Tawkon, one of my favorite Israeli startups of the past year, was in San Francisco at the Disrupt Alley last week to debut the release of its cellular radiation measurement app for Android. This follows the company’s $9.99 Blackberry version, and its unsuccessful bid to push the same app through the iPhone App Store.

If you haven’t followed our coverage of the company, Tawkon developed a technology that collects and analyzes RF-related data it extracts from a mobile phone. It is then able to display a measurement of the estimated radiation a cell phone user is exposed to when using his or her phone. The “harder” the phone has to work to maintain a cellular connection, the more radiation it emits. So for example, if the phone isn’t near a cell tower, or if its own antenna is obstructed, it will increase power to its antenna, which causes it to emit more radiation.

Available for free, the new Android version of Tawkon includes:

• Real-time Radiation Indication – Thanks to multi-tasking support on Android, a small icon on the home screen changes from green to yellow to red, indicating low-moderate-high levels of radiation exposures.
• Live Prompts & Feedback – Automatic alerts when exposure to radiation rises during a call. Live feedback confirms that suggested actions such as moving to a new location were effective.
• Personal Stats – Find out how much radiation you avoided by using Tawkon during the last call, day, week, month and six months.





We received this video mail from TechCrunch reader Aditya Kapur shortly after TechCrunch Disrupt, with the subject line “Thank you for Hammer Time.” In it Kapur describes how awesome our Google Ventures/SV Angel party was and apologizes to Ron Conway for “screaming like a little girl at a Justin Bieber concert” within earshot of the powerful VC.

Highlight: “I could not believe that I was this close to MC Hammer.”

Thank you for reading Aditya. We had a great time as well and, if it means anything to you, we’re thinking about renting out our very own Erick Schonfeld to parties, hospitals and retirement homes in order to spread the joy that his “Hammer Time” has brought into our lives.

App store analytics provider Distimo has released a new report today, analyzing the top applications on Apple’s App Store for iPadand iPhone, BlackBerry App World, Google’s Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for Q3 2010 in the U.S. You can download the free report here.

According to Distimo, the iPhone App Store has the most Games (55% free, 55% paid) among the 100 most popular applications, followed by Windows Marketplace for Mobile (23% free, 45% paid), and the Apple App Store for iPad (25% free, 40% paid). Games are least popular in BlackBerry App World (12.5% free, 28% paid) and Palm App Catalog (33% free, 16% paid). Distimo’s analysis doesn’t include games on the Android Marketplace because Google ranks them in a separate category from other apps. There are approximately 15,000 games on the Android marketplace.

The most popular free applications on all the platforms are iBooks (for the iPad), Type n Talk (the iPhone), BlackBerry Messenger (BlackBerry App World), Pandora Radio (Android Market), ZumZum (Nokia Ovi Store), Facebook (Palm) and Microsoft My Phone (Windows Marketplace).

In terms of paid applications, Distimo reports that Pages (iPad), Angry Birds (iPhone), BeBuzz (BlackBerry), Beautiful Widgets (Android), ToonWarz (Nokia Ovi Store), mCraig (Palm) and Meon (Windows Marketplace) are all the top apps on the respective app stores.

Both the apps for Netflix and iBooks are among the ten most popular free applications for the iPhone and iPad.

Because of the nature of the platform, it looks like RIM publishes the best apps on its App World. Research In Motion develops four of the ten most popular free applications in BlackBerry App World: BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry App World, Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Palm and Microsoft are also the publishers of the Facebook application in its own stores

The data isn’t really that surprising, but it is interesting to see the app breakdown over three months versus one month.

It isn’t often you get to see people enthusiastically using a brand new app in the wild; At the Tahoe Tech Talk today, while on a three hour panel Q & A with angel investors Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Travis Kalanik, Dave Morin, Kevin Rose, Ben Kaufman and Gary Vaynerchuk, I got to see this exact thing happen, as the aforementioned seven wouldn’t stop texting and laughing onstage.

While I still have no clue on exactly “what” was being shared (my guess is they were either colluding or making fun of McClure) after some investigation I figured out the “how.” They were all using Fast Society, a seven day old app that sets up instant temporary group texting through your iPhone, as well as instant conference and group location sharing if you’re so inclined.

Like the digital version of kids passing notes in class, group chats on Fast Society have an expiration date; You can set up a chat for a group of up to 15 people, for three hours minimum and three days maximum. Founder Matthew Rosenberg tells us that the next version will let you set limits of up to seven days and 25 hours.

While in the same space as Plannr, and Groupme the app requires no signups, no usernames, no passwords just your phone number. And the text groups are temporary, so you don’t have to be stuck with your fellow conference panelists once they have out worn their welcome.

Also, and this is the most important element, none of the onstage panelists are currently Fast Society investors — they genuinely were really into the app, which was built and is bootstrapped by Rosenberg, Andy Thompson, and Michael Constantiner.

Rosenberg explains the motivation behind creating it.

“We were at a Bloc Party concert in NYC and having a hard time getting our friends together, it was impossible to coordinate everyone in a group. Then we thought, we should just build it ourselves.”

Plans for an Android and a Blackberry version are currently in the works.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Matthew Scherb, an attorney at the San Francisco office of Winston & Strawn LLP. He litigates complex copyright, trademark, and Internet-related disputes.

In 2000, the now-defunct iCraveTV allowed its users to watch live television over the Internet.  It retransmitted broadcast television without obtaining permission from or paying broadcasters, framed the retransmission with paid advertisements, and users watched while paying nothing.  A federal court in Pennsylvania found iCraveTV was likely on the hook for copyright infringement.  iCraveTV shut down, and the court’s decision appears to have had a blanket chilling effect on Internet-based television.  No one came along to take iCraveTV’s place.

Fast forward to 2010: Seattle-based ivi has arrived.  Like iCraveTV, ivi lets you watch live television on the Internet.  Also like iCraveTV, ivi has not sought permission from or paid broadcasters.  Unlike iCraveTV, there is no paid advertising: ivi draws revenue from a flat monthly fee.  For a premium, ivi offers DVR “time sifting” features such as pause, rewind, and fast forward.  ivi currently streams programs from New York and Seattle affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and a few other networks.  So, next Thursday you could watch an episode of The Office as it airs on WNBC (an NBC station in New York) or, next month catch Major League Baseball’s World Series on KCPQ (a Fox station in Seattle).  You might cheer the return of Internet television.  You might be glad to see a potential competitor to your cable or satellite provider.  But does ivi’s retransmission of broadcast television run afoul of copyright law?  Will it face the same fate as iCraveTV?

We may soon find out.

In mid-September, broadcasters and copyright owners (including the major networks and Major League Baseball) sent ivi a cease-and-desist letter.  They accused ivi of copyright infringement and demanded that ivi stop streaming their television programs.  Fearing a lawsuit from its accusers, ivi preemptively filed a lawsuit in Seattle federal court on Monday, September 20.  ivi seeks an order declaring that its Internet television service is legal.  In quick response, the broadcaster and copyright owners filed their own lawsuit against ivi in New York federal court on September 28.  If ivi wins or obtains a favorable settlement in these cases before it runs out of money, it can proceed with a stamp of approval from a federal judge or from its accusers.  A loss could torpedo its ambitions.

ivi has pegged its legal hopes on a rarely-invoked but potentially powerful exception to copyright liability: the “passive carrier exemption.”  The exemption makes it lawful to retransmit a transmission intended for the public so long as the retransmitter lacks control over the content of the original transmission or over the recipients of the retransmission. ivi believes that by retransmitting freely-available, over-the-air broadcasts and offering basic DVR-like services, it is nothing more than a passive carrier and exempt from copyright liability.

The iCraveTV case never dealt with the passive carrier exemption.  Because iCraveTV framed its retransmissions with advertisements, it probably could not have claimed the passive carrier exemption in any event: by adding advertisements, it was arguably modifying and exercising control over the original broadcast transmission.

Major court decisions involving the passive carrier exemption are, like the iCraveTV case, also a decade old.  They offer mixed signals.

In 1999, the same New York federal court now hearing the broadcasters’ and copyright owners’ lawsuit against ivi denied the exemption to a company called Media Dial-Up.  Media Dial-Up retransmitted radio broadcasts via telephone to its customers who paid a fee for access.  Even though Media Dial-Up did not control the content of the radio broadcasts or limit reception to particular individuals, the court refused to classify Media Dial-Up as a “carrier.”  ”In an era of rapid technological change,” the court wrote, “possibilities for the capture and retransmission of copyrighted material over the Internet . . . are enormous.”  If Media Dial-Up could be a passive carrier, it “would threaten considerable mischief.”  The court called this “common sense.”

Just two years later, in 2001, a Massachusetts court reached the opposite result.  It applied the exemption to Insight, a company that facilitated retransmission of Boston-area television broadcasts, including National Football League games, to Bell Canada for a fee.  It noted that Congress had intended courts to give “carrier” an “expansive” definition.

Will ivi distinguish itself from iCraveTV and Media Dial-Up and align itself with Insight?

If it can, ivi will have succeeded in making the passive carrier exception a powerful shield for itself and others, perhaps other Internet retransmitters such as Ustream or Justin.tv looking to offer new services or cable and satellite retransmitters looking to make the leap to the Internet.

As for television broadcasters, though they may prefer to control the market for Internet television themselves, they may actually benefit financially from having their broadcasts retransmitted on the Internet and other media.  They will reach more eyeballs and could presumably demand higher advertising fees.

Stay tuned for the court’s decisions and also keep an eye on Congress, which can revoke or modify the passive carrier exception.  Congress created special, compulsory licensing regimes for cable and satellite retransmitters as those technologies matured.  Cable and satellite retransmitters do not infringe copyright when they retransmit a television broadcast, but they must pay a royalty fixed by statute.  Congress could choose to impose a similar regime on Internet retransmitters.

"Windows is the past. In the future, AOL is the next Microsoft."

— Steve Case (1999)

Like most serious writers, I've always dreamed of working for AOL. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Heather and Mike took to the stage during Disrupt, alongside AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong, to announce that TechCrunch has been acquired by the 90s chat-room giant.

You can also imagine how relieved I was to hear that our new corporate ownership wouldn't affect our editorial independence. A fact reiterated in the press release that Mike allowed Armstrong to publish on our homepage.

The real meat of the deal was explained to TechCrunch employees and contributors yesterday, in our first ever "all hands" meeting, hosted by David Eun, President of AOL Media and Studios. In an act of Mike-Judgeian corporate defiance, Mike published the full agenda ahead of the meeting, leaving us to salivate at highlights like "HR to hand out offer letters / AOL gifts." (to clarify: these were very separate items) and the time set aside for "administrative happiness".

The rest of the meeting, though, was designated as an "internal AOL meeting" and as such was strictly off the record. However, after giving that warning, the very next thing that Eun said was that we should all "keep doing what we do".

Here then are the details of the meeting…

The first order of business – and indeed the whole thrust of the gathering – was to reassure any of us who might think that TechCrunch (the world's number one technology blog, and a growing start-up) and AOL (America's number one killer of start-ups) might somehow not be a great fit. Eun and his team expertly calmed our fears though, adding: "We don't want you to feel that you can't criticize AOL."

Phew!

"…but of course neither should you feel that you need to go out of your way to criticize AOL."

Oh.

But even if our editorial voice will remain unchanged, that's not to say that AOL is going to take a completely hands-off approach to the company. Indeed, along with their offer letters, each employee was handed a welcome pack which gushed that TC staffers are "the mega to our byte" (rejected phrases include "You're the 56 to our K” and "You're the one cup to our two girls").

So then, what changes can we expect to see at the all-new AOL-TC? Here are my top seven take-aways from the meeting…

1. Included in the welcome pack was a bullet-pointed list of AOL corporate principles, including the promise that "we take fun seriously". To this end, TechCrunch employees will be expected to attend a two hour meeting every Saturday afternoon, during which they will participate in Mandatory Fun. Absentees, or those who refuse to wear the mandated clown nose and comedy hat, will be terminated for cause.
2. In line with standard AOL policy, any employee who decides to leave the company will be required to call an 800 number where they'll be kept on hold for two hours before being connected to a bored call centre worker who will try to aggressively persuade them to stay. Whatever the eventual outcome, AOL will continue to debit $19.95 from the employee’s bank account until the end of time.
3. From now on, all TechCrunch staffers will be expected to state their age, sex and location before posting on Yammer.
4. To placate staffers still concerned about the deal, AOL will host a series of motivational talks with the founders of other acquired start-ups. First up: Bebo's Michael Birch, with his inspiring lecture "How I achieved true happiness by selling my company for $850m and then not working a single day at AOL”
5. To celebrate the acquisition, AOL will finance a romantic comedy based on the events of the past two weeks. Starring Tom Hanks as Michael Arrington, Meg Ryan as Heather Harde and Greg Kinnear as Tim Armstrong, the movie has the working title: You've Got Fail.
6. Twelve months later, the company will develop a sequel. With the working title "Unvested Development", it will neither be romantic nor comedic.
7. My first column for the all new AOL-Techcrunch will, inexplicably, also be my last.

Short Version:

Sony sent us 4 games along with the PlayStation Move. Two of them make me want to turn off the PS3, curl up into the fetal position, and cry my pain away. One is decent. One of them is so damn good that I want to invite everyone I know over for a glimpse into the future.

The platform that Sony built here has incredible potential — now it’s up to game developers to make it worth while.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

I used to cover enterprise software for BusinessWeek. You’re probably not impressed by that, and you shouldn’t be. That beat is a combination of a punishment and proving ground because despite being a huge market, most enterprise software purchases are ones that IT managers grow to hate and one that few everyday readers care much about. One thing has made enterprise software an interesting beat: Larry Ellison.

Whether it’s his love of the ladies, his yachts, his mysterious lack of eyebrows, his strategic brilliance, his quick-witted jabs at competitors, random musings that he may buy Apple, or declarations that software is done as a category and he’d just buy everyone up, Larry Ellison has long been the software reporter’s gift that keeps on giving. Tony Stark in IronMan was reportedly based on a hybrid of Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, and I recognize way more Ellison than Musk in the depiction.

Only — pity for reporters– Ellison seems to have tired of the spotlight. Few magazine covers, no billion-dollar hostile takeovers, no wacky press conferences, no weird Shakepearian dramas with former proteges. Just a well-performing stock and growing business. Yawn.

Part of that is because Oracle either bought or trounced arch-rivals with its buy-not-build application strategy, and like most companies, Ellison becomes more interesting when he has a foil. It looks like that new foil is HP. Hallelujah, enterprise software is getting interesting again.

Here are the new players and plotlines in the Valley’s latest drama:

Mark Hurd– The New Protege: Ellison has a long history of deputies he champions and then burns through, and Hurd is the latest champion. Stable, operational, and ruthlessly cost-cutting Hurd is a good yin-yang for big picture, risk-taking, engineering-focused Ellison and those yin-yang relationships tend to work best in Oracle. His longest running lieutenant is the secretive and meticulous Safra Catz who staunchly refused interviews and once barked at me that she was “ALL ABOUT THE BUSINESS” and hated when we’d write personality profiles about executives. Catz is as much a reason people thrive or fail in the Oracle executive suite as the more famously mercurial Ellison.

Leo Apotheker and Ray Lane– The Avengers: The two men teaming up to run HP are two men burned by Ellison, Leo Apotheker who was CEO of SAP in the years Oracle unquestionably trounced it and Ray Lane, one of Ellison’s many heir apparents over the years, who went to Kleiner Perkins to reinvent himself as a VC…to let’s just say mixed reviews. I’m not saying they’re going to go in everyday and whiteboard out how to take Oracle down, but these are two men who’d love to best Ellison at something.

Hardware and Software Colliding–The Battle Royale: So HP and Oracle are traditionally partners more than rivals. But the lines are blurring. For the better part of a decade, HP has been buying up software companies envious of the margins as hardware became more and more mature and commoditized. Oracle has only recently started to get into hardware with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. But Oracle’s strength has been that enterprises pretty much have to buy its databases and once the foot is in the door, they sell them more and more parts of the stack. So it’s less about selling to small businesses that will continue to drive Oracle’s growth and more about getting into more big verticals and selling each company more stuff.

A few weeks ago I was talking to veteran tech reporter Jonathan Schwartz from USA Today said he thought Oracle might try to buy HP sometime in the future. That seemed far-fetched, but Schwartz may wind up looking prescient. Either way, the battle is on. Otherwise, Ellison wouldn’t have sent this deliciously catty note to the Wall Street Journal. His seemingly-impetuous jabs are always more calculated than they appear. HP and Oracle have been in the same headlines too many times in the last few weeks to stay in mere coopetition territory for long.

This isn’t about Hurd or Apotheker– this is about two colliding giants who need to keep their stock prices up and have found the best way in the past is through acquisitions. Oh yeah, and both have plenty of spies– Hurd is no doubt still plugged into HP and Lane at least knows how Ellison’s mind works. 

Marc Andreessen– The Spoiler? Ok, here’s where I get even more speculative, but it’ll be interesting to see the role Andreessen plays in all of this. He’s the savviest member of HP’s board and an admirer of Ellison’s style, track-record and brilliance. He’s cut from a similar cloth too. He can be charming or utterly eviscerating, and he sees turns in the market ahead of most people. Having covered all four of them, I believe that if anyone could play chess with Ellison it’s Andreessen, not Lane or Apotheker. Separately, Andreessen has said that he thinks enterprise software is ripe for disruption and his firm is going to fund a new generation of Oracle-killers.

Ellison has already launched a volley with his comments to the Journal that the HP board needed to “resign en masse.” Andreessen– you gonna take that? (Please say no.)

Togetherville, a Facebook-like social network for kids 10 years of age and younger, is launching a new feature called School Communities today that aims to “give kids a voice” when it comes to how their schools are run. The feature also represents a big change to the way the site is building its social graph, making it far easier for children to connect with their friends.

It’s easy to forget (and many kids probably ignore it entirely), but Facebook maintains a firm requirement that everyone on the site be thirteen years of age or older. That’s where Togetherville comes in — the site appeals to parents by promising a safer, more secure environment, where parents can moderate who their children are connecting with. Parents approve each of their child’s friends, and can also connect with other parents using Facebook’s social graph.

Before now, though, the process to find your child’s friends was more tedious than it probably should have been — if your kid wanted to ‘friend’ another child, then you would have to be friends with the other child’s parents on Facebook. The new ‘Schools’ feature makes this easier: during signup you’ll enter the name of your child’s school, Togetherville will present your child with a list of their friends, and they can ask to connect with them (pending each parent’s approval).

The addition of schools also brings another dynamic to the social network: communities. Parents can now talk to each other about current school-related issues on the school’s community page (which is analogous to a Facebook page), and it also gives kids a chance to speak their minds.

But while parents will be to engage in a straightforward conversation forum, the kids side of things is a bit more complex. Every so often Togetherville sends out mass polls to all of its users — questions like, “What’s your favorite subject and why?” When a child responds to one of these questions, their answer will appear in the feeds of their friends, and their parent will be asked for permission to publish the response on the community page of the child’s school (they’ll also be asked if the response can be published as part of anonymized data aggregated across all of Togetherville).

CEO Mandeep Dhillon says that this gives kids a unique chance to share their thoughts on their school — if enough students talk about an issue, then maybe the grownups will take notice (I suspect that student requests will result in a lot of noise, but the trends may be worthwhile). He also says that the community feature will be rolling out for uses beyond schools as well, like coordinating soccer teams.

OpenFeint, the comprehensive social gaming platform from Aurora Feint, has landed a deal with Verizon to feature the platform’s top Android Games on Verizon phones.

OpenFeint recently added Android game developers to its rapidly growing community, launching its plug and play social game development to developers to the public a few weeks ago.

According to a recent OpenFeint newsletter sent to developers, the social gaming platform struck deal with Verizon, Rogers Wireless and Bell Mobility to offer their consumers Android game recommendations, all curated by OpenFeint (meaning, OpenFeint has picked the best of its Android games to be featured on those operator services).

So why is this a big deal? There are a couple of reasons why OpenFeint’s deal is interesting. First, OpenFeint used to be social gaming platform exclusive to the iPhone; and actually gained a lot of traction on the platform, powering social gaming services for over 30 million users and growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. But Apple recently launched its own gaming platform, GameCenter, for developers which poses competition to OpenFeint.

In turn, OpenFeint is expanding to the Android platform, and deals with Android-phone carriers help expand the reach of their games. For Verizon, this is a way to create its own app and
games discovery experience without relying solely on the Android Marketplace, which has sub-par discovery features. We already know that Verizon is launching a V CAST App Store on Android that will exist outside of Android's own Market (thanks of course to Google’s open platform, since this can’t be developed on Apple’s closed platform). Clearly Verizon is looking to provide features, such as curated apps and recommendations, that the Android Market lacks. Of course, Google is trying to create a better Android Market experience, but those efforts could be for naught if Android carriers like Verizon beat them to the chase.

One thing I’m particularly proud of: we have provided a free live stream of nearly every conference we’ve ever put on. We’ve found that we still have plenty of people that want to attend in person. But for those who can’t make the event, the content is available to watch, gratis. Very few other large events do this.

The numbers from TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco earlier this week are staggering. We’re still gathering the on demand view data from TechCrunchTV. But we’ve just received the high level numbers from Ustream, who powered the live stream of the event.

235,389 unique viewers tuned in at some point during the event (there were about 2,000 people there in person). Over 65,000 hours of video were viewed, and a total of 316,426 streams were served.

That’s more than twice as many people that tuned in v. TechCrunch Disrupt: New York in May, when 94,000 unique viewers were logged.

We’re committed to continue to provide TechCrunch event content for free via video, and we thank our partners, like Ustream, for helping us make this happen.

COICA, the bill that made waves last week as an affront to free speech and due process rights, was recently postponed, to the net’s great relief. While it seems to have been the kind of inflammatory election-year FUD bill we see very often in this country, it brought up several issues that are worth taking action on.

The bill is ostensibly to “combat online infringement, and for other purposes,” but broadly speaking, it would grant “root access” to one of the fundamental technologies running the web: DNS. Here’s the question: if such an important technology could come so easily within a breath of being in the clutches of politicians and lobbyists, why do we rely so much upon it?

Continue reading…

Google has just acquired BlindType, a very impressive technology that allows you to type on touch screens without even looking at them. See our past coverage of the startup here.

BlindType doesn’t force you to type using a virtual keyboard at the bottom of your screen, which is the norm on most smartphones. Instead, you just start typing wherever it’s convenient— BlindType analyzes the position of your finger taps relative to each other to determine which characters you’re typing (check out the video below to watch it in action).

Here’s a post that just went live on the company’s blog:

We are excited to announce that BlindType has been acquired by Google!

We want to thank everyone for their overwhelming support and positive feedback.
We know that typing on your mobile device can be a frustrating experience, which is why
we’ve worked hard to make touch typing easier and faster than ever – the way it should be.

We’re excited to join Google, and look forward to the great opportunities for mobile innovation that lie ahead.

The BlindType team

BlindType’s website may be ugly, but the video demos are very impressive — I’d love to see this technology make its way into Android. Unfortunately the software isn’t actually released yet (not even as a standalone app), so you won’t be able to try it yourself for a while. In the mean time another fantastic third-party keyboard is Swype, which first made its debut at TechCrunch 50 and now comes stock on many phones, including some Android devices.

We are somewhat obsessed here with the iPad game Angry Birds (and really, who isn’t?). When we first caught wind that the Finnish company behind the game, Rovio, will be branching out into movies and plush toys, we were intrigued. When we obtained photographic evidence of one of these toys, we were ecstatic. (Not Dancingerick.com ecstatic, but pretty excited nonetheless).

Now we’ve got a photo of the entire line of Angry Birds plush toys, courtesy of Rovio’s U.S. adviser, Peter Levin, who is also the CEO of GeekChicDaily (which I wrote about here). He’ll be showing off the whole line of toys at the Big Apple Comic Con this weekend in New York City.

The toys will be available this holiday season, and some of them will be available as in-app purchases in the iPhone and iPad games.

Yahoo is in shambles right now. You’ve likely already heard about the most recent SVP exits, which CEO Carol Bartz has tried to spin. Now we’ve heard another one is leaving as well — Jeff Kinder, the SVP of Media Products and Solutions. And you know what that means — time for a massive re-org at the top of Yahoo. Yes, again.

Based on what we’re hearing, this re-org will take place next Tuesday. Of course, us reporting on this means that it could possibly be moved (as has happened in the past with Yahoo deals), but as of right now that’s the plan.

Based on what we’re hearing Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving may be the big winner of this re-org, as he’s been seen as the rising star in the company. Word is that he’ll be bringing some of his old Microsoft chums in to join him in high-up positions at this new-look Yahoo.

Losing Kinder would be another big blow for Yahoo as he currently oversees: Yahoo! Front Page, Finance, Sports, News, Entertainment, Shopping, Travel, Autos, Real Estate, Local, and Small Business.

As for Bartz? She’s still in charge for now. But there is some talk of attempted coups. In fact, that may be the reason this whole re-org is necessary right now.

The dream is collapsing.

This is going to come as a shock to you: But suddenly and for the first time in years, I really care about the future of AOL. And, because I used to host a show on Yahoo Finance, the story floating around about whether or not these two has-beens of the Internet (sorry, new overlords) would be better together has special resonance with me.

I don’t totally agree with Henry Blodget when he says that it’s a no-brainer because they are the exact same company. (Btw, I used to co-host that same Yahoo show with Blodget. How can a business that employs thousands and thousands of people be so small?) Nor do I agree with Mike that working for Yahoo is a fate worse than losing hundreds of millions in acquisition value.

Here are my totally selfish, biased reasons why I hope the deal does happen or doesn’t happen. Beyond obvious navel gazing, I’m looking at this from the point of view of someone who has worked her whole adult life in media. The companies I grew up writing for are dying in increasing numbers, while TechCrunch just set an uncomfortable cap on how much even the most successful blogs can sell for. Our only hope is that either Yahoo or AOL can finally make good on this obvious but for some reason elusive promise to create a company that can afford to pay well for good content a online mass audience will read.

First, three reasons I hope it does happen:

1. I really miss the Yahoo studios team, and our up-and-down efforts to launch video programming at TechCrunch has proven to me just how hard it is– especially trying to do it on a budget. At Yahoo, I had the benefit of working in a million-dollar, beautiful studio built out during the free spending crazy dot com bubble days, and we had a staff that knew how to make us look good. At TechCrunch we have Jon Orlin running our video efforts– the very guy who actually built that Yahoo studio back in the day. So it’s not a staff problem, it’s a resources problem. Piggy-backing onto what Yahoo had already built and the insanely great Yahoo Finance platform we quickly and cheaply became a profitable division with four times the reach of CNBC. That’s something that TechCrunch just couldn’t replicate. Could AOL? I don’t know. But I do know if we could take the talent and personalities of TechCrunch and add in the expertise and facilities of Yahoo Studios we could launch the kind of amazing and slick video programming that most of us wanted from TechCrunchTV.

2. I think a big part of Silicon Valley’s future is becoming a financial and expertise hub for high-growth, tech entrepreneurs around the world, similar to the way New York became a financial hub for publicly traded companies and a management hub for media. There are huge content, advertising and conference opportunities to knit Silicon Valley elites together with the most mature and fast growing Asian entrepreneur economies. Yahoo has done a better job in Asia than anyone in Silicon Valley. It has valuable properties in China and Japan– so valuable they’re largely propping up the stock prices these days. Yahoo has also been one of the only Internet giants looking at acquisitions and building a presence in Indonesia, and it has been making a huge branding push into India in the last year. I don’t know how all of that could add up to a smart media strategy, but at least there are smart assets and teams on the ground in the most mature and most nascent Asian markets.

3. I still carry a Yahoo backpack because it’s a great backpack, and I haven’t had the heart to rip the logo off, although the OneTrueFan founders tried to convince me to at Disrupt. So, yunno, I have the backpack already… And, for some reason, Yahoo TechTicker still lists me as a reporter. (This was my best attempt at a third reason, which should say something.)

Now, three reasons I hope the deal never happens:

1. Big companies suck. The bigger they get, the more they suck. Yahoo isn’t a company; it’s a collection of smaller companies and silos. For all my talk of potential video and Asian synergies above, I’d be skeptical that any of that would ever prove to be much of an advantage for a property like TechCrunch because my sense is none of those groups are great at working together. Those are things that companies say when they buy you, but they usually don’t wind up being true. This isn’t a knock on Yahoo, it’s just a fact of life.

2. All content companies aren’t the same and all content isn’t the same. My understanding is that Yahoo is still mostly an aggregator of other people’s content, while AOL is mostly a creator of original content. Those are two wildly different businesses and I’m not sure there is a lot of synergy. When you aggregate, you pick great partners and have a symbiotic relationship. When you create content, you are competing with those partners to produce better content. Yahoo’s value in the media world is largely routing eyeballs around the Web. That’s closer to a Digg-model than AOL properties like TechCrunch, Engadget or TMZ. And managing great content creators is a lot harder than managing dealmakers. We’re nuts. Seriously. We’re highly volatile, dramatic and expensive. Why do you think the volume was never turned on during our CrunchCam days?

3. Competition is good for everyone. Some of the arguments for the deal are that AOL and Yahoo would each take out their biggest portal competition. They’d be a must-buy for every large ad deal and the prices of acquisitions like TechCrunch would be squeezed, because there’d be no bidding wars. Yeah, that’s not good for reporters and ultimately not for shareholders either. Competition makes every company better and every industry dynamic. It’s the white space between clumsy giants focused on one another that creates opportunities for new entrants. The only hope for a real media organization that can pay for and distribute the kind of great content that most blogs can’t afford and most newspapers are hemorrhaging is for Yahoo and AOL to be fighting each other to do better, not one big messy company fighting within itself.

Not one to shy away from bold and at times controversial statements, heavyweight investor Vinod Khosla took the stage at Disrupt this week and compared green tech innovation in Silicon Valley to Microsoft’s IE9 browser launch.

No offense to Microsoft, but in this analogy Khosla was criticizing the Valley for its deficiency in game-changing technologies and its focus on incremental advances. We got the founder of Khosla Ventures and former CEO of Sun Microsystems, to defend his statements on TechCrunch TV.

Khosla had some interesting thoughts to share on the current state of green tech investment and entrepreneurship. According to Khosla, too many companies who want to think big are doomed to remain small because they pick the wrong investors, as he says, “Any investor who looks at exit strategies, or multiples of investment or even does an IRR calculation, a rate of return calculation, probably is the wrong partner for you.” These days, Khosla is used to dispensing advice to entrepreneurs— his own daughter is in the process of securing angel investors for her own startup (no, dad does not plan to bankroll the operation). His best advice for his daughter?

“I think the single, most important fact about doing a startup is being clear about your vision and not let it get distorted by what pundits and experts tell you. But the second most important thing is finding the right team, and that’s really, really hard, because people tend to look for people around them…You know, I was relentless… really spent well over 50% of my time recruiting, and I encourage all entrepreneurs to try and do that.”

On his specific investments, Khosla was particularly bullish on Eco-Motors and its advancements on an opposing pistons engine. This summer, Khosla and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, invested another $23.5 million into the Troy-based Eco-Motors (his second round of investment). According to reports, Khosla Ventures owns nearly 50% of the company.

Video above.

Below are some key excerpts:

On Entrepreneurship And Investment
VC should be a co-founder, who thinks big
VK: Your job [(as an investor)] and this is really, really important but misunderstood about startups, startups aren’t big or small, they’re made big or small. So an entrepreneur picking the right partner will more likely end up as a big company, than if they pick the wrong partner who wants a 3X return on money. Any investor who looks at exit strategies, or multiples of investment or even does an IRR calculation, a rate of return calculation, probably is the wrong partner for you.

Incremental Innnovation Vs. Real Disruption
VK: I’ll tell you, ten times more improvement is possible in the engine, than most people think is true or in your standard car… We’re far away from taking enough large shots at it. One of our companies, Eco-Motors is dramatically redesigning the engine, they’re building what’s called an opposing piston engine, most engines today are like V8s… These opposing piston engines were used in the 1920s and discontinued for a reason but those reasons are no longer true but people don’t go back and reexamine the assumptions again. This needs to happen in every area, whether its solar cells, even looking at coal, cleaning up coal or mining or air conditioning, or lighting, almost everything we do…

Question: Going back to those engines, you talked about them with such enthusiasm, you clearly see that as being an important part of your portfolio, what pieces need to align to help this technology take-off?

VK: I don’t think a lot needs to align, we’ll build a great engine, we’ll first find some specialty markets, so we make, so instead of putting it in the car on day one, because those companies are conservative, we’ll make generators out of it, gensets out of it. That’s an easier market to get into, it’s less cost sensitive, but efficiency and weight still count… as soon as we prove it there, we’ll be in autos, already we’re talking to auto and truck makers.”

Best Advice For Entrepreneurs
VK: I think the single, most important fact about doing a startup is being clear about your vision and not let it get distorted by what pundits and experts tell you. But the second most important thing is finding the right team, and that’s really, really hard, because people tend to look for people around them and so it’s the person who they happen to know as opposed to the best possible person they can find…You know, I was relentless, took a lot of time, I used to say when I was starting my first company, I was more of a glorified recruiter than a CEO or a founder. I really spent well over 50% of my time recruiting, and I encourage all entrepreneurs to try and do that.

Here we go again.

It seems like a week can’t go by now without some company suing another company over some lame software patent. The latest is Microsoft which today announced it was suing Motorola for features on their Android phones.

As it continues to rapidly grow in size, Android is increasingly a target of such suits. But the weird thing about these suits is how they always seem to be indirectly targeting Android. That is, companies aren’t suing Google for Android, they’re suing manufacturers using Android on their phones. See: Apple suing HTC for another example of this.

So what does Microsoft think is being infringed upon here? Here’s the key blurb from Microsoft PR:

Microsoft filed an action today in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola, Inc. for infringement of nine Microsoft patents by Motorola's Android-based smartphones. The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola's Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.

So basically it sounds like Microsoft is upset about the customizations Motorola has been making for its popular Droid brand of Android phones.

But the details are the best part. Microsoft is suing Motorola over battery power and signal strength notifications. Oh, and email syncing. Yeah, this is getting out of control.

In a blog post on the matter, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, even cites the similar lawsuits by Apple and Oracle as validation of their own. Ugh.

Update: In the comments, Seth Weintraub brings up a great point:

Microsoft is obviously pissed that Motorola is ‘all in’ on Android. Otherwise, why would they back UP HTC in their case, yet sue Motorola.

Back in April, Microsoft struck a patent deal with HTC — undoubtedly over much of this stuff. HTC is helping out with Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7, Motorola is not right now.

August saw Apple filing for a patent on a “convertible” iMac with iOS integration. While some thought it was merely an exploratory filing in case they went for it someday, it may in fact be more than that. Digitimes reports that Sintek Photronics, a display manufacturer with an amazing name, has sent samples of an upcoming display line to Apple for their consideration — capacitive touchscreens over 20″ in size. Rumors confirmed? Not quite, but they have gained a bit more credibility.

Continue reading…

Last May, we noted that Pulse was a “must-have news app for the iPad.” A few weeks later, no less than Apple CEO Steve Jobs agreed, showing it off on stage at an Apple event. Then the app got pulled over a content dispute. Then it reappeared. Then a competitor with big-time backing appeared, Flipboard. It’s been a crazy ride for the two Stanford grads who built Pulse. And now they’re back on the offensive with Pulse 2.0.

The latest version released into the App Store today brings a big list of improvements. The key ones:

• Source-O-Plenty: Now get 60 sources across 5 pages (12 on each page). Yes, that’s a full 3x our last release.
• Organize away: We’ve completely redesigned the source management to make it really, really, really easy. When you take the number of feeds to 60, this becomes a bit challenging, but we hope that you are able to organize it easily. Just press the wheel at the top-left, and experience the power! Do give us feedback on how to improve.
• Pulse Bazaar: Discover new and interesting sources in our own Bazaar. People get thrilled when they find a source that they didn’t know about. Pulse Bazaar is a step in that direction.
• Zip Zip Zip: Performance enhancements to make your favorite application faster than ever.

The $1.99 app remains an awesome visual way to consume news, now it’s just more robust and faster to use. While it definitely competes with Flipboard, the two go about things a bit differently since Pulse is more straight-up RSS, whereas Flipboard is tied to social sharing. People still seem fairly divided over which is better.

And soon there will be Qwiki for iPad.

To be clear, Pulse 2.0 is iPad-only for now — but the team promises to get it out for the iPhone and Android in the next couple of weeks as well.

You can find Pulse in the App Store here.

So I’m on my fifth straight day of watching startup competitions, and if you cut me a mixture coffee and RedBull would probably pour out of my veins. As soon as Disrupt ended, Endeavor’s International Selection Panel started in Pebble Beach and I drove down to check it out.

Endeavor is a nonprofit that finds and helps some of the best entrepreneurs in the emerging world. I’ve written about them a few times and attended selection panels in the mountains of Patagonia and the beaches of Rio. This one is a little less geographically thrilling  for me, as it’s just in Pebble Beach– a place people usually come to golf or look at cars. But for the entrepreneurs pitching, being a few hours from Silicon Valley is exhilarating. More than a few big name venture capitalists from firms like Benchmark and Redpoint are down here to check out the contenders.

The contrast between how we pick startups at Disrupt and how Endeavor picks them is pronounced and has me thinking a lot about how startup competitions work. Both events come from a place of loving great entrepreneurs, and the teams do a ton of work vetting the entrepreneurs who are invited to compete. But that’s where most of the similarity ends. At Disrupt there are thousands of people watching and the pitches are short. At Endeavor’s selection panels there are the judges, the startups and only a handful of observers. The entrepreneurs pitch for 45 minutes at a time, and the judges have a well-researched dossier about each company, including financials. So it’s less about a quick first impression, and it’s less about entertaining a crowd.

But ironically, Endeavor does one thing that makes it way more entertaining: They let everyone watch the deliberations. Well, everyone except the entrepreneurs that is– they’re left to stew elsewhere. But the rest of us get to see a no-holds-barred, sometimes impassioned debate about each company by a panel of expert judges. Unlike a typical startup competition, there’s no quota on how many entrepreneurs will be let into Endeavor’s portfolio– it could be all or none. But it has to be unanimous. It’s like spying on an investor partner meeting. And in the case they can’t all agree the judge who voted no, has to sit down with the entrepreneur and explain why, in an effort to help make them better.

Wouldn’t you have loved to watch the fights, hear the lobbying, understand the pros and cons between why Qwiki beat out its competitors? I would. Not even TechCrunch staffers are allowed in that tent. I’m starting to think Disrupt– and most startup competitions– are keeping the most entertaining and informative part of the process off stage. If entrepreneurs could see why certain companies resonate with the VCs, investors and entrepreneurs we invite to judge them, it could not only help future companies compete, but it could help entrepreneurs better pitch investors in general.

The ongoing struggle between RIM and data-hungry government surveillance programs is starting to look more like a soap opera than a political drama. After RIM caved to India and began offering a method to intercept Blackberry Messenger messages within that country, the government has decided that the tools they’ve been given aren’t good enough.

“We have manual access to the messenger service. We want automated access and we are hopeful of getting it from January 1,” said G.K. Pillai, India’s home secretary. Apparently, and anyone who reads this site could have told Mr. Pillai this (and RIM did so), the communications they have been enabled to intercept are encrypted with keys RIM cannot provide, because it does not have them. India is attempting to squeeze blood from a stone.

Continue reading…

Brazil, which already has a relatively high proportion of Google data removal requests, is experiencing some stumbles relating to yesterday’s launch of Google Street View, including the discovery of not one but two images of dead bodies, specifically the photo to the left snapped at Avenida Presidente Vargas in Rio De Janeiro and another one reportedly captured at Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais.

According to G1, Google has removed the Brazilian images and instructed other people who find inappropriate material on Street View to report it to Google through the “Report a Problem” link at the bottom of the page.

Perhaps one explanation of this disturbing issue is Brazil’s high murder rate, at 25.2 intentional homicides per 100,000 citizens yearly.

Prior to this the most notable “corpse on street view” story took place in the UK and had a happy ending, with the body in question belonging to a little girl who was playing a prank.

You can view a closeup of the image here. [Warning, not for the faint of heart]

Photo: Correiro Brazil

Eniac Ventures is launching a $1.6 million seed investment fund today, which will invest in companies in the mobile software and services space. The fund has already made seed investments in a number of startups including Localytics, MightyMeeting, NearVerse, and Philo.

Eniac, which was founded by Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh and Tim Young, is focused solely on making small seed stage investments in mobile startups. We are told the average size of the investment is around $25,000 to $100,000. Mehta, the founder of Buzzd, orginally sold his first company ipsh! to Omnicom in 2005 and was an angel investor in AdMob (which was sold to Google for $750 million last year).

Interestingly, Eniac gets its name from the first computer which was developed at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering, where the four partners met as undergrad engineering students back in the 90's.

Beyond just providing capital, Eniac plans to mentor the startups they invest in by making introductions to partners (carriers, handset manufacturers, app stores, content providers), providing business development and marketing advice, and help with raising additional funding.