Sometime in the past few hours, Twitter made a subtle, but not insignificant change: their Promoted Trends are now appearing at the top of the Trends area on Twitter.com. Previously, these were at the bottom of the area, buried under the inevitable topics about Justin Bieber.

Obviously, anything at the top of a list is going to be more visible than something at the bottom of the list — and Twitter appears to be testing out what that will mean for click-through rates of these Promoted Trends. When you click on one, it still takes you to search results for the term with a Promoted Tweet paid for by the advertising company at the top of the feed. Promoted Trends still have the highly visible “Promoted” logo as well.

“We’ve always said that we would experiment with all elements of our Promoted Products suite. Moving the Promoted Trend to the top spot is one example of this experimentation, and you can expect to see more changes in this space,” a Twitter representative tells us.

On old Twitter, this may move the Promoted Trend above the fold for many users. But with New Twitter, Trends have been moved higher — which will make this top Promoted Trend even more visible and clickable. What that will mean in terms of revenue flowing in, only Twitter knows.

Now that their @earlybird monetization experiment is over, Twitter has said it will focus more on its Promoted suite of products. That includes Trends, Tweets, and soon, Promoted Accounts as well.

Marc Hedlund, co-founder and former CEO of personal finance company Wesabe, has penned a refreshingly honest and open take on why he thinks the startup lost to rival Mint.

The latter launched later than Wesabe (and won the top prize at the TechCrunch40 conference back in 2007) and was later acquired by Intuit for $170 million, while Wesabe had a less stellar exit and hit the deadpool last June.

Hedlund takes the blame, but also counters some of the things that have been cited as reasons for Wesabe’s demise for being myths, such as the fact that Mint was first to market, that the company wasn’t making any money and that it boasted an inferior name and design.

An excerpt:

I am, of course, enormously sad that Wesabe lost and the company closed. I don’t agree with those who say you should learn from your successes and mostly ignore your failures; nor do I agree with those who obsess over failures for years after (as I have done in the past). I’m hoping that by writing this all out I can offload it from my head and hopefully help inform other people who try to start companies in the future.

You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment.

Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.

What we’ve got here, ladies and gentlemen, is a must-read.

Good discussion about the post over at Hacker News.

The average shelf life of a smartphone app is pretty short. For free apps, only about 20 percent of users (in the case of iPhone apps) return to use the app the first day after they download it, and then it quickly drops off from there. So there is a very brief window of time to capture people's attention and potential revenues. Slangatang is a beta just out of a new free sound entertainment app which allows people to listen to humorous soundbites from characters from around the world. The app is now on the Blackberry and Android markets or for Nokia phones via text (standard network rates apply, you can download the app from here (mobile download link or in BlackBerry app world). On the face of it it's pretty simple. But what's more interesting is that unlike traditional Soundboard apps which are a dime a dozen, the creators have realised that it's going to be smarter to allow users themselves to upload the quirky phrases themselves. That feature goes live soon.

Ecommerce giant Amazon.com has long been rumored to make a $2 billion play for online private sales club sensation Vente-Privée, but so far a deal hasn't happened. Now rumors are swirling that Amazon is in late-stage negotiations to acquire Spain-based rival BuyVip instead. Company executives have denied the rumors so far, but Spanish business publication CincoDías cites multiple sources familiar with the talks having confirmed the acquisition to them. Paperwork is being signed today, according to said sources.

Back in May, a patent troll called Sharing Sound sued a host of companies, alleging that all of them infringed on a (ridiculously broad) patent for online music distribution.

Targets were Apple (iTunes), Microsoft (Zune), Napster, Rhapsody, Brilliant Digital Entertainment (Kazaa) and Sony / Sony Ericsson. Similar actions were filed a week earlier against Amazon, Netflix, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and GameStop.

The patent being contested – U.S. Patent Number 6,247,130, titled "Distribution of musical products by a website vendor over the Internet” – would essentially prevent all these companies from using any type of online store environment which allows them to provide song previews, a shopping cart or even a music player.

Most of the companies targeted in the lawsuit (apart from BDE and Rhapsody) have already moved to settle their dispute with Sharing Sound, which as far as I know has never managed to use its patented technology to produce anything, or at least not anything interesting.

Apple has now become the latest defendant to settle the patent infringement allegations, which if enforced would have made it difficult for the company to continue running its successful iTunes store.

Judge David Folsom of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (a notoriously patent-friendly state) signed off on the settlement Wednesday, effectively clearing Apple of the allegations.

No specifics on the terms of the deal were revealed.

(Via Law360)

If you haven’t seen “The Social Network” yet – it officially opens in theaters today – I really suggest you do. It’s simply a good movie, even if the narrative doesn’t quite match the real story of how Facebook came to be (hey, it’s a movie).

But if your life is so super busy that you won’t have time for it, fear not, because the crazy Taiwanese video production company Next Media Animation (Wired profile) has got you covered. They just released a new animated video, condensing “The Social Network” into a short clip (not actually under one minute, but it suits people with a short attention span).

It’s also extremely hilarious.

I particularly like the part where Mark Zuckerberg falls in love with Justin Timberlake, right after being ferociously whipped by the Winklevoss twins.

Nokia has declared its Ovi suite of service and the Ovi Store a roaring success. The Finnish mobile giant says 200,000 people are now signing up to its services per day, and that the total number of active Nokia service users across the globe has reached 140 million (Ovi is available in more than 190 countries). Nokia further claims its application store (Ovi Store) is a hit on its own, with 2.3 million apps now being downloaded to phones worldwide on a daily basis.

Our frequent readers may be aware of my Fantasy Foursquare fetish – I like to pretend to be placed I’m not because it gives me a small but measurable uptick in happiness. A break, if you will, from the tediousness of my everyday life behind a computer screen.

I used to just scroll through friends and find interesting places to check in:

I've had a very full schedule recently. Last Sunday I was in Amsterdam. On Monday I was "on a boat" off the coast of Texas and then zipped over to Dubai to check out the Ritz-Carlton hotel. By Wednesday I was in New York visiting the Foursquare offices. I spent the rest of the week in Waikiki, at NASA, in Monaco and, finally, at Pixar's studios in California. I really did visit all of these places – I can prove it because I checked in via Foursquare.

That’s a lot of work, though, and Foursquare doesn’t give you any points towards mayorships when you check in that way – it knows quite clearly your actual location and doesn’t give you credit for the fake checkin.

That’s when a mischievous hacker friend of mine stepped in with a small script that he wrote that will check me in to any venue at all via the Foursquare API. That means I don’t have to spend time finding friends already where I want to be, and since we’re using the API we can easily fake out the “you’re not actually there” problem.

Voila – I’ve become the mayor of TechCrunch, Facebook and Twitter just like that. And the best part is I stole the mayorship of Facebook from another cheater – either my hacker is smarter, or the other guy got bored.

My hacker friend has gotten himself into some trouble, though. He’s using the script too, to become mayor of smaller places. Apparently people really take this stuff seriously. Because he’s now been called out by the legitimate mayor he ousted and some other wanna be mayor as well. He just received this email (meaning these guys went to the trouble of searching for it):

Those you have deposed (as Mayor and Mayor-Apparent) wish to meet you. We are here now and most evenings. When do you generally come by? No one here seems to know you, which we find most suspicious.

-josh.

[via iPhone]

What will our Hacker Hero do? Run and hide or face his luddite enemies in person and outnumbered with nothing but his iPad to defend himself? Check back here shortly for the rest of the story.

Meanwhile, my AOL HQ mayorship in NY is coming along nicely.

A fascinating footnote to the failed Google acquisition of Yelp last December: a Yahoo counteroffer killed the deal, say two source with knowledge of the situation.

As of December 17 Yelp was in the final stages of negotiations to sell to Google for $550 million. But just three days later the deal was off.

So what happened during those three days? Yahoo came in with an offer to buy Yelp for $750 million – $200 million more than Google had offered. Yelp, via their investment bank, asked Google if they wanted to match it. Google declined, and one source says they didn’t actually believe that there actually was a competing offer.

Here’s where things got interesting. The Yelp management team apparently refused to work for Yahoo and wanted to take the Google offer. The Yelp board of directors, faced with a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests all stockholders, couldn’t approve a Google deal when a competing deal was available at a $200 million higher price.

So with the Yelp management team refusing to take the Yahoo offer, and the Yelp board of directors unable to accept the Google offer, everything froze and a deal never happened.

The NY Times discovered many of these details on December 21 last year, but either didn’t know or didn’t name Yahoo as the competing buyer. And there are supposedly people at Google who still believe Yelp actually never had a competing offer at all and simply over negotiated. Our sources, however, swear the Yahoo offer was very real.

If Yahoo did make the counter offer the whole situation is a sad reflection on the company. Even with the Yelp management team knowing that they couldn’t take the Google offer, they still walked from a huge sale just because they couldn’t stomach working at Yahoo. Foursquare apparently made a similar decision just a few months later, walking away from a $100 million or so Yahoo offer even though they knew Facebook would soon jump squarely into their market.

The saddest part of the story is this – things have only gotten worse at Yahoo since then. There isn’t really a whole lot left to say. Stick in a fork in this one – it’s done.

Another one bites the dust. Mobile ad exchange Mobclix has been acquired by London-based mobile marketing agency Velti, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the transaction. We originally reported the rumors of a Mobclix deal last week. While terms of the deal have not been disclosed, we hear the size of the acquisition is north of $50 million. UPDATE: We’ve confirmed the acquisition with Mobclix; here is the release.

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, which launched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, 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.

Velti, which is a public company on the London Stock Exchange, offers a SaaS technology platform that allows agencies and brands to plan, manage, and optimize mobile advertising and marketing campaigns in real time. The company says that in 2009, 2,000 mobile campaigns were run on its platform by more than 450 brands, agencies, and mobile operators in more than 35 countries. Velti has acquired a number of companies over the past year, including mobile ad technology Media Cannon and AdInfuse.

The exit is a little anticlimactic, considering that the names being bantered about with respect to Mobclix’s possible acquisition were RIM, Microsoft and other well-known technology companies. But the sell further reinforces the point that as Apple (via Quattro) and Google (via AdMob) take over mobile advertising, independent startups may not be able to compete. Acquisitions may be the best option for smaller ad networks.

Rumor has it that RIM is actively looking for a mobile ad network, and sniffing around Millennial Media. Nokia may also be eying a mobile network as well. Smaller mobile ad network mSpot just got bought by business software company Marketron. I’d expect to see more market consolidation as these independent ad networks continue to get snapped up. After all, mobile advertising is a $1 billion market and everyone wants a piece of the pie.

I’d like to believe that if Facebook changed the order of “Developers” and “Careers” in the footer of their site, it wouldn’t lead to a huge user backlash. But history suggests otherwise. Okay, maybe I’m slightly exaggerating, but I’m honestly not sure. It seems that if Facebook does anything to change their site, it’s grounds for user backlash. And yet, these past couple of weeks, Twitter has been drastically changing their site, and we’re seeing almost no backlash. Why?

I asked Twitter’s VP of Product Jason Goldman that very question backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt a couple days ago. His response? Twitter needed to execute on a new experience that was still Twitter-like, and they did that. It was about taking the core experience and extending on top of it.

That may sound incredibly obvious, but as we’ve seen time and time again (and on many more services than just Facebook), that’s not easy to do. Goldman admits that New Twitter went through a number of variations — some of which were more “app-y”, as Goldman put it. But they settled on something that at its core was similar to the Twitter website that everyone had grown to know and love.

He also noted that Twitter brought in a range of users from outside the company every week to test it out and see their reactions. That’s an interesting approach because many companies opt to “dog food” their products instead (test them with their own employees). Obviously, the downside of bringing in outsiders to test is leaks, but that didn’t happen here — well, not until the final minutes before launch.

Goldman admitted that part of the good feedback is probably luck. As in, they were lucky to make the right product choices for New Twitter.

Currently, New Twitter is available to slightly less than 50 percent of all Twitter users, so they’re not quite out of the woods just yet. But that’s a huge base using it without much complaint. I think it’s pretty safe to say that they nailed this metamorphous.

Watch Goldman talk about this and more in the video below.

[photo: flickr/fibonacciblue]

The Internet is rife with Google Translate failures, but this is the first we’ve seen on Google Maps. Apparently the Rio De Janeiro = Landfill issue on Google Maps is known within Google and is caused by a mixup between a landfill site near Rio and a poor Portuguese to English translation, where the Portuguese is okay but the English is um, suspect.

I’ve never seen this kind of mistranslation on Maps before and from what I can glean it only affects Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities are, from what I can see, immune. It is currently unclear whether Google is working on a fix.

The image accompanying this post is encoded with JPEG compression, a standard which, while it has been improved somewhat, has been more or less in its present form for almost two decades now. Over those two decades, images have changed their role on the web dramatically, and consequently the number and quality of images on the web have been increasing exponentially. Yet the way we make those images easy to share and transmit hasn’t caught up with the times.

Increases in bandwidth, it must be said, have made the matter one of very little urgency, and it’s important to admit that it takes less time to load a content-rich webpage (the front page of CrunchGear averages 1-1.5MB) than it did to load a barebones page in the old days. But even so, it’s just as true that images take up the bulk of the bandwidth and making them more efficient means making the web more efficient. It looks like Google is trying to do just that with its new WebP image format.

Continue reading…

We’ve had a bit of a tumultuous relationship with Jonathan Mann over the past year. It was August 2009 when Mann (who is sometimes also known as “therockcookiebottom” or “songadaymann“) wrote his jingle about Bing. I called it the “worst jingle ever” but Microsoft clearly disagreed as it won their competition. Mann responded by writing a song about me which was actually pretty good. And then he went on a streak of awesome.

There was the song about Microsoft brainwashing kids with his Bing jingle. There was the Steve Jobs song. And there was the song about the iPhone 4 antenna issue, which Apple even played at their “antennagate” event. And now he was kind enough to write a song about our acquisition by AOL.

Mann is actually on the road at the moment, and doesn’t have all his equipment that make his songs magical, but wrote us the song anyway. This is actually the second song about our big move (which we really appreciate). Watch Mann’s video above. And below, check out his awesome Bronado song (though that one is NSFW). I think it’s even better than this one.

We sat down with Digg co-founder Kevin Rose after TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday to talk about the recent Digg Version 4 launch and the user revolt and media circus that ensued. Rose addressed the lessons he had learned during the tumultuous redesign, including what he would have done differently if given another opportunity.

Highlights:

“We’ve taken heat from a lot of people who don’t like the changes because they take the power out of their hands.”

“It’s always a battle for us, it’s like an arms race. We have the same problems Google does with people trying to manipulate search results with SEO, except on the social voting side of the house.”

“If I had to do it all over again I would have kept all those features we had on the old site, and let the users try them out first and see if they had a taste for the new features and only then, if they really liked them then rolled them out to everybody else.”

“We couldn’t keep the servers up or the site live, so it was frustrating to even access the new features.”

“We took away a lot of the features the core users were using, because we thought we had great alternative and replacements.”

“Twitter did an amazing job with their rollout, they let you switch back to the old Twitter if you didn’t like it, they were constantly collecting feedback via the hashtag. They could jump back anytime to see what users were liking and what users were not liking.”

Rose, who was recently replaced as CEO by Matt Williams, also went in to future product plans for Digg, such as a leaderboard and “Interests” pages for different verticals, a product that Rose says will be launching in the next couple of weeks, with the eventual goal being a Digg that allows you to jump into niche interests and form communities around those interests.

Says Rose,“If we can tap into the longtail of content, then we’ll have a much larger site than we have today.”

And, contrary to reports, Rose was kidding when he spoke about leaving

Facebook has established itself as the biggest photo sharing service on the Internet — by far. But until fairly recently, the maximum size of uploaded photos was a frustratingly small 604 pixels, doing nothing to take advantage of the increasing ubiquity of high-resolution cameras. And that’s a problem when your friends are using Facebook as the primary way to share memories of special events like weddings, graduations, parties, and chubby bunny contests.

Things started to improve in March which it boosted the maximum resolution 20% up to 720 pixels. And now the Photos app is getting much, much better: Facebook is boosting the maximum photo size by 8x, up to 2048 pixels. Now you won’t have to squint when you go to relive your memories a few years (or decades) down the line. This may also make the app more attractive to users who have been turning to Flickr for high-quality uploading.

In addition to the boost in maximum photo size, Facebook is also making some UI changes. The site is going to start rolling out a new light box-based photo viewer that lets you view photos without jumping between pages. Facebook has also improved its UI for tagging friends, making it easier to tag the same person in multiple photos. Finally, Facebook has once again rebuilt its photo uploader for stability and performance improvements.

The features aren’t live for everyone yet, and will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

Earlier today, Google formally released Goo.gl, their URL-shortener, to the public. They’re calling it the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.” But it also may be the coolest thanks to an easter egg.

As Google’s Matt Cutts’ just tweeted out, if you simply add “.qr” to the end of any goo.gl URL, it will create a QR code. Scanning this with any QR code reader will take you to the URL.

So, for example, this URL: goo.gl/umo0, is the shortened link for this post. If I make it: goo.gl/umo0.qr, I’ll get the image above.

This functionality actually isn’t entirely new — but previously it was way too hard to use goo.gl (it was limited to a few Google products). Now that more people will likely be using goo.gl, this is very useful and worth pointing out again.

These QR codes are great for mobile use, and Google in particular has been using them a lot for things such as easy installation of Android apps.

Much has been said about Apple’s foray into “social networking” (at least into what they consider that term to entail) with the introduction of Ping, part of the company’s iTunes software.

Some are positive about its chances, saying it is merely the seed of amazing things to come, others much less so.

I concur with the latter group and deem the product to be horse dung, 160 million potential users be damned.

Yes, they recently did make it a thousand times better when they added the ability to like / share a song you’d already purchased in the past.

But that only tells me just how badly it reeked before that (I’m actually quite positive some people at Apple got stomped for not adding support for Ping within users’ existing iTunes libraries from the get-go – at least I should hope so).

And it appears to me that it’s still a feature no one quite seems to have been waiting for.

Yes, you say, but had Facebook and Apple not jointly pulled the plug on Facebook integration at the last minute, I’d see things more clearly. I would realize how awesome it will be once you can actually connect with your real friends, transfer music recommendations and share purchases in and out of Ping, courtesy of Facebook.

Well I say it wouldn’t make the product suck that much less, and it won’t once it eventually gets implemented in some way (Facebook’s CTO is “very confident” it will, apparently).

I’ll happily stick my foot deep in my mouth if it turns out Facebook integration is what Ping needs to shine, but I’m decidedly bearish on the chances of that happening any time soon.

Don’t get me wrong: Ping needs Facebook integration to make it a little more useful, or fun for that matter. But a little useful or fun is not what people want – there are so many better music discovery and relevant social networking services out there that the only thing Ping has going for it is its potential audience thanks to the success of iTunes. But purely as a product, it simply stinks right now (particularly on the desktop), and people realize as much.

We’re a month in since Ping made its debut. No doubt, you’ve checked it out en masse. You’ve started following some of your friends and perhaps even a couple of artists, and some even people started following you. But have you really used the product a lot since? Have you discovered a lot of music thanks to it? Have you effectively connected with any of the people you follow, let alone with the artists pimping their wares on the service?

I simply don’t see any of that changing fundamentally when Facebook integration ever comes to fruition, if it ever does.

At its debut, Jobs talked about Ping along the lines of "Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes. But it's not Facebook, it's not Twitter." He was absolutely right about the second part. There’s no Facebook or Twitter element at all; only iTunes showed up to that party he mentioned.

And as a result, it’s not a very lively one.

HP has just named their new CEO. No, it’s not Todd Bradley — a popular guess out of the current ranks (and clearly he was thinking about it as well). Instead, HP’s Board went outside and picked Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of SAP.

In February, Apotheker abruptly left SAP after only seven months in the CEO position – well, the sole-CEO position. He had been co-CEO with Henning Kagermann for a couple of years before that. But he had been with SAP for over 20 years.

More recently, Apotheker had launched a private equity fund to invest in European software, IT, and telecom.

At SAP, Apotheker had led worldwide sales, service, and field operations for five years, HP notes in their release. He was a member of their executive board from 2002 to 2010, when he left.

In addition to Apotheker, HP’s Board elected Ray Lane (a Managing Partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) as both a new member of the Board and as the non-executive Chairman. Apotheker will join HP’s board as well. Both appointments become official on November 1.

Apotheker officially replaces, Cathie Lesjak, who has served as interim CEO in August. She will return to her role as HP CFO.

Thus ends the Mark Hurd saga at HP (well, for now at least). Hurd was forced out as both CEO and Chairman of the Board amid scandal back in August. He quickly joined Oracle as co-President, while led to lawsuits. But those were quickly resolved as well.

Below, find the release:

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 30, 2010 – The Board of Directors of HP today
announced the election of Léo Apotheker as Chief Executive Officer and President.
Apotheker, who previously served as CEO of SAP, will also join HP's Board of
Directors. The Board also elected Ray Lane, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, as a new member of the Board and designated him as non-
executive Chairman. Both elections are effective November 1.

During Apotheker's more than 20 years at SAP, he was a driving force in making it
the largest business software applications company in the world. Apotheker helped
develop and implement the most significant changes in SAP history. During his
tenure, he transformed R&D and technology platforms and expanded business
models and customer segments. Apotheker also helped lead SAP to 18 consecutive
quarters of double-digit software revenue growth between 2004 and 2009.

Lane has served on the Board of Directors of more than 20 public and private
companies and joined Kleiner Perkins in 2000. Previously, he served as President
and Chief Operating Officer at Oracle Corporation. Earlier in his career, Lane also
worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, EDS and IBM.

"Léo is a strategic thinker with a passion for technology, wide-reaching global
experience and proven operational discipline – exactly what we were looking for in
a CEO," said Robert Ryan, lead independent director of the Board. "After more
than two decades in the industry, he has a strong track record of driving
technological innovation, building customer relationships and developing world-
class teams."

Ryan continued, "Léo has been a leader in anticipating the transformation taking
place in our industry, and we believe he is uniquely positioned to help accelerate
HP's strategy. He has demonstrated success in the U.S. market and also has vast
international experience – which will be a major asset as HP continues to expand
globally, particularly in high-growth emerging markets. HP has the right assets and
market positions, and now we have the best team to realize the company's
enormous potential."

"HP has a powerful mix of businesses, products and services, one of the most
innovative cultures in the industry, and an accomplished management team who
have played a critical role in its success," said Apotheker. "I am deeply honored to

be joining the more than 300,000 dedicated HP employees."

Apotheker continued, "Given HP's diversified products and services, its financial
strength, and its leadership position across markets, no other company is as well
positioned to drive – and profit from – the revolutionary changes under way in the
marketplace. As we move forward, HP will continue to be a valued partner with our
customers as well as a fierce competitor. I look forward to working with the
outstanding people at HP to write the next chapter in the company's long and
proud history."

"I am excited to join the Board of this pioneering company, and look forward to
working closely with Léo – and the rest of the Board and senior management team
– as they capitalize on the changes taking place across the industry," Lane said. "I
have known and admired Léo for almost 20 years. He is ideally suited to build on
HP's strong foundation, leverage its many assets and keep the company at the
forefront of innovation."

Apotheker will succeed Cathie Lesjak, who was named interim CEO in August
2010. Lesjak, who has served as HP's Chief Financial Officer since January 2007,
remains CFO and continues to serve as a member of the Executive Council. Ryan
said, "Cathie is and will continue to be an important part of HP. We are extremely
fortunate to have one of the deepest, most talented senior management teams in the
industry and to have someone of Cathie's caliber lead HP during this interim
period. On behalf of the entire Board, I would like to thank Cathie and our senior
management team for maintaining HP's focus on serving customers and continuing
to execute our strategy."

Google’s URL shortener just opened up to the public, with a standalone site. Launched last December, Google’s Bit.ly competitor, Goo.gl can now be used for any links on the web. And Google promises that the shortener is the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

From the blog post:

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you're protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we've continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

Stability: We've had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we've worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
Security: We've added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
Speed: We've more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

The new URL shortener also comes with a host of interesting features. For example, if you sign-in to your Google Account, you'll can access a list of URLs you've shortened in the past. And you can see the details the "details" link next to any of shortened URL, where you will find public, real-time analytics data, including traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles.

There’s no API available…yet. But Goo.gl is available via extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Google says an upcoming API can be used to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.

Twitter also released its URL shortener not too long ago, and Facebook is testing its offering as well. That being said, Bit.ly, the startup playing in the space, is seeing enormous traction despite all of these competitors.

More: Goo.gl's Awesome Easter Egg To Instantly Turn Any Link Into A QR Code

Talk to an Android developer about their biggest gripes with the platform, and one the the top bullets on the list — probably even higher than the fragmentation issue — is that fact that Android Market has had weak support for international users.

Up until now developers in only nine countries were able to sell paid applications, and many international users haven’t been able to purchase applications either. Today, Google is announcing some big improvements on this front: developers from 29 countries will now be able to sell applications (a boost of 20 countries), and in the next two weeks it’s increasing the number of countries that support purchases from 14 to 32.

In other words, this means a big jump in the number of people who can develop paid apps, and it also means that the potential market size is going to be significantly larger, which is great news for all Android developers. We first broke the news about these impending changes earlier this week, but at the time Google wasn’t confirming how many countries were being added.

Here’s the full list, from Google’s blog post:

Support for paid application sales is now expanded to developers in 29 countries, with today's additions of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

In addition, Android Market users from 32 countries will be able to buy apps, with the addition of Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan.

According to an SEC filing, DNS service provider OpenDNS has raised more capital, $4.5 million to be specific. We’ve confirmed the additional financing with the company and learned that this was an inside round handled by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners (they took a stake in the company in July 2009).

Chief executive David Ulevitch (see this SFGate profile for more about the man) tells me there wasn’t really a need for more venture capital – the business has been running profitably for a while now – but that OpenDNS had the chance to be “opportunistic”.

OpenDNS essentially delivers a free, fast, ad-supported DNS resolution service with features like typo correction, phishing protection, and optional content filtering alongside more robust paid offerings for enterprises. Ulevitch tells me the company continues to grow like a weed and that they can definitely use the extra funding to ramp up hiring and product development.

Back in March, OpenDNS announced that over one percent of the world's Internet users were using its services. Ulevitch says it’s even more now, though he declined to put a specific percentage on it. Either way, OpenDNS is clearly getting big, fast.

The company boasts 32 employees today, and Ulevitch is hoping to grow to 40 by year’s end.

Tokyo-based augmented reality startup Tonchidot has raised $12 million in Series B funding from various Japanese companies, including the country’s second biggest telco KDDI, major media conglomerate Recruit, ad agency SPiRE and venture capital firms DCM, Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV), and JAFCO.

Tonchidot closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM and with ITV participating back in December 2008. The $16 million raised in two rounds is an impressive chunk of money in Japan’s startup scene.

The TechCrunch50 company is known for Sekai Camera, its hit augmented reality (AR) application that’s available for free on the iPhone, Android, iPad, and on the web. In March this year, Tonchidot introduced OpenAir, an API that allows third parties to deliver content within Sekai Camera. (More info on how Tonchidot did after TC50 2008 can be found in my post from July.)

“SoLAR” games as the third wave of mobile gaming innovation

Now some of the fresh money will be used for expanding the company’s app platform (Sekai Apps) that makes it possible for third parties to release social/location-based/AR games within the Sekai Camera application. Named “SoLAR”, Tonchidot says these titles will constitute the third wave of innovation in the rapidly growing mobile gaming space – following “traditional” mobile games and location-based services like Foursquare or Booyah.

Here’s the official SoLAR Apps promo video:

SoLAR stands for “Social, Location, Augmented Reality”. The first two SoLAR titles already added to Sekai Camera are third-party action game Kaboom and a unique Twitter app called CooKoo (Sekai Camera users can access them directly from a menu). CooKoo is a quirky mix between Twitter client and AR-powered, location-based social game that transforms your tweets into pigeons.

Tonchidot promises more SoLAR titles, mobile payment solutions, Facebook and Twitter connectivity, and other features in the near future. We’ll keep you posted.

One thing I love about Disqus is their mobile commenting abilities. Traditionally, commenting on mobile devices has been awful, but Disqus makes it pretty on the small screen. That said, it’s still a pain to moderate Disqus comments while on the go. So Disqus has a new product to take care of that.

The commenting start-up (which we use here at TechCrunch) is releasing a set of mobile applications to handle comment moderation when you’re away from your desk. The Android, iPhone, and webOS platforms will all be getting this app. It’s out today for Android, and will be out shortly on the other two platforms, Disqus notes (they’re in review).

Here are the features of the app they list:

• Approving, marking spam, and deleting content
• Filtering by status
• Background notifications
• Search
• Reply
• View Context

So trolls be warned, we can now kill you from all angles. Oh, and we’ll have a new effective weapon shortly.

I still think Google’s coolest 20 percent project of all time is Liquid Galaxy. You know, the “eight 55-inch LCD screens showing Google Earth in a unified, surround view” thing that Google sets up around to different conferences they are a part of. It’s sort of like the Star Trek Holodeck. It’s awesome.

And now you can build your own — or buy one! Google has open-sourced the entire project, including the Ubuntu sysadmin scripts to the mechanical design of the custom frames. And they’ve released a new version of the public Google Earth that supports it.

Of course, Google realizes that most people may not have the skills and/or the means to actually build their own — so there are other options too. Google set up a quick-start page to help you, or you can contact their supplier, End Point, who can build your own version for you.

The cost? $72,000 to $80,000 — plus maintenance.

Or you can buy just the parts you need separately.