As we noted nearly a month ago now, Facebook has acquired social activity and ‘check-in’ service provider Hot Potato for about $10 million in cash.

Facebook, fresh from announcing its entry into the location game (our ongoing coverage), and Hot Potato this morning confirmed the acquisition, which is clearly a move by the social networking juggernaut to bring in more talent rather than expanding its product line.

In a blog post, Hot Potato writes:

“This wasn't an easy decision, especially since we've built up a base of dedicated users. If Hot Potato was going to sell to anyone, Facebook was the natural choice. Facebook is still small, moves fast, provides a great supportive environment for people to be entrepreneurial, and most importantly, Facebook builds great products. We're looking forward to joining their team.”

The startup also says that they’ll be shutting down all operations in about a month and delete all data, as we anticipated. New user registrations have already been turned off, and Hot Potato says it will soon offer existing users a way to download their information from the site (here). No user data or account information will be kept by Facebook, they add.

Hot Potato, which launched at our Realtime CrunchUp event last November, raised a small $1.42 million Series A round late last year from a number of early-stage investment firms and a slew of angel investors.

The young company initially focused strongly on check-ins based around events, and later pivoted more towards check-ins based on anything you may be doing.

We recently reported Facebook is planning for more and potentially larger acquisitions in the future, and that they’re recruiting dealmakers to make things happen.

If you haven’t checked out Texts From Last Night, you probably should. The hilarious site, which can provide hours of pure entertainment, allows users to submit the wittiest texts they may have received or sent between their friend (which are keep anonymous except for the area code). One of the site’s founders, Lauren Leto, has just raised funding from an all-star group of angel investors for her stealth startup, Bnter (pronounced ‘Banter’). Investors include Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher).

Details are sparse but Leto tells us that she is taking the way people interact on TFLN and implementing this knowledge in Bnter. The site, which Leto co-founded with Patrick Moberg, will center around how people communicate, will include user profiles, and social components. Leto says the startup will launch sometime next month.

While there’s still much more to be revealed about Bnter, Leto has a track record of being able to take a simple idea to a viral level. TFLN, which never raised money, has spawned merchandise, a book deal and even a tv show.

We’ll be sure to let you know when Bnter launches.

A lot of folks are like “I would love to shoot a lot of Nerf darts at my friends and fellow cubicle dwellers, but my arm is too weak to keep pumping the Nerf gun. What can I do?” Dude. Get a Nerf Stampede ECS-50. This fully automatic gun shoots 18 darts in about a minute and includes 3 full clips and one smaller 5 dart clip. It also has a bipod and a blast shield.

Seriously. This is a monster. I’ve never seen a Nerf gun like this one. It makes you feel like freaking Rambo with a gut.

Click through for video.

Read more…

At the intriguing intersection of green tech and microbial genomics lies a new discovery that could make biofuel production more efficient and affordable. That discovery is a strain of yeast with above-average alcohol tolerance.

Biofuels are made by fermenting crops, and when yeast is used to convert sugars into biomass, the fermentation can create familiar alcohol-based fuels like ethanol and isobutanol.

Here’s the catch: if the fuel is too concentrated, the yeast begins to die. It would be more efficient to be able to produce highly concentrated batches, however. So University of Illinois Professor Yong-Su Jin set out to find a gene in yeast that can help it tolerate more alcohol.

Jin studied the microbe most commonly used in ethanol production, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and found not one, but four genes that boost yeast’s tolerance to ethanol and isobutanol.

Now the challenge will be to breed yeast with these genes over-expressed. One of the genes in particular, INO1, increased tolerance by 340% and could help produce up to 70% more ethanol per batch.

It might not be as simple as it sounds though, since other genetic elements could interact with the identified genes in a way that hasn’t yet been tested. Still, it’s a discovery that could significantly improve biofuel production in the future, especially as scientists begin to breed yeast with this knowledge.

Photo credit: Flickr via Steve Jurvetson

Inkling, a startup that develops a digital textbook platform, has just raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding today, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Kapor Capital, Sherpalo Ventures and Felicis Ventures. Inkling had previously raised seed funding from Mitch Kapor and Ram Shriram. Inkling has added Peter Currie, Former CFO of Netscape, and Bryan Schreier, Partner at Sequoia Capital, to its board.

As the iPad and other tablet devices become a go-to device at schools and colleges for consuming textbook content, Inkling is hoping to help publishers capitalize on that growth. Inkling’s platform, which launched today, delivers interactive textbooks that feature the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. Inkling aims to add another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content.

Inkling’s sync technology lets students collaborate in real time by sharing their notes and highlights with one another. And students can see comments from their friends and professors right alongside their own notes.

The startup has already struck a number of content development partnerships with textbook publishers, including Cengage Learning, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, and Wolters Kluwer. Inkling will partner with these publishers to add interactivity to textbook content.

Inkling launch today also coincides with the public debut of its iPad app, which is available in the App Store.

Oh boy. LG’s Marketing VP made a mighty big claim in a recent Wall Street Journal article. I’ll state it again if you somehow missed the headline: “our tablet will be better than the iPad.” That’s like Kia saying their upcoming sports car will be better than the Porsche 911. Or some Hollywood startup saying they’re making the next Star Wars only better. A blanket statement like that just doesn’t sit well. Although, LG seems to have the right idea and might bust out the best Android tablet to date — well, that’s not that hard really.

Research2guidance, a Berlin-based research organization specialized in all things mobile, recently forecasted the worldwide smartphone application market to reach $15 billion by 2013.

In an update, the firm says the global smartphone app market has in fact already reached $2.2 billion in the first six months of this year.

Also according to research2guidance’s findings, mobile application download numbers reached a total of 3.8 billion in the first semester of this year, compared to 3.1 billion in 2009 (full year, to be clear).

The firm attributes the strong growth numbers to the success of Apple’s App Store, Android Market and other mobile app stores like Ovi Store and Blackberry’s App World.

In the future, they expect growth to also come from niche stores for verticals such as business or health.

The research organization’s projections are fairly conservative compared to others. An independent study released last March by app store company GetJar indicated that the market for mobile apps could grow to a whopping $17.5 billion – thus overtaking CD sales – by 2012.

In an earlier report, research2guidance posited that the big surge in applications will also be driven by a fast-growing number of smartphone users worldwide, which the research company estimates will increase from about 100 million in 2009 to nearly 1 billion by 2013.

Last year, the Twitter-focused stock and trading network StockTwits acquired Chart.ly, a stock-chart service that was designed specifically for StockTwits. It’s sort of like a Twitpic for stock charts (you can Tweet about a stock with a link to a chart on Chart.ly). But for the most part, StockTwits co- founder Howard Lindzon retained existing Chart.ly’s look and feel for users. Today, Chart.ly is getting a UI makeover and additional features as part of the StockTwits Network.

Chart.ly’s new front page is not just more visually appearing, but navigation is more user-friendly. The startup also features charts from top chartists and creators (an alogrithm highlights the charts based on aggregate number of veiws per user).

You can filter streams now by Charts that are Bullish, Bearish, Equities, Forex and more. One compelling new feature to the site is the ability to record a screencast on the site which Lindzon says could be huge for traders. Many traders have been using Chart.ly and StockTwits has a place to build their brand and a business around their trading ideas on the social trading platform. Screencasts allow traders to visually connect with possible investors.

Chart.ly has seen a fair amount of growth over the past year as traders and financial professionals start adopting social media as a forum for sharing data and information. The site now sees 600,000 page views a month.

And StockTwits has also been steadily adding features to its fast growing community. Yesterday, the site announced the ability for companies to include a “verified stream” and profile on the site that can include investor relations news and other company content on the site.

With the launch of an AIR Desktop app, a online video channel, financial news and a more interactive stock charting service in just a year, I’m sure we can expect additional growth from StockTwits in the future.

The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially.

The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the least social social network ever.

Today, the EFF followed up the ACLU’s post by citing things like pleaserobme.com as an illustration of how sensitive location information can be. Not cited is the fact that most people have jobs which they are at from 9 to 5 everyday, so they’re not likely to be home then, leaving their houses susceptible to robbery.

My point is that plenty of people right now are out there on the hunt for a way to show that Facebook Places is the devil. It’s an easy angle. You take something that already is a very sensitive topic: Facebook privacy — and combine it with another sensitive topic: location privacy. Boom. Match made in hell.

I thought Facebook’s presentation (and video) about Places yesterday was great because it focused on the positive. The talk was about serendipitous meetups and friends nearby, not people being stalked or worse. It seems like Facebook fully understands that location has the potential to be the bridge between social networking and actually being social. I’m just surprised it has taken them this long to launch a product.

But clearly they wanted to be careful. And they’re still being careful. Places is about as bare-bones as a location service can be. It is just check-ins. And that’s undoubtedly why they’re paying homage to Foursquare in the Places logo. Without Foursquare, Places would not exist.

But after only one day of using Places I’m seeing the potential here. I’m seeing friends checking-in who I’ve never seen use Foursquare. I’ve seen some friends check-in who I’m fairly positive have no idea what Foursquare is. Earlier, I was in a park near my apartment and I checked-in and saw that 30-some other people that I wasn’t friends with were checked-in there as well.

To some people, that’s creepy (it has been a feature on Foursquare for a while and that’s basically what Loopt was for a while). But to me, I think that’s potentially really interesting for when it comes to meeting people. And the fact that so many had checked-in on day one of the service is impressive.

That’s the power of Facebook’s social graph. It’s a graph that none of the current location players can touch even if you added all of their users together and multiplied them by twenty. Facebook is going to bring location to the mainstream by virtue of their size alone.

But the flip side is that because Facebook has such a large social graph that’s already established, a lot of current users are going to feel this new layer as something being forced upon them. And again, creepy. Of course there’s the option not to use it, but I can certainly see how the friend tagging thing is troubling to a lot of people (particularly because of the somewhat confusing three states).

But it’s also potentially a great tool. Imagine if you’re with a group of friends and only one of you has to check everyone in. That’s the cure for check-in fatigue right there. And when you think about it, this functionality isn’t much different than the tweets we’ve all sent that state something like “at the park with @____ @_____ @_____ and @_______”.

But the real key of Facebook Places is as a platform. Though it is still in the process of being turned on, it’s going to be great to be able to load up one app and see where people from Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, etc have all checked-in. And even better will be when you can check-in on Facebook Places and push it out to these services (so far, only Gowalla has committed to working on this as far as I know).

These services are all going to have to focus on building great utilities on top of this platform because the check-in will finally be completely commoditized. And that’s a good thing. I hope the Places API becomes the Facebook Connect for check-ins so the real innovation can begin. We need to remove the “ugh, another service I have to check-in to” factor.

That’s undoubtedly what Facebook is hoping for too. It’s a potential new branch of the Platform.

While location obviously has risks associated with it, it’s the upside that has all of these startups and now bigger players interested in the space. It’s easy to forget about this upside and instead worry about how everyone is going to be stalking one another. You know, the same things people used to say about the Internet itself back in the day.

Nokia this morning announced that it is acquiring Motally, a privately-held San Francisco company specialized in mobile analytics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s likely not a large transaction – Motally employs only 8 people.

Founded in 2008, Motally was backed by $750,000 in seed funding from angel investor Ron Conway and BlueRun Ventures.

The deal is expected to close during the third quarter of 2010.

Motally’s mobile analytics service offers in-application tracking and reporting, and is designed to enable developers and publishers to optimize development of their mobile apps through increased understanding of how users engage.

The service offering is planned to be adapted for Qt, Symbian, Meego and Java developers, and Nokia says it plans to continue serving Motally’s existing customer base.

So far, the company has been focused on building analytics and tracking tools for Nokia competitors’ devices, including the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android handsets.

The startup’s team may be small, but it’s not inexperienced any way you look at it. Chief executive John Forese joined Motally last March from Nielsen Mobile, where he was most recently SVP of Product Management. The company’s founder and president is Arte Merritt, who has more than nine years mobile experience working with companies like Yahoo Mobile, Helio, Vindigo and a variety of mobile startups under his belt.

Also noteworthy: former Yahoo SVP and Google VP Doug Garland sits on Motally’s board.

Who else is on that board? BlueRun Ventures founder John Malloy, who spent more than 15 years in management and executive roles at MCI and … Nokia, before starting the investment firm (which was actually previously the company’s investment firm, Nokia Venture Partners).

According to his LinkedIn profile, Malloy also founded the Finnish mobile giant’s other investment arm, Nokia Growth Partners.

Not hard to see who made the connection.

Nokia has been making other small acquisitions this year: it picked up mobile web browser startup Novarra in March and geographic search technology company MetaCarta in April.

Remember when Google killed the Nexus One a month ago? Yeah, it’s still sold in a few places here and there, but it’s mostly dead. And apparently it had to die in order to find its heaven: Android app developers.

A new post tonight on the Android Developers Blog declares that the now-for-developers-only Nexus One has proven to be “a little too popular.” As Tim Bray writes, “we blew through the (substantial) initial inventory in almost no time, and they're back-ordered from HTC.” In other words, they’re now completely sold out.

To be clear, Google is selling unlocked versions of the Nexus Ones to registered developers through a publisher page in the Android market. What’s odd is that though they didn’t say so in their very brief post announcing the Nexus One’s death, the assumption is that they were killing it off because it wasn’t selling well. In fact, CNN had them just over 100,000 units in the same time that other phones like the iPhone and another Android-powered phone, Droid, had sold a million units.

I’m still convinced that the Nexus One is the best Android phone I’ve tried. Even the newer ones (EVO and Droid 2) simply don’t stack up. And I loved Google’s ballsy attempt to sell it themselves and bypass the carriers — but clearly that didn’t work too well, and they quickly abandoned that model.

At least the Nexus One is apparently having a good afterlife.

Verizon, Verizon, Verizon … So this is what you’re doing instead of going after the iPhone? You guys must think we’re so stupid.

You’ve based your latest mcgarrybowen-produced “Rule The Air! campaign around the concept of your product being gender, race and age-blind all the while trying your best to tear down Net Neutrality in order to offer tiered access to the Internet, for pure profit.

“Air has no prejudice, it does not carry the opinions of a man faster than those of a woman.”

So you’re not prejudiced against our opinions, but you’re totally cool with discriminating against our wireless data packets?

Also, you’re selling cellphone coverage, not tampons. Guess what? I, and I’m assuming other women, care about “facts” like pricing plans, and signal strength and yes, whether or not you’ll have iPhone availability in January.

On a related note: Never ever ever use the word infectious in conjunction with something you’re trying to sell to women. Ever.

And while you’re not the first ad campaign to include so many token minorities I feel like I’m watching clip art (but still, no fat chicks), do you really need to have the black girl say the “white” line and the white girl say the “black” line? Subtle.

“Air has no prejudice, it does not carry the opinions of a man faster than those of a woman, it does not filter out an idea, because I’m 16 not 30, Air is unaware if I’m black or white, and wouldn’t care if it knew.

So it stands to reason, my ideas will be powerful, if they are wise, infectious, if they are worthy, and if my thoughts have flawless delivery, I can lead the army that will follow.“

Finally, what's with the creepy "lead the army that will follow" part at the end? No, seriously.

Reader Moment of Zen: Count the number of women in the above commercial vs. the number women sitting on Verizon’s Leadership Team. Extra points for spotting a minority.

If you own an iPhone, you’ve undoubtedly used an app that has the “Pull to Refresh” functionality. You know, where you pull a screen down to refresh the contents on the page. That was originally the work of Loren Brichter, now a Twitter employee who built it for his Tweetie 2 iPhone app (now called Twitter for iPhone). Another group of developers, Enormego, rebuilt the functionality and open-sourced it (apparently with Brichter’s blessing) a while back. Which brings us to yesterday, when it landed in Facebook’s new iPhone app.

The fact that Facebook is using it isn’t an issue at all. The problem is that they then wrapped it into their Three20 iOS library (which they also open-source), but did so without proper attribution. The Enormego guys looked at the code and quickly realized it was nearly an exact copy of theirs. They immediately put up a post entitled “What ever happened to common courtesy?” And rightly so.

But not to fear. It appears that this wasn’t a case of Facebook attempting to steal something as their own. Instead, a few Facebook developers have responded to Enormego apologizing for the mistake which they’re calling an oversight.

Specifically, here’s what Facbeook’s Jeff Verkoeyen (who maintains Three20) had to say in a comment:

This is definitely an oversight on my part. I merged the code in from a Three20 fork by another developer in the community. I contacted the developer of that fork and requested permission to use the code, but going forward I need to be more careful about the code we merge into the library. You are completely in the right to be surprised by this situation and I fully intend to rectify it.

Seeing as this code is clearly based on, and likely replicated from, your source, I will be doing a couple of things.

First, I’m going to speak with the developer in question about this. Both of us contributed to this issue, myself specifically by merging code without fully researching the original source. But I also need to be able to trust code from Three20′s forks, and this means I need to be able to trust that attribution is correctly maintained.

Second, I’d love to speak with you about correctly attributing this source to you. Feel free to contact me anytime at XXXXXXX

I sincerely apologize for the attribution fail. Looking forward to chatting with you and discussing what we should do going forward.

Shaun from Enormego responded favorably to that. And then Facebook’s head of open source programs, Dave Recordon, added another comment just for good measure:

Hey Shaun, I’m David Recordon and head up our open source programs at Facebook.

As Jeff said, we clearly didn’t realize that this was actually your open source code when it was submitted via a GitHub pull request back in February. I’m sorry that we messed this one up.

As for fixing this, the code clearly came from EGOTableViewPullRefresh and we’re updating the four file’s within Three20 to directly reflect that and link back to your project. This patch will be pushed to GitHub shortly.

Verkoeyen followed up one more time to let them know he added the attribution to GitHub.

The situation looked like it may spiral out of control there for a second as even Brichter himself started tweeting about it. “Just so there’s no confusion, Facebook should have credited Enormego for their open source pull to refresh implementation, not me,” he tweeted earlier tonight.

Looks like crisis averted.

Earlier this year Topix CEO Chris Tolles got the call no one wants to get – that they were under investigation by a government entity. Two attorneys general, one of which was deep into his senate run, were leveling accusations of abuse at Topix. The company eventually settled with thirty three AGs, plus two U.S. territories. We asked Chris to tell us about his experience dealing with these people. Too often, we’ve found, the office of attorney general is used for little more than a way to advance one’s political career.

“Would you like to comment on the accusations being made about your site by the Attorney General?" Excuse me? What is it about the week after my birthday? Two years ago, Google launched a local news product the day after my birthday and this year, it was Cheryl Truman of the Lexington KY Herald-Leader calling me with this little gem.

Evidently, this is how a California company finds out that the Attorneys General of Kentucky and Connecticut have "significant concerns" about how your company does business. They have a press conference. When I told Cheryl I had no idea what she was talking about, she kindly forwarded me the press release from Jack Conway, the Attorney General of Kentucky.

Through this press release, which accused us of requiring payment to review abusive posts, I discovered that the Kentucky Attorney General had allegedly sent a letter asking me to provide information regarding our terms of service and policies around payment for expediting reviews. (The letter to which the press release referred was put in the US Mail and post marked five days after this incident.)

Topix is the largest local forum site in the US and deal with 3-4 million comments a month, and I was going to find out a little more than I bargained for with regard to the politics involved in focusing on local audiences.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Press Release

This initial dynamic – being communicated at via excoriatory press release proved to be a consistent theme going forward. I suppose I should take it as a testament to our success that taking on Topix would be perceived as an important public policy goal for two candidates for the US Senate. After waiting the 10 or so days to actually get the letter, we set up a call with our lawyers and a bevy of assistant attorneys general. After my lawyers reconfirmed that we weren’t being accused of breaking any specific laws, I decided to take a pretty open stance with these guys and give them the background on what we did, and how we did it, figuring that if they knew what we were doing, and in particular, if they knew that the paid expedition of reviews was only about 1% of all of our feedback, that we would be able to clear this up pretty easily. (I was wrong about this).

The call with these guys was actually pretty cordial. We walked them through how we ran feedback at Topix, that how in January 2010, we posted 3.6M comments, had our Artificial Intelligence systems remove 390k worth before they were ever even put up, and how we had over 28k feedback emails and 210k user flags, resulting in over 45k posts being removed from the system. When we went through the various issues with them, we ended up coming to what I thought was a set of offers to resolve the issues at hand. The folks on the phone indicated that these were good steps, and that they would circle back with their respective Attorneys' General and get back to us.

No good deed goes unpunished

So, after opening the kimono and giving these guys a whole lot of info on how we ran things, how big we were and that we dedicated 20% of our staff on these issues, what was the response. (You could probably see this one coming.)

That's right. Another press release. This time from 23 states' Attorney's General.

This pile-on took much of what we had told them, and turned it against us. We had mentioned that we required three separate people to flag something before we would take action (mainly to prevent individuals from easily spiking things that they didn't like). That was called out as a particular sin to be cleansed from our site. They also asked us to drop the priority review program in its entirety, drop the time it takes us to review posts from 7 days to 3 and "immediately revamp our AI technology to block more violative posts" amongst other things.

So, more calls from local newspaper reporters who had been sent the press release, this time from a few more states. And the AP.

Somewhere around this time, I reached out to my friend Chris Kelly, who was the former chief privacy officer for Facebook, and whose wife used to work in the office of the Kentucky Attorney General. He gave me some good advice on the issue, and since he was pretty busy for running for the California Attorney General position at the time, referred me to talk to a former Attorney General from Indiana, Jeff Modisett who is now in private practice. While our law firm, PietraGallo, out of Pittsburgh, had been a great job with coordination and laying out our options, I wanted to make sure that if things got much worse, that I had an escalation path with someone who knew these guys personally. Perhaps the most useful outcome of these conversations was that I discovered the form factor of resolution for issues like this was a so called "joint statement", such as those between MySpace and Craigslist and a myriad of Attorneys' General.

You can't fight city hall

After the second smackdown by press release, I concluded that it wasn't worth trying to stand up for the $20k a month in prioritized reviews we were doing, and that it simply wasn't worth the cost of getting in deeper. So, armed with the understanding that we should be seeking out a "joint statement" we pretty much walked down the list with the Assistant AG from Kentucky, Todd Leatherman, and tried to find a way to say "yes" in as painless a way as possible. There were also some points they made which were probably good for us to implement (like giving law enforcement a more direct way of reaching us), and this time I made it clear that I wouldn't be officially answering anything unless they agreed to communicate with us first before holding a press conference to highlight any remaining disagreements.

Our joint statement was issued on August 9th, and reported in 238 different articles including a post on TechCrunch. All hail our government in action.

I hope you learned your lesson

Going through this was a tremendous pain in the ass, and I would recommend avoiding it if you can. However, if you run a site that people actually use, chances are something like this might happen to you. So, here are my thoughts and recommendations.

This is going to happen more – The States' Attorneys General are the place that complaints about your company will probably end up. This is especially true if you host a social or community based site where people can post things that others may dislike. And, there's no downside to attacking a company based in California for these guys (MyScape, Facebook, Craigslist have all been targets in the past couple of years). Taking complaints from your citizenry and turning them into political capital is simply too good an opportunity for these guys to pass up.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition – Unlike most other people in business who will attempt to reach out to you to get what they want, and use the threat of going public as a tool, our experience is that the offices of the Attorneys' General seem to be most happy communicating via press conference, without any sort of preliminaries. This is primarily a political exercise, and you’re dealing with people who are very empowered to make life difficult for you.

Pissed off people, not illegality, is the issue to watch – At no time during this process were we accused of breaking any laws. The Attorneys General have interpreted their mandate of consumer protections very broadly, and if a lot of people *think* you are doing something wrong, you are likely to be headed for a problem. The biggest issue for us is that we put a button that had non deterministic outcomes (three people needed to flag a post) next to an option that wanted you to pay $19.99. The fact that we told people in big bold letters that this was paying for making your free review faster did not discourage people from concluding that we had disabled the free feedback and that we were charging to remove posts, rather than letting people jump the queue.

Take this seriously and lawyer up– especially If you find yourself in a place where there is significant downside (instead a small feature, you need to shut down, or there is a massive monetary amount at play), you really want to find some folks who have worked with these guys, and potentially have been one of these guys before. We have great lawyers, but you really need to keep in mind that an AG essentially is a state run law firm employing hundreds of people. I essentially caved and it still took six months and more money than I care to think about.

You're not a wimp, you're a pragmatist – I never thought I would be putting my name on a joint statement with 34 states attorneys' general. It turns out that they've organized themselves into a sort of zone offense strategy and the Richard Blumenfeld AG from Connecticut, essentially is running point for other AG's who want to take on technology companies. Things quickly escalate, and it's unlikely to be good for business to be in a protracted fight with the government. I will point out that Microsoft and Intel were both accused of all sorts of monopolistic business practices in the 90's and Intel mostly worked with the government and Microsoft mostly didn't. Seems to me that Intel's approach worked better.

It takes longer than you think – Especially when these guys start to pile on, it takes them a while to discuss what they're going to do with you. For us, he first press release came out on Feb 11, and the joint statement on August 9th. The ball is often in their court, and there's no much you can do in the meantime.

Sometimes they're right – Despite the rather venal and self serving communications strategies, the issues that the Attorneys' General take on usually have some set of consumers who have brought it up in the first place. While I think I have every right to offer an expedited review system, it pissed off enough people to enter the issue intot he realm of the political, and it's probably better for us to take it off the site. Likewise, it was probably good for us to give law enforcement a more straightforward way to communicate with us (people like to post about crimes they commit or see). (And I'm glad Cuomo, the NY AG took on the banks last year and made them cash out auction rate securities for businesses like ours.)

I think I'm going to take the week after my birthday off next year.

Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field. It appears that the latter is happening.

“Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead).

I’ve long been in the camp that believed Facebook’s entry into the location space would help a lot of these other check-in startups — at least initially. Thanks to the Places API, Facebook is currently serving as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And thanks to their 500 million users, Facebook is introducing the concept of location to millions of new users. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of those users are now interested in Foursquare after yesterday’s announcement (and subsequent tidal wave of press).

But.

All that said, Foursquare does have to be concerned about what Facebook is going to do in the future. Right now, Facebook’s location offering is very bare-bones, but you have to believe they will flesh it out more as time goes on. In particular, you can expect them to partner with businesses to offer deals and other incentives to Facebook members. You know, the kind of stuff Foursquare is doing.

Foursquare clearly has a plan for how they’re going to evolve going forward and stay ahead of Facebook. But they need to execute and make sure they can scale with all this new growth.

Earlier today, in an interview with the LA Times, Crowley revealed the service has about 2.8 million members right now. Given his statement tonight, you can expect them to hit 3 million shortly — perhaps even next week. Now it’s a matter of keeping those people around and engaged.

Earlier today we had a bit of a fire-drill at TechCrunch Headquarters. As I checked into TCHQ on Facebook Places, I also tagged a few of my coworkers, fully expecting their checkins to be delayed until they actually opted into the feature for the first time (unlike some of Facebook’s past controversial feature launches, you have to Opt-In before you can be tagged in Places). Except, as we quickly discovered, you really don’t have to opt in before you can be tagged.

As soon as I checked in on Places, Facebook published News Feed items to my friends indicating that I’d checked in with my coworkers — even the coworkers who hadn’t yet opted into Places. My coworker received an email asking him to confirm the tag, but he had never clicked it. And yet, many of his friends were being notified that he’d just checked into Techcrunch HQ with me. Convinced that this was a privacy flaw I flagged down Facebook PR, who patiently explained to me that this is actually the way things are supposed to work. Huh?

Turns out, there are three different stages of opting into the service. Let’s spell them out.

• Option one: You’ve explicitly opted into allowing people to tag you into Places. Any of your friends can do this. Pretty straightforward.
• Option two: You’ve braved the muddled waters of Facebook’s privacy control panel and turned off Places entirely. You can’t be tagged — if a friend does try to tag you in a Places post, your name simply won’t show up in the post.
• Option three: If you’ve never decided to ‘Allow’ your friends to tag you, but you haven’t blocked the Places feature entirely, you’re in a sort of limbo. This is where the vast majority of Facebook users in the US are right now. As soon as they get tagged for the first time, they’ll get an email and a prompt on Facebook itself asking them if they’d like to allow their friends to tag them at Places in the future. Accepting this will allow any of your friends to tag you unless you go into your privacy settings and cancel it (see Option one).But even if you hit the “Not Now” button, you’ll still be tagged in the relevant Places update. In fact, you’ll still be tagged even if you haven’t even seen the prompt asking you to approve Places tags. Facebook treats this as if you were tagged in a basic status update so it will show up on your Wall and your friends’ News Feeds — you just aren’t associated with whatever Place your friend was tagging you into (i.e. if your friend visits the venue’s Place page, they won’t see that you’ve previously checked in there). The logic here is that your friends could manually tag you in a normal status update anyway. Update:Facebook has clarified that it doesn’t show up on your wall.

From Facebook’s standpoint this makes sense, but it’s confusing as hell to users — generally when you opt out of being tagged somewhere, you’d probably expect not to be tagged there at all.  For what it’s worth, Facebook knows this is confusing — they’re planning to release a video explaining it in the near future.  Still, I think the site should hide any location tags until a user has explicitly said they want to be associated with them.

Um, awesome.

I’m a huge fan of the AMC show Mad Men. I’d argue it is the best show on television right now, but that will just lead to a flamewar with the Breaking Bad people. Anyway, as the winner of the past two Emmys for best drama, the show has a lot of fans. And it has plenty of people who wish they could live in that moment of time (New York City in the 1960s). Now, thanks to eBay, you can get pretty close.

And, if you’re willing to act a little bit — and spend a whole lot of money — you can get very close.

Currently for sale on eBay are dozens of pieces of furniture and outfits from previous seasons of the show. This includes a lot of the furniture from Sterling Cooper, the advertising agency that the main characters work at.

As the show is still very much alive, doesn’t AMC need the set furniture anymore? Well, no. I won’t spoil why, but if you watch the show you’ll know why.

Anyway, this is all being auctioned off for charity. 10 percent of the final sale price will go towards the City of Hope nonprofit. No word on where the other 90 percent is going — but hey, it’s better than nothing.

Smartly, the eBay page for each item includes details about how it was used in the show. For example:

Mad Men Sterling Cooper Cabinet – Break Room
The Sterling Cooper break room was always buzzing with the juicy gossip. Get your very own conversation piece. Cabinet, metal, utility, Aqua blue, 1 drawer, 1 door with 1 inner shelf. Rubber top, black faux marble design.

They also include a video clip from the show showing it in action.

But the biggest item is a walk-on role on the show itself. Currently at $16,000+, it won’t be cheap, but it will be for one show next season. You’ll also get a custom wardrobe fitting, period hair and makeup, and a VIP tour of the set if you win the bid. And you can bring a guest on to the set to watch the filming of your scene.

Currently, the cheapest item is the drapery from Peggy Olssen’s office at $20.50.

The auction for all the items ends on August 22. <Insert 60′s-era joke about who is going be be able to fit into Joan’s dress.>

[thanks Chris]

Founded by former MIT students Jong-Moon Kim and Andrew Sugaya, YCombinator-funded Teevox is an iPhone app that allows you to remotely control watching Hulu and Netflix on your computer.

While apps like PlayOn let you watch Netflix and Hulu on your phone and Apple’s own Remote allows you to phone control movies on iTunes, what’s novel about Teevox is its simple interface and the fact that Hulu and Netflix are just the beginning. According to Jong-Moon Kim, the possibilities for adding features are limitless.

“While there are hundreds, if not thousands of iPhone remote apps. If you take a closer look, you’ll notice they all require proprietary hardware (Apple TV, Boxee) or separate software you need to download and install.”

With Teevox, I downloaded the free app on my iPhone, typed the code in and was fully connected (In terms of user experience the Teevox website is rad).  Implementation of both Twitter and Facebook Connect means that anyone with an iPhone and an account can start using the remote immediately.

The app integrates Twitter and Facebook even further. You and your friends can simultaneously watch shows and send messages about them. Anyone who’s ever been in a long distance relationship will especially understand the utility of this feature for “movie date night.”

Kim (who goes by “Jiggity”) emphasizes that the watching TV on your iPhone thing is the first of many things that the Teevox-backend technology can do. The ability to communicate with websites without having to download any additional software or hardware bodes well for slideshow viewing on websites like Flickr or Facebook.

Teevox plans on expanding to the iPad and to other platforms that can’t be currently disclosed. The iTunes store, which already has its Remote service, is something that the founders are definitely looking at in terms of support.

Kim says we should expect more Teevox-related announcements in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime you can try it out here.

Yesterday during their Places event, Facebook showed a video highlighting the thoughts of the team of developers who actually built the functionality. It’s slick as hell — very nicely done. In fact, we weren’t the only ones who initially thought that it looked like an Apple video.

No it’s not quite the FaceTime Don Draper-esque commercial, but it’s much better than a lot of the very bland videos that most other companies put out there to talk about their products.

The correct way to do these things either seems to be to go for humorous/hipster (like Square) or sentimental/simple (like Apple). With their Places video, Facebook actually sort of combined the two — it’s the ultimate sentimental/hipster video.

As I said, it’s very good. Watch it for yourself below. My favorite parts are the bits where the iPhone is searching for service — welcome to life in the Bay Area with AT&T.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new version of Digg which is on the verge of launching. Beta invites for it are so sought-after that even Bill Cosby had to personally ask founder Kevin Rose for one on Twitter the other day. Thankfully, he got his invite. But for those of you who aren’t stars of one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, we have some good news for you too: we have invites. A whole lot of them.

The first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who click on this link will be able to sign up for the new Digg. And, as an added bonus, when you sign up, you’ll also automatically be following our TechCrunch account so you’ll have a nice full feed of our content to digg.

I’ve been testing out the new version of Digg for the past several weeks and it’s solid. Easily the best part of it is how much faster it is than the current version. Hopefully, they can keep that going as they get up to scale.

The entire experience has also been switched to be more tailored around personalized news stories based on who you follow and what they digg. This idea was sort of in place before, but it was far too slow. Now, again, it’s nice and fast.

Also nice is that publishers can now automatically submit their stories. This means that pretty much everything you will want to digg from a wide variety of big publishers should already be in the system. Obviously, not all current users are going to love that, as many enjoy scouring the web to find the best content that they can submit themselves. But if Digg hopes to differentiate itself from the rapid-pace link spreading of Twitter and Facebook, this is the smart bet to make.

Look for the new version of Digg to launch publicly soon.

Attention those who still remember their parents’ stacks of old Thomas Guides, Google Maps for Mobile has hit a userbase milestone. More than 100 million people a month use the service across various mobile devices, according to a very interestingly-timed post on the Google Blog.

With GPS killing Android-only features like Google Maps Navigation, as well the increasing Google Maps reliance of app developers who want to power location-based services through the iPhone, it’s no surprise that the extremely useful service has grown exponentially since its launch in 2005.

Google Maps has most recently tried to take a cut of Yelp’s action with its Google Place Pages. Facebook shortly followed suit with their own social leaning “Place” in the name product. You might have heard of it.

Stay tuned for the Facebook vs. Google land grab. Literally.

Update: A Google representative reiterated that the Google Maps post timing was completely innocuous, “We issued the post in conjunction with having reached the exciting milestone today. “

Salesforce just released Q2 financial results today, posting record revenue of $394 million, an increase of 25% on a year-over-year basis. Q2 GAAP diluted earnings per share decreased 35% year-over-year to $0.11, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was flat year-over-year at $0.29. Net Income came in at $14.7 million, down from $21.1 million in the same quarter in 2009. The company added 5,100 paying customers during the quarter, 500 of which came through the acquisition of Jigsaw earlier this year. Salesforce says that it currently has 82,400 paying customers in total.

Let’s just pretend for a second that Facebook Places aka Facesquare is a charitable attempt on Facebook’s part to quell check-in fatigue by making nice with Foursquare, Gowalla, Booyah and Yelp (and not another attempt by Facebook to turn the world into this).

Because Booyah always throws people for a loop (“Who the hell uses MyTown?”) and Loopt’s 4 million users statistic always seems to shock people, we’ve posted this handy LBS comparison below. Water cooler tech forecasters should take note of Facesquare’s current lack of game mechanics.

As a wise TechCrunch commenter once said, “Just because you don’t use it, or have never heard of it, doesn’t negate its market share.”

Note: Data for all platforms except Facebook Places was last compiled in July 2010. Booyah has just released figures that sets their user base at 3.1 million.

For a hi-res image: Fidelman via Techpp.

The second semester of Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute San Diego semester has graduated 12 startups this week. We covered the inaugural San Diego session here. Announced in March 2009, the Founder Institute offers entrepreneurs and very early stage startups an environment designed to help foster their growth and education. The program, which is now active in 13 cities worldwide, holds two four-month long sessions annually in each location, which include mentorship sessions from experienced tech entrepreneurs. The program also has a unique structure that allocates some equity to each of the founders involved, so that they have an incentive to work together.

Mentors for the Spring 2010 San Diego, include Alex Bard, CEO of Assistly.com; Jon Carder, CEO of MojoPages; and Dan Shapiro, Founder of Ontela. The startups launching this week from the class are:

TouristWay: TouristWay is a web application that allows independent operators to easily build their own travel portal and sell their own travel packages directly. Presented at the Founder Showcase.

FatPencil: FatPencil is a web-based and mobile flight-logging platform that drastically reduces the time and cost required to maintain government-mandated flight logs. Presented at the Founder Showcase.

InstantIMPACT: InstantIMPACT is a platform that empowers you to impact critical legislation by recommending issues relevant to you, and then enabling communication to appropriate parties.

Kimerit: Kimerit is a knowledge platform that facilitates rapid scientific research through collaboration and funding-based rewards.

The Founders Institute is currently taking applications in San Diego, Washington D.C., New York, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Houston.

On a desktop computer, StumbleUpon makes sense. You’re on the prowl for cool stuff, click a button and find it. But there is a ton of competition these days among services that let you do this — and increasingly people are relying on Twitter and Facebook for this. But mobile is a different beast. A tailored, contained experience for the small screen is welcomed. That’s exactly what StumbleUpon has built with their iPhone and Android apps.

If you’ve ever used StumbleUpon, you’ll be familiar with how to use this app. At the most basic level, you simple sign in, hit the “Start Stumbling” button, and off you go. Content starts loading and depending on if you like it or don’t like it, you give it a thumbs up or thumbs down on the top toolbar. Or you can choose not to rate it at all and hit the “SU” button to go to the next site.

With the click of a bottom you can also share any page via email, Twitter, or Facebook. Or you can share it with another Stumbler. You can also see info about each page including how many views it has, who liked it, and read reviews about it.

But there’s also a way to use the app that’s perfect for the small screens of the iPhone and Android phones. Right below the Start Stumbling button is a “Best for mobile stumbling” area. Here you’ll find links to “Photos,” “News,” “Flickr,” and “YouTube” that will show you only that type of content. Obviously, each of these is great for browsing quickly on a mobile device.

Below that “Best for” area, there’s also a list of your topics (the areas you’ve indicated you’re interested in on StumbleUpon) so you can stumble that way as well.

You can find the app in the App Store here. Or you can search for it in the Android Market. It’s a free download.