As from today, O’Reilly Media will be selling some 600 titles in Apple’s iBookstore, along with almost 150 more from (yes, ironically) Microsoft Press, whose books are sold and distributed by O’Reilly. The iBookstore is of course included in the free iBooks app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch (iTunes link).

For now, the availability of O’Reilly and Microsoft Press titles is limited to the United States and Canada, however.

The titles from O’Reilly include Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks, David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual, J.D. Biersdorfer’s iPad: The Missing Manual, and Mark Pilgrim’s HTML5: Up and Running. Definitely sounds like something for the iOS device carrying developer crowd.

Perhaps less so are the titles from Microsoft Press, which include Steve McConnell’s Code Complete, Second Edition, Ed Bott’s Microsoft Office 2010 Inside Out, and William R. Stanek’s Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant. Although I’m sure those will look awesome on the iPad as well, and it obviously makes a lot of sense for Microsoft Press to get its titles distributed on as many platforms as possible.

Worth noting: since there’s no DRM on ebooks sold by O’Reilly, it’s easy to read titles purchased from the iBookstore on nearly any device with ePub support.

Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media, has blogged about the announcement as well and says the company intends to make the full catalog of titles from O’Reilly, Microsoft Press, and all of its digital distribution clients available in every territory with an iBookstore.

Savikas also points out that, as a solution for the fact that iBooks does not support updates for ebooks, each title includes information about how to upgrade one’s purchase with oreilly.com for $4.95 in order to gain access to additional DRM-free formats and free lifetime updates.

Realtime social search site OneRiot has had a tumultuous couple of months. In August, the company succumbed to layoffs and restructured its executive board, with Tobias Peggs, formerly President in charge of Strategy, Sales, Distribution and Marketing, taking on the CEO role. CEO and Tesla board Director Kimbal Musk left his role as CEO and became Chairman of the company. After a hard look at the future of the search company’s business, OneRiot is shutting down its realtime social search portal and will be focusing its efforts completely on its ad network.

While OneRiot says that realtime search is growing rapidly, it seems that its search portal wasn’t bringing home the bacon. OneRiot recently revamped its search engine has been indexing and ranking Likes and links shared by users on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and MySpace. As of today, the company will discontinue this search portal.

Search ads, however, do generate money, says Peggs. And OneRiot will now leverage the realtime search technology it has developed to open up its ad platform to the public (it was previously open to select partners). OneRiot says its ad network currently reaches in excess of 100 million monthly unique users across search, display and mobile properties.

OneRiot will now be lumping all of its advertising formats into an established ad network. The startup first ventured into the advertising world in 2009 with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed.

The search engine also launched RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web. And earlier this year, OneRiot rolled out self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise.

OneRiot's trending ads, which serve 400 million impressions per month, are being used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter), desktop clients (Digsby), media sharing sites (TinyPic and ImageShack) and on
Kosmix’s Tweetbeat.

Peggs says that the company’s ad formats are not only seeing traction amongst publishers and advertisers (which include Stella Artois, Sony Pictures, and other major brands) but are also seeing higher interaction that average ads. CTRs for One Riot’s mobile ads average from .7 percent to 1 percent. CTRs for the startup’s realtime search ads are 3.5 to 4 percent (which are 2 times the average click through rates for search ads).

A refocusing of a business model is never a bad thing for a startup. While OneRiot may have hit a rough patch over the summer, the company appears to be now hiring for a number of positions And if OneRiot’s ads are performing the way the company claims they are, then the platform could have a future serving realtime ads to mobile and web applications. Of course, the company faces competition from a number of other companies that are trying to help social apps monetize, including 140 Proof, Ad.ly and even Twitter.

 

Symantec, the software and security company best known for its Norton internet security and antivirus software, released its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report on Monday.

For the uninitiated, CSR reports put a company’s social and environmental objectives, not just their profit and revenue outlook, on the record. They are meant to encourage all businesses, no matter their size, to act in a people and planet friendly manner. In Europe, companies are required to report on such issues but not so in the U.S. Symantec began CSR reporting voluntarily in 2008.

The company’s latest environmental goals include: reduction of CO2 emissions company-wide by 15% by the end of fiscal year 2012, using 2008 as a baseline; and meeting LEED certification for existing, and new buildings, especially data centers. LEED certifications were developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

With all these plans, is Symantec now a green technology company? Nah. It does offer an enterprise product, Altiris, that Symantec claims will “reduce energy and costs” for organizations that use it to manage their client PCs. Still, Symantec’s products focus on keeping people, systems and information safe, and their data safely stored. The company isn’t shifting its focus to solving the world’s energy and climate problems, just because it is doing more with its CSR report and policies.

Symantec didn’t do such a good job of growing without polluting in the past year, it admits in its fiscal year 2010 Performance Summary highlights:

“[A] global four percent increase in CO2 pounds per square foot… The key factor in this fiscal year Scope 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) increase is the expansion of our enterprise data center resulting from a change in our business strategy to include hosted and storage services.”

A partner and creative director at Methodologie in Seattle, Dale Hart, has been helping companies design annual and CSR reports in print and online for two decades. He checked out the latest from Symantec and offered praise and pointers. (Symantec was a Methodologie client about a decade ago, but has no current affiliation with the agency.)

First the good…

“Symantec has a button on their home page that leads to their CSR report. That’s great visibility. They also published testimonials from the president and chief executive, and from the chief of marketing about the company’s CSR report and related policies. That is something you don’t typically see from large, Fortune 500 type companies. Executive buy-in lets stakeholders know there's discussion about sustainability issues from the top down. It indicates authenticity,” Hart said.

He also lauded Symantec for having an advisory board for environmental and social guidance, comprised of leaders from non-government (NGOs) and labor relations organizations, as well as ethical businesses.

Symantec reported against standards established by the Global Reporting Index, or GRI. The GRI helps companies figure out what content to include in a CSR report, what’s meaningful and measurable, and how they can make this information easily understandable to stakeholders in their business. It’s kind of a more worldly version of a 10-K, and Hart believes it is among the best ways to standardize CSR reporting.

Symantec’s director of corporate responsibility, Cecily Joseph, also discussed the merits of the GRI with TriplePundit this week.

Still, there was also something lacking in the company’s report, Hart said. He would like to see more U.S. tech firms, including Symantec, reveal more and more consistently about the way they deal with mercury and other toxins in the hardware and software they buy, use and produce. He’d also like tech businesses (and others) to disclose what they are doing with outsourcing partners, and in developing countries.

“Whether or not a company owns manufacturing facilities outside of the U.S., and especially if they do not own them, how do they enforce worker safety, fair labor and environmental best practices there? That should be more readily apparent,” said Hart.

Caregiver search portal Care.com has raised $20 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates with participation from existing investors, Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. This latest investment brings Care.com’s total funding up to over $36 million.

Care.com allows you to search prescreened profiles of hundreds of thousands of babysitters, nannies, tutors, housekeepers and senior caregivers, both locally and nationally (the site provides local services in over 30 cities in the U.S.). You can also access user reviews of caregivers, background check reports of caregivers and recorded reference interviews. And families find advice from experts and toolsregarding care related issues and topics.

The company plans to use the funding towards growing its network. For example, Care.com will expand its network via corporate and government partnerships; customized senior care service offerings; and, new vertical expansion into pet care, tutoring and housekeeping.

There are a couple of enterprise-specific financing announcements this morning, so we've decided to bundle three significant ones into a single post. First up is Xceedium, provider of Zero Trust Access Control solutions - they've closed a $7.5 million Series B financing. StoredIQ, a provider of Intelligent Information Management solutions for eDiscovery, records and compliance management, this morning announced that it has closed $10 million in new investment financing, and Accent, which provides semiconductor integration of communications and metering technologies for the Smart Grid industry, has raised €5 million.

Location-based game SCVNGR is continuing to ramp up its efforts to appeal to local businesses, larger brands, and universities. Since June SCVNGR has offered profiles to normal users (in other words, consumers), where you can see the challenges you’ve recently completed, the badges you’ve earned, and so on. But up until now businesses that offered SCVNGR challenges haven’t had a presence on the game’s website. Today, SCVNGR is looking to help change that.

In short, SCVNGR is launching a feature analogous to Facebook Pages, which allow businesses, brands, and other organizations to set up their own profiles. But SCVNGR isn’t actually calling these business profiles — instead, they’re being called Builder Profiles, because anyone (not just businesses) can build a SCVNGR challenge, and the company wants to make sure the best challenge builders get their share of the spotlight. Still, it’s clear that this feature was built with the businesses in mind.

Visit a Builder Profile, and you’ll see the top challenges and rewards that have been completed there, as well as the total number of times users have engaged with the challenges. CEO Seth Priebatsch says that some businesses have already developed a sort of competition with each other, as they want to be able to show that they’ve had the most engagement.

They look nice, but Builder Profiles have a long way to go, primarily because they don’t have much functionality at this point. Unlike Facebook Pages, which allow businesses to message users who have ‘Liked’ them, Builder Profiles on SCVNGR don’t currently have the ability to message their fans (Priebatsch says that SCVNGR is working out exactly what it wants to do here). Likewise, while you can earn points for creating challenges, they currently aren’t worth anything.

There also seems to be a lot of untapped potential here around the challenges themselves — at this point a challenge is simply listed by name with a brief description, but if SCVNGR continues to gain traction I could see businesses paying for finely-crafted challenges made by other users.

In addition to the launch of the Builder profiles, SCVNGR is also launching a major partnership that marks its biggest deal with a retailer to date: GameStop will begin promoting SCVNGR at each of its 6,000 locations. The partnership is going to initially revolve around the launch the latest title in the massively popular Call of Duty series, called Call of Duty: Black Ops, but Priebatsch sounds confident that GameStop will continue to leverage SCVNGR in future promotional campaigns. SCVNGR also recently landed a deal with the Celtics.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a phone addict. I think back to how my parents interacted with us as kids and I realize that they, as a cohort, never had something as distracting and potentially damaging in their hands as a cellphone… ever. Maybe booze, but that’s a different post. I hung out with a bunch of phone bloggers yesterday and at one point we all had iPhones out at a table, all checking stuff. When I’m with the kids I check email all the time, so much so that my son says he’s checking email sometimes when he wants to wheedle the phone out of my hand and play a game. We’re a face down culture now, and it kind of sucks.

Microsoft, ostensibly, is trying to break us of this habit and I say ostensibly because, if you really look at the Windows Phone 7 UI, you’re actually dealing with more swipes and taps than you’d expect given the sparse interface they are presenting. Sure, the phones are fast and the UI, at times, is strikingly beautiful, but it’s still a phone and, as such, requires lots of attention. Back in the old days, when the first iPhone came out, I was amazed at how people gently fondled and petted those things like hamsters. At one of the early Techcrunch events I saw hundreds of San Franciscans all rubbing their iPhones gently and purposefully. It was a turning point for smartphone culture because although Blackberry users had always been addicted, suddenly an entirely new group was joining the smartphone camp and, as such, were now stuck tapping out messages and making status updates with an intensity that rivaled a drug addiction. Why? Because it was so easy.

Read more…

It looks like Amazon is extending its e-reading platform to include short works and digital pamphlets. Today, Amazon is launching Kindle Singles, which are Kindle books that are in the company’s words, “twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.” Generally, Amazon characterized Kindle Singles as 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages).

Amazon says that Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store, which currently has over 700,000 books, and will be priced much less than a typical book (although Amazon didn’t reveal a range of pricing for the new format). Like standard e-books on the platform, Kindle Singles can be read on the Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices.

It sounds like anyone can submit a story or piece to be included as a Kindle Single, and Amazon is using the announcement as a “call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers” to submit writings. As Amazon writes in the release: Singles are a “perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated—whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event.”

This new format is is important because Kindle Singles opens up a market for new authors. Singles gives bloggers and writers out there who don’t have time to write a book the opportunity to publish a pamphlet or shorter work. And it seems fairly easy for writer to publish these works. Amazon will work directly with publishers and writers to publish Kindle Singles. Amazon says that “Any rights holder can use the already popular Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to self-publish work in the Kindle Store, and this include Kindle Singles.”

A few weeks ago, Amazon released "Kindle for the Web", which enables people to read and share digital book samples in their browsers without the need to install or download anything.

Continuing its strategy of using its cash to kickstart renewable energy businesses, Google is now backing the largest U.S. offshore wind farm project to date. The Atlantic Wind Connection is a proposed string of offshore wind turbines that will stretch 350 miles off the Atlantic coast from Virginia to New Jersey. Once completed, the project will produce 6,000 megawatts of power, which is equivalent to 60 percent of all the wind power built in the U.S. last year. The wind project will serve nearly 2 million homes.

The entire project is expected to cost about $5 billion, but Google is only investing in the first phase to help get it off the ground (or, rather, out to sea). The first phase includes only getting the necessary governmental approvals and financing before the wind power line can actually begin construction. While it is the least expensive part of the process, it is actually the trickiest because of popular opposition to offshore wind farms in general. Other investors include Good Energies and Marubeni Corporation.

Google has invested in wind projects before and entered into long-term contracts to purchase wind power. It’s last wind energy investment was $38.8 million, and this one will likely end up in the same range. Development stage costs for these kinds of projects usually run in the tens of millions of dollars. A Google spokesman says there are no related tax rebates or other benefits associated with the investment, rather Google is hoping to make a straight-up financial return.

Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC)

SundaySky, a company that has developed technology capable of extracting content from any website and molding it into videos created on-the-fly, has raised $9 million in Series B financing. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with follow-on investments from Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners.

Founded in 2006, SundaySky provides e-businesses with a solution that distributes dynamically generated, template-based videos across entire websites, marketing channels and mobile and social platforms.

The company’s SaaS-based video generation platform thus aims to help its customers personalize web experiences, enhance customer engagement, increase conversions and boost search engine ranking.

You can check out how it works here, or see live examples on ePlans.com and Overstock.com (click the videos, obviously).

SundaySky is headquartered in New York with a product and technology center in Tel Aviv. This funding round brings the total amount of capital injected into the startup to a healthy $17 million.

I’m positive you know about the “will it blend” meme, a viral marketing campaign / infomercial series for a line of blenders starring Tom Dickson, the founder of Blendtec. I’m also quite positive you know about the amusing commercials and brilliant online marketing campaigns centered around the Old Spice Man.

Well, for your Tuesday entertainment, here’s what happens when they collide.

(Hat tip to Orli)

Restaurant.com, a popular search engine and gift certificate seller for thousands of restaurants across the United States, two weeks ago decided to dip its toes into the group-buying / daily deal waters. The company offered consumers 90 percent off the site's already discounted restaurant gift certificates, pricing $25 certificates as low as $1.

Restaurant.com later extended the offer to include another full day, giving consumers the opportunity to take advantage of the discounts for a total of 48 hours. It also set the activation threshold to ‘one’, which means everyone could benefit from the offer regardless of how many consumers purchased discounted gift cards.

Looks like it was a big hit: the company today said it has sold 1.5 million gift certificates in those two days.

Restaurant.com says the sale has the potential to fill nearly 1.5 million tables in restaurants across the US, and drive $105 million of incremental revenue nationwide. The numbers are based on the total number of certificates purchased through the promotion at denominations ranging from $10 to $100.

Purchases made through Restaurant.com’s daily deal are divided up among more than 15,000 restaurants nationwide offering a total of 35,000 gift certificate options (with no expiration dates).

Needless to say, you’re well-advised to read the redemption rules to make sure you can use the certificate in your favorite restaurants. You can only use one certificate per visit, and it rarely includes alcohol, tax and tips. Nevertheless, worth a look for a chance to save on your next tab.

I’ve also read multiple times that it’s best to decline when the site asks you to take a survey – the fine print apparently allows them to enroll you in a monthly program.

Restaurant.com, founded in 1999, says its customers have saved more than $500 million through the gift certificate program. If the company manages to repeat this particular super promotion trick a lot more in the future, the stand a good chance at growing that number significantly.

We've seen quite a few ingenious ways to use the Web for recruitment or to land a job. The Daily Mail newspaper's job advert in its search engine-targeted robot.txt immediately springs to mind as does the ad man who bought up Google Adwords spots next to the names of six ad executives he wanted to work with. But the following effort from German digital marketing agency Jung von Matt/Neckar involving Facebook Places before it had launched locally is the stealthiest of them all. Here's how it worked:

Private company stock trading startup SecondMarket just released their Q3 transaction report. The highlight – Facebook continues to dominate with 37% of total transactions, although SecondMarket doesn’t break out the total size of those transactions. Nearly $75 million worth of stock flowed through them in the last three months, though (up from $51 million in Q2):

The SecondMarket private company stock market had another strong quarter, with approximately $75 million in completed transactions spread across nearly a dozen companies. Facebook continues to attract the most attention with more than one-­third of completed transactions.

GlobalLogic, which made up 35% of completed transactions, also had a strong quarter, while new names in the private company market emerged, including Acronis and Gamefly. The types of buyers also continued to diversify with venture capital funds leading the way as the most active buyers in the quarter. The total dollar amount of completed private company stock transactions* on SecondMarket in Q3 2010 was $73,547,122.35.

SecondMarket also tracks buy side interest, which may or may not result in closed transactions. Facebook dominates that category, too, with 34.1% of all buy side interest. Twitter is a distant second with 5.8%. LinkedIn, Zynga, Craigslist, Yelp, Digg, Kayak, Etsy and SecondMarket itself round out the top ten list. See below for image.

The companies with the fastest growing buy side demand include Groupon (up 63%), Bloom Energy, Pandora, Trulia and Zipcar.

The full report is available here in pdf.

Kontagent, an fbFund winner and social analytics platform, is launching a new version of its social analytics suite, complete with social funnels, social event tracking and other features. Kontagent is now tracking over 70 million monthly active users, and has reached over 150 million social network users over the past two years.

Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social interaction and other variables. The new version allows developers to track and optimize advertising efforts, user virality, in-app mechanics, virtual goods, currency monetization, and more.

Using a unique social identifier, Kontagent's Social Event Tracking system will define and track specific, detailed user interaction events, allowing developers to adjust games and applications to fit the needs of users to engage with the application the most.

Kontagent’s Social Funnel allow developers to create and track the performance of funnels for application installation flow. For example, users can track certain monetization events, first users experiences, and more.

The startup, which has raised $6 million, to date, also extends its analytics platform to iPhone and web applications using Facebook Connect.

Kontagent’s founder Albert Lai says that the platform is increasingly being used by social game developers, and the new version offers tools that fit nicely with evaluating data from game mechanics, including virtual goods, and more. While Lai declined to name all of his clients, he says that “most of world’s largest game publishers” are using Kontagent.

Telecom infrastructure company Inovisi Infracom has acquired a stake in mobile internet social network game developer Ozura World for $30 million. In return, Inovisi will sell telecom infrastructure services for Ozura’s mobile social platform Fonwar.

According to Ozura’s most recent report, its Fonwar IM software has over 16 million users as of June 2010 – and it anticipates this audience to double in the next 12 months thanks to further growth across developing countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, India, South Africa and South Americas.

Ozura, which publishes mobile games and other wireless entertainment products, says its games and apps have been downloaded over 30 million times over the past 2 years. Furthermore, the company claims to have seen 2 billion messages exchanged, and close to 1.2 billion SMSes delivered.

Inovisi for its part says it is looking for more investment and acquisition opportunities in the telecommunication space. The company is targeting over $120 million sales from mobile Internet related business in next 2 years and expects this to double by 2013.

SearchIgnite, a provider of paid search optimization solutions which claims to manage more than $600 million in pay-per-click (PPC) spend annually, has released its latest report on the paid search market in the United States. According to the company, spend on paid search ads increased close to 6% year-over-year.

Google commanded no less than 80.2% of all U.S. PPC ad spend in the third quarter, picking up 2 percentage points even compared to last quarter.

And yet, SearchIgnite says early data coming out of the Bing-Yahoo alliance bodes well for Bing to become a viable competitor in the future.

Paid search spend in in the U.S. in the third quarter increased 5.8% year-over-year, compared with flat growth a year ago, adds SearchIgnite.

Month-over-month shows that the growth is picking up, which bodes well for a strong Q4: July grew 4.9%, August 5.8% and September 6.7%.

According to SearchIgnite, PPC ads delivered by Bing show little cost-per-click inflation thus far (something many in the industry feared), and the company doesn’t expect them to markedly inflate in the future either.

In addition, click-through rates have increased for ads served on the combined Bing-Yahoo search inventory, which suggest Bing's ad serving system delivers more relevant advertising units to users than Yahoo.

The report tracked more than 55 billion impressions and more than 1 billion clicks on Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing from January 1, 2006 through September 30, 2010.

Like any good Apple fanboy, when I first heard that Microsoft would be rebooting their mobile strategy a couple years ago, I snickered. I’m sure I made some sarcastic remark along the lines of “this oughta be good.” But over the past few months, I’ve actually been pleasantly and continuously surprised by what I’ve seen of Windows Phone 7 (the artist formerly known as Windows Phone 7 Series Phone, or something) — enough to think that it actually might be good.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. There are still a lot of “ifs” on the table. Microsoft is coming so late to the competent smartphone party that they had little room for error with Windows Phone 7. But after the public unveiling today, I think it’s safe to say for now that they’ve successfully stuck the landing. Now they just have to run a marathon. Up a mountain. Against competitors that they gave a 20 mile head-start to.

I haven’t tested or extensively used any single Windows Phone 7 device yet. But I have used a few different ones a number of times over the past few months. My initial reaction? Impressed. I think my initial audible reaction was: “wow, I already like this better than Android.”

And I do. My main problem with Android is that no matter which device I use, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m using a cheap imitation of an iPhone. That’s both my fault (for using an iPhone first) and Android’s own fault. It has the same basic apps-in-a-grid UI as the iPhone — it’s just more poorly done (but yes, getting better). Or they get one of the OEMs to make a custom skin, and it ends up looking and feeling like it was designed by Mattel.

Windows Phone 7 doesn’t feel like a cheap imitation of the iPhone. It feels like something different.

That’s the same reason why I liked webOS so much as well. I hated the Pre hardware, but the software was great because it was different. It did some things much better than the iPhone because it did things with the UI that the iPhone (as it’s currently constructed) could never do. The same is true with Windows Phone 7.

Is Windows Phone 7 going to be able to catch Android in terms of unit sales? Probably not. But are the devices themselves going to be better? It looks that way. And that still means something. The mobile market is growing so quickly across the board that any player with sufficient resources and marketing muscle can not only hang around, but do well. Palm couldn’t, but Microsoft can — and I think will. (My god, they’ve even already created a commercial that’s a thousand times better than almost all of their other commercials.)

Brian X. Chen had a nice rundown in Wired today as to why he thinks Windows Phone could lead to better products than Android. The basic gist? Microsoft is sort of taking a middle of the road approach between Apple and Google in the mobile space. They’re working with a lot of partners (like Google), but they’re imposing a fairly strict set of manufacturing rules and rigorously testing to make sure the products are up to standards (like Apple).

The end result, I suspect, will be products that fall in between the iPhone and Android phones in terms of build quality. And maybe even usability. That coupled with multiple carrier and OEM partners will mean a lot of units sold for Microsoft. And it could actually expose a weakness in Android if people start to associate those phones with crappier build quality.

I know, I know, this isn’t the same as the PC vs. Mac wars (it certainly looks like there are going to be many more players, for one thing). But just humor me in wondering if Android won’t end up as the PC here? It could be the unstoppable juggernaut that generally is lower quality. It’s certainly not a bad position — but it’s a weird one since unlike Microsoft in the PC wars, Google doesn’t make money from licensing their software. They rely on search — something they also get from all the other players in the space except for Microsoft (thanks to the tight Bing integration in Windows Phone 7).

The whole scenario is kind of strange and frantic — and it’s going to get stranger and more frantic if Microsoft once again becomes a big player in the mobile space. If they get there, will they use their power to try and bend the carriers to their will? Or will they take the Google approach and let them walk all over the place dictating features and bloatware? What will this mean for Bing? What will it mean for Xbox, and are Sony and Nintendo’s portable systems now screwed? What will it mean for Zune? What about tablets? What will this mean for Windows itself?

Or will Microsoft’s culture that so often seems to end in bureaucracy and infighting kill the whole thing?

The mobile space is about to be a full-on gun fight. And at least Microsoft seems to have walked into the middle of it with the right weapon. I was sort of expecting a starter pistol. Or a squirt gun.

[images: Warner Brothers & Cinergi Pictures]

It was bound to happen, I suppose.

A week and a half ago, I wrote a post about bloatware, and how we (the customers) are likely the ones to blame for it. In that post, I cited this thread about Google’s Chrome browser in which hundreds of people complain, and bitch, and moan, that it doesn’t have the feature to set an image as your wallpaper. Yes, seriously — hundreds of people have been complaining about this for over two years.

Well, someone finally fed the bloat trolls.

Thankfully, it wasn’t Google. They still have yet to implement that feature, and I hope they never do because it’s incredibly lame and just leads to a bunch of tacky computer desktops. It’s really a crime against humanity. Naturally, we can blame Microsoft for it — and Mozilla for perpetuating it even as they slowly killed Internet Explorer.

But one developer, who actually contributes to the Chromium open source project behind Chrome, took it upon himself to code up a Chrome extension that gives people the ability to set any image on the web as their wallpaper. It’s a little buggy, according to reports, but overall it seems to work as advertised. The developer is now a savior to bloat-lovers everywhere.

Well, PC-using bloat-lovers, at least — the developers says a Mac and Linux version are in the works. Phew!

Thus ends a two-year saga of Chrome users not being able to practice their fundamental right of easily setting the web’s best pictures of unicorns and Metallica as their desktop backgrounds. And to tile them as far as the eye can see.

I think development of Chrome can stop now. Feature complete.

An update to our post last week on Japan’s DeNA mulling over an acquisition of San Francisco based social gaming startup ngmoco. The deal is supposedly done and will be announced shortly, possibly on Tuesday.

Update: and there we go. Up to $400 million in cash and stock it is ($300 million in cash and stock, plus a $100 million earnout).

The price we reported, $400 million or so, is in the ballpark, says a new source. And part of the reason ngmoco, with revenues in the $30 million range, can command such a high price is the relative strength of the yen v. the dollar. In 2007 the dollar was hovering in the 120 yen range. Today it’s worth just 81ish.

That makes buying a U.S. company a third less expensive for a Japanese company. And DeNA is worth more than $4 billion, making purchases of this size relatively trivial. Just a year ago their market cap was 2/3 less.

That means Zynga, which shares a board member with ngmoco and would probably love to acquire them, couldn’t even field an offer in the same neighborhood as DeNA.

This latest information is coming second hand from a trusted source who heard it directly from a ngmoco executive. We still haven’t heard anything officially from ngmoco at all.

Press release:

DeNA to Acquire ngmoco:)

The Acquisition Creates World’s Largest Mobile Social Games Platform Company

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–DeNA today announces it is acquiring ngmoco, Inc., for up to US$400 million in cash and securities, creating the world's largest mobile social games platform company.

"We are delighted to be joining forces with DeNA, a company that we have admired and aspired to"
ngmoco's shareholders and employees will receive US$300 million in cash and securities and are entitled to additional consideration, up to a maximum of US$100 million, contingent upon the achievement of certain performance milestones through Dec. 31, 2011.

"In ngmoco and its team we see a lot of the same talent and dynamic traction that we have in the Japanese market, making the merger a perfect fit for us," said Tomoko Namba, founder and CEO, DeNA. "This acquisition cements DeNA’s leadership position in the U.S. We're building the largest mobile social gaming platform in the world and populating it with incredible games and services."

Headquartered in San Francisco, and with studios in New York and Portland, ngmoco was founded in 2008 by games industry veterans Neil Young, Bob Stevenson, Alan Yu and Joe Keene. ngmoco's games are played more than 50 million minutes a day and have been downloaded more than 60 million times on Apple's iOS devices, resulting in 20 top 10 applications. The company's Plus+ social network has over 13.5 million registered users, with more than 50 million friend connections and has been installed more than 86 million times. In September, ngmoco announced its commitment to the Android platform with games and services arriving in the fourth quarter.

"We are delighted to be joining forces with DeNA, a company that we have admired and aspired to," said Neil Young, founder and CEO, ngmoco. "The opportunity to be a part of creating the number one social mobile game platform company and to benefit from the unique learning and knowledge that DeNA possesses is an amazing way to accelerate our vision for gaming."

As a wholly owned subsidiary, ngmoco will be responsible for bringing DeNA's "X-Device X-Border" strategy to Western markets by making DeNA's Mobage a global service and platform for games. A key focus for the company is the creation of a unified open developer platform that combines ngmoco's state of the art smartphone technology framework with DeNA's pioneering Mobage Open SDK. The unified Mobage Smartphone Platform will allow developers to target both iOS & Android and access both Western and Japanese customers.

A developer preview of the new global gaming platform will take place in December with further details to be announced.

About DeNA

DeNA was founded in 1999 by Tomoko Namba and has become one of the world’s most successful mobile Internet companies with games and community products that reach 100 million consumers spanning mobile and PC platforms. The company’s ‘DNA’ is comprised of great people that share an unrivaled passion for engaging entertainment. We invite big dreamers and game-changers to learn more about us at http://www.denaglobal.com.

About ngmoco

Headquartered in San Francisco, ngmoco was founded in 2008 by games industry veterans committed to the new mobile landscape opened up by Apple's iPhone. ngmoco creates and publishes games for the iPhone and beyond in collaboration with the best and brightest game makers in the world. Founded by Neil Young, Bob Stevenson, Alan Yu and Joe Keene, the company's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Maples Investments/FloodGate, Norwest Venture Partners, Institutional Venture Partners & Google Ventures. To witness the lives and minds of the ngmoco team at work on the future of iPhone and iPod touch games, visit http://www.ngmoco.com.

“Windows Phone 7: Solid Platform, Sorry Future,” “The Era Of The Uber Smartphone Is Here,” “Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?” “Live From Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Launch Event“…and the list goes on.

Now that we’ve inundated you with a battery of posts on Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, it’s time for a time out and a gut check. In vintage Siskel and Ebert fashion, we asked our reporters to give us their final verdict on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system via TCTV.

Spoiler Alert: While no one was wildly optimistic on Microsoft’s chances, many of our reporters saw a glimmer of fight in this OS. However, as always, as MobileCrunch’s Greg Kumparak says, buyer “be wary.”

For more rapid fire assessments check out “The Windows Phone 7 Launch: Our Take.”

BNI Video, a video control software that allows helps video service providers (VSPs) in the cable, telecommunications and wireless industries manage video delivery, has raised more than $16 million from Cisco, Comcast Interactive Capital, Time Warner Cable, Charles River Ventures and Castile Ventures.

BNI's software allows operators to extend their video services to incorporate different forms of content from multiple sources. VSPs, like Comcast, Time Warner and others can use BNI’s software for transcoding and digital rights management and more. The software also includes the ability to incorporate search and social networking, on-demand network upgrades, and offers more control over system maintenance and service delivery.

The technology not only promises additional functionality for video service providers but also promises to deliver more flexibility for the consumer viewing the video. The company was founded by Conrad Clemson, a former engineering executive at Motorola, and Raman Sud, the former VP of engineering at Unidesk.

As you may be aware, musician Trent Reznor wrote and recorded (along with Atticus Ross) the score for David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network — you know, the Facebook movie. Therefore, he must be an expert on Facebook and love the service, right? Well, not exactly. Okay, not at all.

In an interview with Drowned in Sound, Reznor talks candidly about his feelings about Facebook and social networking as a concept in general. You may recall that last year he half-quit Twitter after getting creeped out by people on the network, then sort of came back to use it for promotion of his work. The publication notes that Reznor has been quoted in the past as saying “Facebook sucks”, but he downplayed that, saying he may have said something like that in passing. But then he jumped a bit deeper into what he meant.

One problem Reznor has with Facebook is the “falseness” that accompanies it. He notes that if as many people listened to Joy Division and “liked” them on their Facebook page, they’d be bigger than U2. What he’s suggesting, of course, is that people don’t put their actual selves forward on the network and instead portray themselves as they want to be seen for whatever reason. Certainly, there’s a lot of that going on. “I’ve seen that with people I know in real life, and I check them out online, it's not always the same person,” he notes.

Reznor also doesn’t like the disconnect of social networking in general. “I guess I'm just coming from an older school of: when you met people you met them. Whether you spoke to them on person or talked on the phone, when you interact with them it would be a real person and not some avatar of themselves,” he says. Obviously, he’s not alone there either. That said, he does note that these networks have helped him get back in contact with people he hadn’t seen in a while, which he does think is useful.

But the most interesting thing he had to say was specifically about the way Facebook is designed and implemented:

As far as the concept goes, I don't think it's actually executed that well. The layouts [sic] kind of foolish and the processing is terrible, as a tool. When I see the media heralding Zuckerburg, putting him up on a pedestal of genius and mentioned in the same breathe as Steve Jobs, I'm highly degree [sic] with that. He was in the right place, at the right time, with a functional tool.

Sounds like we have another fanboy.

Reznor concludes with the idea that what Facebook did to MySpace and Friendster can still easily be done to them. Someone just needs to execute better. That sounds obvious enough, but it would likely be very hard for anything to get traction against a service with 500 million users. Reznor acknowledges that — “most people use Facebook because everyone's on Facebook” — but still thinks it can fall.

[via Hacker News] [photo: flickr/gotheric]

Capitalizing on the “everything instant” trend, relevancy based search startup Surf Canyon launches their “Fully Dynamic Search” today in order to make searches on its site and more importantly on its browser extension more pertinent to users.

What’s unique about Surf Canyon as opposed to search engines like Google and Bing is that it serves up results based on user interaction, so if you click on a specific link while you’re searching (or the little Surf Canyon icon next to each result), the Surf Canyon algorithm takes your click into account and modifies the results on the page to be closer to the result that you looked at.

From CEO Mark Cramer on why Surf Canyon’s “Fully Dynamic” isn’t just another played out iteration of Google Instant:

"Dynamic" is the future of search and we feel we have a critical element to add to that. Instant makes the page faster (dynamically updating SERP after every key press), however, our innovation makes it more relevant (dynamically updating the order of results after every mouse click). The two together (Google Instant + Surf Canyon) make the search experience "Fully Dynamic."

At the moment users on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome will be most comfortable with trying out Surf Canyon’s “Fully Dynamic” Instant search as a browser plugin, as the Surf Canyon site itself can be quite clunky. As an added bonus the plugin lets you manually add or delete preferred sites, even further increasing search relevancy.

Oakland based Surf Canyon currently has $1.1 Million in funding and is working on improving search navigation on its own homepage and well as moving search “away from statelessness to something more resembling a conversation."

Good times are here again….well, sort of. In a new survey of venture capitalists and tech executives, 85% of respondents said that the global economy was marching slowly-but-steadily up and to the right. Last year, only 69% of respondents felt that good about the economy. It’s a surprisingly rosy picture given the drumbeat of worries over the stalling recovery and the potential for a double-dip recession.

Of course there’s good reason the everyday people who work at these tech companies may not feel so happy: While 72% of executives said they expect sales to grow, only 47% said they expected to hire more people. And the hiring outlook is worse for big companies: Only 40% of executives from technology company with more than $1 billion in annual revenues say they planned to hire over the next year. The survey was done by DLA Piper and can be read in its entirety here.

Ok, so another job-less recovery isn’t great news for the US, but these guys seem like a pretty optimistic bunch otherwise, right? Until you ask them about the venture economy. The most surprising stat: A whopping 72% of respondents said that they no longer viewed an IPO as the optimal exit for a venture-backed company. Let me repeat that: Only one-quarter of the VCs and Valley executives surveyed said their goal when starting or funding a company was to take it public. That’s like Barry Bonds going up for bat and thinking his best bet to score runs is a walk.

Peter Astiz, Co-Head of DLA Piper’s Technology Sector Practice called it a “profound, game-changing development.” He continued, “If there is a long-term expectation that the IPO market will not rebound, that means a reduction in the number of dramatic 'home runs' for venture capital investors and lower overall returns.  Fewer IPOs also means fewer small- and medium-size public technology companies which traditionally have been the acquirers for venture-backed company exits.”

There are always those who counter worries about a lackluster IPO market by shrugging and saying it’s acquisitions that provide the bulk of venture returns, not IPOs. That’s true. But there’s a huge difference between an acquisition so juicy you can’t say no, and not even having the IPO as the end goal in the first place. Generally, it’s the companies who could go public who get the jaw-dropping acquisition offers.

The ripple effect wasn’t lost on the tech executives polled: 59% of them said the venture business was permanently altered as a result of systemic changes in the IPO market and that shift would result in fewer VC firms and tech companies in the future.

IPOs play an important role in the broader economy as well, generating wealth and jobs and becoming the acquirer of future up-and-coming companies. IPOs are crucial to a vibrant stock market, which in turn is pretty crucial to America given how much of our 401(k) and retirement plans are invested in stocks. Grant Thornton has estimated that we need some 360 new IPOs a year to make up for the companies the markets lose due to de-listings or mergers. The US hasn’t produced those numbers since 2000, and if this survey is any indication, a big chunk of the tech ecosystem isn’t even trying anymore.