As more and more geolocation apps hit the market, there is an enormous amount of data from these applications that can be mashed up to provide greater use to consumers. Location-based advertising and marketing service Placecast is hoping to help developers sort through all this data with the debut of LocalBox, an ‘all things location-based’ data funnel that allows carriers, handset manufacturers, and app developer communities to add location-based information from any source into a mobile operating system or software development kit (SDK) at scale.

LocalBox, which is in private beta, sources data about location in real time from a number of different open API's, such as those for Foursquare, Gowalla, Citysearch and more, and then reconciles them all to a specific place. In addition to pulling in point of interest data from many different sources, LocalBox cleans up this data for duplicates, erroneous listings, and different expressions of a location, and then normalize them all to a single, correct location in real-time.

The new platform aggregates a number of different types of data for partners including, maps and listings data; venue pages (which include hours of operation, Flickr photos and more); check-ins and tweets; coupons, discount codes, and in-app location notifications from retailers; and transit and weather information.

For example, a yellow page listings provider who wants to a combination of real-time social media updates, venue information, and forms of monetization (location-relevant banner ads, coupons, discounts etc.) can do so using LocalBox.

Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast, says that one of the virtues of the service is that all information is updated in realtime. So as new venues, reviews, tweets, coupons and check-ins are constantly being updated, LocalBox will deliver this data as it is being released. Goodman says that LocalBox also solves the problem of the ‘location data crosswalk,’ which is the issue of duplicate locations, erroneous data or different expressions of a single place. LocalBox claims to reconcile this problem by taking on the task of cleaning up the data for partners.

Placecast has been working with a number of partners (who the company declined to name) to use LocalBox for their applications, and Goodman claims that these companies are pleased with the platform’s capabilities. In terms of monetization, Placecast charges a one time fee to use LocalBox, and then issues a licensing charge to users.

Placecast also offers developers a free Match API that takes take duplicate listings for a venue and combine them into one listing. The startup, which recently raised $3 million in funding, also markets its technology, called ShopAlerts, that allows retailers to bring people into their stores by sending them text messages when they get near their retail outlets.

Target will soon be able to fulfill all your iPad needs. October 3rd is the date that the Apple iPad should hit Target stores throughout the US. Best of all, Target credit card holders can get the iPad for a bit cheaper.

Target’s retail plan includes all six models of the iPad along with a full range of accessories and add-ons. The retailer will honor the suggested manufacturer price starting at $499 for the 16GB WiFi version.

News started to break earlier this week about a $100 million donation Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making to Newark’s school system. He’s announcing it today on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Jason Kincaid and I spoke to Zuckerberg about the donation earlier this week, at the same time we interviewed him about the Facebook Phone issue.

He’s creating a new foundation and funding it with $100 million in Facebook stock. The money will be used to revamp the Newark school system, including closing some schools, opening new ones and experimenting with teacher pay. Newark Mayor Cory Booker will be a key figure in how the money is spent.

We interviewed Mayor Booker in 2008 when he was focusing on fighting crime in Newark via high quality security cameras and a gunshot detection system to monitor an eight square mile crime-heavy area of Newark.

The interview is below.

Mark Zuckerberg: So over the last year. I started researching what the best ways would be to kind of improve the education system. And I just have a lot of reasons why personally I’m interested in this. Have you met Priscilla, my girlfriend?

Michael Arrington: I only know her through your Facebook account.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes. I mean – so we’ve been dating for about seven years. When she graduated from school, she went and became a teacher. Now, she’s in medical school and she’s studying to be a pediatrician. But this is just kind of a common thing that we’ve been really interested in – about education, kids. And, you know, the default path that we were on, we're just like, okay, a lot of other people wait until later on in their career to figure out how to give back. Then we decided – this is just like a year ago, maybe nine months ago, I said, why should we wait? I mean, most people don’t have this kind of success early on in life. We feel really lucky so we should be researching this now. And we decided early on that the thing that we wanted to try to help out with was education. It’s just that there are so many things that are broken in the education system across the country now. The national education budget is 600 billion dollars that goes towards all of education. So it’s kind of crazy, right?

Michael Arrington: That includes state budget?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah – national, state, everything. So it ends up being quite difficult to make a difference because any amount of money that anyone has is just a drop in the bucket compared to that. So when you start learning about education, there are all these organizations that are national like KIPP – the chapter schools that are the top performing. There are 99 of them across the country. They’re really high performing schools.

There's stuff like Teach For America, that places a few hundred teachers in a lot of different cities. And they’re really creating the pipeline for all of the – kind of HR and people who go into… A lot of people who do Teach for America don’t end up staying in teaching. But about two-thirds of them end up in education. So for example, the people who started a lot of the top charter schools are TFA alums. That’s an amazing institution.

But the thing that’s working a lot more recently is rather than trying to take a cut of one of these problems on a national level, going in to any given school – like a school district or city and trying to reform all these different things at once. So in New York, Bloomberg did a bunch of this, D.C. there was a bunch of this. Unfortunately, the mayor who did it there just lost his election. And the approach is – because there are so many different issues that are kind of all compounding in the education system rather than trying to fix any one of them in a lot of places,you get a lot better results when you fix all of them in one place. And the idea is that you're going to show that it's getting results on a five or eight year time frame. Then, that creates an example that other cities can go copy and improve.

So we did all this research and we figured it would be a while until we found a good candidate but it turns out that Newark, New Jersey is a good candidate for a lot of reasons. So the main reason is that the leaders there are really good. So there’s this guy, Cory Booker, who’s the mayor and who’s a Democrat and the governor, Chris Christie in New Jersey is a Republican. They’re both really good leaders who are rising stars in their respective parties. And just very well respected nationally, have a lot of political capital that they can spend on trying to make the reforms, the changes that are painful but necessary to get this stuff done. And at the same time, Newark is one of the lowest performing school districts in the country right now. About 45% of high school students drop out. Around 50% of students don’t pass the state proficiency exams for literacy.

In a study at the local community college almost all of the Newark students who end up graduating and going [there], end up having to take remedial classes in education – in language or math to just to learn stuff that they should have learned in high school. So it’s really right now, it’s not – it’s one of the lower performing school districts but to me that’s just an opportunity when you get great leaders to show that you can make really good improvements, right? And one of the great things about Newark is that it’s so close to New York City that there are a lot of other issues in Newark at the same time. But if you can just fix the education issues, then, everyone can just drive 10 minutes and get a job in New York City, so it becomes the highest order bit.

So that – that way Cory is really aligned towards one – like this is his top priority. He just got re-elected by a pretty big margin and it’s his biggest priority. Then, so now – so that’s kind of what we’re doing, I mean, the idea is fund him and basically support him in doing a really comprehensive program to get all these things in place that they need to get done. [DELETE: So we should close down schools that are failing, get a lot of good charter schools and figure out new contracts for teachers so that better teachers can get paid more money, that more for performance as opposed to just based on how long you've been there. Have a lot of programs that are after schools that to keep kids healthy and safe and I mean, Newark, isn't the safest city. So that's the basic thing. And I mean for...]

Michael Arrington: It’s $100 million and – that will be spent over how long do you think?

Mark Zuckerberg: Five years.

Michael Arrington: Okay. And that will open up some new schools?

Mark Zuckerberg: Oh, yeah.

Michael Arrington: Quickly?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, yes.

Michael Arrington: They can build them up.

Mark Zuckerberg: But it’s also a – well, actually a lot of the work will be done in the first year, kind of just like getting the charter schools to come … Working with Teach For America to get more placements for their – for their teachers.

Michael Arrington: So what happens after five years if this works out really well?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, a lot of the data on reforming school districts shows that it actually takes eight to 10 years really to turn the thing around. But what the real goal is here – is just to show that it’s working. I mean, I don’t have much of a connection to Newark. I grew up in New York, right outside the city. So Newark is just close by and it’s going to – I hope that this helps the 45,000 students who go to school there. But the long-term goal would be to make Newark into a symbol that you can do this. So that way, a lot of the results can get replicated in other places and I – I hope that we can do that on the three to five-year period and that there will be more work after that. But hopefully a lot of it will get put in motion in the first year or so, and a lot of stuff that they need to do is just close down certain schools, make sure that there’s room for good schools to come in and join, set up programs. And then, a lot of this is going to be operating it and just going to take a long time to change.

Jason Kincaid: What about attracting better teachers to the schools? I'd imagine part of this isn’t just the way teachers are gauged but you know, the actual teaching talent. Is that what TFA should and can help with?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. Also, TFA is – one of the things that’s pretty interesting is around this. So my girlfriend wanted to be a teacher after she graduated from Harvard. And one of the things that I saw that was interesting was socially the response that she got. Where, everyone was kind of, "this is such a nice thing that you’re doing it". But it was like she’s doing charity. It’s clear that she could have gotten paid more doing some other job. She’s really smart and she was clearly foregoing the real economic value for her to do something that was socially valuable. So the question is, how can you make it so that a lot of the people who would go do other things, teaching is a respected and valued enough job that people actually go into it. Given that it has a lot more impact than what these people are being compensated at today. And I think of that – that is a big problem. One of the things that’s been pretty interesting about TFA is they’ve actually gotten a lot of really good college students to go into teaching but it’s only for a short period of time. 15% of the graduating Harvard class applies to TFA and there are aren't enough placements today to accept all those people but they would accept a lot more of them if they could. It's just that it's really hard —TFA needs to go fund those people and get them placed at specific schools. There is often some politics around that. So that's one of the big things that they are working on. But the TFA is trying to double over the next five years, right. So but that number surprised me, when I learned that 15%, I mean… Apparently TFA is I think by far the largest employer of students graduating from Ivy League schools.

Michael Arrington: So is it a government organization?

Mark Zuckerberg: No, no. It's a private charity. Yeah. And now, the woman who founded it is starting – this woman, Wendy Kopp, is starting an international version Teach For All. So it’s cool, but in doing research for this, a lot of the educational issues in the U.S. are pretty different from international. So I’m not sure how much we’re going to be able to learn from this experience to do it internationally but maybe for the next one we'll think about something like that. A lot of this really just comes down to though — I spend all my time running this company, you know. So for a lot of people who are later in their careers when they start this stuff, they can spend more time on it like running a foundation and I really couldn’t. So for me this is more like a venture capital approach where it's like you pick the entrepreneur, the leader that you believe in and then you really like try to give them a lot of leverage.

Michael Arrington: Cory Booker in that case.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yes.

Michael Arrington: He was doing some things around cameras and crime control.

Mark Zuckerberg: Exactly.

Michael Arrington: That was really controversial.

Mark Zuckerberg: So his whole first term was focused on getting crime down because Newark has the highest crime rate, I think in the country and he reduced it by like 50 or 60% or something insane. Those numbers aren't fact checked, so that might be off but it’s large, all right. And he’s pretty amazing when you talk to him about this stuff. He himself moved from the – mayor’s house and he got like a trailer and moved to like the most dangerous street in Newark. And he used to drive around on the streets with the police there at like three or four in the morning tracking down crime. And his whole theory was like…

Michael Arrington: That was when he was a city councilor, right, before he ran for mayor?

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it was after he was mayor. I mean, maybe he did that before and after. But my understanding was that, that was during his time as mayor because that’s when he made this this huge priority, is we have to cut down crime. It was like, if I’m going to get the police force to care about this, they’re going to go out risking their lives like I need to show that I irrationally care about this. I think he is pretty amazing.

Design interaction firm ZURB today launches Clue, a tool which enables publishers to get concrete data on what exactly visitors remember seeing and find interesting about specific websites.

Part of the multi-product website analytics ZURB platform, Clue’s objectives are simple. It wants to be a way for small businesses and large companies to spot and rectify immediately if there is something glaringly wrong with their websites (like the web equivalent of when you ask a friend, “Hey is there something obviously wrong about this?” and they point out a typo.).

The process is such: Visit Clue, submit your URL and make a “memory test” which gives you a unique URL that you can then share with friends,a target market or control group in order to get feedback about how people initially perceive your site, giving them 5 1/2 seconds to declare their initial perceptions of your website UI via submission of the top five things they remember.

Says ZURB chief marketer Dmitry Dragilev, “[Clue] is great for lowering Bounce Rate for sites that sell something. Are ads getting in the way of content? Do people remember just the ads? Or content as well?”

Apple announced the refreshed Apple TV just a few weeks back and immediately starting taking pre-orders. However, something is now amuck. The Apple TV product page always listed September as the ship date, but now it says 2-3 week, which puts it in October. Apple also just started issuing refunds for expedited shipping. This comes days before it was expected to ship, too.

What’s that? Getting a little deja-vu? Very good, sir. Apple also refunded the expedited shipping cost days before the iPad shipped.

Apparently you can get satisfaction, if you’re the owner of an iPad that is. A report recently released by the American Customer Satisfaction Index shows that consumer satisfaction with personal computers is at an all time high, having grown 4% this year and now registering a 78 on the ASCI 100-point scale.

Leading the pack for the seventh year in row, beloved fanboy brand Apple gains 2% to hit 86 points, its highest score ever and a full 9 points ahead of its competitors Dell, Acer and HP which all scored 77s.

The secret of Apple’s success? CNBC delves deeper and reports that all this fuss is about the iPad.

“The iPad, even at this early stage, pulled up Apple's overall numbers – which makes it the highest-scoring product Apple has, and therefore the highest-scoring product ACSI has ever tracked.”

Hmm … Fair enough. After all, I’ve never seen anyone get excited about a HP Color LaserJet printer in quite the same way (See: image above).

Photo: Josh Liba

Stanford computer science student Feross Aboukhadijeh is celebrating two milestones this week, his YouTube Instant site hitting one million vistors in ten days as well as a new job, having accepted Chad Hurley’s job offer over Twitter shortly after his Google Instant-inspired service caught the attention of the YouTube founder. Aboukhadijeh will continue to attend Stanford while he works at the company.

Aboukhadijeh tells TechCrunch:

“YouTube Instant hit one million visitors on Monday, just 10 days since I launched it! The site also has 28,000 Facebook Likes, 20,000 Tweets, and 14,000 Stumbles – quite impressive numbers for only two weeks since launch! (I’ve been busy with the first week of classes at Stanford, so I didn’t announce this until now.)

YouTube Instant has been on the homepage of CNN, Fox News, VentureBeat, CNET, Hacker News, All Things D, Engadget, and PC Magazine. The site went viral on a scale that I never could have predicted.

Also noteworthy: I just updated the site with some awesome new features: autoplay, keyboard controls, shareable URLs, and a sexy new design. And I'm not going to stop there. I'm currently working on adding awesome Facebook integration, on-the-fly playlist creation, and custom auto-updating AdSense units.”

Interestingly enough, the ambitious Aboukhadijeh was a software engineer intern at Facebook when he created Youtube Instant.

Online video management software company KIT digital continues its buying spree with the acquisition of Prague, Czech Republic-based Brickbox Digital Media along with its international subsidiaries and affiliates. Brickbox Digital Media is one of Europe’s leading providers of digital video asset management solutions.

The company serves as an intermediary between content owners and distributors, offering products and services that include mezzanine file management, localization, digital cinema mastering, and authoring of media for replication.

Brickbox primarily serves European distributors out of its Prague headquarters and back-office operations in Sofia, Bulgaria, with sales and account management offices in Los Angeles, London and several locations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

KIT digital paid upfront consideration of approximately $10.1 million (after working capital adjustment and $1 million hold-back related to consolidation of Brickbox’s minority interests), comprised of approximately $6.6 million in cash and 339,476 shares of the company’s common stock.

KIT digital also agreed to pay the shareholders of Brickbox consideration equal to 10% of forward revenues from Brickbox over a four-year period, subject to a $20 million annual revenue threshold for each year and certain profitability thresholds.

Brickbox and its affiliates are said to derive approximately $12 million in annualized revenues.

Its clients include Arrow Films, Eagle Rock Entertainment, Momentum Pictures, 20th Century Fox Entertainment, Warner Home Video, Universal Studios, and numerous European content distributors.

My love affair with Quora continues. I simply can’t think of another site where so much useful information is being organized so rapidly in one place. You’ve got experts fielding anonymous questions. You’ve got high-profile people answering questions about themselves or their companies. And you’ve got juicy speculation.

At TechCrunch, part of what we do is gather information and hunt down sources to find out if it’s true or not. But what if Quora could replace that? What if they can take that hunt public? One question posed on the service yesterday may put that to the test.

Someone asked the question, “Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced?” This is a hot topic on the Internet these days given Yahoo’s lack of turnaround under her watch as CEO. And we even wrote about some of the speculation we’ve be hearing yesterday as well. But Quora offers up a more direct answer: Yes.

Specifically, this is the response to the question on Quora:

Yes. From what I understand serious conversations are being had about taking Yahoo private (which is a good thing) and as part of that Carol would be fired, on this one the record speaks for itself:

• She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company.
• She wasted over $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric)
• She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo ad exchange system).
• Yahoo left between $500M to $1B of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo deal team)
• She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn’t work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo in the tech and business community.

The person giving the response seems to have some knowledge about Yahoo that goes beyond common knowledge. For example, they seem to know how much Yahoo is spending on ad campaigns, and they know Yahoo executives like Hillary Schneider and what they’re working on. This would seem to indicate the person either works at Yahoo, worked at Yahoo, or is close with people who work at Yahoo.

Of course, this could all be complete BS. The fact that the user is anonymous doesn’t help. But rarely will you find a source willing to go on the record about stuff such as this. So that’s not enough to completely discount it. And clearly others agree. Nine people voted up this response, including Michael Wolfe, an EiR at Benchmark Capital, and Keith Rabois, a prominent entrepreneur/investor who is now the general manager at Square.

For all I know, this anonymous user is getting their information from the same banking sources that are spreading this type of stuff around. Or it could simply be some random person well-versed in tech stuff having some fun with speculation. But if this does play out the way the user lays out, then what? I don’t know. But I do know that will be a huge win for Quora.

Hey so I just woke up from my afternoon nap and WOW, oh wow — Stuff just got real. And as everyone with an Internet connection knows, when real stuff happens, funny stuff happens and when funny stuff happens someone eventually gets around to making a Downfall spoof about it.

While those in need of a levity fix are waiting for the Taiwanese CGI of “Blogger Walks Into A Bar …” or the BIN 38 Aaron Sorkin movie to come out, they’ll have to make do with the latest Angelgate application of Godwin’s Law, which I’m sure we’ve all already seen by now.

My favorite parts?

“Leave if you applied for YCombinator, Seed Camp, Facebook Fund, or TC Disrupt …” and the random gratuitous jabs at Tim Ferris.

I see a lot of demos for a lot of apps. Today, in particular, I sat through a dozen back-to-back demos for startups launching at Disrupt next week. Some of them really blew me away. But none of them quite compare to the unexpected demo I got after my long day when I walked into a Palo Alto CVS to buy some toothpaste.

As I was waiting in the checkout line, a very polite Stanford college student named Parth Bhakta asked me if I would be willing to test out a prototype for an augmented reality mobile app. I was tired, but I am a supporter of higher education.

When I looked down at his hands, however, instead of an iPhone, he held a few pieces of paper with wireframe drawings in pencil. This was his app. I was supposed to pretend the paper was an iPhone screen and press the hand-drawn buttons as I shuffled through the flow. The idea is that you could point your camera at a magazine rack and get digital versions of the magazines, which you could preview on your iPhone and then purchase individual articles or the entire magazine. It made a lot more sense when he did it (see video).

Now, there is nothing wrong with getting your ideas down on paper or paper prototypes to work out the kinks before you start coding. But you might want to wait until you have an actual working app on an iPhone before testing it out in the wild and asking for feedback from normal people. To be fair, Bhakta was only following his assignment, which was to make a paper prototype of an app that could enhance the experience of standing in line and test it on potential users. So I blame his professor for sending him on this hapless mission. (There is really no way to test an iPhone app on paper, the buttons don’t do anything). The best part: the course is called “Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design.” I didn’t want to break it to him, but he was missing the computer part.

According to The Media Note, Saudi Information and Culture Ministry spokesman Abdul Rahman Al-Hazza announced last night Saudi time that all Saudi Arabian web publishers and online media, including blogs and forums, will need to be officially registered with the government.

Al-Hazza claimed that the measure will cut down on libel and defamation and is not intended to limit freedom of speech.

However Saudi Arabia has a checkered history when it comes to Internet censorship, and old media is currently very regulated. The government heavily controls the few newspapers in operation and traditional journalists can be detained if they cross the line.

While the Saudi government has arrested bloggers critical of Saudi life and censored activist Twitter pages in the past, this is the first attempt at regulating online media as a whole. As blogging becomes more popular, Saudi Arabian authorities are starting to treat it with the same caution and restriction applied to traditional media in the country.

Of course this has gotten many bloggers upset, and people have taken to Twitter to protest, with the hashtag #haza3 which refers to the Ministry official’s last name. Public protesting is illegal in Saudi Arabia.

The regulation has not yet gone into effect and this story is still developing so stay close for updates.

For those curious, you can visit the Saudi Arabian Minister of Information’s official Twitter and Facebook profiles here.

As we just stated in our previous post, there was clearly an email sent by angel investor Ron Conway to a group of super angels who were likely involved in the Bin 38 “AngelGate” meeting that Mike stumbled into a couple days ago. We’ve now received a copy of the email that Conway sent from an anonymous tipster. And we’ve confirmed it is authentic from one of the recipients.

It’s a bombshell. No, it’s a nuclear bomb. It speaks for itself. Read it below.

Subject: Super Angels Gathering

I want to share my views on the two gatherings you had in June and this week and what they represent in my opinion.

So that I would not be influenced by any outside inputs I am writing this without sharing my thoughts with anyone including David Lee and the other SV Angel Partners.

I want to clarify once and for all my total disagreement with your values and motives for being investors.

I have stated consistently for year that I invest because I love helping entrepenuers and watching them learn and succeed.

I am honored that entrepenuers share their crystal ball views of the future of innovation and technology with us and respect the guts it takes to start a company.

At SV Angel we try to reciprocate by adding value any way we can.

I think that actions speak louder than words and SV Angel has always been a friend of entrepenuers and we focus our business to help entrepenuers achieve success.

The world of startups would be a better place if you spent less time complaining about deal structures, terms, vc's, and valuations etc and the cars you drive, and just helped entrepenuers build their companies.

The Free Enterprise system is very efficient …..why not let the marketplace demands decide on these issues, its worked for many many years. These startups are binary …they succeed or fail so why waste time on deal structures, terms, vc's, and valuations etc and just help entrepenuers build their companies.

In my opinion your motives are driven by self serving factors around ego satisfaction and "making a buck".

My motives and values are very different.

They are so different I want to be up front with you and recognize this and disengage from any involvement with you. I will not be a hypocrite.

I am tired of seeing you and engaging in idle chit chat and not sharing my true feelings.

I think you have a different value set and lets agree to disagree and not have to even engage in any idle chit chat or discussion of any sort….ever.

Furhermore, I regret David Lee was involved in the gatherings. I am sure he does too.

We talked about the first dinner and I encouraged him to write the email above and withdraw….I know he was uncomfortable with both gatherings….where no one was there to speak up for the interests of the entrepenuers.

By now you are rolling your eyes and saying "Ron's a ___________(fill in the blank) ….and who is he to pass judgement…..

We are all entitled to our opinions.

I am just being honest and transparent….the way most of the entrepenuers I invest are…

I wish the Angel community could have the same integrity and values of the entrepenuer community, but unfortunately I now believe that is hopeless and your actions prove that.

What do you think the entrepenuers you have funded are thinking right now.

This is despicable and embarrassing for the tech community in my opinion.

Can you learn from this ?

Please keep this confidential even though I know that will be hard since two of you let your egos take over and show Arrington how important you are by telling him you were headed to a "secret" angel gathering.

Dave McCLure…pls try not to blog about this and cause silicon valley more embarrassment with your unprofessional classless writings

Note: I did not include those who were at the gatherings who I don't know well enough to form an opinion around their motives or values.

Fighting international cyber-terrorism isn’t easy, but it’s a mission on which we can all agree, right? Not so fast.

Russia has been pushing a proposal in The United Nations agency for information technology, which describes the greatest cyber-threat not as hacking or stealing but as using the Internet to spread ideas that might undermine a country. Russia wants any such use of the Internet classified as “aggression,” and hence illegal under the UN Charter.

Sounds like China right? Yes, but check out this awfully teal map of countries that agree. It seems that a lot of the world seems more aligned with the Chinese view of controlling any information that may be considered subversive than they’re aligned with the high-minded Western ideals of freedom of speech and access to information. Most notably they include the other BRICs: India, Brazil and Russia. In fact, it’s Brazil that has asked Google to remove more content from the Web than any other nation this year. Brazil made more than double the requests of the next closest country, Libya.

NPR covered the story this morning, but it’s not a new shift in thinking. Russia has actually tried to introduce this information-arms-control-like agreement every year since 1998. So why do we only jump up and down about China? Presumably, under Russia’s proposition, Iran could hold Twitter accountable for giving people the ability to change their avatars to green or any Middle Eastern country could hold Facebook accountable for providing a platform by which people de-radicalize potential suicide bombers.

It’s a delicate issue for the US diplomatically and inside the US– way bigger than “Googlegate” because, well, I refer you again to the map. The issue doesn’t seem to be about different political systems, but rather different levels of stabilization in more chaotic emerging markets. Near-unfettered Internet freedoms aren’t always as high a priority in these countries, not because they’re evil, but because there are more pressing problems of gun violence, terrorism, or a paucity of food, water, jobs and basic infrastructure.

I usually try not to get into a lather about protecting Internet freedoms in other countries, because I don’t think it’s the job of private sector tech companies who are supposed to be international to act as tools to enforce Western-style democracy. Freedom and democracy are two different things. Some “democratic” countries I’ve reported in are more repressive in day-to-day life than other authoritarian countries. In addition, I believe that Google would have done more good by staying in China and working within the system than pulling out with a pouty “We don’t like their laws” as Eric Schmidt said on the Colbert Report this week. (To which Colbert astutely asked how long did it took for Google to start disliking China’s laws.)

But this is something different. It’s not about whether other countries should be allowed to control what happens within their borders and whether US companies simply chose to do business there or not, based on local laws. At stake are new rules that would bring international United Nations justification to draw sovereign boundaries around many different Internets. At stake is making it OK to build powerful new Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook and Twitter at the borders of the Western world– not with an easy-to-circumvent Great Firewall but with internationally-accepted rules against freedom of information and expression.  Talk about unintended consequences in a debate we thought was about identity theft and hacking.

On a more crass, business note, this could have a chilling impact on US Internet companies expansion into lucrative emerging markets. So far China is the only country that’s developed larger audiences for its own homegrown Internet companies than US versions in almost every category. That makes not only political sense but business sense because China is so culturally and linguistically different and the market is so much more advanced in terms of entrepreneurship, venture capital and the wild-west IPO markets of Shanghai, Hong Kong and the new Startup Board in Shenzhen.

But so far, US companies do better in many categories in India and Indonesia– because the Internet has grown slower giving less opportunity for locals to build big companies and more challenges with monetization. When the percentage of the population online is this small, frequently the people online are city-dwelling, affluent multinational employees or office workers who also speak English, making the need for, say, a local-grown Hindi Facebook a lot less immediate. And on a platform like Twitter, there are even fewer cultural and language restrictions because the site is so simple, how people use it localizes it.

But comparatively isolationist countries like Russia and Brazil could easily fork off with a more local versions of sites dominating as their markets grow. It’s not hard to see how local, business pressures could drive this diplomacy around blocking ideas on Western sites– they way some people allege it already has in China. And–on a more banal level than the future of freedom in the world–that would be disastrous for older Web companies in the US counting on emerging markets to grow.

This problem is not going to go away– and not just because Russia appears to introduce it every year. By 2050, the US will be the only G7 nation that is still one of the largest nations in the world. Its testament to the sheer size and resilience of the “world’s only Superpower” that we’ll still be no. 2. At least we’ll still have a strong say in the way the world runs. But sharing power with modern, emerging markets that have had a totally different history and experience with the 20th century will likely take the bulk of the 21st century to figure out– especially when it comes to border-less technology issues like the environment and the Internet.

I criticized Groupon last week for running too fast with its international strategy before it had stabilized its lock on the US market. But the flipside of that argument is that at least Groupon executives are getting a better picture of what the Internet will look like in this new world.

On the surface, it seemed like the situation that has come to be known as AngelGate was dying down. Since we broke the news about the secret meetings between angel investors where they supposedly agree to agree on things, a lot has been said on both sides. Mike said what he knew, and one of the angel investors present at the meeting he crashed, Dave McClure, came out in opposition to the allegations. But things have gotten more interesting this evening.

McClure sent out a tweet earlier that was clearly meant to be a direct message. It read, “Ron is throwing us under a bus. and it’s chickenshit that he writes that after David Lee comes to both meetings.” He quickly deleted the tweet, but not before plenty of people saw it, responded to it, retweeted it, and it was syndicated elsewhere.

It doesn’t take someone deeply engulfed in the situation to figure out what McClure is talking about. Clearly, Ron Conway, founder of SV Angel and the most prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley, sent an email to other angels involved in the situation. Clearly, that email was in opposition to McClure’s stance that those at the meeting were doing nothing wrong. David Lee, who McClure mentions, is a partner at SV Angel and was at the meeting.

McClure’s tweet also confirms that there were two meetings of these angels. Mike showed up to the second one.

McClure has since tried to play off his failed DM. “sigh. bad day. sorry folks,” he tweeted immediately after he deleted the tweet. “well so much for the slow news day,” he then tweeted right after that. Indeed. Expect more fall-out from this in the coming days.

Update: And here’s the email from Conway.

Facebook’s had a rough day. In fact, it’s had its worst day performance-wise in over four years, with 2.5 hours of downtime that resulted in countless complaints from users. Perhaps more important, it also had a bevy API problems, and its Like buttons — which are embedded on over 350,000 sites across the web — were apparently busted too. When Facebook goes down, it’s a big deal.

This evening Facebook Director of Software Engineering Robert Johnson has written a post-mortem of the outage, explaining what caused the site to fail.

According to Johnson’s post, the problem stemmed from an automated system Facebook had built to check for invalid configuration values in its cache. Unfortunately, that automated check backfired — to the point that Facebook had to turn off the site entirely to recover. Here’s a portion of the explanation:

Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn't allow the databases to recover.

The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful – we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.

Facebook has generally had a good track record in terms of keeping its homepage alive, but I’ve heard repeated complaints about the integrity of its API. And given Facebook’s goal of becoming the social fabric of the web — which entails maintaining a presence on countless third party sites — it’s imperative that it keeps its various widgets and authentication buttons working properly.

Innovid, a video advertising startup, has raised $4.1 million in funding from Genesis Partners and T-Venture, the venture capital company of Deutsche Telekom. This brings the startup’s total funding to $7.1 million.

Innovid' develops an interactive pre-roll advertising product, called iRoll, that allows advertisers to turn any existing pre-roll video ad into an interactive one. And users are encouraged to click and perform mouse gestures with the interactive ads to gain further information.

Innovid has integrated iRoll in campaigns for a number of high-profile brands including Kraft, Buick, Hyundai, Disney Pictures, and Sony. And the startup’s publishers include 80% of the web's top video publishers including partnerships with NBC, MTV, Fox, and Tremor Media. The funding and partnership with Deutsche Telekom will help the startup hire additional staff and expand to mobile, connected-tv and European markets.

Some days the news is depressing right across the board – natural disasters, murders, heiresses being denied entry to Japan. Other days, thought, it seems like my Google News alerts deliver nothing but joy. Today is a day of the latter kind.

First off came an alert that the New York Daily News' Orla Healy has been fired from her job.  That's depressing news for Ms Healy, of course, but fun  news for me as it allowed me to spend twenty minutes photoshopping this owl…

Then came an even more joyful story: the revelation that Tivos and other DVRs are unable to record episodes of CBS’s new show '$#*! My Dad Says' due to the inclusion of non-standard characters in its title.

The naming of ‘$#*! My Dad Says’ (starring William Sh*tner) is the result of an increasingly coy game of Chinese whispers. It started out, of course as 'Shit My Dad Says' – Justin Halpern's Twitter account which currently has just north of 1.7m followers. Then came a book, published by HarperCollins, and the first level of bastardisation (sorry, b*stardisation) to "Sh*t My Dad Says" before finally arriving as a TV show, which CBS insists with a straight face is pronounced "Bleep My Dad Says".

(As an aside, it's amazing how many of CBS's shows can be made to sound much better by censoring just one word: Two and a Half Bleeps; The Big Bleep Theory; How I Bleeped Your Mother…)

With the FCC's restrictions on televised profanity recently held to be unconstitutional, it would be easy to accuse CBS of cowardice, or at least of trying to have their cake and eat it. Actually though, the network deserves kudos for keeping most of the original name. By doing so they've drawn attention to the growing gulf in standards between the websites that a fast-growing number of Americans visit every day and the dwindling amount of traditional media those same Americans consume.

Much like when Random House bought the rights to the blog 'Fuck You Penguin' and republished it as 'FU Penguin', CBS's decision shows that traditional media is hovering between two stools (so to speak): clearly they think their audience will be offended en-masse by profanity in a show’s title, but at the same time they're happy to leverage profanity-laced Twitter accounts like Halpern’s to drive audiences.

It's a problem that's only going to get worse as more and more break-out media properties originate online and as ‘digital natives’ grow up to become the mass-market. When their target audience has been watching and sharing clips of goatses and girls bleeping into cups since infancy, TV networks are either going to have to start talking a similar language – sans coyness – or risk becoming irrelevant to an entire generation.

Or to put it another way, sooner or later they're either going to have to bleep, or get off the fucking pot.

While they’re still only officially saying that the it will launch “later this year”, it appears that Google is taking the steps to get ready for a Chrome Web Store launch very soon. Specifically, a post today highlights that developers can now hook their apps up to Google Checkout merchant accounts (to be able to sell their apps — U.S.-only for the time being), and that there is now a way to preview how your app will look in the store when it goes live.

None of this should be too surprising consider that a presentation in August stated the Chrome Web Store would launch in October. But all the pieces are finally falling into place. While the placeholder space for apps in Chromium (the open source browser that Chrome is based on) keep popping in and out of existence, the Web Store itself seems to be fully functional (it’s a part of the Extension online area).

Google has also posted a set of guidelines for what images developers will need when they upload their app for display in the Web Store. Included here are guidelines for icons, header backgrounds, screenshots, and promotional images (which are optional).

As we’ve previously noted, the main overview page for the Web Store appears to look very similar to Apple’s App Store in iTunes. But today, they’re showing off an example of what individual app pages will look like — it looks simple and obvious enough. See that preview below — look for its launch in the next few weeks.

Photobucket-owned image hosting service Tinypic just killed off its service to all international users. According to reports, users in countries other than US, UK, Canada and Australia are now seeing the above message.

From what we’re seeing on various blogs, users both restricted and unrestricted are unhappy about the move calling for a Tinypic boycott, suggesting alternate services such as imgur as well as figuring out a work around way to get access to previously uploaded photos.

From our tipster:

“We just lost access to over 6,500 images that users were posting to our forum (19,000+ members)… all of them international users (spanish speaking).. Argh.. :( Those images are no longer viewable to them.”

We’ve contacted Tinypic for more info and will update this post when they respond.

Update: While no one from Tinypic or parent company Photobucket has responded to our emails, another tipster reports that Tinypic is mysteriously back up for Spanish and possibly other users:

“People are Tweeting the same thing … Did Tinypic change their minds? Are they going to roll out a plan this time hopefully altering everyone in advance; like they should have in the first place.”

We’ve just sent another request for info and will keep updating as we hear more news.

Let's imagine a scenario; scenarios are usually fun. Let's say you're walking down the street, or in the mall, as you do, phone in hand, and see something in the shop window that catches your eye. "Hmm, this looks interesting," you say to no one in particular. "Let me check that out." So you walk, inspect the item, then say to yourself, "You know, this looks pretty neat, but I'm not quite sure I want it yet. $X-Amount isn't exactly an impulse, you know?" You whip out your phone, launch something called SpringPad, then scan the item's barcode with your phone. SpringPad goes out to the Internet, pulls all sorts of metadata, then stores said data for you on its Web site. When you get home, and you have time to think, you pull up SpringPad, then all of that data is ready and waiting for you.

Built by former Scribd developer Ed McManus, Facebook “Like” aggregator TheLikestream launches today after six weeks of work. Capitalizing on the waning appeal of Digg post-redesign and the popularity of the Facebook “Like” button, the site is a Digg clone but instead of “Diggs” it tracks Facebook “Likes.”

“Today that kind of bit me in the … when Facebook went down” says McManus referring to Facebook’s recent and uncharacteristic outages.

Any time a user hits the “Like” button on the site, that vote gets inserted into the user’s Facebook stream, immediately landing on the homepage. There’s no upcoming section.

In order for a user’s vote to be counted, they need to register through Facebook Connect on the site. There are also three different ways to submit stories to TheLikestream; Through a bookmarklet, directly sharing a URL on the site or through the  onsite page builder, where you can drag and drop html components as well as flash widgets. Based on feedback McManus is getting from users the onsite page builder seems to be user’s favorite way to submit stuff to the site.

Using the same time decay algorithm as Reddit, as time passes a TheLikestream-ed story needs to get more “Likes” in order to stay in the stream, favor being given to those more recent stories.

Already I can see a scale problem, reducing the “Digg effect” of a high trafficking homepage, if the site starts amassing stories with hundreds of “Likes” and positions them against recently submitted content. McManus responds that because of the small number of “Likes” that is not an issue currently but he will take it into consideration,“Content that ends up being really successful, i.e. gets a lot of  ’Likes’ will keep a balance between content that is highly viral and content is more recent, it’s definitely something I will address when there is more stuff on the site.”

When asked about the interesting choice of “The” in the name (just like the proto “TheFacebook”), McManus responded that Likestream.com was taken, “I was actually thinking “The Likefeed” but Facebook doesn’t let you use anything with the word Feed in it on top of the platfrom.” Heh.

According to McManus, the site has already gotten a couple thousand hits on its launch date despite today’s Facebook’s shoddiness.When asked about a business model, “I just want to create something that people like, If I can do that then I can find a way to monetize it later. Sort of like the Valley story I guess.”

Like.

Anybody who thinks this is good must only have discovered the Internet today. Weak. Sucks. It’s sucky. Worst video ever. This is unwatchable. Not funny. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Why is this on TechCrunch? (Welcome to my hell).

Happy trolling!

Via: Daily Wh.At

Chasing the general trend of people spending more and more time on their phones, video ad network BrightRoll announces today their expansion into mobile video advertising, attempting to expand inventory and lower CPM costs. Advertisers and third party buyers can now buy mobile pre-roll ads through BRX, BrightRoll’s video ad buying platform.

BrightRoll is one of the largest video ad networks, serving 65, 489, 000 uniques in August according to comScore. What’s interesting in this latest development is that rather than only placing video ads before video content (which is scarce outside of YouTube), BrightRoll is basically doing the same thing as it does online and serving up ads in front of any content on your phone, whether it be video, audio, games or apps.

Says BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti,

"While we'll bring the same value to mobile that we bring to online in terms of research, optimization and targeting, the sheer increase in scale that mobile inventory represents will fundamentally improve the results we're able to deliver to our clients."

While the move into mobile ad inventory marks a big jump in terms of audience and reach, BrightRoll plans to continue offering the same analytics and interactive capabilities of the web ads. However applying the same web tropes to mobile is a challenge when you consider the fact that people might be reluctant to view video ads on the go.

One key benefit in the inclusion of mobile inventory is the ability to now target audiences based on mobile specific data like geo-location and type of mobile device, a boon for local advertisers. Brightroll current has 15 million in VC funding, lead by True Ventures.

Much as been made of the so-called Facebook Phone. While Facebook is still being vague about their ideas for this (but at least they’re no longer denying it), it seems likely that anything they do will be based on Google’s Android platform. And INQ may offer the first of these starting next year. But Facebook isn’t the only web company thinking about phones and Android. Mozilla is as well. Or at least, their community is. Today on the Mozilla Labs blog, they’ve unveiled Seabird, an Android-based concept phone built around the ideals of the Open Web.

The concept, created by Billy May, looks amazing. The shape is a little odd (sort of like an upside down raindrop), but it boasts an 8 megapixel camera, dual side pico projectors, wireless charging, and an embedded Bluetooth dongle. The dongle acts as both an earpiece and a controller for the phone. While the pico projectors allow you to display a virtual keyboard on a tabletop for typing.

Would any of this actually work? Who knows. Some of this technology is certainly a few years out. But still, as a concept, this is pretty great.

As for Mozilla actually making such a device, in a FAQ below, this is addressed:

Does Mozilla have plans to produce a mobile phone?

No. Mozilla produces Firefox for Mobile, the popular Firefox browser for mobile phone systems such as Nokia Maemo and Android.

You can also view it on YouTube in 3D here!