Ever wonder what the inspiration was for the Facebook Friends icon, the one with the outline of two people side-by-side? Neither have I. But now that Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley put up this side-by-side comparison of images on his Tumblog, I will never be able to look at the outline of the woman friend’s bob haircut again without thinking of Darth Vader’s helmet.

It’s just a funny photoshopped juxtapostion with the caption, “I'm sure this is where the Facebook 'Friends' icon came from.” I don’t want to psychoanalyze Crowley too much on this. He simply reblogged something he found amusing from someone else’s Tumblog. (That is what you do on Tumblr. It’s like retweeting). But you have to wonder if he doesn’t feel a little bit like the Luke Skywalker friend.

Before closing Foursquare’s last $20 million round, he was talking to Facebook (and others) about a possible acquisition instead. The deal never happened, and Facebook went on to launch its own rival geo-location product, Facebook Places. Interestingly, Foursquare was present at that launch., but Crowley definitely has mixed feelings about Facebook. Sort of like Luke did about Darth Vader.

Resilient storage solutions provider Cleversafe this morning announced that it has secured $31.4 million in an extension of its series C funding from new and existing investors including Motorola Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and OCA Ventures. Earlier this week, the cloud storage company also announced that it had received a strategic investment from and inked a development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit investment firm that was launched by the CIA back in 1999.

According to an SEC filing, cloud-based phone systems provider RingCentral has raised $10 million in its third institutional financing round (with another $851,240 remaining to be sold).

The filing lists previous investors Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital – it’s unclear whether the company’s third backer, DAG Ventures, also participated.

RingCentral markets an advanced replacement for legacy phone systems in the form of a hosted business phone system with voice and fax functionality.

RingCentral capabilities are said to include “auto-receptionist, flexible extension structure, multiple voicemail boxes, smart call routing, business answering rules, extension dialing, call transfers, and elegant integration with Smartphones”.

Like Michael Arrington wrote earlier, RingCentral’s phone systems basically make their clients appear bigger than they are.

We pinged RingCentral to ask what the fresh capital will be used for, and if any new investors participated in the round.

The clock is counting down until November 2, when American citizens will flock (hopefully) to their local polling places to cast their votes for the mid-term elections. And you can bet some of them will be checking in on Foursquare. To mark the occasion, Foursquare has teamed up with noted design firm JESS3 to create a dynamic map, which will display Foursquare check-ins in real-time at nearly 107,000 polling locations across the country. You’ll be able to access it at http://elections.foursquare.com/.

The site goes live this morning, but obviously we still have some time to wait before the big day so there’s a placeholder countdown clock for now. Fortunately JESS3 has given us some details on what the site will look like: the map will include the total number of check-ins, the gender ratio of check-ins, and a listing of the top check-in locations across the country. And it’s all done in HTML5 using the Canvas attribute (though there’s a Flash fallback for browsers that don’t support it). And, of course, there will be a special Foursquare badge awarded to anyone who checks in at a polling place come election day.

JESS3 built the site using data from the Voting Info Project (which has data on every polling location in the US) along with map data from Open Streetmap (which gives designers more flexibility than Bing or Google Maps). We’ll check back in with them in a week to see if any interesting trends emerge from the data.

This is Foursquare’s first major election, and it sounds like it has more ambitious plans for the next go-around in 2012. But it isn’t the only service that’s embracing politics: both Twitter and Facebook had extensive coverage of the 2008 elections, and you can be bet they’ll both be back for more this year, and in 2012.

uCIRRUS, which markets real-time enterprise operating software dubbed PUSHvm, this morning announced that it has closed a $4 million funding round led by SK telecom Ventures and joined by Qualcomm Ventures and ATA Ventures. The company says the fresh capital will be used to accelerate the product roadmap for PUSHvm, which powers real-time datastream processing and delivery of large volumes of customized data for its clients, thus reducing their infrastructure costs.

Barry Diller realizes that his Ask search engine isn’t going to gain market share anytime soon, but search can still power growth for IAC if it just keeps up with the growth in the overall search market. IAC released third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were up 25 percent to $422 million. Operating income quadrupled to $36 million, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.32 versus Wall Street estimates of $0.27. (However, after stripping out the adjustments due to one-time sales of stock and other assets a year ago, net income was actually down 19 percent).

Search represented nearly half of revenues ($205 million). The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon, but those searches tend to generate lower revenue per query than those on Ask.com, which itself is still growing and is now ranked as the sixth largest website in the U.S. LAst month, Ask CityGrid Media’s new local advertising network also contributed to overall search revenues.

But search wasn’t the fastest growing part of IAC’s business. Revenues for its media and other properties (such as CollegeHumor, The Daily Beast, Electus, Evite, and Vimeo) grew 44 percent to $63 million. Match’s revenues jumped 31 percent to $106 million, with paying subscribers up 30 percent to 1.8 million (“organic” growth in subscribers, though, was 16 percent). The rest of IAC’s revenues came from ServiceMagic, up 10 percent to $48 million.

In terms of operating profits, the two biggest contributors were Match ($38 million) and search ($29 million). The media businesses showed an operating loss of $4.6 million. The company also bought back $125 million worth of shares during the quarter. The stock is up about 5 percent this morning to $27.85 on the earnings news.

Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).

Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). On the other side of the spectrum we – unsurprisingly – find MySpace (unique visitors down 5.53 percent for the month and 19.1 percent for the year) and MapQuest (down 5.8 for the month and 22.1 percent for the year).

If MySpace’s redesign will help buck the trend remains to be seen.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Yahoo’s Flickr.com seems to have lost some of its shine lately, showing a 14 percent decline in unique user visits in September 2010.

And what about IAC’s Ask.com, which actually jumped over online juggernauts such as Amazon.com and MSN.com last month, according to Compete’s data. The search engine is now ranked in sixth place, trailing sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and YouTube.

Other winners include Disney’s Go.com and Mozilla.com, which showed the largest monthly unique user visitor gains (15.8 percent and 30.5 percent, respectively).

If there was one problem with the otherwise excellent Eye-Fi card it’s that images stored to the card had the nasty habit of appearing on public Flickr accounts without their owners knowledge – images that usually involved the owner in a compromising position with a close, naked friend or a barnyard mammal. Sure you can control where the Eye-Fi sends stuff but not many people bothered with those settings.

The company has just announced Eye-Fi View, a sharing system that makes sense. View creates a temporary private storage space for all Eye-Fi users where it keeps photos safe and sound for up to a week (you can buy unlimited storage for $4.99 or $49 a year.) You can see the updated View UI at http://center.eye.fi/.

Read more…

Have you ever walked into your neighborhood Sephora only to feel utterly inundated by a sea of colorful beauty products? There are literally thousands of slots filled with bronzers, eye palettes, brushes, moisturizers, foundations, creams, creating a dizzying kaleidoscope of shades and scents.

As someone who doesn’t pour over fashion magazines for the latest product and make-up tips, it’s simply overwhelming.

I’ve always wondered why we couldn’t take the makeup discovery process out of the box, aka the brick and mortar experience, and bring it into the home in a real, non-Mary Kay tactile way that’s a step beyond mere online shopping.

A new breed of startups are trying to do just that, including New York-based BirchBox, which just raised a $1.4 million seed round led by First Round Capital and Accel Partners. Several individual investors participated in this round, including Sam Lessin (drop.io), Dave Morin (Path), Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal), Kirsten Green (Forerunner Ventures), and Gary Vaynerchuk.

BirchBox, which officially launched in September after a few months in beta mode,  is a mash-up of a monthly sample service, an online shop and a beauty editorial content.

The core of the site is the monthly subscription plan. Users can either pay $110 upfront for a full-year package or $10 a month, with the option to quit at any time.

Each month, users receives at least four premium samples (no dinky packets), shipped to their homes from high end beauty retailers like Laura Mercier, Nars and Cargo. The website supplements these monthly packages by providing pertinent tips and tutorials for the featured samples. If a user wants to purchase the full-size version, they can buy it on BirchBox, which will earn them points for future discounts (inviting new members will also help you rack up points). The idea is create a fun discovery process at an affordable price and to help brands reach consumers and drive sales.

The site currently has 2,000 paying subscribers and competes with traditional retailers, like Sephora, and other makeup sample subscription services like Yellow Box Beauty or TestTube.

"Beauty brands have long recognized the power of sampling and Birchbox improves the reach and effectiveness of sampling programs by identifying high potential consumers outside of the brands' traditional reach, tracking their behavior and feedback, and encouraging a deeper relationship with the brand,” Principal of First Round Capital, Phineas Barnes said in a statement.

According to the co-founders Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp (who, like the founders of Gilt, are Harvard Business School grads) they wanted to create a service that was simple and exciting, by focusing on prestige brands and their latest products.

“We thought, wouldn’t every woman want a best friend who has access to the beauty editor’s closet,” Beauchamp says.

When I asked her whether she will eventually slap on an (oh-so-trendy) flash sales feature on BirchBox, she flatly said, “No.” Although she acknowledges the popularity of flash sales, and many like Gilt have dabbled in cosmetic offerings, Beauchamp says BirchBox is focusing on new products and catching them early in their life cycle.

For now, the service seems to lack significant customization (most users will get the exact same items), but the startup says it’s working on increasing personalization, particularly for skin types, hair traits and style tastes.

I’m interested to see how this service works out and whether the economics make sense for the participating brands. Beauchamp provided little detail on the pricing structure, but these top tier beauty brands are effectively giving away premium-sized samples of new products for the sake of promotion. That makes sense if users opt to buy the full-size versions when their samples run out, less sense if there’s a thin correlation between samples and sales.

We’re hearing from two separate sources that Nasza Klasa, the largest Polish social networking platform, is on the block for €130 million.

Launched in November 2006, at its height the service had over 27 million registered users. But figures have been nose-diving this year as Facebook eats into its core social networking user base. It may be that heat from Facebook which is prompting the sale. We’ve reached out to Nasza Klasa for comment.

In a world of Angry Birds and Foursquare, I’m not sure how AT&T came up with this one.
This week, AT&T unleashed the Eco-App, a youth-centric iPhone app that tries to promote sustainability through education. It’s hard to argue with a such a legitimate, noble goal but the app itself is a bit of a head scratcher.

As explained on AT&T’s website, the Eco-App has two top features: a tool to help teens find nearby recycling centers and educational resources to help teens comprehend the “environmental benefits of paperless billing.”

File this under the increasingly expanding folder of “What was AT&T Thinking?“

Eco-app is part of AT&T’s "One Million Eco Challenge,” a broader initiative to raise environmental awareness among kids and teens. To be fair, the app includes useful information, like tips about local environmental events but it just seems awkwardly out of touch, like the cliche reindeer sweaters grandmothers push on unsuspecting teens.  I have full faith that a large fraction of America’s youth is interested in environmental issues, we’ll just have to find a better way to reach out to them— beyond paperless billing.

Well, well, well. An eagle-eyed reader tells us PayPal posted a short announcement yesterday on its corporate blog, only to pull it mere seconds later. As you can tell from the URL, PayPal was poised to announce support for “all three major mobile platforms” (also see retweets of the blog post).

That is: support for Apple's App Store, Blackberry App World … and Android Market.

How do we know? Thanks to a little something called Google cache (screenshot below for posterity).

We don’t know why the announcement was pulled, but presumably the news will be spread at PayPal’s X Innovate conference today and someone simply pulled the trigger on the blog post a bit too soon.

Not that word of the deal hadn’t gotten out prior to PayPal’s developer conference (see here, here and here).

Nevertheless, the news will make a lot of Android app developers and publishers smile.

(Hat tip to Eric Wijngaard)

Spotlight Ticket Management, which offers Web-based ticket management software for venue owners and operators, sports teams and the like, has secured a $2.5 million round of Series A financing led by Point Judith Capital.

Sports media entrepreneur Brian Bedol, founder of the former Classic Sports Network (now ESPN Classic) and CSTV (now CBS College Sports), has also joined the round of financing.

Founded by former StubHub executives, Spotlight prides itself in partnering with everyone in the ticket value chain, including leagues, teams, companies, marketplaces, and event providers.

According to the company, the product is already in use by over 1,000 corporations such as NBC Universal, Motorola and 20 teams in the four major professional sports leagues, including the Miami HEAT and Chicago Bears.

As part of the financing agreement, Sean Marsh David Martirano, both co-founder and General Partner at Point Judith, will join the Spotlight board of directors.

Spotlight was founded by Joe Greiner (CEO), Tony Knopp (President) and Aric Haut (COO) – all three had executive sales positions at StubHub before kicking off Spotlight.

An advertising agency that represents American Express took issue with my post yesterday complaining about my failed efforts to get a simple credit card. In the post, titled Damnit Amex, Give Me A Credit Card, I complained about the difficulty of someone in my particular demographic to get credit, and noted the usefulness of Credit Karma, a startup that gives people immediate access to their credit report.

Some users actually saw an ad for the Amex ZYNC card next to the post.

In an email to our sales team, the agency said “We found this on your site today, obviously not a good thing for AMEX or for ZYNC branding.”

I disagree. But let’s continue.

They added “Are you able to take this down from your site? If so, please do as ASAP.”

Nope. The sales team doesn’t have the authority or the ability to remove content from the site. And the punchline:

“If you are not able to monitor this more closely, we unfortunately will not be able to run with TechCrunch in the future.”

Ok. Let’s step back for a minute.

First of all, the agency in question should understand that the post was a significant net positive for American Express. Sure, I was complaining. But I also put American Express’ brand squarely in the center of things. There were a variety of credit cards that I was unable to get, but the Amex Starwood card was the one I wanted. I wanted it, and I couldn’t get it. Who doesn’t get how great that is for Amex?

Paleolithic* marketing morons who can’t think outside of a box, that’s who. The same kind of person that not only gets upset that their client is the center of attention, but then actually threatens to pull business if we don’t get our editorial in line with their agenda. This isn’t the Wall Street Journal, you know. We don’t like being told by others what we can and cannot write.

Despite the fact that we will certainly never do business with this agency again after this post, I won’t name them. Perhaps they can still save themselves and, someday, thank me.

* – Thanks to a reader for the clarification. Changed Neolithic to Paleolithic (this is why I love doing what I do): “Neolithic is not much of an insult. Neolithic culture is the last stage before starting to use metal. It doesn’t imply cavemen. Northern Europe had a neolithic culture just a few thousand years ago, and the Americas did till Europeans arrived. If you really want to insult someone, call them paleolithic. That would include some pretty apelike individuals.”

It’s been a difficult couple of months for Digg. The crowdsourced news site pushed out a major new design at the end of August which met with a lot of criticism and broken axles. There was literally a user revolt and things deteriorated so rapidly that earlier this week the company had to let go more than a third of its employees.

How bad did it get? Here’s one data point from comScore: Digg lost 30 percent of its audience in the month of September alone. Digg’s estimated unique visitors worldwide went from 18.4 million in August to 12.8 million in September. That is a drop of 5.6 million people in a single month. Remember, the new site went live for everyone on August 25, so September was the first full month of the new design. Compared to a year before, Digg’s worldwide audience shrank by 16 million visitors.

Other metrics show the same story or worse. Pageviews sank 70 percent from August to September (from 155 million pageviews to 46 million). Average visits and time spent per visitor were also down.

The numbers for October are not yet out, but I’d be surprised to see any immediate rebound. Can Digg stanch its losses and start to rebuild once again?

MySpace is mere hours away from their big redesign push (our early review is here). If you’ve got nothing to do until midnight California time, spend it perusing this document. It is, according to an anonymous source that claims to work at MySpace, an internal MySpace document showing traffic and engagement by age band.

And it’s on Google, publicly.

The document shows MySpace traffic from August 1 to September 30, 2010. It’s broken down by property (MySpace.com, photos, mobile, music, etc.), age and sex. You can see, for example, that on September 28, 284,579 people between 18-24 viewed their “Account Settings” page.

I downloaded the spreadsheet in the very likely event public access is removed once MySpace discovers the “private” setting. Or they just put it, you know, on their own servers.

“People like stumbling videos more than webpages,” StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp tells us in explaining why the service has decided to revamp their video offering, which they’re doing tonight. While you’ve been able to stumble through videos for a couple of years now, they’re finally making the experience more social. And they’re adding two big names to the arsenal: TED and Hulu.

Previously, StumbleUpon was simply using trending data to find hot videos to take your through. But now they’ve integrated their social recommendation engine into the mix to make the entire experience more personalized. In other words, you’ll now be taken to videos liked by people you’re connected with on the service.

And with this as well as the addition of videos from TED and Hulu, the company hopes the experience becomes more than just watching the latest viral videos on YouTube. In fact, Camp talks about this as being more of a “social TV” experience and “a good alternative to television surfing”.

Of course, right now, this is all still confined to the browser, but Camp does envision a future where they bring this social video browsing experience into the living room. The key to that, he says, is making sure all the content is in HD. In the web browser, that doesn’t matter so much, in the living room, it does.

StumbleUpon plus Hulu is particularly interesting here because it is a bit like traditional television surfing. You can stumble through episodes of shows that your friends like. And if you find one you like, you can stay there and watch it. I asked if they were worried that Hulu might not like this usage (Hulu is notorious for blocking unauthorized access), but Camp said he’s sure they’ll be fine with this, because it’s just about finding what you want to watch on Hulu then watching it the same way, ads and all.

Camp also notes that they’ve added a lot of Vimeo content into the mix recently. And says that while there aren’t currently any Facebook videos, it’s something they may think about in the future — but it’s tricky because of the privacy issues and API access needed.

As for other large videos site, Camp says they’re looking at them all. Pretty much anyone using embeddable Flash can be easily added at any point, he says.

Yahoo Mail just announced its first redesign in five years and it took the tech community 20 hours to notice. Meanwhile Aol Mail went down last week without making a sound. Imagine the echo chamber uproar if either had happened to Gmail.

So if we’re not using Aol and Yahoo, who is?

People with low credit scores according to Credit Karma. While the above chart doesn’t mean that changing your @gmail.com address to a @yahoo.com or an @aol.com will actually lower your score, it is showing that for one reason or another people that who use Yahoo Mail tend to score lower on their FICO analysis.

From Credit Karma:

“Certainly switching email providers will not increase or decrease your credit score. It’s more the case that people with a certain score have a greater likeliness to use a particular email provider. Why this happens is probably due to some demographic skew which then carries to the email domain.”

Of all the mail service providers, Yahoo definitely has the most users at 94.6 million uniques a month. In terms of user age, our parent company Aol Mail skews most heavily toward the 65+ age range (!), while Yahoo skews between 35-44, Hotmail 25-34 and Gmail the same at 25-34 according to comScore.

In terms of household income, Yahoo Mail users are skewing towards the under $15k income bracket when compared to the rest of the Internet, despite the fact that a majority of users are in the $40K to $60K range.

Perhaps the fact that people who make less money (because they’re students or other people with no income) are overrepresented on Yahoo Mail might shed some light on the Credit Karma statistics?

In any case, you can add this to the pile of  “What Your Email Address Says About You” posts. And, in this case, it says you’ve got bad credit.

If you haven’t tried out Blippy since the company rather infamously launched last year as the social network for sharing credit card purchases, you should go back and give it another look. Things are quite a bit different now. And a new partnership showcases that.

Blippy has partnered with Sephora to create a version of Blippy specifically tailored to the fragrance and beauty retailer’s brand. From here, Sephora shoppers can easily share purchases, see what others are buying, and talk about all this stuff. While you can still see some purchase prices, it’s less about that, and more about the social aspect of the shopping experience. For example, a user saw someone bought some DiorShow Mascara and asked, “Is it worth the higher price tag (as compared to a $5 mascara)?” A few minutes later, they got an answer (yes).

Sephora loves this because it allows their customers to connect with other another around their brand. Blippy loves it because it’s all valuable social data. In fact, they love it so much that they decided to on their own create 16 other stores for various brands — brands like Amazon, Apple, eBay, Netflix, Safeway, and Target. To be clear, Blippy doesn’t have partnerships with these guys, they just realized the Sephora store idea was a good one.

The release is quick to note that: “Neither Blippy nor Sephora will share purchase information without explicit prior approval from each participating customer.”

The current data across the board says that Blippy users have now shared 2.6 million purchases totaling more than $65 million in sales.

MySpace is preparing to roll out its long-awaited redesign, perhaps as early as tomorrow, at least for new users. It’s not going to be pretty. Well, actually, it is quite pretty—I’ve seen screenshots—but that still might not be enough to help stem the diminishing appeal of the social network. MySpace tried to brief us on the new design under embargo, which we don’t do, so we declined the briefing. Nevertheless, we keep getting snippets of information from various sources.

So let me describe it for you. The design will feature the new MySpace logo at the top, and center around discovering and sharing media—music, photos, and videos. When you log in, a big status bar will prompt you to “Share something!” That can be a status message, a link, a photo, or a video.

As with MySpace now, there is an emphasis on sharing music, videos, and games. By sharing this media, you become a social filter and a tastemaker for your friends. People with a lot of friends can become social promoters of music and other media, and the new design seems to be set up to highlight and reward those people.

The new MySpace is a lot cleaner and more organized than it is now. Instead of a linear activity stream, the new design is broken up more into tiles, or at least that is one view. A stream of what your friends are sharing is one of the tiles, but there are also tiles for videos, celebrities and musicians you are following, and photo-heavy advertisements. The tiles remind me of the look now popular in iPad apps like Pulse and Flipboard.

There is definitely a realtime theme going on as well. You can toggle between what is “most relevant” to you and “live” updates. Another live notifications box at the top shows upcoming events and messages. If you are not logged in, the new homepage will show a rolling counter of things people are sharing, as well as tiles for promoted albums, TV show, celebrities, and trending items people are discovering.

Overall, this is appears to be improvement to the current design. But will it be enough to bring people back to MySpace or bring new people in? If all your friends are on Facebook, they are not going to be sharing their music with you on MySpace. By focusing on media sharing and curation, maybe it can find it’s place again in the social network pecking order.

The new MySpace:

The current/old MySpace:

Among the many things about living in the year 2010 that blow my mind (robot vacuums, smartphones, Google Books), the fact that we are at the beginning of commercial space flight is, incredibly, not constantly on my mind. Yet advances are constantly being made, most visibly by Virgin Galactic, which just this last week inaugurated the commercial facility for vertically- and horizontally-launching aircraft. I mean spacecraft. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to saying that.

Spaceport America, in addition to having a snazzy logo, sports training facilities for Virgin Galactic pilots spacemen, a 10,000ft runway, and will serve as Virgin Galactic’s headquarters for the next two decades. Want to visit? Good luck with that — you should probably just watch this video.

Continue reading…

It’s said that you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Apple, it seems, is sticking with that rule. Yes, the elusive white iPhone has been delayed again.

As Apple representatives have told Reuters, the white version of the device is now not due until next spring. This is the third delay of the device, as it was at first pushed from launch day in June until the second half of July. Then it was pushed until “later this year” in late July. Now for the next question: will it actually beat the next version of the device itself to market?

Like clockwork, Apple unveils a new version of the iPhone each year at their WWDC conference in early June. It usually goes on sale shortly after that in late June/early July. Summer this year doesn’t technically start until June 22, and there’s a very good chance that the next version of the device, let’s call it “iPhone 5″, will at least be unveiled in the spring — now the stated launch of the white iPhone.

Adding to the confusion is the whole Verizon iPhone storyline. It’s generally believed now that Apple will unveil a CDMA version of the iPhone that’s compatible with Verizon’s network in January of next year. It would likely go on sale shortly after that. This should be a modified version of the iPhone 4. But at WWDC, Apple could unify the iPhone product line with a CDMA/GSM version of the iPhone 5. Would Apple really want two other versions (the Verizon iPhone 4 and a white iPhone 4) being released only months or weeks before that?

You’ll note that in the Reuters story, Apple isn’t quoted as saying a “white iPhone 4″ is coming, just that a “white iPhone” is. Perhaps the idea now is just to scrap the second shade until the iPhone 5?

That will piss off a lot of people who were waiting for the white one. But for whatever reason, Apple just hasn’t been able to get it made. And that’s odd considering that I played with one at the unveiling of the iPhone 4 in June (see picture above). I didn’t notice anything wrong with it, but there have been reports that it was hard to color the enclosure in the right white pigment or that it was letting light bleed through.

Who knows what is going on. All I know is that this may actually be a better option if you want a white iPhone 4 at this point.

So much for that special edition Disney™ Snow White® iPhone 4 for the holidays!

Perhaps you missed Apple’s Back to the Mac event at their headquarters in Cupertino, CA last week. You know, the one where they showed off iLife ’11, a sneak peek at OS X Lion, and the new MacBook Air. You can watch the entire 90-minute presentation online for free now. But why do that when you can watch the entire thing in 104 seconds and get the key takeaways?

Okay, not really.

What you will get in the video below is a minute and a half of hilariously awesome superlatives. This is nothing new for Apple. And while this video and the ones that have come before it are cut to be funny, it also showcases something much more meaningful.

First, Apple employees from Steve Jobs on down are great salesmen who understand the importance of positive and enthusiastic language in a pitch. Second, this only works if the people doing the pitching really believe in what they are selling — or if they are really good at lying. With Apple, it really, truly, absolutely does seem to be the former. It’s remarkable. Incredible. Exciting. Amazing. Great. Brilliant. Jaw-dropping. Wonderful.

Digg just can’t get a break. On the heels of news that the company had to lay off 37% of its staff and saw the departures of both its CRO and CFO, last night a report surfaced alleging that Digg was gaming its own system, ostensibly to favor certain partners. If true, this would have further undermined user trust in the site’s democratic voting system, and the evidence was convincing that something out of the ordinary was going on. Now Digg has just responded to this accusation with a blog post that boils down to, “Yes, we do have fake accounts voting up stories, but they’re for testing purposes”. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

Before doing that, I’m going to address a story submitted to Digg that called out activity of a number of our internal test accounts. As with many sites, we continuously run tests on the site to expose vulnerabilities in our own security. In this case, we did have a number of our internal test accounts Digging content from the Upcoming section of the site. We learned a great deal about some vulnerabilities in how users can inappropriately Digg stories into the home page. We have already made some changes over the last few weeks and are going to be making some other changes to the site this week to address a few of the issues we found. Similar to how good security companies try to break their own security, we have always tested and will always run tests to find spam vulnerabilities on Digg.

Most importantly, we should have been forthright with our community about our testing efforts and we’ll certainly do so in the future. Rest assured that Digg does not in any way receive financial gain from this activity and the accounts were not used to submit any content.

Digg founder Kevin Rose followed up on the blog post with a comment explicitly saying that Digg has always used such test accounts:

We’ve never taken a single dime from a publisher for any activity on Digg (outside of standard ad units). We’ve used test accounts since day one and will continue to use them as we validate our various spam/promotion algorithms.

Along side the post explaining the fake accounts, Digg’s Jen Burton detailed some of the new (or at least, returning) features that would be coming to Digg in the next two weeks. These include the ability to sort content by images and video, suggested users, the Bury button, and a ‘Breaking News’ module.

Google TV is now out there in the wild. There’s no indication of how it’s selling just yet, but my hunch is that like early Android, it may be some time before sales really take off. That shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the platform is built on top of Android. But there aren’t a lot of apps and sites yet that are tailored for these new devices. They need more. And they know the way to get them. Free giveaways!

As they’ve announced on their Google TV blog today, the search giant is giving away 10,000 Google TV units to developers. Yes, 10,000.

The give-away started this morning at the Adobe MAX conference where they dished out 3,000 units. And it will continue over the next couple of weeks as Google will patrol the Google Code forums to look for developers who sound even remotely interested in developing for the platform. Or you can submit a request to get a unit for development.

Says Google:

As we've always said, the coolest thing about Google TV is that we don't even know what the coolest thing about it will be. The experience is in the hands of its users and developers, and everyone is invited. Come play.

The Google TV unit being given away is the Logitech Revue, a device which normally sells for $300.

Sadly, this giveaway is U.S.-only for the time being. And yes, they want some sort of proof that you are actually a developer that plans to make an app or optimized site for the platform. I’m thinking about learning Java to build a solid fart app for the platform to get a free unit myself.

Update: Google wanted to make it clear that these units are meant to spur developers into making optimized sites for Google TV — not necessarily app developers (not yet at least).