The video is boring. I’m not exaggerating. However, it happens to be the most complete demo of a polished Android tablet without any marketing bull. It’s just some dude running through the major apps. That’s it. It actually does a fine job of prove Android as a practical tablet OS. It shows the mobile operating system as responsive, well suited for the tablet format, and overall usable — all items that cannot be said about the HP Slate after watching its video demo from earlier today.

Of course the demo is probably highly scripted and not likely to show any downsides to to the product. But that’s fine. This video at least shows that Samsung knows that it must show off the Tab’s raw capabilities. That’s what’s going to sell tablets.

Online ticketing startup Eventbrite is amping up the social features of its service by creating deeper hooks with Facebook. When you purchase a ticket through Eventbrite (like you can for Disrupt, for instance), you can already share that purchase with your Facebook friends. But now Eventbrite will be adding a deeper layer of integration with Facebook to power social event discovery.

Later today, when you log into Eventbrite with your Facebook ID, you will start to see all the Eventbrite events your Facebook friends are going to. It will show you a list of social recommendations based on the Eventbrite tickets your friends have bought and chosen to share publicly. It is all opt-in. Activities ned to be shared publicly on an event-by-event basis, and only if the event organizer has made the event itself public.

Eventbrite is calling this a new “event graph” (like a social graph for events), but it is only for Eventbrite events. There are shades of Plancast in the new feature (hi, Mark). Plancast, which itself is integrated with Eventbrite, lets you share events no matter whether you bought a ticket or not.

But Eventbrite actually does sell tickets and makes money on each ticket sold. The more that people share the events they are going to on Facebook, the more tickets Eventbrite and event organizers who use it sell. Now what if Facebook started tying its events to Eventbrite ticket sales, and maybe allowed people to use Facebook Credits to buy tickets. It’s just a thought, but you can see where all of this might go. Check out this interview we did last November with Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz.

Once upon a time, Microsoft backed a format called HD DVD and, well, that didn’t turn out so well. But the departure from focusing on high-density physical media early on might have forced Microsoft — and the Xbox team — to look towards digital downloads for future products. UK Xbox chief, Stephen McGill, seems to agree and recently stated to gaming site Xbox Achievements that “People now recognize what a smart decision it was to keep the [Xbox 360] pricing low,” in reference to not including an advance optical format within the Xbox 360. Then he goes on to properly slam the Blu-ray format.

Apparently today the French equivalent of Black Friday for the local hi-tech market - everyone's out on a shopping spree. Ok, that's perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but still.  After Liligo's acquisition by Voyages-SNCF.com for some 20-30 million euros this morning, online publisher Commentcamarche announced that it is acquiring French Benchmark Group. Together, the two companies plan to give life to a top-tier media group, which should rank within the top 5 French online publishers. For the moment, the amount of the transaction has not officially been disclosed but some sites, including CF News, have said that it could be in 60 million euro ball park - which is double the amount that Liligo went for. Yet, for now, it's all just a Twitter rumor.

This guest post is by Tomer Dvir, Founder & CEO of Soluto.

It’s been just over 100 days since we stepped onto the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in New York City as an anonymous, under-the-radar startup. Two days later, we stepped off stage with the Disrupt Cup in our hands and got sucked into a tornado of downloads, happy users, angry users, global media attention, and very little sleep.

I have a very vivid memory of watching the first Battlefield demo at Disrupt, by our competitor UJAM, which was simply mind-blowing. Chris Sacca jammed with them, the judges screamed “amazing”, and the moderator (Paul Carr) commented “well, I feel sorry for the next start-up”. Two demos later we went on stage, told our story, and went on to win the show (UJAM was also in the final heat).

While Ishay Green, Roee Adler and I were telling Soluto's story in NYC, the team back home was struggling with the pace of downloads. Back in April, when we planned our goals, taking the launch at Disrupt into account, we figured that 300,000 downloads was an optimistic end-of-year target (no one downloads software anymore, right?).

Well, we certainly hit a nerve, and it seemed like the entire world reacted. Seven weeks after winning Disrupt, we were at over 500,000 downloads, and the rate kept growing. We had to shift timelines and priorities to focus solely on scale—improvements we planned for February 2011 had to happen yesterday.

Our first tiny feature, the boot analyzer/optimizer, started spreading virally between techies. Operating with no PR agency, Soluto was covered by "serious" publications such as the New York Times, ZDNet and PC World, but much more importantly, by over a thousand bloggers worldwide. Our users are spread across 150 countries. The United States leads (23% of users), followed by Germany, Japan, UK, India, Brazil, Italy, France and China. Meanwhile, Team Soluto grew by almost 40% since Disrupt.

Still, our launch was riddled with downtime, bugs, and frustrated users of all sorts. We even had to pull the download offline for over a month while we scaled up (it’s back now). It was a very difficult time. Anyone who's ever managed product or R&D knows this feeling of going home at 3am, with bugs still out there in the field, users still suffering, but you can't work fast enough to satisfy all of them, and there's no simple solution. We believe that the only way to succeed is to use plenty of common sense, never stop questioning yourself, and never ever fall in-love with your decisions.

The data we already have in our PC Genome database is mind-blowing and we will soon make it public, gradually. Just as a teaser, in case you thought Blue Screens Of Death (BSODs) have disappeared from the world, think again. We have logged well over 3 million BSODs and we know what causes most of them. Granted, some of them were caused by Soluto itself (roughly 750), but at least we know this, and we want every software developer to know the problems caused by his/her software.

I must address the criticism about TechCrunch allowing a startup that raised $8M to compete. I understand where this criticism is coming from, but I strongly disagree with it.

We're dealing with a damn complicated problem. Real research is required, and I mean real research—tackling kernel-level technological questions relevant to a billion PCs that no one in the world has answers for. It takes time, and we need to feed our 25 engineers. To date, the largest non-R&D expense at Soluto were the flight tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt NYC (we flew coach, cargo was fully booked).

There's a saying: "if you're 100% certain it can be done, you're probably not far enough ahead of the competition". That's what we live by.

Just four months after our launch, we've already been approached by many of the top 10 PC manufacturers, and our application is deployed in numerous Fortune 500 companies where IT managers are considering to deploy Soluto organization-wide. And this is just for our tiny boot feature, which is the first step in our development roadmap.

A few thank-yous are in order. To the bloggers worldwide who get what we're trying to do – thanks for seeing beyond the initial boot feature and into the revolution we're initiating (even to those who almost got us kicked-out of Disrupt). To our amazing team of developers (please stop reading this and go back to work). And to TechCrunch, for giving us and many other start-ups a stage to shine.

This is what TechCrunch Disrupt did to Soluto. We'll be at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, and we’ll be bringing the Disrupt Cup to hand off to the next winner. As you can see form the video below we had a lot of fun with it. Good luck to all the Battlefield startups and see you at Disrupt.

This morning, Amazon released a small update to its Android app, including voice search and a Wikipedia dictionary. Hidden in the release was another interesting stat—the U.S. Kindle Store now has over 700,000 books. This is up from 670,000 books three weeks ago.

It seems like Amazon is adding books to the Kindle store at a steady pace; As of the end of April, the store had 500,000 titles. The U.K. store only has 400,000 titles, as of our last report. Barnes and Noble claims to have 1 million titles for purchase.

Amazon claims that the latest version of the e-books are selling like hotcakes, with more next generation Kindles ordered in the first four weeks of availability than in the same timeframe for past versions of the device. And Amazon sold three times as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as it did in the first half of 2009.

Of course, this fast growth doesn’t mean Amazon is not paying attention to the competition. The company recently released a new ad directly targeting the iPad, illustrating that Apple’s device isn't as easily visible in direct sunlight as the Kindle for reading.

The HP Slate is a real product — numerous mentions from HP VPs and various leaks state that — but it’s far from “official.” Somehow, though, a somewhat-thorough video review was just posted on the ol’ Interweb for the whole word to see. Remember, this product is head for the enterprise market and you can’t even buy it, so don’t get all flame-happy when you see with your own eyes that Windows simply isn’t meant to be controlled with you fingers.

This demo is a laughable mess when it gets to the UI demonstration even though the person recording says the Slate is ”pretty responsive, pretty quick.” Yeah, alright. At least the hardware looks solid. Click through for the video and your first chuckle of the day.

Think Finance, a company that helps serve the banking needs of the “unbanked”, has secured a $90 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital Advisors. The company, which is profitable and has raised $60 million in VC funding from Sequoia and other investors, will use this line of credit to fund expansion of its existing banking products and work to develop new financial tools.

According to Think Finance CEO Ken Rees, there are 60 million “unbanked,” individuals in the U.S., which designate consumers who don’t have traditional bank accounts or cannot qualify for credit cards. Think Finance provides this population with pre-paid debit cards, online installment loans, financial literacy tools, and more. The company has served more than 1 million customers through its existing products.

For example, the company offers ThinkCash, an online installment loan that rewards customers for making timely payments and helps them to build a better credit profile. The company is also beta testing its latest product, Elastic, which blends a prepaid debit card with a flexible emergency cash line of credit.

Think Finance also licenses its products to traditional banks, such as the First Bank of Delaware, so that these institutions can offer products for individuals who are “unbanked.” Think Finance takes a revenue share from these partnerships.

Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is sharing stats about its free music cloud service that allows you sync your entire music collection across Android phones and PCs/Macs today. Since the service’s public launch in June, mSpot has seen 500,000 downloads of the streaming music app to Android phones.

Here’s how it works. mSpot’s application operates in the background of your computer and phone managing the upload and day-to-day syncing of your music library. In addition, it can upload playlists, coverart, ratings and song information you may have entered using iTunes. The application will also make automatic updates whenever changes occur in your library,re-sync music when new songs are added, across different connected devices.

Today, mSpot is offering new features including storage options that allow users to keep up to 40 GB of music in the cloud, which includes roughly 32,000 songs for $3.99 per month. mSpot offers free storage for the first 2 gigabytes (approximately 1600 songs).

Other new features announced today include voice activated playback via song/artist/album search for Android, prioritized uploading by Artist, Album and Playlists, the option to stream music (not save on phone) to conserve SD card space and the ability to load songs quickly on the phone via USB sideloading.

The service also promises to handle transitions between spotty and solid coverage areas and reduces data charges on your mobile plan. Other features include the ability to see lyrics of songs and to make a ringtone out of any song.

As we’ve written in the past, mSpot has been developing this proprietary playback technology that allows users to play songs from the cloud instantly for four years. mSpot mobile application automatically senses network conditions and adapts playback accordingly even without network coverage.

CEO Daren Tsui says that the company didn’t expect demand for the Android app to scale so quickly. In fact, mSpot user data shows that mobile is gaining traction among users as an entertainment and cloud platform. According to internal company usage data, those customers who have the option to listen via both Web and Mobile spent the majority of the time (83% in August) listening on their mobile devices.

Clearly, mSpot’s streaming service is useful for Android users who don’t yet have a native application. But Google is expected to launch its own cloud-based music streaming service, which should be released later this year. The company even acquired streaming technology Simplify Media to boost its service.

Mspot also offers its Mobile Movies site, which will let users stream full-length movies on their mobile phones, on the web, so you can enjoy mSpot’s online streaming movie service on your computer. mSpot has struck deals with Paramount, Universal, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users' PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie.

The PC streaming functionality builds upon the mobile movie service mSpot launched last year. The service, which also includes an iPhone app, includes 1000 titles that can be streamed to both a computer and mobile device.

Mobile social network MocoSpace has raised $3.5 million in a round of strategic funding from SoftBank Capital. This brings the startup’s total funding to $10.5 million.

MocoSpace develops a web-based social network that counts over 14 million users and three billion page views per month. While the network, which launched in 2006, was previously only mobile web-based and prided itself on its users mainly being non-techies who don’t own an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, the site has evolved into smartphone apps as well. The site makes money with its virtual currency and through advertising and mainly reaches the 18 to 34 age demographic.

MocoSpace recently launched an Android app, which allows for live chat with friends currently on app or on the mobile website, photo uploads, profile viewing and commenting and message notifications. And MocoSpace now offers users a website, a feature phone site, a smartphone site, and and iPhone app.

The new funding will be used towards expanding social gaming on the platform. The MocoSpace audience already plays one million games on the site per month, but the company will soon be launching its own browser-based mobile social games, and is currently developing partnerships with mobile web game developers to provide a wide range of game titles on its platform. New funding will also be used towards hiring developers and engineers to support the new gaming platform.

Cloud-based storage and sharing application Box.net has bet big on iOS apps so far, and has seen considerable traction with its iPad and iPhone apps. Since launch, Box.net has seen 200,000 downloads of its iPhone and iPad apps, and topped 1 million content previews on mobile in the second quarter of 2010. Today, Box is expanding beyond the iOS platform to offer users a free Android app, which is now available on the Android Marketplace. Similar to Box's other mobile offerings, the Android app makes it easy for users to access, share and manage their business content on-the-go. You can browse through files and folders; preview files, including documents, media files and Web documents; share Box links to files and folders via email; and upload files stored on your Android device.

MapQuest, an AOL subsidiary and until further notice still the No. 2 Internet-mapping service after Google's, recently debuted a site in the U.K. based on a project called OpenStreetMap, which is dedicated to user-created mapping. Today, the company announced the beta launch of four new European mapping sites built on OpenStreetMap data, in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

If you haven't heard of SwiftKey by TouchType and you have an Android phone, you're either suffering with the native keyboard or trying out some of the other popular alternatives, such as Swype for instance. The release of the bigger and better SwiftKey for Android wouldn't be big news, if it wasn't for the fact that it is. I've been using the keyboard for about two months now and despite some hiccups, it is already a lifesaver. The new version is slick, not to mention faster.

Here in Europe we've been fascinated by what has become known as AngelGate. But after talking all day to many contacts today across the tech scene in Europe, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I'm not about to blow the lid on anything similar in Europe. Leave aside the arguments about what happened at Bin 38, and taking on the hypothetical situation that "Super Angels" (and there are handful) might be colluding in Europe, I'm afraid there is no evidence for this (at least that I can find). Here's why.

It’s come to this: the success of Netflix and Redbox in the United States have driven Blockbuster, as expected, to file for bankruptcy protection after failing to adequately and swiftly adapt its movie-rental model from physical storefronts to mail-order and online technology pioneered by its aforementioned competitors.

The company filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, listing assets of $1.02 billion and debt of $1.46 billion. The company's largest trade creditor is Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment with a $21.6 million claim, according to today's filing.

The news, first reported by Bloomberg, comes almost 25 years after Blockbuster opened its first store (Dallas, Texas on October 26, 1985).

Blockbuster’s non-U.S. operations and its domestic and international franchisees, all of which are legally separate entities, were not included in the filings and are not parties to the Chapter 11 proceedings.

Blockbuster in a statement says it has reached an agreement with a group of bondholders, led by billionaire Carl Icahn, holding approximately 80.1 percent principal amount of its 11 3/4 percent senior secured notes on the terms of a plan to recapitalize its balance sheet and put it in a stronger financial position.

Blockbuster claims said plan would reduce its indebtedness significantly, from nearly $1 billion at present day to an estimated $100 million or less when implemented.

The company has secured a commitment of $125 million in new “debtor-in-possession” financing from the senior noteholders to help meet its obligations to customers, suppliers and employees in the ordinary course during the recapitalization process.

Blockbuster says all its U.S. operations, including its stores, DVD vending kiosks, by-mail and digital businesses, are open and serving customers in the normal course and that the company is fulfilling all orders as usual, including continuing to provide access to new releases the first day they become available.

For the time being, all 3,000 of the company’s stores in the United States will remain open. If I were you, I wouldn’t be too sure about your neighborhood video store sticking around for that much longer, however.

The company’s international operations in Canada, Denmark, Italy, Mexico, and the United Kingdom are also conducting business as usual – the only country where the axe is falling is Argentina, which Blockbuster says has experienced continued shortfalls in operating cash flow.

At a time when French entrepreneurs were starting to get all anxious about there being so few acquisitions by French companies in the local hi-tech market, Voyages-SNCF.com kicked it up a notch and announced that it was acquiring travel search engine Liligo. The news officially broke this morning in La Tribune but without much detail. The official amount of the transaction has not yet been released, our sources are telling us it's somewhere around 20 to 30 million euros. But obviously it's still a bit early to tell regardless because a certain amount is dependent on Liligo's performance for this year.

Yandex, Russia's leading search engine, has beefed up its music streaming options with the launch of the Yandex.Music service. In addition to single tracks previously available for streaming directly on yandex.ru, where available, users who search for a particular track, album or artist will be re-directed to Yandex.Music in which they can make their own playlists or further search for music by style or genre etc. In terms of restrictions, the service allows users to add both tracks and entire albums to playlists and stream an unlimited amount of music for free, perhaps reflecting the prevalence of the 'grey' market in Russia.

For a company that was founded back in late 2002, LinkedIn has been notoriously inactive on the acquisition front to date. This year, that changed with the purchase of recommendation technology company mSpoke. And now, almost 6 weeks after that announcement, the business social networking company says it has made a second acquisition.

LinkedIn is buying San Francisco-based ChoiceVendor, a startup that provides ratings and reviews of B2B service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States.

Like with the mSpoke purchase, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

From the sound of it, LinkedIn is buying the company mostly for its team. At least that’s what I read in LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner‘s supporting quote:

"Our acquisition of ChoiceVendor is right in line with our top priority to build a world-class team at LinkedIn. We've admired the work that Yan-David, Rama, and the talented ChoiceVendor team have done for some time now and are excited to have them join us, especially given their highly relevant work experience."

Yan-David being ChoiceVendor co-founder and chief exec Yan-David Erlich, and Rama being VP of Engineering Rama Ranganath.

Prior to founding ChoiceVendor, Elrich was an entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures and the founder and CEO of Mogad / Social.IM which was acquired by iSkoot in 2008. Previously, he also held software engineering and product management roles at Microsoft and Google.

Rama Ranganath was at Google before co-founding ChoiceVendor, where he was an early engineer on the AdSense team and eventually managed several teams including the Google Ad Manager team. Prior to that, Rama worked at Microsoft.

According to a notice on the ChoiceVendor website, the just-acquired company is ceasing operations, effectively immediately.

LinkedIn says it currently boasts more than 75 million members globally and expects to have 900 employees by the end of this year. The company has long been rumored to prepare for an IPO, but to date has not confirmed plans to do so in the immediate future.

(Via BusinessWeek)

On the surface, Tecca looks like a pretty cool service. You download an app, browse it for devices you’re looking at in store, and figure out if the price is right. How? By checking out online prices, most notably the prices available from Best Buy, one of the investors in Fuse Capital, creator of Tecca. Even if the app brings up 50 other prices from 50 other stores, the assumption here is that BB has the best price and you go home happy.

Best Buy is already in the cat bird seat when it comes to electronics purchases. Companies that support “lowest price” challenges (we visit P.C. Richards in New York for appliances, for example) are beholden to their low prices and although they’re often draconian when it comes to checking your wallet on the way out the door. But they’re the only game in town and services like Tecca, even if they don’t immediately bring up Best Buy pricing, is an effort to solidify that concept before any upstarts come into the market.

Read more…

This whole Facebook Phone thing just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

First, we broke the story about the project. Then Facebook PR officially denied it, saying our story was “not accurate.” Naturally, they were arguing semantics, as we suspected, and other reports about such a project quickly followed. This led to a sit down with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during which he acknowledged that our leak was “probably accurate.”

Okay fine, misunderstanding, miscommunication, whatever. But tonight brings another new report about the project. This time, Bloomberg is reporting that Facebook is working with INQ Mobile on two smartphones that will first hit Europe, and then come to the U.S. to potentially be sold through AT&T. These phones are believed to run on Google’s Android operating system, but likely a modified version with deeper Facebook integration.

But here’s what’s weird about this. When Facebook PR denied our original story, they noted that the high profile employees Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos were likely working on other projects like Connect for the iPhone and the INQ1 phone — the first INQ phone with some Facebook integration. In my follow-up, I noted that the idea that two of the key architects for Firefox and Chrome OS (Hewitt and Papakipos, respectively) were working on something like the INQ phone was humorous. And in his sit down with us, Zuckerberg seemed to agree:

[...] different people come to us with different ideas all the time, and we mentioned the example of the INQ phone in the past, and I think you appropriately said that it isn't some massive big thing, and the reality is we don't think it is a massive big thing either, but it is cool and actually a lot of people bought it.

Later:

Interestingly, a lot of this stuff, we don't even do the engineering work. The INQ phone, I don't think we had any engineers work on it.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s statement to Bloomberg said the following:

We've been working with INQ for a couple of years now to help them build a deeply integrated Facebook experience on their devices.

So if it’s not engineers, which team exactly is working with INQ on these phones? Just the marketing department? Just the team that does deals?

Or perhaps Zuckerberg was just refering to the INQ1, and these newer INQ phones will be different — but it sure doesn’t sound like that.

The quest to find the Facebook Phone continues — perhaps even inside Facebook itself.

I love Quora. I don’t know what it is about the service, but something makes interesting people give very interesting answers to a huge range of questions. Take Paul Buchheit, for example.

Buchheit is an angel investor and co-founder of FriendFeed, the social aggregation and conversation service that Facebook acquired last year (he now works at Facebook doing well, something). But he’s perhaps best known as the key person behind the creation of Gmail for Google. He also had a hand in the creation of AdSense/AdWords as well — you know, the way Google makes all their money. Point is, when he compares Facebook to Google, it’s worth listening to. And that’s exactly what he did a couple days ago on Quora.

“I believe many people were (and still are) significantly undervaluing Facebook equity. It has the potential to be worth more than Google,” Buchheit wrote.

That’s a big statement. But depending on who you talk to, it’s either crazy or a certainty. Buchheit obviously has a vested interest in saying that — quite literally. With the Facebook deal, he and his fellow FriendFeeders were undoubtedly given a nice basket of stock options. At the time, it was believed that the total deal was worth about $50 million, with around $30 million of that in Facebook stock. In other words, if Facebook is one day worth more than Google, Buchheit will be very, very rich.

All of this came up because someone on Quora posed the question: ”Is Paul Buchheit considered a successful entrepreneur?” — and Buchheit himself responded. “I don’t know, but I’m happy with how things worked out :),” he led off before making his prediction.

At the time of the FriendFeed deal, Facebook was valued around $6.5 billion — “silly-low“, as Buchheit puts it. Today, on SecondMarket, Facebook’s valuation is over $30 billion. This means that the roughly $30 million in Facebook stock (we’ll just say that’s accurate for now, but who knows) is worth something north of $125 million. That all of a sudden makes the FriendFeed acquisition worth something like $150 million (again, hypothetically)!

“I think re-doing the math on this deal in a couple of years should be very interesting,” Buchheit concludes with.

Google’s current market cap value is about $165 billion. If Facebook is to get that high, they’ll have to grow in value six times over (and they’ll undoubtedly have to be public in order for that to happen). That would make FriendFeed’s (again, hypothetical) shares worth over $750 million, with the total deal value approaching $800 million.

Wow.

If Facebook gets anywhere near that in value, Buchheit is right. He’ll be seen as a very successful entrepreneur.

The “Waiting for Superman” movement continues to sweep through the Valley with news that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has donated $100 million to Newark Schools– no doubt encouraged by his COO Sheryl Sandberg who has been a big supporter of the movie and the movement to reform public education.

Some people have insinuated the move was a calculated ploy to whitewash Zuckerberg’s image with the fictional and snarky “The Social Network” coming out and getting rave reviews. Although Zuckerberg sounded more media trained than I’ve ever heard him in his interview this week with Mike and Jason, the idea that he donated a sum that large to rebut at movie that’s widely-documented to be fictional is a stretch. Especially considering this week’s leaked emails and IMs weren’t exactly a smoking gun supporting the whole evil genius theory.

But I’ll tell you who will win big social capital points as “Waiting for Superman” gains steam: Bill “still the richest man” Gates. It’s hard to remember, but Microsoft used to be a widely admired company before the antitrust trial. The tide changed so much that Gates became a de facto pop culture villain whether you were a Microsoft fan or not. Hollywood described him as an evil genius manipulating his college-era-BFF well before Zuckerberg and “The Social Network” were a glint in Aaron Sorkin’s eye. He was creamed with a pie. He was mocked on the Simpsons for “buying out” aka wrecking Homer’s Internet company. And there were many other indignities. His name was pop-culture shorthand for Machiavellian. I’m not saying some of those indignities weren’t deserved. But driving home after watching a screening of “Waiting for Superman” my husband– an avowed Mac zealot– remarked that he suddenly realized he no longer hates Bill Gates.

The goodwill has been building for a while– the TED talks, the mosquito nets, the All Things D chum-fest with Steve Jobs, the truckloads of cash for the poor. But somehow seeing him in this movie, juxtaposed with an emotional story and kids that are hard not to root for, and given the fact that he’s gone out stumping for the film– well, it just Al-Gores-him-up a bit. (Although admittedly, that still may not be enough for Netscape founders and shareholders.)

Earlier today we published the full transcript of an engrossing, detailed interview we had with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that focused primarily on the social network’s mobile plans. During our conversation, he talked about how Facebook would ideally like to make your entire phone social: enter your login information once, and your apps should know about your interests and who your friends are. Compelling as that may sound (assuming you aren’t concerned about any potential privacy issues), there’s still a big roadblock to seeing it come to fruition: Facebook would need to have deep access to the phone’s OS to make this happen.

That isn’t going to happen any time soon on the iPhone, which, as Zuckerberg says, is “hard to penetrate” — without Apple’s cooperation, Facebook won’t be able to do an especially robust integration:

Mark Zuckerberg: For platforms that are really important, but are hard to penetrate, like iPhone, we'll just do as much as we can. For Android, we can customize it a bit more. Other folks are going to want to work with us on specific things. But, our goal is not to build a phone that competes with the iPhone or anything like that.

And Facebook isn’t about to build its own operating system from the ground up, because that would be a time and resource-consuming endeavor. Which leaves… Android.

Google’s mobile operating system is famously open-source, which means that other companies like Facebook are free to tweak it to their heart’s content, revamping the UI or even adding a new social layer, while leaving the nuts and bolts that make the phone tick in place. Mucking with Android code could preclude Facebook from being able to include some of Google’s Android applications, like Gmail and Android Market — Google has tighter restrictions on who can bundle these apps — but that may not be a dealbreaker for the social network, especially if it’s looking to make the phone a Facebook-centric experience.

Rumors of Facebook working on a custom Android build were first reported by Silicon Alley Insider, after our original story describing Facebook’s mobile ambitions first came out over the weekend. And during our interview Zuckerberg essentially confirmed that Facebook was at least experimenting with Android:

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we'll build our own operating system or something, but who knows. That is more history than we've had so far with the company, so it is really hard to predict that far out. But for now, I think, everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system.

Jason Kincaid: So, it sounds like a customized version of Android seems like the best thing, the deepest integration you could do without building your own operating system.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, and I mean…

Michael Arrington: Is that putting words in your mouth?

Mark Zuckerberg: No, I mean, we've looked a bunch of different technical things.

I know if we were going to build an operating system, then we wouldn't have anything to talk about for 4 years. And I know we didn't start 4 years ago, so I know we're nowhere near anything on that. What I can say generally is that our goal is not to build an operating system from scratch, or else not to design hardware from scratch. Our goal is to make it so that we can design the best integrations in the widest variety of phones.

And to add even more fuel to the fire: as I wrote this, Bloomberg published a report stating that “Facebook Inc. is working with mobile-handset manufacturer INQ Mobile Ltd. on two smartphones that may be carried by AT&T Inc.,” which are “slated to run Google Inc.'s Android operating system”.

Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital was supposed to be my guest on “Ask A VC” this week, but called me this morning to cancel because his attorneys pointed out that doing press interviews while raising a new fund ran afoul of Securities & Exchange Commission rules. Oops. Filling in is Mike Hirshland- or “VC Mike” as he’s called.

Regular readers know the drill by now: Email your questions to AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com. You can leave them in the comments, too, but I’ll prioritize the ones emailed, because they don’t give the guest time to prepare an answer. I purposely invite guests who are leaders in the field and are blunt. So don’t be shy. With a lot of developments in the world of venture capital this week, there should be plenty of questions out there.

If you don’t know Hirshland here are some facts, that may prompt more questions:

1. He is a partner at Polaris Ventures in Boston, but spends almost all his time in the Valley because he says that’s where the best consumer Web companies are.
2. He founded Dogpatch Labs– a bicoastal hang-out spot in San Francisco and New York to help give him a leg up on deal flow in this ultra-competitive world.
3. His investments include Automatic (aka WordPress), ThingLabs (aka Brizzly) and Quantcast.
4. Before Polaris he worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee that investigated Microsoft’s antitrust issues.
5. He’s sort of an over-grown frat boy. I say that with love. You’ll see what I mean Friday when the show runs.

Send your questions now! We’re taping early this week.

Last night, hundreds of UC Berkeley students like myself sat in a packed auditorium to hear Michael Arrington speak with visiting Berkeley scholar, entrepreneur, and TechCrunch contributor, Professor Vivek Wadhwa. What was expected to be a mild discussion turned into a heated debate. Wadhwa firmly disagreed with Arrington on key topics on the agenda for the night such as the worth of a college education and, you guessed it, women in tech.

Arrington started off the talk saying what a room full of professors and college students dreaded to hear—that a college education can hinder instead of help the path of a brilliant entrepreneur. While he thought that for most of us college is a necessary stage for maturing, he half-joked that for the Zuckerbergs out there "The best thing in the world is to go to Harvard for a year and drop out. Everyone knows you were smart enough to get in".

For Arrington, great entrepreneurs are fearless daredevils who should be willing to take a risk as big as dropping out of college if they're passionate about their cause. Wadhwa cited the valid example of small-time entrepreneurs who need a college education in order to survive, with Arrington rebutting that "if you think small, you end up small".

The normally mild-mannered Wadhwa became visibly impassioned about the dearth of women in technology. Wadhwa argued that Arrington lived in an "ivory tower", oblivious to the ugly prejudice that Wadhwa has himself faced as an immigrant entrepreneur in North Carolina. Arrington admitted that as a white male, he could not speak about gender or race discrimination firsthand. Yet Arrington did point to his TC colleagues (and boss) as well as women in the audience who are living examples of the success and support women in tech are able to achieve.

As expected, Arrington riled up the crowd with more bold statements and colorful analogies. You'll have to watch to understand why he thinks "entrepreneurs are like pirates" or why he feels pressured to get a sex change.

Chilean Minister of Commerce Juan Andres Fontaine attended the event and had some news after the debate. He announced a $40,000 grant the government is offering to qualified international entrepreneurs to start companies in Chile. Chile's impressive pro-business, pro-immigration policy left many students in the audience thinking about packing their bags for South America and Arrington concerned about the potential loss of bright American minds to other countries with greater entrepreneurial opportunities.

The arguing did make for great TV, but the most interesting part of the lecture were the undeniable words of wisdom Arrington and Wadhwa had for their young audience. A piece of advice both panelists agreed on was to never forget the importance of ethics. As Arrington said, "Never hurt anyone to benefit yourself…but do something amazing, however you define it, and change the world”. That advice also serves as an important tip for young entrepreneurs hoping to gain exposure on TechCrunch: aim to change the world, because as Michael said "I'm not interested in the people who aren't".

Thanks to CalTV and camerapersons Matt Grobar and Tiffany Hsu for providing the video.