Years ago, the nations of the world signed a space treaty. No, this isn’t a recap of the latest Mass Effect 2 DLC. It basically said, "OK, space exploration will be for the benefit of all mankind. All areas of space belong equally to all nations." Ludicrous, by the way, the thought that we should have any sort of sway over the stars. The point is: we came together, at least on the surface, for the benefit of every person on the planet. With that in mind: how would you react to a similar Internet treaty? Something the nations of the world can get behind in order to save the Internet?

Here’s an interesting one: a new startup aims to help retailers replace traditional promotions and incentives such as coupons and discounts with virtual goods and virtual currencies for a wide range of social games and networks. The American/French company, dubbed Ifeelgoods, is launching today.

Ifeelgoods was formed by e-commerce entrepreneur Michael Amar, former Shop.org Executive Director Scott Silverman and alumni from Google, DAOODA and PayPal.

The company is backed by multiple investment firms such as Tugboat Ventures, Quest Venture Partners and Kima Ventures alongside a couple of angel investors like Adbrite CEO Iggy Fanlo, Vincent Worms and Nicolas El Baze (of investment firm Partech International) and David Scacco of MyLikes.

Ifeelsgoods’ goal is to make online retail promotions more effective and less expensive by using relevant virtual goods and currencies from the most popular social games in lieu of traditional promotions such as discounts, coupon codes or gifts with purchase.

It comes in the form of a hosted solution that lets retailers manage their own virtual goods promotion offers, redemption and related customer services.

"In retail, incentives and promotions are critical sales tools but they are one-size-fits-all and can be very expensive," says Michael Amar, Ifeelgoods CEO and co-founder.

"As social networks and social games become even more integral in people's daily interactions and personal relationships, it's evident that retailers who learn how to capitalize on these trends will have a powerful advantage over their competition."

Ifeelgoods will partner with (unnamed) publishers of social games to make their virtual goods and virtual currencies available to retailers to offer as incentives to customers. They will in turn benefit from exposure to existing and new players and increased sales of virtual goods and currencies, Ifeelgoods hopes.

Executives from Ifeelgoods, aside from Amar and Silverman, include Dimitri Ducourtieux, COO and Vice President of Europe, who previously led major technical projects for top European retailers including Otto Group, Intermarché and Yves Rocher; Suchit Dash, who joins as its Vice President of Product after an extensive career at PayPal; and Vida Ha, who spent five years as a senior software engineer at Google before joining Ifeelgoods as Lead Engineer.

The company can also boast an impressive advisory board; it includes people like Iggy Fanlo (CEO of AdBrite), Siva V. Kumar (Co-Founder & CEO of TheFind), David Marcus (CEO of Zong), David Selinger (CEO of RichRelevance) and Meir Zohar (Founder and CEO, eXelate).

Ifeelgoods is headquartered in Menlo Park, California and has locations in Washington, DC and Paris, France.

Z3 Enterprises, a publicly listed multimedia publishing and marketing company formerly known as Bibb Corp, has signed an agreement to acquire Usee for $105 million in stock upon completion of the company’s recently announced 6:1 forward split.

Upon close of the transaction, Usee will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Z3, adding revenues of nearly $10 million annually to the bottom line of the parent company, and self-reportedly also “pending contracts worth well over $100 million per year”.

Z3 Enterprises states that while its primary focus is on the acquisition, financing, and production of media related consumer products, the acquisition of Usee allows it to diversify its revenue streams.

The company adds that the transaction will also enable Usee to complete several other acquisitions of complementary companies in the VoIP space in the future, and subtly points out that Usee owns a number of patents in that fast-growing segment of the market.

Usee offers what it (horridly) dubbed the UseeiseeFone, a telephone device that enables people to communicate, face-to-face, with other “UseeiseeFones” or call, errrmm, non-UseeiseeFones just as they would with a regular phone. The device can also connect directly to a TV set or computer for a larger picture.

Z3 Enterprises and Usee intend to raise $150 million for Usee’s operations, including the international expansion of its products and services. In addition, Z3 Enterprises says it intends to utilize Usee’s platforms for advertising and delivery of some of its video-based content, which includes educational programs and other corporate and consumer products.

Google Apps is making some serious inroads into businesses and other organizations. Today, Google announced that more than 3 million businesses, schools, and government agencies are using Google Apps. To put that in perspective, that gives Google more enterprise customers than Salesforce, which has about 2 million.

There are now 30 million employees and other enterprise users on Google Apps, which is a bundle of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Video, and Google Sites. Google Apps has grown by 5 million enterprise users since last March. Google sells it as an economical alternative to Microsoft Office and Exchange, with better sharing features since all the apps are based in the cloud.

The success of Google Apps is part of the growing consumerization of enterprise apps. Employees want their business apps to have a similar look and feel and the same ease-of-use as the consumer Internet apps they use every day. Google Enterprise president David Girouard will be joining us next week at TechCrunch Disrupt on a panel with Yammer CEO David Sacks and Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary, where I will ask them what is driving this consumerization of the enterprise (tickets).

The Galaxy Tab will soon be here and Samsung is revving up their marketing machine ahead of its launch. The latest video clocks in at just under two minutes and attempts to make a case for the tablet by yet again showing off its functions. Honestly, nothing shown is all that spectacular anymore thanks to the iPad’s rich feature set. The only two things demoed that are not available on the iPad is video chat and Flash compatibility, but I doubt many people will fail to notice those key advantages.

That’s actually fine. People like choices and consumers will no doubt smile at the fact that another tablet is finally available with a similar feature set as the iPad. It’s now up to a marketing blitz from Samsung and the four major carriers in the US to get the word out. Believe it or not, there is a good amount of people who doesn’t get their news from tech blogs. Crazies, I know.

TiVo already has an impressive lineup of internet apps on their DVRs but the offering just got a little more musical thanks to Pandora. Nearly all of Pandora’s trademark features including access to the Music Genome Project is available in the app. Users can thumb up or down artists and create personalized radio stations on the fly. Existing Pandora users can sign into their accounts or new accounts can be created via an on-screen interface — no computer required.

Pandora is just the latest app to hit the TiVo Premiere platform. It joins other music apps such as Rhapsody, Live365, Music Choice as well as Netflix, BlockBuster, and YouTube. It clearly signals that TiVo is commented to adding killer applications to their devices although this update is probably the first of many that passes-over older TiVo boxes such as the Series3 or HD line. The company moved to something totally different with the Premiere and the older platforms might not get all the goodies as the new model. Oh well. I guess it’s time to upgrade.

Just as promised, the Peek 9 launched today and brings a whole new level of cool to the not-a-smartphone device. It seems nearly everything is updated from the mail service to the hardware. It’s a mighty big update for Peek, but somehow all this goodness rings up for less than the previous generation — even the service plan is cheaper now.

Internet media company Internet Brands this morning announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement to be acquired by an affiliate of private equity investment firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners VI in a transaction valued at approximately $640 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, stockholders of NASDAQ-listed Internet Brands will receive $13.35 in cash for each outstanding share of common stock they own, a premium of approximately 46.5% over the closing price last Friday.

Internet Brands owns and operates more than 100 vertical websites, including Autos.com, Gardens.com, Loan.com and DoItYourself.com. In total, Internet Brands claims these sites organically attract approximately 62 million unique visitors per month.

The company was founded in 1998 by business incubator Idealab.

When the company last posted its financial results, it reported revenues of $28.1 million in the second quarter of this year and net income of $4.6 million in second quarter.

Idealab, which beneficially owns approximately 19% of Internet Brands’ outstanding common stock and approximately 64% of the voting power of the company, has entered into a voting agreement with an affiliate of Hellman & Friedman relating to the merger agreement.

The merger deal is subject to stockholder approval, including approval by holders of a majority of the outstanding common stock not owned by Idealab and other parties, and customary closing conditions. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Debt financing commitments have been provided by Bank of America, N.A., BMO Capital Markets, GE Capital and RBC Capital Markets.

Update: Internet Brands CEO Bob Brisco blogson INET going private again:

We became a public company three years ago, just as the global financial markets began to falter—and ultimately crater. We've prospered, despite the most difficult economic, financial, and advertising market backdrop in about 85 years.

We take pride in our NASDAQ performance and shareholder returns. At the $13.35 offer price, our stock would have appreciated roughly 67% from our IPO. That compares to an overall NASDAQ decline during the same period of roughly -10%. Our management team is proud of our performance and I am proud of them. We are blessed with a great team.

So, why potentially go private again? Because we believe this would be a good deal for our shareholders. Because we would continue to build one of the finest New Media companies in the world and become even more focused on long-term growth. Because H&F would be a great partner.

Update 2: Law firm Levi & Korsinsky is already announcing that they’ll investigate if the Board of Directors has breached its fiduciary duties to stockholders by “failing to adequately shop the Company” before entering into this transaction.

Data warehouse appliance company Netezza had been rumored to being close to getting acquired for a while, and this morning it turned out IBM is the one on the buying side. Big Blue is acquiring the company in cash transaction at a price of $27 per share or at a net price of approximately $1.7 billion, after adjusting for cash. Netezza, which boasts approximately 500 employees around the world, provides high-performance analytics in a data warehousing appliance.

Kiva.org, one of the pioneers in micro-lending to entrepreneurs, is entering the educational space today, launching the pilot program of student microloans on the platform.

Kiva is a peer-to-peer lending site that began as a way to facilitate micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries, Through Kiva's platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle.

Most of the entrepreneurs who benefit are in developing countries, but last year Kiva opened up its service to needy U.S. entrepreneurs last summer (which caused some controversy). It also has APIs for other developers to build on its data set.

With the Student Microloans program, now anyone can lend as little as $25 to students in Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador to to fund their educations. Similar to the way the organization handles its small business loans, Kiva is working closely with its Field Partners in the three countries to find students and to create a loan offering tailored for the countries' students. In some cases, Kiva is providing the additional reach needed to fund its current portfolio of student loans and, in another case, Kiva's partner is creating their first ever student microloan offering.

As with other Kiva loans, the progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Typically, students have between one and three years to pay back their loans. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds or re-lend to another student or entrepreneur.

For example, Alicia Fructos, a student from Caaguazú, Paraguay is using Kiva to help fund her education (pictured below). From her lending page on Kiva’s site:

Alicia Frutos is from the city of Caaguazú. She is 23 years old and in her fifth year studying Legal and Notary Sciences at Universidad del Norte in Caaguazú. Alicia has a 22 year old sister who graduated with a degree in Accounting from the same school. Her mother has a business renting out tables and chairs for social events, while her father works as a merchant. Alicia currently works as a registrar at the courthouse, where she is gaining experience while earning an income to help pay for her studies. She is eager to finish her degree so that she can open her own law practice, grow professionally, and be recognized for her excellent work as a lawyer. Alicia is requesting a loan to pay her monthly tuition. Since she is seeking to complete two degrees, the cost is quite expensive.

Kiva has been growing like a weed since its launch in 2008. Currently, over 477,000 people have loaned more than $150 million to 408,000 entrepreneurs in 53 countries via Kiva. Kiva’s repayment rate thus far (for entrepreneurs) is 98 percent and the startup is raising $1 million every 5 days for small businesses.

The move to help fund student loans in developing countries seems seems like a natural transition for Kiva, but CEO Premal Shah reinforces this is still a pilot program and the startup is still waiting to see how the program fares before extending it to other countries.

Of course while Kiva pioneered the model of using microlending to fund small businesses in developing countries, another startup, Vittana, launched its microlending marketplace for student loans last May.

Posterous users can automatically push content posted to their blogs onto other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and so on. Up until recently, people could even post content like text, pictures and videos to their Posterous account and subsequently have it auto-posted to a Tumblr blog.

Now, as of this morning it seems, people who try to link a Tumblr blog to the Posterous service in the latter’s back-end get served the following notice, which leaves little to the imagination (emphasis ours):

Link Your Tumblr Account

Your full blog post will get autoposted to your Tumblr. Don’t worry about where you’re going to host your images, files, or music anymore. We’ll always just do the right thing.

Tumblr autopost has been temporarily disabled — seems like they are blocking our API requests at present moment. We’re working on getting this resolved. In the meantime, you might try emailing Tumblr support about it.

In other words, Posterous says Tumblr no longer wishes to host content automatically pushed from Posterous to them, and has thus technically disabled users from autoposting their content. And Posterous is telling users it is investigating the issue and “working on getting this resolved” which means they’re either talking to Tumblr or hacking a workaround.

It’s always possible Tumblr isn’t intentionally blocking API requests from Posterous and that there’s a technical issue that Tumblr will resolve. It also appears Tumblr has opted not to block Posterous’ import tool, which enables people to make the switch to the latter easier.

Update: and indeed, Tumblr CEO David Karp tells me that Posterous hasn’t been blacklisted at all, and that it’s probably just a case of them hitting Tumblr’s normal API throttling, which he adds recently became more aggressive in cases where clients make repeat requests with bad login credentials.

Karp also points out that they’re happy to help sort this out and currently looking into it.

Either way, there’s clearly been a feud growing between the two companies, both backed by venture capital firms, as of late. Both operate in the same, effortless-blogging platform space, and Tumblr is the bigger one and growing faster, but it has also been around for longer and definitely feeling the Posterous heat.

Last June, Posterous embarked on an aggressive switching campaign to attract more users, and one of the companies they singled out was of course Tumblr. Their message back then:

Tumblr is a pretty cool service. They offer easy set up, loads of funky themes and super-simple reblogging. But blogging on Tumblr is sort of like being in high school. But you know deep-down that you can’t be in high school forever. Eventually, you have to move on.

Unlike TwitPic, Tumblr at the time didn’t respond to the campaign by threatening legal action, nor did they block the Posterous auto-post feature as far as we know. It would have made more sense then than it does now, but here we are.

Posterous nor Tumblr has responded to a request for comment so far, but we’ll update if and when they do (update: see above for comment from Tumblr).

Soon, visitors of Facebok.com will no longer land on a shady site promising cheap Apple products in a Facebook-styled theme (deliberately not linking to it) but be redirected to Facebook instead.

That’s because the company has prevailed in a dispute over the domain name earlier this month.

Facebook had apparently filed a complaint against the current owner of Facebok.com, supposedly a German named Franz Bauer (which is almost certainly not his or her real identity) who resides in a hotel in Munich according to public WHOIS information.

He or she will now see the domain name get transferred over to Zuckerberg and co.

Coincidentally, the domain name Faceboook.com and Facebooj.com also lead to that same shady website, and I’m sure there are many more like that. For those two, at least, Facebook has yet to file formal complaints.

Facebook, in general and especially compared to other Internet giants, isn’t all that active when it comes to protecting users from landing on ill-intended websites based on the misspelling of its website address.

According to UDRPsearch, the company has only filed two formal complaints with the National Arbitration Forum this year, compared to only three last year. Closer to home, I know that Facebook.be isn’t owned or operated by Facebook either, as an example.

All this may not be that big of a deal at first glance, but profiting from type-in traffic based on typos in domain names is an entire industry. The more companies make a certified effort in obtaining ownership over these types of domain names, the less of a chance for survival that particular nasty industry will have.

“Two-factor authentication” may be the least sexy-sounding feature I’ve ever written about. But if you’ve ever worried about being phished or having your password hacked, it could be your best friend — because it makes it much, much harder for a hacker to break into your account. Today, Google is announcing that it’s bringing the security feature to its millions of users: the feature will be rolling out first for Google Apps Premiere, Education, and Government edition customers, with plans to bring it to all Google users (even those who aren’t using its Apps suite) in the next few months.

So what exactly is two-factor authentication? Most of the login systems you’ve probably used are only ‘one-factor’ — you enter one password and you’re in, but if that password gets compromised, you’re toast. More secure systems are common in large businesses, and often require both a password and a physical card or dongle to login — these are called ‘two-factor’ systems, because they require both your password and another key, and are far more secure because a hacker probably isn’t going to have that physical token. Unfortunately these security systems are generally quite expensive. But Google is bringing one to the masses.

Google’s system doesn’t require a physical keycard. Instead, it relies on your mobile phone. First, you need to activate the optional feature from your settings page (again, this is only available to certain Google Apps customers at first). Then, when you go to sign in to your Google account, you’ll first be asked to enter your password as usual. Next, you’ll be brought to a screen asking for a verification code (see the screenshot above).

The verification code comes from your mobile phone, which you’ve previously linked up to your Google Account. Google has built a ‘Google Authenticator’ application for Android, the iPhone, and Blackberry — fire up the application, and it will give you the six digit verification code that you enter back into your browser (the system can also send you a SMS message or give you the code via voice call).

That’s it. The entire process only takes a minute or so, but it’s much more secure because anyone wanting to access your account will also need access to your mobile phone. You can opt to require this two-factor authentication all the time, or you can elect to only require it one time per computer (in other words, you’ll only need to enter it once on your home PC and/or work computer).

Like I said, this may not sound sexy, but it’s a big deal. Given how much data users are storing on Google, and the fact that plenty of people still fall prey to phishing scams on a regular basis, this is a major step in helping keep users secure. This is all optional (unless your Apps administrator sets a policy requiring it), but I suspect Google will be making a push to urge users to take advantage of the new system as it begins rolling out more broadly.

The news will also make Google Apps an even more tempting proposition for security-conscious businesses (Google notes that prior to this release, it was also the first company to receive FISMA certification in the collaboration/document sharing space). To make this more appealing to businesses, Google is also open-sourcing its authentication apps, so businesses can create their own custom-branded versions.

The first thing you'll do after watching Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s The Social Network is visit the "History" subsection of the Wikipedia article on Facebook, seeking details on how much in the film is actually true, but primarily looking for evidence as to whether or not founder Mark Zuckerberg was that much of an asshole between 2003 and 2005.

Let me save you the trouble. He wasn’t. And perhaps Hollywood has an ulterior motive in making him out to be.

With The Social Network, Hollywood has made an artful attempt at taking the inferiority, fear and awe that it feels towards Silicon Valley and projecting it onto the cold, calculating (and fictional) Zuckerberg; "Creation myths need a devil," spoken by Rashida Jones' Marylin Delpy, is the most resonant line in the film.

But The Social Network’s Zuckerberg is less like the the devil and more like the world’s most Machiavellian Aspie. His detachment and arrogance is emphasized from the beginning scene, with enginerd Zuckerberg dissecting the lopsided proportion of genius IQs in China vs. the United States, bringing up his 1600 SAT score and then going on to demean his girlfriend's intellectual prowess with "You don't need to study, because you go to BU!"

As someone who has both read the leaked version of the script as well as seen the finished product, I can say that the emphasis on Zuckerberg's brutal intelligence has definitely been amped up from Sorkin's original draft by Jesse Eisenberg's cutting performance.

A subtle but particularly telling part in the movie, pulled off elegantly by Eisenberg, comes after an attorney for the Winklevoss twins asks Zuckerberg if he is paying attention, to which Zuckerberg bluntly says no, elaborating …

MARK

I think if your clients want to stand on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have a right to give it a try. You have part of my attention, the minimum amount needed. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook where my employees and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

Ouch.

The Cold War spawned a spate of Russian movie villains, and then we had Arabic stereotypes post 9-11, and now The Social Network marks an entry point in a new era, where the Internet is the enemy and people who understand how to code and build websites have power; We are scared of those who inexplicably understand the mechanics of our social lives and are almost inhumanely driven by the formidable pain of never fitting in.

If the constant controversy surrounding Facebook privacy highlights anything it’s that anonymous engineers have become creators of anxiety, simply by virtue of knowing how to create and access the intimidating tools that have become indispensable to those that don’t know their https:// from their WGETS.

Even Sorkin himself told New York Magazine, "I am not a fan of the Internet." As the perhaps the smartest most awkward guy in the entire world, Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect scapegoat for the whole damn thing, being someone who stole Hollywood's cultural influence and built a half a billion strong distribution network it could only dream of, delivering a brutal blow to its business model as a side note.

And with The Social Network, Hollywood now strikes back, by targeting its best and brightest talents (Fincher, Sorkin, Eisenberg, Jones, and a too brilliant to get into right now Justin Timberlake) towards the portrayal and evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg, nerd as villain. In an impressively meta sense, this movie recaptures the pop cultural buzz that has been co-opted by Facebook, at least for the moment.

Eisenberg's ultimately relatable Zuckerberg is the apotheosis of a laundry list of fake evil nerd archetypes: Syndrome from The Incredibles, Jeremy Piven in Old School, Darth Vader, Plague from Hackers, The Brain, Tim Robbins in Anti-Trust, Stephen King's Carrie, and a laundry list of real ones, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, David Barksdale, 4Chan, and so on and so forth.

But “evil” isn't exactly the right word to describe the symbolic Zuckerberg (too many Google associations). "You're not an asshole Mark, you just want to be," is the last line in the film, spoken by the sympathetic Delpy. And by now we've all subconsciously associated Zuckerberg with the word "creep," thanks to the ubiquitous movie trailer.

Even "creep" doesn't quite hit on why we can't help but root for Zuckerberg by the end of The Social Network. Having a front row seat to Hollywood’s new media catharsis and desire for some kind of inner-nerd atonement is why we have been and are going to be obsessed with the movie for months. That and the fact that we've got nothing to fear but those smarter, more arrogant and more driven than ourselves.

Basically, it’s complicated.

Want proof? Read other takes on the film here, here, here, and here.

The Social Network hits theatres October 1st.

Image: Dan Frommer

The Myriad International Holdings unit of Naspers has acquired a controlling interest in social networking and shopping site operator Multiply, we’ve learned.

Multiply will continue to operate under the same management team.

This company was originally founded in 2004 and raised $26.6 million in venture capital funding over the past few years in a bid to compete against the likes of MySpace and, later, Facebook and Twitter in the social media space.

Obviously, it never became much competition to these social networking giants (although admittedly MySpace itself has lots much of its shine recently), especially not in the United States where the bulk of online advertising budgets is spent.

Its last funding round, secured in November 2008, valued Multiply at $100 million, although I’d be very surprised if MIH / Naspers acquired its interest in the company at that valuation.

Originally started as a straightforward media management and closed-circuit communication service (Microsoft handed over the reins of MSN Groups to the company back in October 2008), Multiply has shifted most of its focus to social ecommerce in recent times.

Multiply, which now blends social networking and private media sharing with an online marketplace, at present self-reportedly counts over 70,000 merchants and 20 million monthly unique visitors.

Presumably, the venture-backed company considers there to be potentially more revenue opportunities down the line. Earlier this year, the company launched the Multiply Marketplace to provide a way for sellers to be found by buyers within the Multiply network.

Sellers can sign up for a customized online shop within the Multiply network and start listing items for sale and promoting them to the site’s user base. I checked out the United States offering and it was a thoroughly underwhelming experience, to say the least.

This is what most of the virtual ‘shops’ look like:

When I signed up for the site, I received a welcoming message from Multiply founder and CEO Peter Pezaris, which read that over 10 million people use the network to buy and sell products and services every month. Having browsed the Marketplace for about half an hour, I can’t possible imagine that’s really the case, although I understand most of its user activity originates from Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Boca Raton, Florida-based Multiply says teaming up with Naspers, which holds stakes in a good number of Internet and mobile ventures from across the globe, will allow it to focus more attention on intensifying its social shopping efforts in Southeast Asia in particular.

To illustrate its reach: Myriad International Holdings, Naspers’ investment subsidiary, boasts a large stake – nearly one third – in top investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (which boasts investments in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon but is also big in Russia) and holds about 35% of Chinese Internet juggernaut Tencent.

How do you know when a Facebook PR person is lying? When their lips move (or they issue a statement!) ba-dum ching!

We’ve been taking a beating today on our story about Facebook working on a branded mobile phone. Just like last year with the Google Phone, lots of people threw tantrums about how we made the story up right up until Google launched their own branded phone, the Nexus One.

And that’s what’s happening today, due in no small part to Facebook PR issuing what looks like a blanket denial of the story this morning. “The story is not accurate!”

Except the story is accurate. Facebook has been working with hardware manufacturers to explore building their own phone. We don’t know the timing, and we don’t know how deep the software stack is that Facebook is contemplating building, but we know that as of very recently the project was alive and well.

Here’s how Facebook is able to issue a blanket denial to a true story and get away with it:

First, give a solid soundbite that everyone will love. “The story is not accurate. Facebook is not building a phone.”

Note that those two sentences sound like they’re supposed to go together, but they aren’t. Technically what they’re saying is that at least one fact in the story is wrong. Also, Facebook is not going into the hardware building business. But what most people read is a flat denial. The story is wrong! Tabloid journalism!

Except, uh oh.

Second, Insert a ton of additional sentences that seem to support the initial dramatic statements. But what they’re really doing is putting in language that they can point to later that shows they weren’t technically lying. “Deeper integrations!” “INQ Phone!”

Third, and this is purely optional, add a good kick in the nuts on the way out. Maybe something about how people tend to exaggerate things to get headlines.

This is the statement that Facebook sent to everyone in the news business today, except us. Despite us asking for it.

So why did Facebook do this? Normally they would just say “we don’t respond to rumors and speculation” when anyone talks about leaks around future products. But this was different. Here’s the reason – they don’t want to freak out Google and Apple and everyone else. They work closely with these partners on Facebook’s existing applications. A Facebook branded phone may disrupt those discussions. Case in point.

Also, this project is likely just getting started. Two of the three rock stars just joined the company (Tseng and Papakipos from Google, Hewitt has been with Facebook since 2007). It could be a year or more before the phone hits the market. And any number of things could happen to make them kill the whole project off.

All we learned today was that the mobile space is so important that Facebook was willing to lie (while technically just spinning) about their plans. And they were so pissed off about the leak that they took that final shot at us as well. Nicely done Facebook.

Editor’s note: This guest post is an open letter from Scott Jones, founder and CEO of ChaCha on why the recent "T-Mobile Text Tax" is now a Net Neutrality issue.

While the Federal Communications Commission fiddles with the issue of Net Neutrality, and by extension mobile broadband regulation, Rome has begun to burn. While the fires now are relatively small, they threaten to combust into an uncontrollable conflagration that will leave customers wondering why they don’t have access anymore to their favorite websites or mobile applications.

The concept of Net Neutrality is pretty simple. Consumers look to the FCC to prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management, which should be entirely transparent. Today, the providers may not like bandwidth hogs like BitTorrent; tomorrow they could decide they don’t like YouTube or music sites because they also use lots of bandwidth. If unchecked, the providers could limit (by slowing their page loads) or totally preventing consumer access to whatever they don’t like such as political or religious sites with views they corporately don’t agree with. The providers would decide what is appropriate for consumers to see or access. Suddenly, the world’s largest library of information has “Do Not Enter” or "Not Allowed" signs posted here and there. Consumer and advocacy groups say Net Neutrality legislation will prevent this kind of “corporate censorship.”

Net Neutrality supporters say it is critical that the concept also apply to wireless services and their operators because, in the not-so-distant future, most people will access the Internet via wireless devices.

“If consumers had a wide choice of broadband service providers, preserving an open Internet might not be such a critical issue,” Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist, wrote in a blog post recently. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans have few (if any) choices in selecting a provider. As a result, these providers are in a position to influence whether and how consumers and producers can use the on-ramps to the Internet–and we’ve already seen several examples of discriminatory actions or threats that impair openness.”

For example, Skype, which allows users to make free and low-cost phone calls over an Internet connection, and Google Voice, which allows use of a single phone that follows them, regardless of which voice network they use, have been blocked by certain carriers.

T-Mobile has been sued by a text-message marketing company for allegedly blocking access to the T-Mobile network because of a client that provided information on medical marijuana. Ez Texting, a company that helps businesses send marketing text messages to large numbers of people, filed the suit Friday. The company provides the behind-the- scenes infrastructure for the type of ad that asks consumers to text a specific word to a specific number to get more information on a product. “This case is yet another example of a totally arbitrary decision by a carrier to block text message calls between consumers and organizations they want to communicate with,” Gigi Sohn, president of public interest group Public Knowledge, said. “The FCC should put a fast end to this blocking by issuing the ruling we asked them for three years ago.”

Similarly, T-Mobile plans to suddenly institute a charge for every text message that ChaCha's messaging aggregator sends on ChaCha's behalf to T-Mobile customers. Never mind that T-Mobile is already making a small fortune charging their customers for text plans or on a per-text basis, and never mind that T-Mobile already charged profitable and fair rates to aggregators and content providers including ChaCha. Noted global expert on mobile telecom, Tomi Ahonen has written that, for carriers, texting is “the most profitable mass market service in the economic history of mankind…with a profit margin [that] is north of 98%.” Oh, and by the way, in the second quarter of 2010, T- Mobile USA reported service revenues of $4.70 billion up from $4.63 billion in the first quarter of 2010.

T-Mobile would have you believe that the charge will help reduce “unsolicited” commercial texts, but ChaCha is contacted proactively by mobile users asking questions (over 60 million a year JUST from T-Mobile customers). We are a free service that provides timely, accurate answers. We answer over 2 million questions a day, primarily from folks who text us and we text them back answers, although the service is available via www.chacha.com, the mobile Web, mobile apps, via Twitter, etc…. We are commercial only in the sense that we also serve our users one or two text ads in conjunction with each answer (and never unsolicited). This helps pay for the more than 50,000 people answering all those real-time questions.

Interestingly, T-Mobile is exempting Twitter and Facebook (which send collectively about 15 times as many messages to T-Mobile users than ChaCha does) from the new charges because they won't be subject to the tax like the rest of us. Even more interesting is that, to the extent T-Mobile has any congestion from all the increased texting, Twitter and Facebook are driving the lion's share of the explosion of texts coming from content providers, so why are all the other publishers footing the bill on behalf of Twitter and Facebook? Because this charge will be passed along to ChaCha, amounting to a 600% price increase on October 1st, we have no choice but to drop T- Mobile customers from our SMS service, unless something changes.

As for T-Mobile stifling innovation, if Twitter had to endure this tax across all carriers, it would cost them about $50 million annually, based on their Q2 2010 Nielsen-reported text traffic. If the "text tax" had been in place over the past few years, it would have made it impossible for Twitter to have grown or prospered.

What this means is that T-Mobile has decided on behalf of their customers that having access to the world's largest repository of questions and answers is “not appropriate.” While you may not be a ChaCha user, think what will happen if T-Mobile's text tax does impact one of the services you DO use and like, such as Zynga, ESPN, NFL, NBA, Fox, Foursquare, USA Today, the Weather Channel, Yahoo, AOL, or Google.

For ChaCha, this is a business issue. We have a work around to reduce the burden of this “tax.” But, T-Mobile is giving their subscribers reasons to consider other carriers and/or prevent defectors from AT&T/Sprint/Verizon from considering T-Mobile. Also, their “text tax” move will completely stifle innovation in the space, further harming T-Mobile customers. This is also clearly a Net Neutrality issue as it applies to wireless services and their operators. Without consulting its customers, T-Mobile is implementing a pricing structure that removes rights from their customers to utilize what we think are pretty valuable free services.

Your favorite site or service could be next.

Peek sent out an email today announcing that a new Peek will be announced tomorrow. A bit needy, sure, but I’ll bite because they got my attention with this line, “It’s called Peek 9 and it is a major step forward — cheaper, simpler, and faster than ever.” Cheaper, simpler, and faster than the current Peeks? Nice. If that statement isn’t marketing bull, the Peek 9 might have a chance.

As we reported last week, search engine Cuil was unceremoniously shut down on Thursday, and there were reports that employees were told to go home and forget about getting paid.

New sources tells us that Cuil was in the final stages of an acquisition as of last Wednesday, and everything was in place except the final signatures. Then the deal fell apart for some reason.

Or put another way, Cuil found one last way to fail.

There are certain assets, particularly algorithms and patents, that may have some value to certain companies, we’ve heard from one of our sources.

A complication may have been over employees, which were supposed to go with the deal and be taken care of by the buyer.

Regardless, our understanding is that Cuil is trying to regroup and get the site back live, and another deal, or the old deal, may be closed soon.

Either way, at best it’s a soft landing. More details as we gather them. There are only a very few buyers who’d have much interest in Cuils assets – particularly Google and Microsoft.

If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting for the autotune remix of the “Brooklyn Tornado 9/16/10″ YouTube clip all week. Well in case your Google alerts for “Brooklyn Tornado Autotune” did not go off, here you go.

Now you can relive what some call the East Coast’s “Double Rainbow“ dialogue classics in all their autotuned glory, but especially, “Dude it’s fucking funneling!” and “Look at the tree!” “Look at the tree!.” You’re welcome, Internet.

Thanks: Simon Dumenco

We’ve heard from multiple sources that mobile ad exchange Mobclix, which launched at TechCrunch50 in 2008, is in late-stage talks to be acquired. According to our sources, investment bank Allen & Co. is brokering the deal and the buyer is a public company. We’ve contacted Mobclix co-founder Krishna Subramanian who wouldn’t comment on whether his company will be acquired.

Mobclix’s exchange allows app developers to sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks, like Millennial Media and Jumptap, bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app. The startup also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics. And Mobclix offers analytics via a recent acquisition of Heartbeat.

We’ve heard that Apple And Microsoft were sniffing around the startup but neither seems to be a likely acquirer. Apple already shored up their mobile ad efforts with the acquisition of Quattro Wireless. Microsoft just announced a partnership with Mobclix this past week and a few other ad networks to form an exchange for Windows 7 phones.

Still, Mobclix could be an attractive target to a technology or media company who is looking to buy a mobile ad exchange but doesn’t want to pay a high price (i.e. Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob). RIM is apparently looking for a mobile ad network as well. And you can’t rule out HP, who has been on an acquisition tear. Another possible buyer could be an large advertising company who wants to add a mobile ad exchange in house.

Intel's recent acquisition binge has been enormous—they've spent almost $10 billion in the past month on TI's cable modem division, security software maker McAfee, and Infineon's Wireless Solutions (WLS) business.

At last week's Intel Developer Forum, CEO Paul Otellini talked about this massive acquisition spree like it's predestined to succeed. But if we look back in time, Intel's pitiful M&A track record suggests this couldn't be further from the truth.

Between 1999-2003, Intel spent over $11 billion buying about 40 companies, and the vast majority of these acquisitions failed. In fact, of the 15 largest acquisitions in its history, Intel has shut down or sold off the acquired products in every single case (aside from Wind River which is too recent to include).

This is an awe-inspiringly bad track record, and likely puts Intel as the worst acquirer in tech history. There isn't even a Wikipedia acquisition page for Intel like there is for Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Apple. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say Intel's corporate PR department had Wikipedia remove the page.

Only kidding. But the truth is, Intel doesn't want the media and public to remember how bad they are at M&A. They want everyone to believe it will be different this time.

The Reasons Behind Intel's Past M&A Failings

Intel has become dominant off of one single product category: PC processors. They love how easy it is to make money in PCs, and even do things like sell 100% margin scratch-off cards to consumers to "unlock" features (it's amazing what you can sell when you have a monopoly).

Intel isn't good at innovating outside of PCs / servers primarily because a "not invented here" (NIH) culture prevails within the company, causing internal teams to reject products which originated elsewhere, or which serve non-core markets.

Intel's missteps outside PC processors are vast. First was the failed diversification in the 1999 – 2002 communications boom. Then Intel made a massive splash at CES in 2004 with a technology called LCOS for digital TVs, only to kill it later that year. And of course Intel tried once and failed in mobile, selling off its XScale division to Marvell in 2007.

It’s fine to fail fast like companies sometimes do with products (e.g. Google Wave), but with Intel we’re talking about a different type of failure: overpaying for bad acquisitions and a complete inability to wean itself off of PCs.

Unfortunately, M&A is Not a Strategy

In addition to its cultural resistance to outside innovation, Intel has also tended to rely on ad hoc M&A as its growth strategy. This is bad. M&A should be used to augment a corporate strategy, not as a strategy to grow in and of itself.  In this way Intel faces the classic innovator's dilemma as they attempt to reach beyond PCs and grow through acquisition.

McAfee and Infineon are huge risky roll-up bets—Intel has very little presence in security and mobile today, and McAfee is the largest deal in corporate history. Synergies will not be realized unless the technology, operations, and people are rolled successfully into existing Intel product lines.

And large roll-up acquisitions in technology can’t typically rely on cost synergies—they must produce additional revenue synergies. In this context it's very revealing that Intel has publicly hedged, talking openly about how both Infineon and McAfee can be operated autonomously.

But operating these companies autonomously isn't what Intel promised to shareholders when it comes to growth and diversification beyond PCs into new markets.

And there are already ominous signs for Intel: Rumor is that Apple has already ditched Infineon for Qualcomm in iPhone 5. This is pretty ironic following Intel CEO Paul Otellini's public gloating about Steve Jobs being "very happy" with Intel’s acquisition of Infineon. And very bad for Intel since Apple was Infineon WLS’s largest customer.

So though only time will tell if it will be different this time for Intel, it certainly isn’t starting well. And it's tough to see how these huge sprawling acquisitions into new markets will work given Intel’s record of poor execution.

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Contributor Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies.

In 2007, Google said it wasn’t working on a Google Phone. In 2009, Google said it wasn’t working on its own branded phone. In 2008, Microsoft said it wasn’t working on a Zune Phone. Leading up to the iPhone unveiling, we heard an Apple phone wasn’t coming. Guess what? All those projects were very real. And the Facebook Phone project will prove to be no different.

Perhaps you read our story from late last night that Facebook is working on its own phone. This morning, Facebook PR has begun countering that story, saying that our report “is not accurate.” Sorry, did I say “countering”? I meant “spinning”.

If you read their statement, it goes on and on about how important the mobile space is to Facebook and technologies like HTML5 and their own Connect are central to what they’re working on. It’s all vague PR babble that actually doesn’t mean a whole lot. In fact, the only thing that does is this: “Facebook is not building a phone.”

There are a few possibilities here. 1) Our sources on this are wrong. 2) Facebook is lying. 3) Facebook is telling their own version of the truth. 4) This is a need-to-know basis project and Facebook PR doesn’t need to know.

We going to say that based on what we’ve learned, what can safely rule out number one. We’re also going to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt and rule out number two — for now. Number four is possible, but seems unlikely. We have to believe that Facebook would simply tell their PR department to say nothing at all, if they didn’t want to brief them on the project. So that leaves number three.

By saying “Facebook is not building a phone,” what the company likely means is that they won’t be manufacturing their own hardware. Right. We never said that they were. As far as we know, Facebook doesn’t own hardware manufacturing plants, so how would they? This is the same type of semantic caveat Google kept using in saying they were not working a phone. Okay, there aren’t actually Google employees in the plants building them, just like there won’t be Facebook employees building them piece by piece.

Instead, Facebook, like Google, is likely working on its own mobile operating system (maybe even based on Android — we admittedly don’t have a lot of details at this point) that will be tied to hardware built by a third party. That’s exactly what we said in the first paragraph of our post last night:

Facebook is building a mobile phone, says a source who has knowledge of the project. Or rather, they're building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware. Which is exactly what Apple and everyone else does, too.

So, yes, technically they’re not physically building a phone, I suppose. But that’s sort of like saying Banana Republic isn’t in the clothing business because they outsource the actual shirt-making to Asia.

But my favorite part of the statement is this:

For an example, check out Connect for iPhone and the integration we have with contact syncing through our iPhone app.  Another example is the INQ1 phone with Facebook integration (the first so-called 'Facebook Phone'). The people mentioned in the story are working on these projects.

So a chief architect of Firefox (with a ton of OS and mobile OS experience), a chief architect of Chrome OS, and the former product lead of Android are working on the INQ1 phone?

Right.

We may not know the specifics about what Facebook is up to with regard to their own phone, but we know they have a very talented team working on the project. And Facebook can deny it all they want right up to the day it’s released.

Update: Nice job Facebook. You still sure there is no phone?

(Oh, and for those asking — yes, the Zune Phone project was very real. Microsoft killed it after years in development and that played a big role in J. Allard’s departure, we hear.)

In an offense called “Operation Payback,” members of the Internet collective Anonymous have organized what seems to be anti anti-piracy movement. Dubbed by Torrent Freak as the ”protest of the future” the group has been pretty busy over the past 36 hours launching DDoS attacks on the MPAA, Indian anti-piracy site AiPlex Software and today both RIAA.com and RIAA.org. The attacks are apparently in retaliation for comments the CEO of Aiplex software made about his firm being hired by the film industry to take down The Pirate Bay.

The original call to arms below:

How fast you are in such a short time! Aiplex, the bastard hired gun that DDoS'd TPB (The Pirate Bay), is already down! Rejoice, /b/rothers, even if it was at the hands of a single anon that it was done, even if ahead of schedule. now we have our lasers primed, but what do we target now?

We target the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG! The IP is designated at "216.20.162.10″, and our firing time remains THE SAME. All details are just as before, but we have reaimed our crosshairs on this much larger target. We have the manpower, we have the botnets, it's time we do to them what they keep doing to us.

REPEAT: AIPLEX IS ALREADY DOWN THANKS TO A SINGLE ANON. WE ARE MIGRATING TARGETS.

From the Anonymous media kit:

Operation:Payback is a bitch.

DATE \September 19, 2010\

To whom it may concern,

This is to inform you that we, Anonymous, are organizing an Operation called "Payback is a bitch". Anonymous will be attacking the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America), and their hired gun AIPLEX for attacks against the popular torrent and file sharing site, the Piratebay (www.thepiratebay.org). We will prevent users to access said enemy sites and we will keep them down for as long as we can. But why, you ask? Anonymous is tired of corporate interests controlling the internet and silencing the people’s rights to spread information, but more importantly, the right to SHARE with one another.The RIAA and the MPAA feign to aid the artists and their cause; yet they do no such thing. In their eyes is not hope, only dollar signs. Anonymous will not stand this any longer.We wish you the best of luck.

Sincerely,

Anonymous,

We are legion.

Both RIAA sites currently offline (they went down 5 minutes before schedule), as people continue to mobilize through the 4Chan message boards and Twitter, using the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS tools to initiate independent attacks, and continuing to make what would seem unlikely for a group of people called Anonymous, celebratory tweets.

For all the “future of cyber protest” rhetoric, it remains to be seen how much effect a flood of traffic and a few hours of downtime will have on changing RIAA or MPAA piracy policy. After all, despite yesterday’s sustained attacks, the MPAA site is back up and running, snow owls and all.