Premiering at  New York Film Festival yesterday and coming to theatres October 1st, the world’s first Hollywood movie about the founding of a social network can now also claim the bragging rights of a solid 100 score on movie review aggregator Metacritic as well as a 9.9 score on Rotten Tomatoes.

While both the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes sample sizes are currently small, The Social Network joins The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia (re-release) as one of the universally highest rated movies of all time.

But will critical acclaim put butts in seats?

Box office success doesn’t seem such a farfetched feat. By now each of you have probably been assaulted countless times by Columbia Picture’s obnoxious and relentless marketing campaign but your desire to see the film has most likely not yet waned.

And Hollywood is sure banking on drawing in at least part of Mark Zuckerberg’s captive audience of 500 million — the movie’s budget was rumored to be in the more than modest range of $45 million to $52 million.

Those interested can read more in “Zuckerberg, 'The Social Network' And The Rise Of The Terror Nerd” and watch more recent The Social Network clips inexplicably and exclusively released on the disaster that is Yahoo! Movies.

We’ve all had a pretty long week dealing with all this, for lack of a better term, AngelGate stuff. For the people involved, me included, it hasn’t been much fun.

Mostly because angel investors as a group do so much for our community. They are the the grease that let so many young startups go from being an idea to something more. The fact that some of them may or may not have had discussions that may or may not have been inappropriate is, in the end, a sidenote. In fact, the only reason the discussion is interesting is because of how important angel investors have become to the startup ecosystem.

I’ve listened to impassioned pleas from both sides of the argument. I’ve also listened to a few rants that were less than pleasant to listen to. The story is probably not over and there are more private emails that some are lobbying to get posted.

But one thing I’m not going to let happen is this – AngelGate won’t take over the TechCrunch Disrupt agenda. Yes there is a panel on Monday morning that includes two of the major figures in the story – Ron Conway and Dave McClure.

I’m reaching out to both Conway and McClure and asking that the discussion stay on the rails and I’m pretty sure they’ll both think that’s just fine.

We may touch on the issue but for the most part the half hour conversation will be about much more interesting issues. I had a chance, for example, to talk with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha today about the panel and what he thinks we should discuss. He wants to talk about how venture capitalists and angel investors can help entrepreneurs succeed. And I think that’s a grande idea.

In the end TechCrunch disrupt begins and ends with the entrepreneur. We have twenty five absolutely amazing startups launching at the event, and announcements from tons more. You can even meet the guys that turned an idea at the HackDay at the New York Disrupt into a full fledged, funded startup.

Now that sounds like fun to me.

See you all on Monday.

A few months ago, Sarah wrote about group-buying travel site Jetsetter.com, arguing that it solves a ‘big problem’ in hotel booking. After the post went live, she received plenty of feedback suggesting other sites to look at, but one came up time and time again: Oyster.com.

Founded in 2008 by Elie Seidman and Ariel Charytan, Oyster is – essentially – a curated version of Trip Advisor. Focusing on Hotels in major US cities, Oyster sends real-life reviewers to each property in the hope that users will come to trust a professional editorial voice over the crowd-sourced opinions of user-generated rivals.

Now the NY-based company is about to start raising a series B round. We invited Seidman to join us on this week’s episode of ‘Why Is This News?’ to explain what the funding is going to be used for, and also to defend a costly editorial operation in a market where user generated views are king.

(After which we spent five minutes discussing room service)

Video below.

Buried in the San Francisco Chronicle’s story about Zynga’s massive new office space is this little nugget:

The Zynga deal occurs as significant portions of South of Market are filling up with biotechnology and other new media companies, like technology blog TechCrunch, video-streaming site MetaCafe and microblogging service Twitter Inc.

The latter is on the hunt for another 200,000 square feet…

While we appreciate the mention, the news is that Twitter is is apparently already looking for more office space. So is it true? Well, Twitter certainly isn’t denying it.

“We have about 250 employees. And based on our current growth trajectory, at some point we’re going to have to look at other options,” a representative told me when I specifically asked about the hunt.

I followed up to see if they were looking around the SoMa area of San Francisco specifically. “All we know is that we can’t stay in the two floors that we currently have, based on our growth, so we’ll have to look at other options,” is what I was told.

It was only last November that Twitter moved into its new offices in the SoMa district of San Francisco (home to us, the new massive Zynga building, and a wide range of other startups) — taking over the old Bebo offices. And it was only a few months after that, that they took over another floor in the same building. At that point, in June, they had just hit 200 employees.

But if Twitter is looking for another 200,000 square feet of space, they must be planning to expand rapidly very soon. Zynga’s huge space is 270,000 square feet, and that’s supposed to house up to 2,000 employees. So if Twitter finds this space they’re apparently looking for, it should house well over 1,000 employees.

There was some news earlier this week that Twitter also recently opened an office in New York City. That’s not entirely true, according to Twitter. “In NY, we have a temporary area in rental space for a handful of people who are based there,” Twitter says. They don’t classify that as an office (despite tweets to the contrary), instead they consider the San Francisco office to be the only one.

And apparently, it’s soon going to get a whole lot bigger.

It appears that Salesforce has just acquired enterprise chat startup Activa Live. We’ve confirmed the acquisition with Salesforce.

Activa Live develops Activa Live Chat, an enterprise, on-demand live chat software for customer service, support and online proactive sales interactions. The software allows companies to monitor, identify and engage with online visitors in real-time, helping increase sales and customer satisfaction.

The software also includes a feature that reveals what a visitor is typing before their message is sent and helps live chat agents find the best answer for customer questions without searching through libraries of canned responses. Activa is also offered as an app on Salesforce’s App Exchange.

Activa is available in both a browser-based version and a desktop version for all platforms. The company’s technology is used by Best Buy, American Apparel and a number of other high-profile brands. While details are still unclear, we’d assume that Active Live Chat will be integrated into Salesforce’s Service Cloud, a SaaS customer service platform.

Recent Salesforce acquisitions include Sitemasher, and Jigsaw.

And I thought our new office was big.

It turns out, we have nothing on Zynga, the social gaming juggernaut that is moving practically right next door. (And it is actually right next door to the San Francisco Design Center, where we’re holding TechCrunch Disrupt starting next Monday.) Their new office at the Townsend Center at the corner of Townsend St. and 8th St. is reportedly 270,000 square feet, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

I repeat: 270,000 square feet.

According to the Chronicle, that’s about half the size of the Transamerica Pyramid (the iconic building you see in San Francisco skyline pictures). And it’s enough room for over 2,000 workers. Currently, Zynga has about 1,200 employees — which is already insane. Facebook itself, for example, is listed as having about 1,700.

Apparently, this is the biggest new lease signed in San Francisco in almost four years.

And clearly Zynga has the money to make this move (they currently have a series of offices in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco). Their revenues are exploding — they may surpass $500 million this year. And then there’s that massive investment from Google, which they still won’t fully confirm.

Zynga will apparently be redesigning the interior of the building and working on the exterior as well before they move in. During the dot-com days, this building housed Macromedia and Sega of America at various points.

Welcome to the neighborhood, Zynga. Prepare for a turf war.

[Photo: Michelle Gachet / The Chronicle]

Apple, no doubt, has a history of creating commercials that resonate with consumers. And with the recent Facetime ads, Apple has taken it one step further, appealing to the human emotion. But honestly, sometimes the best commercials are not produced by a big-name agency or a famous director. TechCrunch reader Paul Sanduleac sent us this video of his four-year-old brother using an iPad. It’s nothing short of impressive.

Not only is the little boy able to swipe on the device, but he’s taped playing various with apps, including a Keyboard app and a few games. You can see he’s having the time of his life, while also interacting with the content and learning alphabets and colors as well.

Since Apple first introduced the device, the iPad has been lauded as being a revolutionary way for kids to interact with apps and media. But sometimes it takes a simple video to remind you just how effective the device is for tots.

Last month we wrote about the popular iPhone game ‘Angry Birds’ being turned into movie and toy form.

Today TechCrunch reader Joe Ziemer reports that he passed a woman in NYC with a box of ‘Angry Birds’ stuffed toys at her feet and snapped the pic above. The explanation? Turns out she works for the manufacturer. And, according to the Ziemer, she hinted that they’d be in stores come early 2011.

Update: Apparently Ziemer also contacted Kotaku about the beloved birds. And works for Digital PR firm TriplePoint PR. Hmmm …

Mike Hirshland is a great sport. He filled in at the last second, taking the Ask-a-VC hotseat the week his industry erupted in scandal. In this video we talk about the “AngelGate” controversy and how Hirshland is dealing with the very real problem of rising valuations.

He also answers reader questions about applying to DogPatch Labs, how it’s different from traditional incubators, how much equity entrepreneurs should have give up per round, what really motivated him to become a VC, and the good and the bad of media-training.

I’m not sure who the guest will be next week, but I plan to nab someone at Disrupt for a live version of the show. Given our absolutely ridiculous lineup of speakers, I have plenty to chose from. Send me your questions now at AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com. Feel free to tell me the VC you want the answer from too. Maybe I’ll do a group show.

A week after announcing the acquisition of U.S. mobile social gaming studio, Gameview, Japanese gaming giant DeNA is making a strategic investment in another U.S. gaming company, social game studio Astro Ape. The investment amount was not disclosed by the companies.

Based in Edison, N.J., Astro Ape creates social game titles for the iOS platform, including Office Heroes, an iPhone app simulating a game within the corporate world. As part of the investment, Astro Ape will develop titles for DeNA’s MiniNation mobile platform, DeNA's subsidiary in the smartphone market.

DeNA has been actively looking to expand its footprint in the U.S. via acquisitions, investments and partnerships. In fact, this is the fourth American social gaming investment by the company over the past year. The company purchased game studio IceBreaker and invested in gaming platform AuroraFeint last year.

This year, DeNA has created a new gaming portal with Yahoo, and launched a $27.5 million social gaming VC fund. Financially, DeNA is on track to create $1 billion in revenue this year, posting strong first quarter earnings a few weeks ago, fueled by the company’s entry into the American market and debut on iPhones in 2010.

Palo Alto based Opzi, a stealth Y Combinator startup that will debut at TechCrunch Disrupt next week, has closed an impressive first round of financing – nearly $1 million from SV Angel, First Round Capital, Naval Kavikant, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Paul Buchheit, Fritz Lanman and Raymond Tonsing.

That’s quite a syndicate. And equally impressive is founder Euwyn Poon. Poon graduated from Cornell University at the age of 18 and subsequently received a J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2007. He then practiced law for two years. Now, all of 25 years old, he’s founded one of the hot startups of the year.

What is Opzi? You’ll have to wait until next week to see when they debut on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Well, this is bizarre. Minutes ago Paul Berry, CTO of the Huffington Post, tweeted that “google analytics chrome 6 bug is going to be big news”. After a little digging, we think he may be right: Chrome 6 (and the more recent Chrome 7, which is still in beta) is causing issues with Google Analytics, causing traffic data to be seriously skewed for visitors using Chrome’s browser. The number of Unique Visitors reported by Analytics is jumping up, but the average number of pages viewed by each user is dropping off a cliff. Update: See below, Google says that there was an issue, but that it has been fixed in the most recent Chrome update.

Here’s how one site administrator describes the issue on a Google support forum:

With the release of Chrome 6 we’ve seen a huge jump in Unique Visitors and Visits, which would show that the issue (some sort of Cookie “dropping”/overwriting) happens during the visits as opposed to in between the visits. This also pushes the Avg. Pageviews per Visit down, so we know that those really aren’t just extra visits that we receive. Looking at the Avg. Pageviews per Visit by each of the version (5, 6, 7), I can see Chrome 5 has a healthy ~20 pageviews per visit average, while 6 & 7 have around 3 pageviews per visit, which points to session (cookies) being cut down all the time.

It looks like this has been going on for weeks now, too. We’ve just delved into our own Google Analytics logs and are also seeing similarly odd behavior from Chrome browsers starting at the beginning of September. Chrome 6′s release date with September 2.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information. Update: Google has given us this statement.

‘A bug in Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine reported the wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case, which caused Chrome to incorrectly execute Google Analytics’s JavaScript, providing an artificially high visitor count. This bug has been fixed in the most recent releases of Google Chrome and all users have been automatically updated with the bug fix. While we believe this issue is fixed, we’ll be closely monitoring over the weekend and beyond.’

In venture capital, there are three people who rule Silicon Valley: John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. All three will be speaking at Disrupt. (There are still a few tickets left). We’ve already mentioned Doerr and Moritz, and now we are pleased to announce that Khosla will be completing the triumvirate.

Khosla, of course, was the first CEO of Sun Microsystems back in the 1980s before he joined John Doerr to embark on a storied career as a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. At Kleiner, he had a string of huge wins, including Nexgen (which was acquired by AMD and formed the core of its ability to take on Intel), Juniper Networks, and Cerent (which was sold to Cisco for $7 billion). In 2004, he created Khosla Ventures to invest his own money and began to dive deep into greentech, while still keeping his hand in infotech. Always known for being a risk junkie and identifying big opportunities early, he started to build one of the deepest portfolios of greentech investments in the Valley. Last year, he finally took outside money, raising $1.1 billion for two new funds, including a seed fund.

Khosla will give us the lay of the land in greentech. His greentech portfolio covers everything from power generation, batteries, and advanced hydrocarbons to water, plastics, and chemicals. It sounds almost like a future General Electric, which is why we paired him up with Kevin Skillern of GE. Skillern leads GE’s energy-focused venture capital arm of GE. In July, GE launched a $200 million Ecomagination fund with leading VC firms to fund new greentech startups. Whereas Khosla tends to invest as early as possible, GE wants to identify those technologies ready to be commercialized. The conversation should be fascinating.

Glam Media, a top-ranked women's media network, is announcing a number of new hires today for its technology, brand sales, engineering, and product teams.

Chris Murphy joins Glam as the Sr. Director of Platform Solutions after five years working in advertising at Yahoo. Murphy originally joined Yahoo when the company acquired ad exchange RightMedia. Manuel Ponce De Leon, Glam’s new Program Manager for Media Products, joins the company after serving as the lead for the rich media product team at Google. Lindsey Frankenfield, a former ad exec at Technorati, is joining as Program Manager for Ad Serving & Data Products; and Ryan Bowermaster, Program Manager for Ad Platforms, joins Glam from Yahoo, where he worked on RightMedia’s Display Platform API. These employees will be working on Glam Adapt, the company’s recently launched new ad serving technology.

In terms of sales, Glam is bringing on Christine DeMaio as VP of Sales Development Brand Advertising from Condé Nast Digital, where she was the Vice President and Group Publisher of the entire Condé Nast Digital sales team. Another Conde Nast transplant, Dana McGovern joins Glam as the Advertising Director for the East Coast.

As the company expands internationally and continues to grow in terms of traffic, Glam is on a bit of a hiring spree. Earlier this morning, Glam announced that it was tapping former Microsoft exec Adam Roston as its new M&A head. In May, Glam poached Bruce Jaffe from Microsoft as CFO (possibly in preparation for an IPO). And Glam has been steadily bringing over talent from Yahoo; last Fall the company nabbed Yahoo’s top ad exec Josh Jacobs.

According to comScore’s latest data from August, Glam Media is now the sixth most trafficked web property in the U.S., coming in just behind AOL, and is moving into providing male-oriented content as well. Glam founder Samir Arora says that as the network continues to grow, he expects to hire more staff, increasing its existing 250-member team by 100 new employees over the next year.

Back in June of last year, a report in The Washington Post stated that the U.S. Department of Justice had begun a probe looking into the hiring practices of some of tech’s biggest companies. The probe was at its early stages at that point, but they were specifically looking into if any companies had agreements in place not to recruit one another’s workers. In August of last year, we reported that two of those companies, Apple and Google, did have such an agreement in place — and we even obtained an email that seemed to confirm it. Neither Google nor Apple responded to our request for a comment on the issue. Of course, they couldn’t sidestep the DoJ so easily. And today, the government is announcing a settlement on the issue.

Specifically, the DoJ is saying it is settling with six companies — Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar — ensuring that they will not enter into no solicitation agreements for employees going forward. In the complaint and settlement proposal they’re filing today, the DoJ is saying their findings indicate that there were agreements in place between a mixture of these companies over the years that prevented poaching. Here’s how they outlined it:

According to the complaint, the six companies entered into agreements that restrained competition between them for highly skilled employees.   The agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, Apple and Pixar and Google and Intel prevented the companies from directly soliciting each other's employees.   An agreement between Google and Intuit prevented Google from directly soliciting Intuit employees.

Again, Apple and Google is the one we reported on.The DoJ says:

Beginning no later than 2006, Apple and Google executives agreed not to cold call each other's employees.   Apple placed Google on its internal "Do Not Call List," which instructed employees not to directly solicit employees from the listed companies.   Similarly, Google listed Apple among the companies that had special agreements with Google and were part of the "Do Not Cold Call" list.

That’s pretty much exactly what we had heard for our source on the matter. Here’s the key part of the email we obtained back then when someone from Google accidentally did cold call an Apple employee:

Google has an agreement with Apple that we will not cold call their staff.

Further, we heard that when Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s Board of Directors in the Summer of 2009, that agreement (which was of the under-the-table variety among executives at both companies) may have been called off. As we’re all well aware, the companies began to be at odds with one another at that point. You’ll note that the 2006 timeframe when the DoJ believes the agreement began is when Schmidt first joined Apple’s Board.

Even more interesting in the DoJ’s findings may be that Apple and Adobe actually had an agreement in place not to poach employees as well. Yes, the two companies that hate each other. From the DoJ report:

Beginning no later than May 2005, senior Apple and Adobe executives agreed not to cold call each other's employees.   Apple placed Adobe on its internal "Do Not Call List" and similarly, Adobe included Apple in its internal list of "Companies that are off limits"

The Apple and Pixar agreement should be no surprise given that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has led both companies in the past.

The DoJ notes that the settlement still has to be accepted by the courts (but you have to believe it will be) and that it will put these new competitive rules in place for five years. Here’s the key:

Although the complaint alleges only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the proposed settlement more broadly prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.  The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.

The DoJ also notes that this complaint/settlement is a part of the larger antitrust inquiry into employment practices by high tech firms. And it says that they’re continuing to investigate other claims.

Update: And further confirmation from Google on the matter:

In order to maintain a good working relationship with these companies, in 2005 we decided not to "cold call" employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly.

[photo: flickr/mackz]

Jack Ma– CEO of The Alibaba Group and president of the Carol Bartz fan club– was on Charlie Rose this week, and while he didn’t offer any more insight into the Yahoo situation, he said a lot of interesting things.

Ma is a force. He’s going at half-normal-speed in this video. I saw him speak at the World Economic Forum last week in Chinese and the translators couldn’t keep up with him. They kept tagging in-and-out because he exhausted them so quickly.

Ma says three things are at the core of his company and business philosophy, calling them “his religion” on the show. The first is that technology isn’t Alibaba’s core competency, rather it’s the company’s culture. That first bit is the surprising part– Ma goes on and on about how untechnical he is. That’s something I’ve never heard any executive of a tech company say, even if they aren’t technical. Ma says “I know nothing about technology,” adding he can’t write code and the most he can do is send and receive emails. That takes some confidence as a leader to be so bold about what you don’t know.

The second element of his “religion” is that shareholders come last– the most important groups are customers and then employees. He says matter-of-factly that customers are the ones who pay him and employees are the ones who stick with him but shareholders come and go. (Note: There’s some interesting subtext, whether it was intentional or not. The largest shareholder is Yahoo, who Ma would very much like to go.)

The third element is that “Small is beautiful”– strange coming from the guy who built one of the largest Internet companies in the largest online market in the largest country in the world. Few things are “small” in China and fewer still are praised for being small. But Ma’s platforms are powered by millions and millions of small business people who couldn’t do business any other way in China. He says that in the US, real world business infrastructure is so good that ecommerce is “dessert” but in China it’s “the main course.” He thinks the future of China is empowering lots of entrepreneurs in the classic, small-business-man sense of the word. What China needs most he says are hundreds of millions of jobs, and he thinks lots of small businesses are the answer not more giants like Alibaba.

Technology is merely a tool; shareholders are the least important constituency; and small is better than big. This is how Jack Ma views the Internet and the world differently than a typical Valley CEO. Given he’s built the largest ecommerce and online payment platforms in China while most Valley companies have failed to get off the ground, the difference in mindset might well be part of the reason why.

The full video is here, and there’s a clip below.

When Google Instant debuted on September 8th, the search company touted its efficiency. As TechCrunch has previously reported, Google Instant saves web users time by delivering results more quickly than other engines, and Google's earlier search products. Marissa Mayer Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, estimates Google Instant could save a collective 350 million hours of search time over its first year.

But how will Google Instant impact the company's own data centers, operations and energy efficiency? Does it increase network traffic and power consumption by an end users’ local PC, by the network or through additional processing by Google servers?

A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch:

It's too soon for us to know exactly how this will impact our power consumption. Of course, as our business grows, we want to make sure we minimize our environmental impact. We're taking every step we can to implement innovative and responsible environmental practices across Google to reduce our carbon footprint, ensure efficient computing and help our employees be green.

He also referred to pages at Google's corporate website detailing the company's efforts to become carbon neutral.

Google has increased its efforts to be environmentally responsible over the years. It has invested in renewable energy businesses, and committed to purchasing power from renewable sources for example.

Its products — Google Earth and Google Maps in particular — advance a wide range of environmental research. A couple of examples are the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's study of water and air quality around the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the African Wildlife Foundation's study of elephants and other conservation projects in the African Heartlands.

Google also took a pledge devised and promoted by the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, to cut the energy consumption of computers in half.

However, Google keeps details about its infrastructure and energy use secret, viewing them as a proprietary and competitive issue. Twitter, Facebook and other technology firms also conceal details about their data centers and energy consumption in aggregate for the same reasons. Regulated stock exchanges, and the U.S. government don’t compel internet service and IT companies to report more details about their environmental impact, today.

Green IT and sustainability researchers worry that the computing power required to run Google Instant makes the feature more of an energy sucker than an energy saver on balance.

The chief executive of 1E, a global green IT software and consulting firm, Sumir Karayi explains:

"At the base level Google is doing more processing up front [with Google Instant]. Because of that, it is highly unlikely that this solution itself could have any positive impact on the environment, or save energy costs for Google, even if it has a very positive impact on the productivity of the end-user."

At the same time, Karayi also thinks Google Instant is "incredibly sensible." With it, he says “Google is addressing one of the biggest areas of waste in IT, the amount of time PC users, and IT professionals waste on doing things that are not required and that can be automated. If you can save a few minutes or milliseconds, cumulatively, that amounts to a huge number of work minutes, even if these are not directly energy-saving or easily quantifiable."

According to a comprehensive report by Energy Star (a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy) data centers used 61 billion kWh of electricity in 2006, comprising 1.5% of the nation's electricity consumption at the time, and costing approximately $4.5 billlion. Energy Star estimated that national energy consumption by servers and data centers would nearly double by 2011 to more than 100 billion kWh, representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.

By setting new standards and offering new tools to measure and rate the efficiency of data centers and servers, the government agencies hope they will drive IT and internet service companies to voluntarily do things like calibrate their buildings, equipment and software, or use non-hydrocarbon energy sources to power their data centers, thereby curbing their negative environmental impact and those aforementioned electricity costs.

Facebook Pages — the public profiles that the site offers to brands, businesses, celebrities, and other public figures — launched in 2007, got a revamp around eighteen months ago and have quickly picked up steam. Some of the most popular pages, like Lady Gaga, have tens of millions of fans. And Facebook wants you to follow more of them.

Today, it’s officially launching a Page Browser that suggests Pages you may be interested in, with an interface somewhat reminiscent of Netflix that allows you to filter by category. Suggestions are tailored based on pages you’ve previously ‘Liked’, and following a new Page simply entails clicking on its icon.

As Inside Facebook reported, the feature actually launched a few weeks ago, only to be shut down shortly thereafter (it looks like they’ve added a few more Page categories, like ‘Movies’, in the mean time). Also worth pointing out: Facebook’s blog post says this was built by a team of two people — Facebook frequently likes to play up the relative impact of each employee, compared to larger companies like Microsoft and Google.

This isn’t the only thing Facebook does to encourage you to ‘Like’ more pages. In July it launched a new-user flow that includes a Suggested Interests List, which ensures that novices have stories populating their News Feed. And as you browse the site you’ll often see both ads promoting Pages and recommended Pages Facebook thinks you might be interested in.

TechCrunch Disrupt starts Monday – just three days from today. And we’ve just gotten word that Google CEO Eric Schmidt will be speaking. We’ve added him to our amazing list of speakers. Schmidt will join Disrupt on Tuesday at 10 am.

This is a surprise guest. We’re not quite sure what Schmidt will talk about. Will it be about that new social layer Google is adding to its services? Will it be about how Google is doing in mobile with Android? Will it be about the forthcoming Chrome OS? Whatever it is, it will be interesting. Come to Disrupt to find out. (Yup, there are still a few tickets left).

Brightkite has always been an interesting startup. They were in the location game early (a 2007 TechStars launch) — perhaps a bit too early, as the true hype in the space has only really began in the past year or so. Nevertheless, they were able to get an exit (well, sort of a merger/exit) in 2009. And they’ve been able to accumulate over 2 million users. And they’re still plugging away at location — but going forward, they’ll be doing that without two founders, Brady Becker and Martin May.

May actually left a couple months ago, as Brightkite noted with a farewell post. But Becker has also left, we’re hearing. And his bio page seems to confirm this. And while they may be out of Brightkite, they’re not out of the location game, we’re also hearing.

We’re told that Becker and May have started a new stealth startup called Forkly. The service’s website gives no clue as to what it is beyond the phrase “we are forkly.” But the Twitter account indicates that both Becker and May are working on it (those are the only two accounts it follows), and states that “We’re a new, stealthy startup in Denver.”

Becker’s LinkedIn also says that he’s currently the founder of Forkly.com (and YouAreHere), but gives no more info. May’s bio doesn’t say anything about Forkly, but he is the mayor of its headquarters in Denver (which apparently used to be a restaurant).

But a source tells us that Forkly is definitely a new startup in the location space. This obviously makes sense given both Becker’s and May’s experience and areas of expertise. Aside from Brightkite, the two were also the driving force behind Check.in, the multiple check-in web app being run under the Brightkite banner. (The two of them actually demoed it for us at SXSW this past year.)

We’ll try to dig up more about Forkly. Stay tuned.

Update: I’ve just confirmed with Becker that he did recently leave Brightkite and that yes, Forkly is his new startup. He declined to give more information about it at this time.

Looks like IBM and HP have just been hit with patent infringement lawsuits. According to a release, BackWeb Technologies has filed separate lawsuits in the United States District Court in San Francisco, California against IBM and HP, alleging patent infringement.

The patents seems to deal with technology for transmitting information between a remote network and a local computer and distributed client-based data caching systems. BackWeb alleges that IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager and IBM's recently acquired BigFix products infringe four U.S. patents owned by BackWeb. BackWeb also alleges that HP's Client Automation product infringes three U.S. patents owned by BackWeb covering methods for transmitting information between a remote network and a local computer.

BackWeb's has created a "push" communications technology, specialized for the connecting mobile workforces. The technology is deployed to sales forces, field employees, mobile managers and remote operations. Typical applications include enterprise sales force automation, CRM, e-learning and training.

BackWeb could have some grounding in this; the company recently settled a patent lawsuit with Microsoft, where BackWeb ended up licensing its technology to the company. It’s unclear what the financial terms of the agreement were in June. BackWeb has also sued Symantec, and Sybase (which was settled).

Zynga’s quest for world domination continues today, as the social gaming giant acquires the assets of German game engine developer Dextrose AG. Zynga has been growing fast and on an acquisition tear this year, buying up XPD in Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, and Challenge Games in Austin.

Dextrose AG develops a commercial game engine for pluginless browser games. Called "Aves Engine," the game engine technology allows developers to build any type of web based 2D or 2.5D game using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Similar to the nature of the company’s previous acquisitions, the Dextrose AG team will become Zynga Germany (based in Frankfurt). This will be the company’s first engineering presence in Europe (the company has an operational office in Dublin). Joining Zynga from Dextrose AG is co-founder Paul Bakaus, who will become CTO of Zynga Germany. Bakaus is a jQuery core team member, and helped create the user interface framework jQuery UI. Fellow Dextrose founder Rocco Di Leo will become Country Manager at Zynga Germany, responsible for all processes and organization involved in the development of future browser game technology.

Of course, with big profits and armed with a massive war chest (which recently got $150 million larger thanks to Softbank Capital), Zynga has more than enough cash to make these acquisitions. And the company is expanding through a number of high-profile partnerships, including deals with Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Just about a year ago, Twitter revealed a project called The Fledgling Initiative. No, it wasn’t some new secret Twitter feature, instead it was a project that would see Twitter make its own wine. Yes, wine. But for a good cause — Room to Read, the non-profit that’s all about extending literacy and the education of children around the world. But at the time, Twitter warned it would be quite a while before the wine was ready to sell. Well, a year later, it finally is.

In a post today on their blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone notes that this weekend the wine will be available. People who pre-ordered should get their shipments shortly. Meanwhile, there are still bottles and cases to be bought here.

The wine, which is called Fledgling wine, is available in two varieties: a white (chardonnay) and a red (pinot noir). Each 750ml bott is $25, or you can buy a whole case (12 bottles) for $300. Both are 2009 vintage that Stone says “are being made using some of the best vineyards in California by the acclaimed winemaking team at Crushpad.” “Incidentally, 2009 appears to be an excellent vintage in California, potentially one of the best of the decade,” he continues.

Specifically, these bottles being sold will help promote literacy in Uttarakhand, India.

Twitter will also apparently have a Fledgling wine launch event tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I asked Twitter if we can expect to see the wine in stores anytime soon. “Just the web site for now. But we’d love to see it in stores and other places!,” a representative told me.

Google’s Project 10^100 — an initiative that began two years ago today as a call for ideas that would help improve the lives of people around the world, some of which Google would fund — is finally ready for its grand finale. Google has just announced that it’s given a total of $10 million to five different organizations, after culling through over 150,000 ideas.

Here are brief summaries of the five programs Google is donating to, from Google’s blog post:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free
Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world's most widely spoken languages.

Idea: Enhance science and engineering education
Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.

Idea: Make government more transparent
Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Idea: Drive innovation in public transport
Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb's technology for an urban setting.

Idea: Provide quality education to African students
Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS' primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to master’s and Ph.D. study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

This is an awesome move by Google, but it’s worth recapping the lengthy road it took to get here. Two years ago, in honor of the company’s tenth birthday, Google announced the initiative, with plans to hold a vote on incoming submissions a few months later. But Google was mostly silent about the program for exactly one year (we’d occasionally get pinged asking what was going on), until it revealed that it had been overwhelmed by the number of submissions and decided to have the community vote on which 16 broad themes it should be exploring most. After that there was another lengthy one year wait (and more tips from our readers asking if Google had killed the project).

Thankfully the wait is over and the money is being put to great use.