If you have a successful mobile application that’s reliant on advertising, then you obviously want to do everything you can to maximize how much revenue each ad unit is generating. One way to do that is to sell ads directly to clients instead of relying exclusively on big ad networks like AdMob. The benefits are clear — advertisers can more directly hone in on the audience they want to reach, and developers can generally get a higher price for their ad space. But it also takes time and experience, which small development teams don’t have.

That’s where Burstly comes in. Today, the company is launching a new Storefront feature that allows app developers to set up their own branded portal where advertisers can directly purchase placement in their apps. And to help launch the new feature, Burstly has teamed with a very popular app store developer: Newtoy, the company behind the hit game Words With Friends.

Beginning today, advertisers will be able to directly purchase ads on Words With Friends, which has grown to 1.5 million daily active users who spend a an average of one hour playing per day (that’s a lot of ad impressions). Advertisers will now be able to go to Newtoy’s homepage, where they’ll see a banner prompting them to run ads in the game. Click the banner, and you’ll be taken to a workflow that lets you upload your ad copy, geo-target your ads, and specify how much you’re willing to pay for your impressions.
Burstly hasn’t fully automated its signup process yet so other developers can’t immediately get their own ad storefronts up and running, but CEO Evan Rifkin says that the company wants to support as many developers as possible (in other words, you can sign up and the company will try to get you set up soon).

Burstly is particularly excited about the platform’s geo-targeting features. At this point advertisers can target their ads to users in major metropolitan areas, and in the future Burstly will support targeting based on zip codes. This means that a local business can identify an application that’s relevant to their business (a movie theatre might purchase ads to appear on a movie app, for example), and can then target their ads at users in their neighborhood.

App publishers are given two choices for how they want to price their ads: they can either set the pricing themselves, or they can rely on an automated bidding system. The latter will show advertisers a suggested bid price based on various market conditions (for example, how much ads are selling for in other apps). The company recommends the second option.

Burstly company raised $1.8 million earlier this year, and has offered an open source SDK that helps mobile developers manage and optimize their ad networks, in-app purchases, and more. Today’s Strorefront launch comes in addition to those features.

I’m in San Francisco, at the Cisco press conference where the connectivity giant is rumored to be showing off a new video calling tool — likely one that sits on top of your TV. Cisco already has such solutions in place for enterprise, but their growing interest in the consumer space, and the increasing numbers of internet-connected TVs, have likely inspired them to improve existing video calling solutions.

Microsoft has just announced the acquisition of AVIcode, a Baltimore-based company that develops a realtime application monitoring software for the .NET Framework. According to a statement from the company, the acquisition will help provide Microsoft “customers with unified management for physical, virtualized and cloud applications, whether they are running in a customer, service provider or Microsoft datacenter.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

According to the blog post, AVIcode’s software will be available through the Microsoft’s System Center product family. AVIcode’s products include a variety of application monitoring services for the full application lifecycle.

AVIcode’s monitoring capabilities includes, a specialized Silverlight monitoring product, data on how an end user measures an application's performance and quality, the ability to trace the performance of critical business transactions, and allows administrators to access detailed information regarding the hardware and software components of a distributed application or service.

Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s CVP, Management & Security Division, writes that “Bringing together the capabilities of Operations Manager with the enhancements from AVIcode enables organizations to truly get the 360-degree view of their service—independent of where the service is hosted, whether a datacenter/cloud, in a partner's hosted data center/cloud, or from a public cloud solution such as Windows Azure.” AVIcode has raised over $2 million in venture funding.

It’s unclear if the AVIcode deal is part of Microsoft’s secret acquisition spree of 15 companies over the past year, including 3D virtual world Vivaty. In contrast to Google, Microsoft has been more tight-lipped about its acquisitions but perhaps this strategy is changing.

It looks like there is yet again more data to support the trend Google’s Android platform is eating away at the share of other smartphone operating systems, including RIM and Apple. ComScore’s smartphone numbers were just released today, which measured smartphone usage from May until August. According to the recent data, 55.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in August, up 14 percent from the the May period.

While RIM was the most popular smartphone platform with 37.6 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.2 percent share; Google continued to gain ground in the market, rising 6.6 percentage points to capture 19.6 percent of smartphone subscribers. In fact, RIM’s share dropped from 41.7 percent in the May period and Apple also saw a slight drop as well. Microsoft accounted for 10.8 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.6 percent. All the platforms posted losses in share except for Android phones.

Consumer interaction with mobile phones increased for the time period as well. For the three months ending in August, nearly 67 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.4 percent, while browsers were used by 34.5 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 2.6 percent).

Consumers who were using downloaded applications made of nearly one-third of the mobile audience, representing an increase of 2.3 percent from the previous period. ComScore says the consumers who access social networking sites and blog is on the up, increasing 1.7 percentage points, representing 22.5 percent of mobile subscribers. Consumers listening to music remained flay, tising 0.4 percentage points, representing 14.7 percent of subscribers.

In total, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices for the period. In terms of device manufacturer share, Samsung continued to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 23.6 percent market share, followed by LG with 21.2 percent share. Motorola came in third (18.8 percent share), followed by RIM (9.0 percent share) and Nokia (7.6 percent share).

Syncapse, which bills itself as a social media technology company, has secured $2 million in financing from the Business Development Bank of Canada.

This announcement follows Syncapse’s first round of private equity financing – the company raised $3.3 million earlier this year.

The initial funds were used to fuel Syncapse’s global expansion and invest in product development for SocialTALK, social media management software for brand marketers and agencies. Syncapse, founded in 2007, says it invested nearly $10 million in product development in 2010 and is on track to invest a similar amount next year.

Using the new funds, Syncapse aims to expand its suite of technology products for marketers, ramp up hiring efforts for sales and marketing roles and appoint new members to its board of directors. The board currently includes Rob Burgess, former CEO of Macromedia, and Ian Giffen, Chairman of The Descartes Systems Group.

Syncapse was most recently in the news with its acquisition of London-based social media development firm Nudge Social Media.

Seculert, a young startup building cloud-based software that comprehensively detects cyber threats affecting corporate networks, this morning announced that it has raised funding from YL Ventures. The size of the round was not disclosed, but I'm told it concerns a "very significant 7-digit USD figure".

Ooma, my secret weapon when it comes to reducing the price of overseas calls, has just announced PureVoice, an “HD” voice technology that offers a “superior home telephony experience.” Essentially the system uses redundancy and compression to transmit voice packets at higher quality than you’d find in normal telephone conversations although, presumably, you’re still burdened by legacy voice technology on the carrier’s side.

You can check out a goofy demo of PureVoice on Ooma’s site. Press release follows.

Read more…

Offer provider TrialPay is launching a new product today that enables game publishers to monetize social currency offerings, called DealSpot. The new product essentially allows games to offer exclusive deals to game players within a game, as opposed to the offers appearing in a separate game outside of the game (often called the ‘offer wall’).

The company is partnering with Groupon, Tippr and Living Social for local deals, LOVEFiLM for subscription entertainment, branded retailers such as Yves Rocher and Lancôme for shopping, Rue La La and Mertado for flash sales and more. Deals automatically appear in games and prompt a user to click on the link to receive the exclusive deal to earn virtual currency.

DealSpot has been running in private beta on Playdom's Sorority Life, Playfish's Restaurant City and iWin's Family Feud. And TrialPay allows publishers to offer the deals based on player performance. For example, iWin will use DealSpot to display special promotions to players who have reached certain levels in Family Feud. Another example of an implementation took place within Playdom’s Sorority Life campaign, which rewarded players who purchased a Groupon for $25 off a $50 purchase at Gap also received with the game’s “Brownie Points.”

TrialPay received a big vote of confidence when Facebook selected the offer provider to power in-game and shopping offers for Facebook Credits. Peanut Labs, which was recently acquired, was also used by Facebook for its offers initiative. And Peanut Labs has its own deal-focused offer product, called Cherry Deals.

Some excited rooters at the XDA Dev Forum tried to root the G2 – namely to unlock the software so they can add their own programs and control the OS – only to find that there is a built-in lock in the G2 hardware that returns the handset to the stock state upon rooting. That’s right: it’s a self-repairing system, like grey goo.

That said, this is pretty much some BS. To force a user to use one and only one version of Android is an anathema to the spirit and letter of the Apache license under which Android is given away by Google. This move proves that carriers see Android as a cash cow. They don’t really have to spend any money on development so they can spend plenty of money on locking things down to their liking. It also flies directly in the face of those who see Android as the “freer” alternative OS.

Read more…

In what is possibly the best presented and above all realistic exposition I've yet seen on what it's like to extend a European startup into Silicon Valley, Andy McLoughlin, co-founder with Alastair Mitchell of Huddle, socked it to the crowd at the annual Future of Web Apps London event this week. "Fighting and Thriving in the Valley" is a step-by-step look at what it's like to take a startup from outside the Valley - in this case Huddle's roots in London - and create a footprint in the US via San Francisco. It was an excellent speech. But since Carsonified, the people behind FOWA, have gone down the road of locking down video for the preserve of their paid-for online conferences (as is their right), we haven't seen any online video of the talk. However, here's a point by point run down of Andy's presentation.

Zingaya, the UK-based VoIP startup, has launched a fun new service today that makes it easy for your Twitter followers to call you. I'm calling it tweet-to-call in reference to the company's main offering, its click-to-call widget that can be embedded on any web page. Dubbed zin.to, here's how the new service works: After logging in through Twitter, you're asked to link your account with either a phone number (U.S.-only for now) or your Skype username. Next you choose whether to let any of your followers call you or only a specific Twitter user. And finally, you specify the window of opportunity or how long you want the tweet-to-call option to be open. The service then sends out a tweet along the lines of "@sohear please call me within 30 minutes via http://zin.to/". Pretty neat, huh.

We haven’t been able to reproduce this, and Google has yet to respond to our requests for confirmation and more information, but SEO consultant Patrick Altoft says he has spotted something fresh while using the search engine: full-page previews of search results.

Update: TheNextWeb has been able to reproduce this as well, so Google’s definitely testing this right now.

Note that this is different from thumbnailed results with page previews, which Google introduced as an option to its main search engine about a year ago.

Click the image above for a larger version.

According to Altoft, Google highlights certain sections of the page preview in orange and expands the text to provide a snippet of information. These highlighted snippets are not always the same as the snippet in the search results, he adds.

Surprisingly, as you can tell from the screenshot, Google also started showing multiple results from the same site without indenting the results.

Are you seeing this?

Update 2: Here’s Google’s vague response: “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.“

Update 3: Here are a few more pictures we were sent [thanks Kailash]:

“I think that communicating via images is one of these mediums that you’re going to see take off over the next few years because of a fundamental shift in the enabling technology.“

If you need one line summarizing why Kevin Systrom built Instagram, that’s it.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a long preview of the photo sharing app. Today, it is officially launching in the App Store.

I know what you’re probably thinking: oh, another photo-sharing app. But the fact is that at least one of these apps is likely going to take off in a major way at some point soon. To some extent, Hipstamatic already has, but one of these is likely to get even bigger. “There’s no Flickr for mobile yet,” is how Systrom puts it.

He continues, “What do I mean by that? A community, focused on helping you collect, organize, and share the images of your life from your mobile phone. The best we have right now are tiny camera icons stuffed as forgotten features of giant complicated apps that *have* to do everything.” Obviously, he wants Instagram to provide that missing community.

And it’s a good point. The iPhone 4 is now my primary camera. Is it as good as a DSLR? Of course not. Is it as good as my point-and-shoot? No, but it’s getting pretty close. And the convenience of always having it in my pocket trumps what it lacks in quality. The pictures taken with it are very good. And with effects and filters like Instagram offers, I get many more compliments on my photography than I ever have before. It makes my life on the go interesting.

And that’s part of the key to Instagram. Systrom says he’s looked at all the top photo apps in the App Store and all of them stood out in that they’re not “plain old photo-sharing apps.” “You have to do something special,” he says. “Photo sharing as a concept is relatively uninteresting as a sell. But processors are so fast now that we can do really cool things to your photos with the tap of a button. We can take that beautiful 5MP camera and turn it into a panoramic camera or a lofi 1980′s Polaroid.,” he continues.

And Systrom knows that one key in his app being successful is how actual users are using it. So far, he’s thrilled that a couple handfuls of the web’s best designers have taken a liking to Instagram while it has been in private beta. Once it opens up today, he hopes even more like-minded people will.

You can find Instagram in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

Bit.ly, HootSuite (with its Ow.ly service), Ad.ly and perhaps even Smel.ly could well be at risk of having their domain names sudden.ly taken away by the Libyan government.

Ben Metcalfe blogs that his domain name vb.ly was recently seized by NIC.ly (the domain registry and controlling body for the Libyan domain space) because the content of his website, at least in their opinion, was in violation of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.

The story gets worse.

If you’re interested, you’d be well advised to read Metcalfe’s and Violet Blue’s blog posts in full.

Here’s the gist (from Metcalfe’s end conclusion):

- .ly domains deemed to be in violation of NIC.ly regulation are being deregistered and removed without warning – causing significant inconvenience and damage.

- .ly domains are being deregistered and removed due to reasons that do not correspond to the regulations defined in the official NIC.ly Regulations.

- NIC.ly seems to want to extend their reach beyond the domain itself and regulate the content of websites that use a .ly domain. The concept amounts to censorship and makes .ly domains untenable to be used for user-generated content or url shorteners.

- Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law is being used to consider the validity of domains, which is unclear and obscure in terms of being able to know what is allowed and what isn't.

- NIC.ly have suddenly decided that <4 letter .ly domains should only be available to local Libyans and this appears to create motivation to recover what premium domains they can to go back into this new local-only pot of domains.

It’s of course the third and fifth points that could spell trouble for URL shorteners and other services with short brand and domain names ending in .ly (like the ones cited in the beginning of the article). I hope for their sakes that this turns out to be isolated case.

(Via Hacker News)

Computational search engine Wolfram Alpha is debuting its Android App in the Android Market today, simultaneously launching with the new T-Mobile G2 Android phone.

Similar to the iPhone app, WolframAlpha for Android is available for $1.99 in the Android Market. The app features the ability to search with a voice keyword, includes ten trillion data elements of knowledge, and tens of thousands of computational models.

WolframAlpha’s allure is the engine’s ability to provide you detailed numerical data on a vast variety of subjects including math, science, engineering, health and nutrition, geography, economics, linguistics, people and history, sports, and music. For example, you can enter a math problem into the search engine, and it will return with the correct answer. Or you can type in a type of food, and the search engine will return the nutritional data.

It’s probably a good idea that the search engine avoided pricing its Android App at $50 as it did initially with its iPhone app (which was eventually slashed from $50 to $1.99 after less than stellar downloads). This more moderately priced app on Android phones should bring a faster rate of adoption.

Dick Costolo, former COO and now #newtwitterceo, told The Telegraph in an interview that he and the rest of the company’s shareholders are shocked – shocked! – that anyone even dares suggest they just might be open to selling Twitter.

Ok, those aren’t his exact words, but he denies claims that his promotion means that the company is being prepped for a sale, and that both he and co-founder Evan Williams have gone that road before (having both sold a company to Google) and are not looking to repeat that particular trick.

What else is he going to say, really?

Anyway, now that we’ve established that Twitter wants to take over the world independently, here are in-my-humble-opinion more interesting nuggets of news from the interview: you can expect to see country-specific ads on Twitter as from “early next year” and the company subsequently plans to expand with offices in other parts of the world.

Costolo reveals that Twitter will soon be able to serve country-specific advertising through its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends products (Promoted Accounts wasn’t mentioned although I suspect it could be part of the initiative too) in a couple of months.

In addition, the company intends to “start thinking about where to set up offices and place people around the world" after that roll-out is complete. Despite its high usage numbers around the world, Twitter still only boasts one office, in San Francisco (where it is looking for a bigger boat as its growth accelerates).

Care to venture a guess where in the world Twitter will establish local offices?

Online ticket seller Eventbrite raised a $20 million round of funding from DAG Ventures, Sequioa Capital, and Tenaya Capital (formerly Lehman Brothers Venture Partners). DAG led the round (Sequioa led the last one). The D round is twice the amount of capital as all three previous rounds combined, bringing the total raised bey the company to $29.5 million.

CEO Kevin Hartz tells me he still had $5 million in the bank from his previous rounds of funding, but he is now ready to expand aggressively. Only about 15 percent of Eventbrite’s gross ticket sales come from outside the U.S., and he wants to make that bigger. (In Europe, Amiando is a competitor).

Tickets sold through Eventbrite overall are on track to double this year to $200 million worth of tickets, and it has already processed 7.5 million tickets this year. About half of those tickets are free. The average price of a ticket is $60. Eventbrite only takes a fee for tickets with a price, but all those free events are terrific marketing for the service. “The No. 1 source of new customers for Eventbrite are people who have attended an event,” says Hartz.

Hartz also wants to make Eventbrite itself into more of a destination site for discovering events: “Today, there is only one destination site, Ticketmaster, to find events that are going on. We think that needs to change”

Eventbrite recently took steps to add more social discovery features to its site by showing people who sign in through Facebook the events their friends are attending. Social sharing is a huge driver of traffic and ticket sales for Eventbrite. Last quarter, Facebook passed Google as the single largest driver of traffic to Eventbrite.

When asked which entrepreneur teenagers admire most, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs reigns supreme according to the 2010 Junior Achievement Teens and Entrepreneurship survey (PDF), leaving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the dust.

Junior Achievement surveyed 1,000 teens in the United States by telephone to get an idea of which entrepreneurs they admire most. Nearly a quarter of respondents (23 percent) named Jobs as the most admired entrepreneur, albeit down from 35 percent in the 2009 survey.

Even with Facebook at more than half a billion users, and the movie The Social Network taking the world by storm, Mark Zuckerberg only received nine percent of votes for most admired entrepreneur, tying with skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. Teens apparently admire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (17 percent), Oprah Winfrey (14 percent) and Jay-Z (13 percent) more than Facebook’s founder and CEO.

Of course, the persons beating Zuckerberg out, including Jobs, have been in the game much longer and thus have careers filled with accomplishments, while Zuckerberg is just getting started. He could totally beat Hawk next year if he hones his skateboarding skills, too.

When asked which qualities the surveyed teens admire most in these entrepreneurs, wealth and fame earned only 10 percent of their votes. Thirty-one percent of teens admire entrepreneurs who “make a difference in people's lives” and 31 percent cited “success in multiple fields” as what makes an entrepreneur stand out.

When asked what their incentive for becoming an entrepreneur would be, teens said “doing good” was only the third-ranked response at 15 percent. Topping that was “working for yourself” at 27 percent and “controlling your destiny” at 24 percent.

If you’d like to learn more about the survey, such as the differences between responses from boys and girls, you can read the press release.

Following last year's huge success, it's back. "The Europas" - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2010 - will honour the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across Europe. The Europas is all about geting together and celebrating the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own (see last year's amazing event). So put the evening of Friday, November 19 in your diary now. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale here. These awards will recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year, with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be recognised. Leading lights of the the tech startup and investor scene will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you'll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Advisory Board. You'll be able to vote shortly. The Awards Ceremony will take place in London (venue to be announced). We're planning a big party with DJ, bar and food. Award categories will be announced shortly.

Meet “Where’s Smiling Cigar Guy?,“ the breakout meme star of such photos as “Tiger Woods Hits Ball At Photographer” (see below) and such Tumblrs as Smiling Cigar Man | Awesome Face Fan.

So, imagine how honored we were when we realized after careful study of our photo archives that Smiling Cigar Guy had been both on stage with winners Qwiki at TC Disrupt AND at Social Currency CrunchUp …

And of course there’s a sub-meme, “Smiling Cigar Guy Takes Over The World.”

I wrote about two startups today that raised angel-sized financing rounds of around $1 million each: Hipmunk and Alphonso Labs. What caught my eye about both deals is this – neither had involvement from the so called “super angels” (except Hipmunk, which took an investment from SV Angel).

Hipmunk raised from traditional individual investors. Alphonso Labs raised money from venture capitalists.

Super Angels are investors who previously invested only their own money but at some point raised small funds and started investing third party money. That makes them indistinguishable from traditional venture funds in most respects.

Unlike angel investors, super angels have limited partners to answer to. And if returns aren’t competitive, those limited partners go elsewhere. Which is why we’re seeing so much stress emerge in the sector. Competition is fierce, and valuations are rising.

In fact, valuations are rising so quickly that a crucial psychological milestone has been reached – the $4 million pre money valuaiton. That was the primary reason that led to the formation of the AngelGate group, say multiple sources who attended those meetings.

For the first time this year the valuation on early stage deals started to average more than $4 million, say our sources. And that is the threshold where super angels’ valuation models start to break.

In a typical super angel round a company will raise $1 million on, say, a $4 million pre-money valuation. That gives investors 20% of the company, which is worth $5 million after the transaction is closed (the $4 million valuation plus the $1 million they just received)

Unlike old school venture capitalists, super angels are only counting on small exits of $15 million – $30 million. They need 7/10 or more of their companies to have these small exits to make any money. Any less and they won’t be able to raise new funds. Traditional VCs only count on 3-4 deals even returning capital. The rest are losses. But at least one of those ten deals is a huge home run, returning 10x the initial investment. Or more.

But with valuations rising, say investors we’ve spoken with, even 7 or 8 “wins” out of 10 won’t be enough to sustain the funds, given how small the acquisitions are. So exit valuations must increase, which is unlikely given the small number of buyers competing for deals, or valuations need to decline.

Some investors are just paying the higher valuations – Dave McClure is a notable example. Others are sitting on the sidelines and not investing much.

But all are griping.

The rising popularity of convertible notes, which are actually debt rounds that convert to equity later on, is increasing stress on the system. In some cases there aren’t any price protections for investors in those deals at all.

What happens next? Some of the super angel funds need to disappear, say Silicon Valley insiders. And maybe that’s for the best. The ones that are left standing will have an easier time making money down the road.

Users on Blippy, the controversial service which lets you share purchases and purchase prices with your friends, are sharing $500,000 in purchases per day, according a Tweet posted by co-founder Philip Kaplan.

To put this in perspective, users were collectively sharing more than $1.5 million worth of purchases every week in May (or $214,000 per day). Back in December, Blippy was showing $1 million in purchases total, so the service is definitely growing. Kaplan also says that users are posting more than 1,000 reviews on the site per day.

While some think Apple’s Ping is a threat to Blippy, Kaplan doesn’t seem to think Ping is a direct competitor. While 40 percent of total purchases shared on Blippy are iTunes purchases, Kaplan says iTunes is only one of 250,000 stores on Blippy.

Blippy has raised $13 million in funding, and is valued at nearly $50 million. And if you are confused about what Blippy actually does, here’s a helpful video that explains the service.

As you’re probably aware by now, Facebook is holding an event at their headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The invite we received didn’t seem to give any real clues about what would be announced, but that didn’t stop everyone from guessing anyway. But now we know a part of what they’re rolling out — because they’ve actually already sort of started rolling it out. At least a part of what will be unveiled tomorrow is a redesign, we hear.

Yes, just like Twitter did a few weeks ago, Facebook will be giving their service a new coat of paint tomorrow. Some users are already reporting that they’re seeing a new version of chat appear on the site — that’s because it’s a part of this redesign, we’ve confirmed with a source. More specifically, chat will be moved to the left side of the screen and big profile pictures are being added into the chat itself. But the real key of the redesign is that all Profile pages and much of the rest of the site will be revamped to look more like Places pages, we’re told. If you look at the image below of our TechCrunch Disrupt Places page, you’ll get a taste of what’s to come.

Aside from the movement of chat, apps will be moved below profile pictures as icons. The profile navigation will also now reside in that area, we believe. That means the top tabs you see now on Profile pages will likely be no more. There will also likely be a lot of subtle tweaks to the UI in order to unify the entire service. All the major Facebook areas should be getting this new coat of paint, we hear. That means Profiles, Pages, Events, Groups, Photos, and Videos.

From what we’re told, Facebook has been in a state of lockdown for the past two months or so working on this new design. This lockdown is actually called “Lockdown” — there’s even a Facebook Group for it. Apparently, it’s something that CEO Mark Zuckerberg uses to get the troops worked up and ready to work basically 24/7. “Whatever it takes,” we’re told. If you believe the Wall postings there, the last Lockdown was four years ago before this current one.

VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha previously reported on this Lockdown two months ago when the company apparently went into it. Tomorrow morning, they could be emerging.

Facebook has not yet responded to our request for comment. I suspect they might tomorrow.

“The concept of “liking” things is very old, likely older than the words we use to describe it…”

– Facebook Engineer Andrew Bosworth

We can’t get enough of Quora these days, basically because it connects people who have information to people who need it, and especially to those that didn’t think they needed it. One of the things you thought you didn’t need to know? That the Facebook “Like” button started out its life as the “Awesome” button.

In an epic Quora thread, Facebook Engineer Andrew Bosworth delineates the history of the “Awesome”/”Like” button, what eventually turned out to be a way to connect Facebook users with the entire Internet — with the added bonus of rerouting all activity through the Facebook platform.

Other than the whole “Awesome” thing, which Mark Zuckerberg ended up vetoing in favor of the more bland “Like,” other ideas that got tossed aside in the design process were stars and a plus/minus sign.

Attempting to dispell the commentary that Facebook copied Friendfeed’s “Like” feature, Bosworth’s timeline pinpoints the word “Like” being proposed internally to a less than enthusiastic response on on August 22, 2007, in contrast with the Friendfeed’s official launch of their “Like” button on October 30, 2007.

According to the timeline, Facebook was ready to to launch the button by November 12th but Zuckerberg put a kibosh on the plan:

“Final review with Zuck surprisingly doesn’t go well. Concerns about the whether the interaction is public or private, cannibalizing from the share feature, and potential conflict with Beacon. Feature development as originally envisioned basically stops.“

So Friendfeed gets its out first, and it takes Facebook another two years to push its universal “I enjoy this” button out the door launching it on their own platform in February 2008 and then expanding it to all websites in April 2010. Bosworth adds regarding the Friendfeed button launch, tongue in cheek, “As far as I can tell from my email archives, nobody at FB noticed. =/.”

Going by Bosworth’s retelling, it seems like Facebook came up with the concept first but never actually went through with an “Awesome” button, until after Friendfeed launched theirs as the “Like” button. While Facebook engineer Tom Winah states, “the launch of Like on FriendFeed wasn’t on our radar at all, “ in some sense Friendfeed basically did Facebook’s “Like” button quality assurance for two years.

And despite initial lukewarm “Like” response, Facebook ended up going with the same name; “We were all stubbornly insistent that no word could be more awesome than “Awesome” and Zuck was the main person to recognize it wasn’t a good choice,” confirms Facebook engineer Tom Whitnah.

To everyone involved’s credit, people have been both liking and thinking things were awesome since the origin of the species.

I am very excited for Google TV. There is no question that I’ll be getting one of the units (probably the Sony Blu-ray one) as soon as it’s available. I know it’s not the full-on cable-killer I’m looking for, but I see it as a potential way to help wean people off of cable and move beyond the cable companies. We need to kill those guys and their crap service — we’ve been addicted for far too long. So it saddens me to see these latest leaked pictures.

While watching ABC’s Nightlight, Engadget was able to grab some screenshots of a remote for a Google TV device made by Sony. My God, it’s full of buttons. And not in a good way.

To me, this looks like an absolutely user experience nightmare for consumers. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’ve had this nightmare before. Oh that’s right, my current TV remotes have similar button fetishes — just to a lesser degree. Can you imagine your parents trying to figure this thing out?

My current TV and cable box remotes are both cluttered to the brim with a buttons. Each is beyond confusing. Sometimes, it makes me want to scream. And actually, the one that controls the cable box sometimes does make me screen — like a baby — as it seems to have been developed by Fisher Price. So Sony has decided to add more buttons?

Remarkably, this Google TV remote seems to have Engadget excited:

Two circular directional pads, a QWERTY keyboard, volume, channel selection, some play / pause buttons… everything you’d need to rock the web and video all at once. That’s about all we can say at this point, but man does October 12th look even more painfully far away.

I just hope that (as has been suggested) that you’ll be able to use a touchscreen device (such as an Android phone) to control the device as well. The last thing I want is for this tax calculator of a remote to be sitting on my coffee table.

Yes, Apple’s remote with basically no buttons is awful for text input. But just like the Kindle, most of my navigation on my Apple TV is navigational, not text-based — and the remote is great for that (and the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad Remote app is even better). I get that Google TV is going to be different (they want you to do searches that generate revenue, remember?) and a QWERTY keyboard may make some sense, but there has to be a better way that basically duplicating an Xbox 360 add-on.

Or what about Google voice search? We all know they can do that too. Just give me anything but the remote shown above.