activities his family could do together in the small Connecticut town where he lives. Armstrong bought Patch afterwards when he came to AOL, but only took back his initial investment in AOL shares—and he is obviously very interested in the product. He stuck his head in the conference room where I was getting my demo because he saw the Patch screen projected on the wall.

Matching volunteers with local organizations is still one of Patch’s features, but its main focus is covering local news and creating an in-depth directory of local businesses and places of interest. Each Patch covers a small town with a population between 15,000 and 75,000, places like Fairfield, Connecticut, Mill Valley, California, Scarsdale, New York, and Morristown, New Jersey (which will be the 100th Patch).

The front page covers local news much like you would find in a local small town newspaper (“Police Investigate Drowning,” “A Guide To Walkable Westchester,” “Coyote Attacks Another Young Girl In Rye, Bites Neck“). Each town has its own editor, a “walking newsroom” who writes stories and assigns them to an average of 11 freelancers, who also fill out listings in the directory and take photos. There are also events, announcements, and volunteer opportunities. Readers can add their own.

Some complaints have surfaced about Patch’s low pay and the grueling working conditions (mostly, it seems, from older out-of-work journalists who aren’t used to the rapid-fire pace of Internet publishing). Webster responds that Patch pays “competitive market rates for community journalists” and that “75% of local editors are making the same or more than they did at their last job in journalism—the other 25% came from journalism school or were freelancers.”

But the real engine of Patch is the database it is building up of local businesses. So far it has 105,000 local listings, and is building out more every day. Before Patch launches in a town, it creates a directory of the local businesses, parks, hospitals, schools, and other public places. It launches with about 1,200 for each town, which get entered into Patch’s structured database. Each place gets its own profile page on Patch, with a description and highly detailed data such as teacher/student ratios for schools or suggested dress code and parking options for restaurants. For instance, here is directory listing for the Crabtree Kittle House & Inn in Chappaqua, NY.

The local directory of places is how Patch makes money. If a business wants an enhanced listing, complete with a video tour (shot by one of the 40,000 freelance videographers who work for another AOL acquisition, StudioNow) and preferred placement, that costs $1,000 a year. Patch is going after Yellow Pages and local newspaper advertising dollars.

These profile pages are very search-engine friendly, and any time a Patch article mentions a place in the database, it is automatically linked. “A lot are using their Patch profile as their place on the Web,” says Webster. Patch also offers a self-serve ad tool that turns any directory listing into an online ad unit which can be used on any Website and link either back to their Patch listing or to their own site.

Webster explains Patch’s rollout in terms of phases. The first phase is to get up and running in hundreds of towns and get local residents engaged. The goal is to reach half of each town’s population. “We exceeeeded every metric we had set for ourselves,” boasts Webster. “Phase 2 is how do we get people to buy things from local stores.” That is where the coupons and local deals come in (you saw that one coming). The coupons are shown as ads on the homepage of the towns where the businesses are located, as well as on their directory listings.

The local coupons are still pretty primitive compared the experiments we are seeing from geo startups like Foursquare and shopkick, but Webster hints that a mobile Patch app is coming soon. And when I asked about whether the directory would become available to other developers and startups through an API, he notes that could be coming soon as well: “We are looking at every possible way to distribute Patch content.” Once Patch gets into gear, it could definitely start driving a whole new class of advertising revenues for AOL.

On Sunday, a dozen startups from around Silicon Valley came together for the Startup Cup — a soccer tournament raising money for charity:water that rounded up over $1,200. Companies playing included Box.net, Slide, WePay, Scribd, Weebly, Xobni, Square, UserVoice, Revision3, and Kabam.

The matches were hard-fought, and much sweat (and some blood) was spilled as each company vied for the top prize. In the end, SocialText came out the leader, led by company cofounder Ross Mayfield. And there were no losers: everyone got free Chipotle burritos and Subway sandwiches. I’ve never seen so many burritos at once. It was beautiful.

As with any good sporting event, the tournament was not without its controversy — it didn’t take long to figure out that many of the teams in contention had brought a few ringers who didn’t actually work at their respective companies.  But nobody seemed to mind too much.

For those wondering, Team TechCrunch had a strong showing. Because the rest of the staff was back at TCHQ monitoring the day’s news we could only afford a pair of employees (myself and Alexia), but we rounded out the roster with members of the WePay squad. We won the second half of our match 1-0, but unfortunately the first half (which we considered a warmup) was lopsided in the other direction, leading to our untimely demise at the feet of Team Footbalistic in the first round of the tournament.

Hat tip to Trista Myers, currently an intern at Weebly, for putting the whole thing together.

Child safety monitoring service SafetyWeb is releasing a free version of its online tracking tool today, specifically for law enforcement agencies.

The SWOT tool allows police to secure the social networking accounts of a missing child and access recent status updates. Basically it tracks recent activity across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and any other social networking services a missing child might use to rely information on their whereabouts. The platform also provides instant alerts of its video, social network and photo site tracking.

SWOT got a standing ovation when demoed by SafetyWeb founders (and parents) Geoffry Arone and Michael Clark at the Crimes Against Children Conference last week, which SafetyWeb co-sponsored with Google and Facebook.

This realtime monitoring of  a child’s accounts could be crucial in gathering data leading to a child’s safe return; With over 2000 children going missing daily, free technology that can scour for online traces of missing children is a boon to beleaguered law enforcement officials, as well as frantic parents.

SafetyWeb has recently acquired Odojo as well as announced a $8 million funding round from Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. It shares the child safety and online tracking space with SocialShield and Kidsafe.

Back in June, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith wrote a blog post announcing he was moving on from the company, and handing over the CTO reins. We’ve just confirmed that fellow co-founder Matt Brezina has also left the company.

The timing of Brezina’s departure isn’t fully clear, but we hear it was also a few weeks ago — he just didn’t have the big blog post about it. Obviously, having both co-founders leave so closely to one another is a bit odd. It was only this past April that they raised a large $16.2 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures. Talk was that this put their post-money valuation at around $65 million. The company also recently moved into a new office in the SoMa area of San Francisco (Twitter’s old offices, actually) and crazy mural spending aside, it would seem that things were fine on the surface.

But before we confirmed the Brezina news, we had been hearing whispers of growing discontent within Xobni. The direction of the company and current management was cited as being two issues of concern in particular.

Initially a Y Combinator company, Xobni launched at the first TC40 conference in 2007. In 2008, the company was about to be acquired by Microsoft for something in the $20 million-range (they had only raised about $5 million at the time) but they walked away at the last second. At the time, they were focused on improving Microsoft Outlook, but they’ve since taken their tools to everything from BlackBerry to Gmail.

Update: I’ve now spoken with Brezina who confirms his exit but says it’s only because they’ve hired good people to run the company — of course, they always tend to say things like that, and in fact, Smith said the same thing. That said, Brezina did confirm that he and Smith are still on the board and involved.

As for what’s next, Brezina is working on it. Stay tuned.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt that covered a range of topics including Google’s future, newspapers, and privacy. The article contains some choice quotes about the future of search (there’s a somewhat ominous bit about Google knowing about your location, friends, and interests, so it can figure out what you want before you even want it — but this really shouldn’t be news to anyone). And then there’s this, as first called out by ReadWriteWeb:

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Err, seriously? Google’s CEO thinks that people are going to start changing their names as a way to distance themselves from their past indiscretions on social media sites? Maybe I’m just myopic (I’m sure Schmidt has a much better understanding of the future of search than I do), but this notion isn’t just scary — it seems downright pointless.

Consider this: it’s in the best interest of just about any business to figure out if any of its prospective new recruits has a criminal record. And to verify that their job history checks out. And that their college degree is more than a figment of their imagination. Schmidt may be envisioning a centralized system where such critical background information is available to employers without their needing an applicant’s full name, which could make a name change worthwhile. Fair enough.

But if this name-changing practice became commonplace, how long would it take for an entire industry to emerge built around helping businesses who wanted to go the extra mile and link people with their “former” identities? You can bet they’d pay for that privilege. There’d probably be a pretty hefty market for people running searches on their new boy- and girlfriends, too.

And then there’s always the possibility that a spiteful ex tweets out your “old” name as a act of vengeance, or that a friend accidentally tags you under the “wrong” name on Facebook (or whatever social network is popular in this hypothetical future). Good luck getting that back in the bag — you can bet that these new-and-improved search engines are going to be far less forgiving than they are today. And Schmidt has previously said that Google can visually identify people with a mere fourteen photos, which could render this all a moot point to begin with.

In other words, in an age where search will be much more powerful than it is now, a simple name change probably won’t present much of a hurdle to anyone actively looking to dive into your online past. Schmidt’s right about one thing though: society really doesn’t understand what will happen when “everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time”. Let’s just hope it eventually comes up with a better way to deal with that problem than a new nametag.

It’s not often that we fight. Actually, no, that’s not even slightly true. It’s not often that we fight on camera. But this week’s episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch is one of those times.

Our guest is Gene Massey from Cinema Shares - an LA-based startup that hopes to allow filmakers and other media moguls to do mini-IPOs to raise capital for their projects. Both of us were excited by the idea of the business – but when it came to whether the idea of fan-funded films will be good or bad for the world… or whether Paul was suggesting that Christians and NASCAR fans are idiots… well, watch the video to see what happened.

Video below. Note: due to some choice language, this week’s episode is more not safe for work than usual.

Zivity is a great site for women and photographers who aren’t afraid to get a little racy to express themselves and potentially be discovered. That said, they obviously don’t have the reach of something like Playboy. But thanks to a new partnership between the two, interested women can potentially get the best of both worlds.

Playboy will host a series of contests on Zivity, the winners of which will get to appear on Playboy.com. The Playboy community will choose themes for each of these contests. Here are some of the ones already being thrown out there: "Hottest Super Heroes," "Show Your Lady Gaga," "Suits and Stockings," "Glistening Lips," "Babes in Boots," "Downy Hairs," "Girls with Glasses" — you get the idea.

The winners for each contest will be chosen by the Playboy community (starting late September/early October), and Zivity teases that certain models are likely to get scouted to appear in Playboy magazine or other Playboy ventures as well.

Women who are interested simply need to sign up for a Zivity account and start making some custom photo shoots for the contests. Models have to be 19 years old, while the photographers have to be 18. Zivity and Playboy are looking for professional-amateur to professional level photography for the contest and pictures have to have been shot with DSLR cameras.

Playboy has been struggling of late as the move online continues to eat away at the core ad sales at the magazine. There is even some talk that founder Hugh Hefner may attempt to buy back all the shares and take it private once again. But while the business may be struggling, the brand remains huge, so this is a big win for Zivity and their community.

Back in February 2009, we wrote about the relaunch of Virb, a social network owned by MediaTemple’s venture platform (mt) Ventures. Instead of trying to take on goliaths like Facebook, the site hoped to offer users a complimentary social network, with features like an activity aggregator (think FriendFeed), theming, and skinning. Unfortunately, it didn’t gain much traction, so today the site is morphing once again to try to find its niche. And it’s returning as a simple, polished website builder.

Try not to roll your eyes too hard — Virb CEO Brad Smith knows full well that there are already plenty of website builders out there. But he thinks that there’s room for one more. Smith explains that Virb is setting out to take the simple feature set and high quality design that Tumblr brought to blogging platforms and apply them to the creation of ‘entire websites’.

Smith points to Squarespace, a popular website creation tool that just raised $38.5 million, and says that it’s still too complicated for some people. “We’re trying to come in below that demographic,” Smith says. He wants the site to be for people who want to whip up a photo portfolio, band webpage, or wedding site with no development experience needed. In addition to Tumblr’s design sensibility, Virb is also borrowing Tumblr’s ‘follow’ mechanic, with an unintrusive button that appears in the upper right corner of the site.

The site is launching with ten themes, most of which are catering towards creative types: musicians, photographers, and others who want to present their portfolios online. But there are also some more standard themes for blogs and businesses. Here are a few examples:

• http://brianohara.virb.com/
• http://rubin.virb.com/
• http://sgoralnick.virb.com/

I toyed around with the new tool, and found parts of it to be quite polished — the theme editor is slick and allows you to modify fonts and colors as you’re looking at your site, with the changes appearing immediately. Uploading media in bulk for a photo album or to showcase your band’s new CD is also very straightforward and smooth, and the media is displayed to viewers in nice-looking embedded widgets.

Still, I think it has a ways to go before it can really become a ‘Tumblr for entire websites’. After first entering the Virb content/page editor, it took me a few minutes to get my bearings, and the site didn’t do much hand-holding to introduce me to each feature. Granted, I figured it out in less than five minutes, but I suspect the market Virb is targeting — namely, people who want something very straightforward that ‘just works’ — may be a little more confused. That said, this could easily be remedied by a better introduction process and some UI tweaking.

Virb’s other issue is that it faces many other competitors — it’s hardly the first company aiming to make website building very easy (see Weebly, Yola, Squarespace, SnapPages and myriad others) and there are services decided to helping artists build online portfolios, like Carbonmade and Viewbook. And Virb is charging money for the service (some of its competitors aren’t): Virb costs $10 a month, though users of the ‘old’ Virb will be able to subscribe for $5.

All of that said, Virb could still find a place. After all, there were plenty of other blogging platforms available before Tumblr caught on.

Health education websites such as WebMD have been around for some time now, but recently launched startup ChickRx has a slightly different take on the online medical information space. ChickRx is a health website and community for twenty-something women.

Founded by two recent Harvard MBA graduates, ChickRx provides relevant, fresh personal health information to young women. It’s sort of like a DailyCandy-meets-WebMD for health news. The site features expert Q&A, news, product picks and celebrity tidbits across the following categories: Sex & Gynecology, Fitness & Nutrition, Emotional Health & Relationships, Dermatology, and General Health.

Much of the content on the site falls into the preventative medicine category, with tips and info about bone density, breast cancer, and more. And ChickRx, unsurprisingly, has a large amount of content focused around weight-loss and sex.

Co-founders Stacey Borden and Meghan Muntean, who are both in their twenties, felt there was a need for a health website specifically targeting their demographic. The site takes a more “Tongue-in-cheek,” approach to serious health issues, attempting to make topics like ‘how to detect if a mole could be skin cancer’ informative and entertaining. Another example is internist Dr. Andrea Ruman’s description of the telltale symptoms and treatments for irritable bowel syndrome in an “Ask Rxperts” Q&A piece titled “IBS: It Beats Syphilis.”

ChickRx, which has raised $400,000 in seed funding counts Chris Schroeder, Trip Adler, Tikhon Bernstam and Susan Kare as advisors. Of course the startup still faces competition from WebMD, Medpedia and more general health info sites. But ChickRx could find a following, especially if the startup could partner with magazines (think Glamour, Marie Claire) to provide branded health content.

Last we’d heard from Newegg, the major online electronics retailer, was when the company filed for a $175 million IPO back in September 2009.

Now we hear former President Tally Liu, who took over the CEO role from founder and chairman Fred Chang a little over two years ago, is out.

Details are scarce for the moment, but Chang will apparently be resuming his previous role as the global CEO of Newegg, while S.C. Lee, the company’s executive vice president and director since 2005, has been appointed as the acting President of Newegg North America.

Liu gets thanked for ‘past contributions’, but other than that Newegg’s statement is void of any details about the man’s unexpected departure.

Before joining Newegg, Liu was Vice President of Internal Audit at Knight Ridder, a major media chain acquired by The McClatchy Company. For nearly three decades before joining Newegg, Liu held various executive finance positions within Knight Ridder and its subsidiaries.

Major shareholder Insight Venture Partners’ managing director Deven Parekh merely expresses his “support for the executive team changes” at Newegg in a statement.

We’ve contacted Newegg to see what’s going on but have yet to hear back.

When Newegg filed to go public nearly a year ago, the electronics retailer’s financials were revealed. The ecommerce company, which specializes in online sales of computer hardware and software, at the time said it had turned a profit since its founding in 2001.

In 2008, Newegg posted sales of $2.1 billion, albeit with razor thin profit margins, and boasted over 2,000 employees, according to the SEC filing.

Almost one year after the filing, the Amazon competitor has yet to make any new announcement regarding its intent to go public. It’s possible that this delay was a factor in Liu’s sudden departure, although this is purely speculation on our part.

This year has been rocky for Newegg, though.

In February, the online retailer was sued by three former employees accusing it of numerous labor and business abuses, such as violating “a slew of labor laws, overwork[ing] and abus[ing] immigrant workers and order[ing] employees to hack into competitors’ computer systems.” Newegg has always denied those allegations.

In March of 2010, Newegg – inadvertently – sold 300 counterfeit Intel Core CPUs. Initially, the company stated that the processors were “demo units”, but later said that they discovered that the processors were actually counterfeit, and that the company was terminating its relationship with one supplier in response.

Earlier this month, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled against Newegg in a patent infringement lawsuit brought on by Soverain Software over shopping cart software and other related e-commerce applications. The suit was originally filed in November 2007 against Newegg and other Web retailers, including Zappos.com (now an Amazon company).

On 11 August 2010, the judge ruled that Newegg has infringed on several patents and ordered Newegg to pay $2.5 million in damages.