Internet marketing services company eBridge has raised $2.5 million in financing from Comerica Bank in a bid to broaden the scope of SMB-focused tools and services currently offered through its local business division, eBridgeInteractive.

eBridge has been in operation since 2003, using technology and a service-oriented approach to help small and medium-sized businesses maximize their visibility on the Web.

Initially focusing on local search, eBridge in 2009 expanded its offering to include more business services such as social media monitoring, hyperlocal domain names, copywriting, marketing video production and reputation management.

eBridge says it aims to continue looking for other future sources to support its growth.

The TechCrunch staff has been pretty busy these last few days, what with throwing and covering a conference and all, but our excellent event photographers (Dave Getzschman, Max Whittaker, and Aaron Morris) have been even busier. They’ve taken hundreds of shots, all far better than those I could manage during the panels and chats, and they’re all collected at the TechCrunch Flickr page.

I’ve sifted through them and collected a few of what I felt were the best; (use info). If you feature prominently in one of these photos and would rather the picture is deleted, let us know. Click for a slightly larger version, or head over to Flickr for the originals. Feel free to use these in any way you see fit, as long as you give credit to TechCrunch and the photographer.

Thanks to all our attendees, speakers, panelists, startups, and support staff, congratulations to Qwiki, and thanks again to our readers and viewers; we’ll see you again in the summer.

Joe Wilcox at BetaNews has posted a must-read article in the wake of the announcement – made at TechCrunch Disrupt SF – that the Redmond software giant would be transitioning all its Windows Live Spaces users to Automattic‘s WordPress.com platform.

You may recall Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, stating that there were roughly 30 million active Windows Live Spaces accounts.

Wilcox, however, has managed to obtain internal e-mail messages exchanged between (yet unnamed) Microsoft employees that suggest far lower numbers.

However, according to a senior Microsoft manger e-mailing colleagues: “The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M ‘blogs’ — most are dead. WordPress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a ‘who has the best online service for blogging for our customers’ and had nothing to do with technology.”

Ouch – so basically most of the 30 million so-called active blogs are in reality dead, and Microsoft expects a mere 300,000 sites to effectively migrate to WordPress.com (which currently hosts just south of 14 million blogs).

Wilcox points out, correctly, that it’s not unusual for companies of any size to overstate statistics that aren’t otherwise easily confirmed for PR reasons. That’s undeniable, but it doesn’t justify the fact that Microsoft not only overstated the number of active Windows Live Spaces accounts to the press, but presumably also to the startup it was partnering with.

For context: the email exchange wasn’t centered around the number of Spaces accounts, per se. In fact, the conversation that was leaked to BetaNews revolved mostly around the fact that Automattic runs WordPress.com from Linux servers, something Microsoft (which offers an alternative platform named Azure) was obviously uncomfortable with.

The senior Microsoft manager emphasized customers and not technology for a reason. Earlier in the exchange, Microsoft decision-makers debated about customers moving from Internet Information Server running on Windows Server to ngix running on Linux. “I’m hoping for a second half to this story, where we’re hosting these WordPress sites on Azure…moving 20+ million to Linux seems like shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of securing the platform,” wrote another Microsoft employee.

Microsoft’s PR agency has responded to the leaked emails, suggesting the “30 million active users on Windows Live Spaces” actually included both authors and visitors. It clarified further, saying the real number of active authors is closer to 7 million.

Automattic has also commented to Wilcox on the story, saying that, while the company doesn’t have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to WordPress.com in the next 6 months, it has seen close to close to 50,000 migrations in the first 48 hours, which it deems “very promising”.

In a comment on this Guardian article, Paul Kim, VP of User Growth at Automattic, adds that “if there are only 300,000 actual active blogs (1% of 30 million), we’ll be able to determine that very soon”. Note the word “only” in that comment.

Automattic also made it perfectly clear that it doesn’t plan to host any WordPress.com blogs on Windows Azure for the foreseeable future.

eBuddy, the swiss army knife of web and mobile instant messaging services, this morning announced that it has achieved over 100 million downloads of its mobile applications since its 2007 debut, thus stepping in the footsteps of the likes of Facebook, Google (Maps), and Opera (Mini) when it comes to the number of app downloads reached. In case you're not familiar with eBuddy, the service basically enables users around the world to chat for free in one, aggregated interface across most major IM networks, including AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, ICQ, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

Turkish courts have famously banned video sharing juggernaut YouTube several times since March 2007. The site still isn't accessible, despite the fact that Turkey's president Abdullah Gül used his Twitter account last June to express disapproval of the country's blocking of YouTube. Gül at the time said he had instructed officials to find legal ways of allowing access. But now we're getting multiple tips about Turkey imposing a new ban on video sharing site Vimeo (an IAC company), and chatter on Twitter suggests this is in fact the case - see #censorshipinturkey and #vimeo for more.

E-commerce platform eSellerPro has raised £2m from Notion Capital. It says it will use the new funds to invest in sales, marketing and customer service to "further drive and support huge demand" across the UK, European and U.S. markets, which has already seen the company processes more than £150m in annual sales. For Notion Capital, which invests in early to mid-stage Internet-based startups, it represents the 8th fund investment since being founded in late 2009.

Yesterday, at Disrupt it took a long time for the judges to decide to award the top prize to Qwiki, the visual information consumption service that presents information in a fluid assemblage of photos, videos, and spoken words. It’s the kind of service that would demo really great on an iPad, where you want to just sit back and watch as information is presented to you. Although the co-founders Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier showed a concept video of an iPhone wake-up app based on the service, they only actually showed it working on a laptop in Flash. During the deliberations backstage, the question was raised whether it would even work on the iPad.

Well, it turns out that it will and Qwiki already has an iPad prototype in development. One of the Qwiki engineers milling around backstage after the awards ceremony showed off one of the iPad prototype’s features (the ability to zoom a video to full-screen in the middle of a Qwiki). The engineer kind of has a Double-Rainbow moment over it. SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar, who is an investor in Qwiki, captured the video above.

The only question I have is why the hell didn’t they show the iPad app on stage? It didn’t matter in the end, but I think it would have helped us better visualize some of the possibilities. Now, I really want to play around with Qwiki.

The votes have been tallied. The judges have weighed in. A battlefield of twenty-seven startups was whittled down to a final, elite group of seven. And now the winner has been chosen: Qwiki has taken the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.

In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from Disrupt NYC winner Soluto. Upon receiving the cup, CEO Doug Imbruce exclaimed, “Let’s change the world!”

Taking the runner-up spots are CloudFlare and Pinger, both of which were also very impressive.

Qwiki climbed above the rest by offering a new way to consume information: text, audio, video, and images melded together in a seamless interface, generating a dynamic movie of whatever you search for. It really does seem like something from the future, and it’s only going to get better.

Make sure to check out our full coverage of each of these stellar companies:

• Qwiki Just May Be The Future Of Information Consumption. And It's Here Now.
• CloudFlare Wants To Be A CDN For The Masses (And Takes Five Minutes To Set Up)
• Pinger Now Turns Your iPod Touch Into A Free Cell Phone

And while only one startup can claim rights to the Disrupt Cup at a time, this was an incredibly solid field of companies, and we want to reiterate that it was a very close race. Many of the companies that took part in the Startup Battlefield are going to be doing great things.

In addition to the Disrupt Cup, some special awards were also given:

Yume for Best Marketing Strategy – Checkpoints
Perkins Coie – CloudFlare
Greylock Partners Disruptive Product – Qwiki
Greylock Partners Business Model – Pinger
Omidyar Network – Sumazi
Microsoft BizSpark – Badgeville

The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield is approaching its dramatic conclusion, and the 7 finalists remaining are making their closing arguments in front of a panel of all-star Silicon Valley judges. Here are their questions and the startups’ answers, along with links to our past coverage of each company.
Judges:
Kevin Rose
Marissa Mayer
Jason Goldman
Ron Conway
Roelof Botha

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Badgeville
Read Our Past Coverage: Badgeville Wants To Layer Social Gaming (And Yes, Badges) Across The Entire Web
Team of five, raised $250k, profitable.
KR: I love it. Foursquare for the web.
MM: I also like it. I think the analytics piece is powerful. You have to integrate it on your site (i.e. it isn’t already everywhere).
JG: You allow custom rewards.. One thing that’ interesting about foursquare is that you have to be careful with how you set up rewards.
A: It is how you implement it. We’re finding that in implementations we are coaching customers about best practices.
RC: Impressive when your rev is double your capital and you’re a startup. Who are competitors?
A: Lots of consumers plays looking to adapt this to websites, non-whitelabel, not aligned with medium/large publishers… Our vision isn’t about gamification, it’s about influencing behavior and outcomes… There’s not just market with medium/large pubs. Can also go through medium and long tail with API products.
RB: I think this is a yes. Key themes: mobile, social. Don’t think website owners would do this on their own. So I think this company is off to a great start.

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Pinger
Read our past coverage: Pinger Now Turns Your iPod Touch Into A Free Cell Phone
MM: Monetization?
A: We already do ads for text. For voice you can buy or earn minutes. Earn though Offers.
JG: What was inflection point? Domestic only? Per minute cost?
A: Handing out real phone numbers. For now. About 2 cents a minute.
RB: Thing is scary is competition.
A: For carriers, we’re bringing devices/iPad etc for first time into network. Adding new traffic to networks. Skype costs money to get a phone number. Google Voice is different problem for different market. GV uses your minutes.
KR: You’re profitable and growing like crazy, why here?
A: Michael asked us. We don’t need the money but we need PR.
A: We’re banned in some schools which is a great sign.
RC: If you get them when they’re 18, how do you keep them when they switch to an actual cellphone.
A: Keep people using great products by giving them a great product.
JG: On calling plan. Download apps to get minutes value exchange is a little wonky. There are only so many apps. You’re creating maintenance problem where they download and have to remove.
A: We also let you buy it. Can use iTunes account.

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GameCrush
Read our past coverage here: GameCrush Lets Guys Pay Money To Play Online Games With Women (Seriously)
RC: Metrics so far? Enough women to meet demand?
A: 12% conversation rate for people registering to play. Yes. Got 6000 over last 3 months during private beta.
MM: I disagree with observations around gaming. I think having a unique title is big. I think you need more compelling games. I wonder about real-time nature especially if you are missing realtime and addictive nature.
A: We noticed that players are building relationships with PlayDates. We want to expand to have more engaging games. Could also put platform on other platforms.
KR: 60 cents a minute sounds high.
A: We launched at a dollar a min, we discounted it. That seemed to be price point they were satisfied with.
A: We have ‘the edge’ which is more edgy but we are not an adult site.
JG: You talked about sports bar metaphor. Games might not be pickup mode.
A: If I go to sports bar I don’t expect to see women I’m going to talk to about sports… This mimics mecanics of bar.
RB: Innovation is interesting. Video used to sit on the side. Realtime video hasn’t been integrated the way you’re doing it. I think Chatroulette was one of first.. this is an extremely interesting innovation. My question, do you do anything more as a social engagement service of which gaming is only one arena.
A: End of the way we’re about enhancing interactive experience, but it could be around watching pilots, cooking.

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Opzi
See our past coverage: Opzi: A Quora For The Enterprise
RC is an investor
RB: Converting users to paying customers.
A: Looking at what Yammer has done. Going to create a product, from then on want team leaders at a company to adopt it and spread it virally.
KR: Why can’t Quora do this?
A: Quora is aiming to extract knowledge and make it public, they’re a consumer play, don’t think it falls in what they’re thinking of. Companies will go in diff. directions after Q&A.
MM: I think integration points are interesting. A lot of info gets created in a company as a byproduct of something else. Need to provide great enterprise search.
JG: I think Google, Salesforce are you bigger threat than Quora. They already have these touchpoints, this in place with the businesses.
RB: Don’t think you need the most comprehensive search, just need to connect people who know where to find the answer with the question asker.

---

DataSift
See our past coverage here: Tweetmeme Founder’s Datasift Helps You Find A Needle In A Tweetstack
RC: Business model?
A: 50% of rev comes from data sales. Cloud based, we charge you for complexity involved and how long we run it for.
KR: I think of Yahoo Pipes where it’s fun, but how do you get a lot of people do use this?
A: iPad app able to visualize news with magazine style.

---

CloudFlare
See our past coverage: CloudFlare Wants To Be A CDN For The Masses (And Takes Five Minutes To Set Up)
Since stepping off stage at Disrupt, getting 2.1 website signups per minute.
MM: Market need is very real. Hard problem. Future roadmap?
A: Goal is to protect the entire Internet.
When a visitor comes to a site on the CF network, get the best possible experience.
JG: You built five data centers with fudning?
A: Not from foundation up. We raised 2 million from some amazing partners.
RC: Soluto won the last Disrupt… was so good but can you explain the IP behind it. Prove that it works.
A: I would encourage people to look at users.
JG: Pricepoint?
A: Have freemium. Enhanced features for money. SSL. Also, sort of like OpenDNS model where users have given us permission to monetize certain number of pages, like error pages. We’re not messing with your content, we’re unintrusive. If infected computer comes to your site can tell them about it.
KR: Curious as to if you had a medium/high vol site can you handle it. What happens if you fall over.
A: We’ve done some high traffic site. SXSW Panelpicker. Can hit a big button and route traffic direct to backend. If DNS goes down can go to other large DNS providers.
RB: We’re an investor in OpenDNS. Question is around customer acquisition and distribution.
A: We think going forward opp for channel program. On Monday announced partnership with HostGator. They’ve built CloudFlare into their control panel.
KR: Technical team?
A: We started Project Honeypot six years ago. Been tracking online fraud. Started out with Email. Have someone who was on original Ops team at Yahoo. We’re hiring.
A: We think there’s an opportunity to work with hosting providers, rather than charging them, to work with them to build out or infrastructure.
RC: What’s data center cost?
A: Fixed cost. Minimum data center is three machines. Can’t say actual cost.

---

Qwiki
Past coverage: Qwiki Just May Be The Future Of Information Consumption. And It's Here Now
RC: Biggest application?
A: Qwiki is a platform.
KR: Beautiful, elegant. But is it just reading from Wikipedia?
A: Wikipedia is a source but there’s much more. Many other sources for media, videos, structured data.
MM: I think it’s really polished, visually beautiful. Well packaged. Watching information is a sweet spot. How interactive?
A: You do put more time into a video, but you recall better.
JG: People react to personal assistant metaphor. But seems like different usecase than information retrieval.
A: We are worst audience for this text, because we spend our days going through a lot of text. But everyone else gives what they want plus what they use.
JG: Think about which usecases you can own. I think you can own having your iPhone waking you up and waking you up like HAL.
RC: I don’t know if I’d use it I’d have to think about it. Barry Diller would try to buy this for CityGrid. Lot of text and video on the web, am I right in thinking that the audio is what makes this the most unique. I think this is Flipboard-ish.
A: We draw from a lot of sources, the presentation is the difference. Different use case from Flipboard.
RB: What you’ve hit on is “site, sound and motion” captures our imaginations. Question is, what’s the cost of processing?
A: All programmatically created on the fly. If it’s a reference we can cache. Depends on use case for caching.
How do you monetize?
A: If we get a large footprint we can build a sophisticated advertising engine. Right now we’re on product. But with consumer’s undivided attention, there’s a lot you can do.

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“Environmentalists get in the way…and do more damage than they know,” said Vinod Khosla, one of the world’s leading clean tech investors, today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Why? Self-described environmentalists demand or adopt technology that sounds promising without a sense of its true cost or impact to the environment. “Painting your roof white is better for the environment than driving a Prius or similar vehicle,” Khosla pointed out.

The green movement contrarian famously invested in a business that aims to make coal power cleaner (Calera) with carbon sequestration. The very notion displeases environmentalists who are concerned about the way coal is mined, as well as emissions from coal-burning plants.

Today, Khosla Ventures joined Sigma Partners investing a $13.7 million round in PVTSolar, a company that puts a new spin on solar power generation for home and light commercial use. PVT’s Echo system supplements typical photovoltaic solar panels with technology that captures the heat they generate to supply additional power.

Earlier in the week, a Khosla Ventures portfolio company Amyris — makers of non-petroleum fuels and chemicals — raised $85 million through an initial public offering (according to Fortune).

Khosla noted that Amyris came to him wanting to produce anti-malarial drugs. Six months later, after “playing around” with the company’s biotechnology, they were producing jet fuels. His fund made a $15.59 million investment in the business that’s now worth about $65.36 million.

The amounts of venture capital invested by Khosla may sound high to the uninitiated. But relative to clean tech deals struck by other funds, Khosla said his were 20% lower: “Our median series A investment is around $3 million. I don't care what other VCs are doing. I'm telling you the facts of our business. The way we practice venture capital, we help entrepreneurs experiment with technology, take their crazy ideas, their best ideas, and then create a position where capital to get started becomes irrelevant.”

Joining Khosla on stage was General Electric’s Kevin Skillern, who heads up GE’s venture capital investments in clean energy. Skillern told TechCrunch immediately following the talk that GE is focused as much on creating and commercializing new technology, as it is on making installed, legacy systems more efficient. GE equipment produces 1/3 of the world’s power, and much of what’s already installed will be operating for more than another 10 years, he noted.

In contrast to Khosla, he believes that some clean tech startups — like those seeking large utilities as customers, and those who want to gain scale as quickly as possible to take advantage of government subsidies — simply do require more capital than startups in other sectors, like consumer web and entertainment, to get started. Khosla made the case that clean tech firms don’t have to be capital intensive compared to other tech startups.

Khosla Ventures invests in companies whose well-being is not dependent on government subsidies over time. “Subsidies can help technologies get started. But I don't invest in anything that can't achieve market competitiveness in five years. You should be able to achieve the price for a good that will sell in India or China without a subsidy in that time.”

Skillern and Khosla both called on Silicon Valley and corporate venture capitalists to think less about what Khosla called “nice features,” and more about truly disruptive businesses that will solve the world’s problems.

Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk a bit with our own Michael Arrington. After she revealed a couple new Google Instant features, she went right into another topic: social.

Michael (of course) asked Mayer to disclose Google’s plans for their upcoming social strategy. Mayer (of course) would not do that. But then Michael turned the discussion to a social product Google does currently offer: Orkut. To hear Mayer tell it, the service never caught on in the U.S. simply because it was far too slow after its initial launch.

Orkut launched in January of 2004, and as Mayer remembers it, it attracted “several million users in a few days“. This caused the network to slow down to a crawl, Mayer noted. And that, in turn, turned a lot of users away from it — at least in the U.S. “It’s all about speed here,” she said.

In Brazil, where Orkut is still dominant, it was a different story. Those users didn’t mind the slowness, Mayer said (though she didn’t elaborate as to why they didn’t care). As a result, it took off, and even today it’s still the dominant social network.

Mayer noted that it took a little bit of time, but eventually Google was able to scale Orkut for its traffic surge. But by then it was probably already too late in the U.S., Mayer indicated.

Michael kept trying to get Mayer to say that in Google’s effort to play catch up in social in the U.S. they should buy Twitter or even Facebook. Again, she wouldn’t do that. She gushed about Twitter (which she said she uses daily), and she said she thought Facebook has a different mentality than what Google is trying to do with social.

Mayer also said that Google remains committed to Orkut — at least in Brazil and India where again, it’s big. “We’re pretty happy with it,” she said.

Digg founder Kevin Rose here at TC Disrupt and got back to our seats to discover that a new “Digg This” button had just been launched both on our site and on Digg.com itself.

Perhaps this “design refresh” is the first in a slew of features about to launch in the coming weeks? While prettier and faster, the button opens up a pop window where you have to “Digg” the story for a second time in order for the “Digg” to register which still seems like an uneccessary extra step.

To the left is the new button in all its iterations, via Digg designer Danny Trinh. Below is what the button used to look like on Digg Version 3:

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage to talk with our own Michael Arrington. But before her talk she had a couple new things to announce. Specifically, new things about the recently-announced Google Instant.

Mayer invited a couple Google employees up on stage to show off a couple new Google Instant features. One allows you to use keyboard navigations with the service. The other brings Instant features to other search verticals — like video and news search. These features will be rolling out of the next couple of days, Google says.

Mayer also noted that Google Instant is available to users in 12 new countries today. Those are: Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

“Google Instant makes your searches two to five seconds faster,” Mayer noted based on Google’s study of users. In aggregate, this represents a huge amount of time saving for Google users, Mayer said.

More: Marissa Mayer: Orkut's U.S. Failure Was Due To Slow Performance After Fast Growt

Shervin Pishevar, founder and Executive Chairman of mobile gaming company SGN, has just taken the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to showcase an impressive new iPhone application called Mini Tycoon: Casino. The game is the first of a series that Pishevar believes will be extremely popular on the platform — he’s predicting Casino will do over $1 million in revenue per month.

The preview of the game was fairly brief, but gameplay will be similar to Farmville, except you’ll be planting slot machines instead of crops on your path to building a successful virtual casino. Pishevar says that the game has been in development for a year and that a huge amount of attention has been paid to getting the details right — and the graphics do look quite polished.

Pishevar also talked about the game’s scaling abilities. He says that many similar games on the iPhone have issues supporting a high number of concurrent users (he also says that most of them aren’t polished). Mini Tycoon, he says, will be capable of supporting Farmville-like numbers of users, and it sounds like he’s hoping for Farmville-like success.

Mini Tycoon: Casino is only the first game in this series — SGN plans to leverage the platform to quickly build similar games with different themes. The game is being submitted to the App Store today, so we can expect it in the next two weeks or less. We’ll have a more extensive rundown once we get our hands on the app.

Digg founder Kevin Rose took the stage here at TCDisrupt today to talk to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington about the future of Digg among other things. Rose referred to his brief five month stint as CEO after former co-founder Jay Adelson left as something that was less than pleasant.

“I think of myself as a PM [product manager] and creative director, so it was hard being a cheerleader for 60 some employees — 10 to 15 employees is where I max out. I like to ship product and rollout features and when you can’t do that it’s frustrating.”

Digg’s most recent foray into product has definitely been a learning experience for Rose, “I thought we had a better solution than ‘Upcoming,’” he said referring to the beloved feature on the old Digg that showed you stories that were about to hit the Digg front page. Digg removing the feature on V4 was the focal point of much user dissatisfaction and Rose ended up having to return it to the site on its own tab and also at http://digg.com/upcoming.

“We have a very passionate dedicated community, then they revolt on you and you have the homepage stories of ‘Digg sucks.’ It’s not all or nothing.”

One revelation that came up during the talk? Jay Adelson, Rose and Digg crew turned down an offer of $60 million dollars in cash plus $20 million in earnout during the trajectory of the social news site. Rose told Arrington that he didn’t regret turning down the offer, which we’re guessing came either from Current or Google (Rose refused to disclose).

Rose told TechCrunch that while turning down the offer and his now infamous “Valley Boys” Business Week cover are among the things he doesn’t regret during a career filled with ups and downs, he hopes that startup founders can avoid some his other stumbles, such focusing on Digg revenue instead of building out features and not slowly rolling out Version 4 to users.

Says Rose, “I’m trying to help entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes I made, because I made a lot of them.”

At the Web 2.0 expo in New York today, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor announced that 2 million websites have added the “Like” button and Facebook’s other new social plug-ins, which were launched five months ago. Facebook also confirmed the stat in a Tweet.

That’s impressive considering the number was 50,000 only five months ago. Facebook’s new social plugins,which include a ‘Like’ button for the web and an array of other widgets, were launched at f8 in April.

Aside from the Like Button, Facebook's other social plugins include an activity feed that displays your friends' activity, a widget with recommended articles, and the Facepile, which shows you photos of your friends who also use the site you're browsing. And Facebook recently revealed a slimmer, sleeker Like button.

In a note posted today, Facebook says that some of the publishers using the new plugins are seeing increases in traffic after embedding the new social plugins. For example, ABC News saw a 190% jump and Gawker saw a 200% increase in traffic. Publishers also reported increased engagement on their sires. For example, NHL.com reports that visitors are reading 92% more articles, spending 85% more time on-site, viewing 86% more videos, and generating 36% more visits.

Fresh off a $7.4 million funding round, last year’s TechCrunch50 winner Redbeacon took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today. The company announced that it has expanded to its second city; Seattle. Redbeacon was previously only available in San Francisco (and has over 5,000 Bay Area providers listed on the site).

Redbeacon lets users search, browse and book local service providers – from plumbers to bakers – on its website. Service providers pay a fee to Redbeacon for new paying customers, or in some categories, like lawyers, for a lead.

In conjunction with the expansion, Redbeacon also debuted a widget that allows third party websites to embed core Redbeacon features into their sites, allowing visitors to sign up for services within another site. The widget includes all of the functionality as the site, letting visitors choose their particular service in their geographic area, select a date for delivery or meeting and more.

For publishers, Redbeacon will pay a share of revenue generated from those customers. Publishers can also customize the look and feel of the widget. Partner sites can even specifiy certain types of jobs that can be booked through the widget as well. Redbeacon already has a number of launch partners, including NBC Bay Area’s local TV site as well as a Fox affiliate in Seattle that will be including the widget on their websites.

We brought 4INFO founder and CEO Zaw Thet, VP of Groupon Mihir Shah and Brand In Hand founder John Hadl together to talk about their experiences in mobile marketing here at TechCrunch Disrupt, on a panel moderated by TechCrunch’s own Jason Kincaid.

Panel moderator Jason Kincaid began the panel with the classic mobile marketing example of a consumer having a phone in their pocket and having a push notification give them an alert that there’s a frozen yogurt discount nearby.

Shah, Thet and Hadl all agreed that this hypothetical usecase of hyper-local targeted marketing was not in the cards, with the industry focusing more on advertising against that the consumer wants as opposed to offering up random discounts and ads based on what’s nearby.

Thet expressed the primary difficulty of  hyper-targeted push mobile ads being fragmentation, that it was really difficult to take the million dollar budget for a client like Tide and apply it to a micro scale. “I don’t need to give an offer to someone on their car, just because it’s in the area,” says Hadl, “there’s no demand for it, it’s not that there’s not tech.”

Kincaid also brought up the famous Carol Bartz quote about Apple’s iAds, “That’s going to fall apart for them. Advertisers are not going to have that type of control over them. Apple wants total control over those ads,” and asked the panel whether they thought this was true.

The panel agreed that price rather than control was this issue with iAds; “Some people can’t afford them,” said Hadl, “Everyone likes to shoot at the front runner, but the only thing that people really have a problem with is pricing.” This is interesting especially in light of recent reports that iAds is slowly encroaching in Google’s mobile share.

The panel also agreed that biggest problem faced by the mobile ads industry currently is that supply greatly out weighs demand, and Hadl hopes that demand will increase based on better targeting.

Thet brought up a resolution to the transition that mobile marketing is currently experiencing; While the usecase of walking by a Starbucks and having a coupon ping to your phone is not viable, mobile ads on apps like Citysearch and Yelp, where consumers are actually looking for services and products could be hugely profitable. Says Shah,“You need to figure out where your users and engagement is.”

Thet also added that developers interesting in taking advantage of the growing mobile ad space should try to connect to consumers in more interesting ways, “Don’t be scared to do more than a 20-50 banner. interruptive advertising does work on the mobile. It’s got to be more than just the banner.”

On stage today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, recalled a story from the days when he backed Excite, one of the original Internet portals. Specifically, he spoke briefly about the time they failed to acquire Google.

This story has been circulated for a while, but not many people know about it. Khosla stated it simply: Google was willing to sell for under a million dollars, but Excite didn’t want to buy them.

Khosla, who was also a partner at Kleiner Perkins (which ended up backing Google) at the time, said he had “a lot of interesting discussions” with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at the time (early 1999). The story goes that after Excite CEO George Bell rejected Page and Brin’s $1 million price for Google, Khosla talked the duo down to $750,000. But Bell still rejected that.

Whoops. As of today, Google’s market cap stands at $167 billion.

Excite, meanwhile, was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2004. That company became Ask.com, and now it’s owned by Barry Diller’s IAC. As Diller stated at Disrupt today, Ask would probably be better off outside of IAC at this point.

What might have been…

Last month, we noted that PayPal would soon launch a new version of their iPhone app that would be more check-friendly. That app should be released in the next day or so, PayPal’s Laura Chambers revealed on stage today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

On a panel alongside Keith Rabois from Square and Holger Luedorf from Foursquare, Chambers said that this new app will allow you to take a picture of the front and back of a check with your iPhone camera, and it will be added to your PayPal balance.

Such functionality has been explored by some banks already, and it’s a very useful technology. Chambers notes that the ability to do this actually stemmed from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 nine years ago when much of the infrastructure of the U.S. was either shut down on purpose or was struggling under the weight of demand. The U.S. then started to pass legislation to make things like this possible. Such a system allows you to easily transfer money under a variety of situations, obviously.

Of course, as Rabois noted, Square is trying to go one level beyond that and get rid of checks entirely. That would be even more convenient.

Bose showed off their latest innovation yesterday: The VideoWave, an average 46-inch LCD with an enlarged Wave Radio speaker setup bolted on the backside. It’s expensive. Of course it’s expensive. I mean, it’s a Bose system. Did you expect anything less? However, it’s a tad too expensive at $5,349 and I believe Bose knows this.

Now, I understand Bose and their target demographic. I sold AV equipment retail for years at Circuit City and know that Bose products sell themselves. They require nothing more than a quick demo and a store credit card with a high enough limit. My friend’s father recently “treated” himself to Bose speakers after retirement, beaming with pride as he unboxed his set.

It’s even easier to sell against Bose, though. All it requires is a reasonable argument from the salesman and suddenly a customer is spending hundreds, if not thousands less, on an Onkyo HTIB with professional installation. It’s this logic Bose is afraid of and perhaps explains the high-price. Bose knows they’re not going to sell a lot of these TVs.

Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, IAC CEO Barry Diller took the stage for a fireside chat with our own Michael Arrington. They covered a lot of topics, but the first thing Diller keyed in on was the most important: net neutrality.

“All of you have to get out there and start arguing for this strongly,” Diller emphatically said. He clearly feels very strongly about this topic. “It is the lives of you all and the people coming after you — we have to protect that,” he continued.

He noted that some Republicans are in opposition to the idea of net neutrality on the grounds that they don’t want government rules on anything. “It’s absurd,” Diller said. “We have to unleash the FCC,” he continued noting that they were bogged down with typical bureaucracy.

Diller said that the FCC has to help get broadband Internet much more developed in this country. He noted that the U.S. is 16th in the world with regard to broadband. “It’s shameful,” he said noting that we’re the leaders in technological innovation.

He then talked a bit about search neutrality. “I want search to remain as neutral as possible,” he said. He said he was worried that Google is starting to get more vertically integrated. He admitted that he had a vested interest in search neutrality as he owns a lot of content — and also Ask.com. Though, the latter, he isn’t exactly bullish about.

In Silicon Valley fortunes can change in a matter of weeks. Last year’s awkward nobody entrepreneur could be today’s mogul, angel or VC. This always creates an interesting social tension: Suddenly the guy who was skulking around coffee shops trying to get his business plan in an angel’s hand is the guy new entrepreneurs are skulking around. No one wants to become too cloistered, because they remember where they came from and they might miss the next Facebook. But on the other hand, being too open is a dangerous slippery slope of a time suck with diminishing returns.

That’s why angels I talked to backstage at Disrupt this week were in love with Formspring. (Note to self: Someone’s valuation is going up in the next round…) It’s a way to interact and answer questions without exposing yourself too much or giving up too much control over what’s published. They called it “office hours” and today a bunch of angels are holding these open forums on Formspring at noon pacific time, including Travis Kalanick, Josh Felser, David Lee, Mike Maples, and Steve Anderson. If you need a break from our Disrupt live feed, head over and ask some questions to some of the Valley’s most powerful mentors and investors.

Here at TechCrunch Disrupt we do things in realtime. So when news starting breaking that IAC CEO Barry Diller was stepping down as chairman of the board of Live Nation, we did the obvious thing: we asked him.

Diller took the stage at Disrupt this morning to speak with our own Michael Arrington. We we brought up the Live Nation rumor, Diller said that he did tell the rest of the board that by the end of the year, they should start looking for a new Chairman. But he also said that there was “no rush” to do this.

In other words, he seems to be saying that reports of him immediately leaving the board in a huff are incorrect. He did say that another board member clearly leaked about an hour after the talk for some reason, which he was a bit confused by, but he’s not mad about it.

Diller implied that he’s simply on too many boards already (he’s on five) and that he doesn’t have much to add to Live Nation’s board, in his view.

Diller became the Chairman of the group after Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster in February (IAC has a stake in Ticketmaster).