Justin.tv has been bleeding employees recently. VP of Marketing Evan Soloman, VP of Business Development David Aufhauser (and most of the business development team), and VP of Product Caleb Elston have all left the video streaming startup over the past few weeks. While that sounds like a foreboding number of key hires exiting the company in a short amount of time, CEO Michael Seibel doesn’t seem too worried. “At a glance, the situation looks a lot different than what it really is,” says Seibel. Each employee that left had a distinct and different reason for leaving that had nothing to do with the performance of the startup, says Seibel. For example, Elston got the startup bug, and Aufhauser came on a year ago to forge premium partnerships for livestreams, a strategy that Justin.tv has since shuttered. In fact, the company continues to grow in terms of usage, says Seibel, at a faster rate that ever, especially when it comes to mobile streaming.

According to the company, there has been a 20% increase in total broadcasts overall (both mobile and web) since the launch of Justin.tv’s Android app that broadcasts live video from the mobile phone. A few weeks later, the startup added the same functionality to the iPhone, launching an iPhone app that allows you to broadcast video from the device on Justin.tv.

Since the launch of both of these apps, streaming on mobile devices has grown significantly, with mobile live streams now 17% of total broadcasts and 31% of total unique broadcasters (most users are using multiple platforms including Web and Mobile). Mobile live streams also represent 35% of total new broadcasters, with more than a third of our new users are signing up for mobile first.

Justin.tv is even close to surpassing some competitors in terms of unique visitors. In September, Justin.tv saw 3.7 million unique visitors In the U.S. compared to Ustream’s 3.8 million unique visitors in the same month, according to comScore data. In August, the gap between Ustream’s and Justin .tv’s unique visitors was much bigger, with 3.9 million unique visitors compared to 3.1 million unique visitors respectively.

The startup has been open about its movement away from forming partnerships for live streams of events and premium content, focusing solely on the UGC realm. The launch of mobile apps as helped grow this content, with more users recording random moments in their lives.

There’s no doubt that livestreaming is generally growing by leaps and bounds, and Justin.tv is riding that wave. But one of the reasons why competitors like Ustream, YouTube and LiveStream have started to form premium partnerships for livestreams is because it brings in additional revenue. It can be tough to make profits on UGC, as shown by the years it has taken YouTube to achieve profitability (Apparently Google’s video site is just now achieving profitability). For now, Justin.tv’s main revenue stream is via advertising. But revenue from video ads is steadily increasing, which is definitely good news for Justin.tv.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Skyfire, the folks behind the Flash-friendly smartphone browser of the same name. They’ve presumably been sitting quiet in anticipation of Skyfire for iPhone — which, by the way, has been in Apple’s approval queue for a month and a half now.

Earlier today Skyfire reached out to us with a bit of exclusive info: they’ve got two new executives joining their team. They poached one of’em from Adobe’s Flash team, while the other comes from Akamai (who, for those unfamiliar, pretty much hosts the Internet… or at least its videos. Hulu, Whitehouse.gov, Apple — all their videos are belong to Akamai).

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

GrubHub, a service that lets you order food for delivery or take out from local restaurants online or by mobile phone, released a new iPhone app and an Android app in beta last week. The company also revised its native Web app to take advantage of HTML 5 features like geolocation and client-side storage.

The new apps feature a GPS-enabled restaurant search. Users can find the restaurants that deliver near their current location, or choose to manually enter a delivery address from their smart phones. The app will display restaurants in the GrubHub directory that deliver to that location.

The GrubHub geolocation features should make it easy for travelers to order take out when they’re camping at a client’s office and don’t know what’s nearby, or if they’re too tired to leave the hotel but don’t want room service.

The GrubHub iPhone app is free to download from the iTunes app store. The beta Android app is also free, and can be downloaded by visiting the Android marketplace and searching for “grubhub.”

GrubHub, a Chicago-based venture backed company, gives its users access to food delivery service from more than 4,000 restaurants in U.S. cities including: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Denver and Boulder.

Like the original GrubHub site, the company’s mobile apps allow users to order food for delivery without having to deal with phone calls, busy lines or inept order-takers from their smart phones. If they prefer a little human talk time, however, the new apps let users tap to call a restaurant without having to dial and multi-task first.

GrubHub-listed restaurants deliver everything from pizzas, American Chinese and comfort food, to higher end fare and local specialties. Mike Evans, GrubHub co-founder and COO said in a press statement "These new mobile apps make ordering food from anywhere that much easier… Mobile orders comprised 1 percent of our total revenue [in 2009]. With the growing popularity of our mobile apps, we project mobile orders will comprise 10 percent of GrubHub sales by the end of 2010." That represents about $7 million spent on food-to-go, the company estimates.

The new apps also let users read menus, reviews, and ratings before placing an order; search by specific items, restaurants, or cuisines from the home screen. The iPhone app lets them: save multiple addresses, past orders and credit card info so they can order regularly from a home, office or local watering hole without re-entering all their info again.

GrubHub’s Android app, currently in public beta, doesn’t have all of the same data-saving capabilities of the native Web app or the GrubHub iPhone app, yet.

Matt Maloney, the chief executive of GrubHub told TechCrunch: “In our first seven days out there, we didn’t even announce the app and our mobile orders increased by 50%.” He also added “Users wanted this because mobile is becoming the preferred platform for interacting with your local businesses. I pretty much only order from my phone now myself.”

Angry Birds, a game that inexplicably has won the hearts and minds of millions (I still prefer Crush the Castle) is apparently coming to a toy store near you. These two birds, shot at Nokia HQ with a Nokia N8, can be flung across the room using slingshots at local pigs who have stolen your nest.

No word on pricing or availability but they look pretty nicely done so we can only assume they’re either prototypes of giveaways or commercial products.

StudyBlue, a studying platform for college students, has raised $3.65 million in Series A funding from undisclosed investors. This investment brings the startup’s total funding to $6.5 million.

On StudyBlue, students can upload or transcribe their class notes, create digital flashcards as well as study guides. The platform will intelligently generate quizzes from a students notes and provides a place to store any notes in the cloud. StudyBlue will organize notes, and create flashcards from notes that can be accessed on a mobile phone or can be printed.

Over the past two years, the service has expanded from 25 to more than 500 campuses in the U.S., with more than 100,000 students using the platform. While StudyBlue offers an iPhone app, the startup will use the new funding to develop Android and iPad apps. The investment will also be used to expand to other university campuses.

Today at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, PageLines will announce the release of Platform, a drag & drop design framework for WordPress. The product features some nifty CMS design options, a drag-and-drop layout editor, and a fully configurable template builder for creating custom websites.

In addition, Platform comes fully integrated with bbPress forum and BuddyPress community software right out of the box, and additional support for SEO, social media, ad campaigns, and more. If you’re into WordPress, you want to check this out.

Platform is a minimal, typography-based theme that serves as a "platform" on which CMS websites are created. Andrew Powers, founder of PageLines, says it was created specifically to save users time and frustration when building websites with WordPress and to "take the code part out of web design".

Platform's front-end design is based on what PageLines refers to as 'sections.' These are similar to WordPress widgets (drag-and-drop sidebar content) but according to the company works much better for creating cool designs and for use with templates.

Check out the blog post and the demo + video below for more information.

The product, Platform Pro, costs $95 for a single license, suitable for multiple sites owned by the same person. A multi-user developer license will be sold for $175, which also includes compatibility with bbPress forum, graphics and links removed.

By now, I assume you’ve heard that Opera Software will soon be bringing its full-fledged mobile browser product, Opera Mobile, to Android Market for people to download and use free of charge. The company declines to say when exactly they intend to launch the product, going only as far as to say it will be “within the next few weeks”.

The public release of the consumer offering was just a matter of time, as Opera Mobile for Android as a product already existed, albeit for Opera’s OEM partners only.

Soon, Android users from around the world will be able to give the browser a whirl.

Note that it differs from Opera Mini for Android, which is a special kind of browser that renders web pages from Opera’s servers rather than natively on the handset.

Opera is running some test builds on select Android smartphones, and this morning I caught up with Opera Mobile & Devices product manager Phillip Grønvold for a quick interview and a demo on a Samsung Galaxy S phone, which I captured on video:

What do Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick's Sporting Goods, Crocs, Eddie Bauer, Maybelline, Denver Broncos, University of Texas Athletic Department, and Purina all have in common? They’re brands that have signed up with Vitrue, a social media marketing company — just in the last quarter. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was their best quarter ever in terms of revenue and expansion.

It’s been a while since we’ve written about the company — in fact, as far as I can tell, it has been about four years. Back then, Vitrue was just getting started, taking seed funding from Ron Conway and others. Since then, they’ve raised several million more dollars, but have also developed an SRM (social relationship management) platform that is used by some of the largest companies in the world.

Four years ago, Facebook wasn’t anything close to what it is today, and Twitter didn’t exist. Now, of course, Vitrue’s business is heavily wrapped around social networks such as those. The blog Inside Facebook did a good Q&A recently with CEO Reggie Bradford on how specifically his company utilizes Facebook.

From Q2 to Q3 this year, Vitrue says revenue grew nearly 100 percent as they tripled accounts using their SRM platform while also greatly expanding access their their API. To manage the growth, the company has also doubled their workforce in 2010, we’re told. But even after that, they remain cash-flow positive.

Currently, the service says it managed over 680 Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts for various clients. That adds up to some 276 million fans/followers (a nearly 250 percent jump in growth from Q2). They also moderate some 5 million comments for clients. Ugh — that would be my least favorite job ever.

Seeing as the company seems to be rocking and rolling, it probably won’t be another four years before we update on them again. Just a guess.

UberCab, an app that lets users request a car service to pick them up wherever they are right now, has closed a $1.25 million angel financing round. First Round Capital led the deal, and partner Rob Hayes joins UberCab’s board of directors. Lowercase Capital and Founder Collective also participated, as did more than a dozen other individual angel investors.

The company was founded by Garrett Camp (StumbleUpon founder) and Travis Kalanik in 2009. The goal was to simply scratch an itch – Garret wanted a private car and driver without actually keeping one full time. But calling a car service multiple times a day was a hassle.

So he came up with the idea of UberCab, and talked Kalanik into joining the effort. When it launched earlier this year anyone in San Francisco could download the app to their iPhone or iPad and use it to call up a car at any time. Within a couple of minutes a Towncar, Escalade or other car will show up wherever you are, using your mobile device’s location. You take the care wherever and are automatically billed on your credit card, including tip. The best part of the service, in my opinion, is that both the driver and passenger get to rate each other at the end of the trip.

I’m a user of the service and have become fascinated with the idea of anyone eventually being able to join the service as a driver, much as AirBnB has let anyone rent out rooms in their home. I also like that it’s easier to use than taxis, have much nicer cars, and costs only about 20% more.

The service will soon launch in other cities. But for now it’s just San Francisco.

Earlier today, Google announced their Q3 earnings. And they were good. Really good. But that doesn’t mean that questions still don’t linger about the company going forward. Namely, how are they going to make money off of something besides text-based search advertising?

Google’S position is that they already are. Today they shared three key numbers to show how well three other areas of their business are doing: YouTube, display ads, and mobile. And mobile came up again later during the Q&A session on the call. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on the call and took the question about how Android will make money for the company.

Schmidt called Android “probably the largest single platform play in the market today.” And going forward, he thinks that’s only going to increase as more and more people buy smartphones. At the same time, “in the open source approach, that means we give the software away, which is always paradoxical. People say, well how do you make money from that?,” Schmidt was quick to jump to.

“The evidence we have is that people who use Android search twice as much as everything else,” Schmidt continued. “So, clearly, there is more revenue associated with those searches.”

One of the specific numbers shared by Google SVP of Product Management, Jonathan Rosenberg, was that the annualized run rate on mobile for Google is now one billion dollars. But it’s important to note that this is across all platforms and devices. That just means that a lot of people are searching on their phones and seeing ads.

That’s exactly what Google wants, but Android is a bit different since they’re pouring so many resources into it. “If they are using Android systems, revenue that we share in the search are shared with operators but not with anybody else. So, again it's more lucrative,” Schmidt noted.

Schmidt also said that on that basis alone, Android is already “hugely profitable.” And he continued on to say that Android is likely to be financially successful even without any of the other mobile ideas that are possible. “We can layer on value-added services,” he said.

That’s interesting. It suggests that Google is definitely thinking about ways they can layer premium services on top of the platform in order to make money. At the very least, they haven’t ruled it out. What kinds of services? Who knows. One obvious one would be turn-by-turn navigation, but they’re already giving that away for free.

But Schmidt was quick to jump back to, “Our primary purpose right now is building this open platform.” He also stated that the goal with their app store is to make money for developers, not themselves.

One somewhat overlooked side effect of last week’s Facebook Groups launch was the inexplicable disappearance of the “Clear Chat History” button from Facebook Chat, which is currently undergoing some hardcore product changes due to the Groups introduction. A vocal minority of Facebook users protested the change as violating user privacy by not allowing chat users to immediately remove their data among other things.

A source familiar with Facebook hypothesized that the button’s removal was due to load issues cause by the new reliance on Group chats, as chat data greater that 14 days would have to make a database hit, overloading the server if scaled to apply to large Groups and causing performance issues. Despite these practical concerns, Facebook responded to the user outrage today by confirming that they would return the button, with the following statement:

“We’ve been making a number of changes to optimize and simplify Facebook Chat over the past weeks. As part of the effort to improve Chat, we’ve been testing an interface without the ‘clear chat history’ link prominently displayed, since only a small number of people use it.

Based on the tests, we've decided to keep the ‘clear chat history’ link and to optimize it’s placement within the Chat interface. Given its low usage, we are placing it at the top of the Chat scroll ― where it is still easily accessible without cluttering UI space throughout the course of the chat. We believe this solution strikes a good balance between the many different interests of the millions of people on Facebook Chat.”

According to Facebook, a small number of users utilized the “Clear Chat History” button which is why it was considered for removal in the first place. While I have still yet to receive any notification on whether the most recent “Clear Chat History” iteration auto-deleted history instead of manually deleted, what I can glean based on the statement is that the button will be returning to the top of the “chat scroll,” which if I’m  not mistaken, is where it was originally.

In any case, based on these first signs of Q&A processes and the fact that a whole new team has over taken “Facebook Chat,” we can most likely can expect a complete chat overhaul soon.

Image: Allfacebook

One of the major issues I’ve been seeing raised internationally in the last year is that of fresh water shortage. Do you remember that striking visualization of the entirety of our planet’s fresh water pictured next to the salt and the rest of the planet? Do you remember reading how in 20 or 30 years, populations will have expanded so much that fresh water will be “the new oil”? Like so many global threats, this one made its mark in the media and then receded to a distant memory. Such is the life of a meme, even an important one, but the water crisis is still imminent and some people are working to delay or prevent it.

We’re all careful not to make our showers too long, and not to leave the faucet running, but municipal water waste occurs massively on an institutional level as well. i2O is a centralized water control method that directs the distribution and pressure of an entire water system. Sure, it sounds like Plumbing 2.0, but this is actually a good example of a disruptive technology.

Bringing our utilities up to date and improving local adjustments (like reverse charge from solar panels, grid-independent entities, and so on) is essential to keep our cities operating at peak efficiency. Sounds a bit robotic, I know, but the fact is that as cities worldwide grow denser and larger, existing municipal utility management systems simply aren’t going to cut it.

And really, as there is so much overlap between water control and, say, internet traffic routing and smart electricity grids, that it’s inexcusable for a modern city of a million people to have anything but a highly sophisticated, predictive, data-rich utility management system.

i2O systems (that’s i two oh, not i twenty, if that wasn’t clear) have been installed in dozens of UK cities and save an average of nearly 50,000 liters a day each, as the system rerouted and adjusted pressure around leakages and inefficient pipes. There will still be bursts, and bad sealing, and we’ll still be losing a lot of water, but anything we can shave off the estimated 32 billion cubic meters of water lost from cities each year (World Bank estimate) is worth it.

The system is actually more practical in less developed countries, places where more modern piping and water control systems haven’t reached yet. They lose far more water to leakage and inefficiency — up to 50% from source to tap by the World Bank’s estimate. These are places that often have the least water to begin with, and therefore the least to spare.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if the i2O system is likely to make it out there just yet. It’s extremely sophisticated, and relies on GSM signals, servers, custom valves, and so on to synchronize and update its network and get the best results. I get the feeling that the 200-year-old clay pipes being used in suburban Cairo are unlikely to be retrofitted any time soon. You have to have a functioning system to fix first, so of course efforts should be made to bring the developing world into the 20th century of water management before worrying about getting them into the 21st.

You can find out more about i2O at their website, along with a more technical explanation of the system and its advantages over existing water management solutions than seemed appropriate here.

I was going to write this post anyway, but it turns out that October 15th is Blog Action Day — and what luck is mine, this year’s cause is water! The problem addressed by i2O is certainly important, but there is much more to learn about and more interesting solutions in the offing than we have room to highlight here. That said, here are a few resources for those of you interested in learning more, donating, or perhaps even adding your blog to the festivities.

The World Health Organization has some good resources for learning about the threat of water scarcity in general, who is affected, and so on. Lots of links to international water causes.

Wikipedia’s page on water conservation has some useful tips and, as always, links to about a hundred interesting related links.

The New York Times has an interesting ongoing investigative series about pollution and water use in the USA. It might be good to brush up on the Clean Water Act if you’re going to get your outrage on.

Here is the picture I referred to in the intro, and here are some articles you might have missed when the water shortage meme was in flower, or more recently:

As climate changes, is water the new oil? (Reuters)
Steve Solomon and Jenny Price discuss the shortage (LA Times)
Tribes in Kenya Wage Water War (In These Times)
Downstream: Water Access and Sanitation News (Pulitzer Center)
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (book by Steven Solomon)

Keep fresh water shortage on your short list of global menaces with solutions in reach. Hopefully the other blogs participating in today’s event will add to the visibility of this worldwide problem.

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life.

Earlier this evening, Google published a post on their Chrome Blog highlighting some of their favorite new extensions for the Chrome web browser. As there are now something north of 8,000 Chrome Extensions out there, this seems like a good idea (which Google plans to do regularly) to highlight new ones. But buried at the bottom of the list is one Google made themselves. It’s called Highlight to Search. And it’s awesome.

It’s such a simple thing: when it’s installed, any word you highlight with your mouse cursor on any webpage will bring up a search magnifying glass icon below it. Clicking on that will open a tiny Google Search overlay box with that word already entered. An auto-suggest drop-down also populates just in case you’re looking for something related. And clicking on any of the suggested results will open the full query in a new Chrome tab. Again, so simple, so obvious, but so useful.

The truth is that you could sort of do something similar already with Chrome. If you highlight any word and then right-click, you’ll see an option to “Search Google for XXXXXX”. I use it all the time. But the extension saves a right-click, gives users a much nicer interface, and gives you auto-suggestions.

The app has actually be out for a few weeks, but only has a few thousand installs. For comparison sake, the Chrome to Phone extension which Google also recently released has nearly 200,000 installs.

This is yet more proof of why extensions are awesome. One man’s potential bloat (which this would be if it were a default feature) is another man’s treasure.

AppRats, which demo’d at i/o Ventures Demo Day, has taken a gamble on the fact that the next iteration of celebrity will come from YouTube (“You need a different set of skill sets for the Internet” says founder Charlene Kuperstein) and has banked itself on engaging fans of those celebrities on Facebook platform, trying to provide individuals with over 25,000 YouTube subscribers with custom branded platforms in order to target their viewership market.

“There is a pattern that every time a new form of media is born, a completely different type of celebrity arises. Now it’s 2010, and as history repeats itself, there must exist celebrities who are perfectly adapted to thrive on the Internet.”

Except fans don’t usually spend a lot of time on YouTube, so Kuperstein and Moriarty build various popular YouTubers free apps so they can market their YouTube channels though Facebook, taking advantage of that platform’s huge user base and time spent ratio..

As an example of the market’s viability, Kuperstein and co-founder Ryan Moriarty bring up the example of MysteryGuitarMan (video above), a YouTube celebrity who gets over 500 million video views a year and has brought in a calculated one million dollars in revenue.

Currently AppRats has signed up MysteryGuitarMan along with 50 of the the top 100 most trafficking YouTube celebrities, and makes money through ad revenue share, hoping to expand to other models and platforms soon.

This morning, Apple issued a press release where the first word in the title was one many of us have been waiting years for: Verizon. No, they didn’t announce a version of the iPhone for Verizon’s network. But what they did announce—an iPad/Verizon MiFi bundle—is a very good sign for that next partnership.

That may sound obvious enough, but not everyone is buying the significance of the maneuver. It is true that Apple did not make a CDMA version of the iPad, and this device plus additional third-party dongle is sort of a weird offering coming from Apple. But the fact that Apple and Verizon are clearly working very closely on this deal is significant. Let’s consider what the two sides are actually selling here.

Apple is agreeing to sell all three varieties (storage sizes) of their iPad in Verizon’s stores across America starting in two weeks. When purchased with their MiFi device, the two together cost $629.99, $729.99, and $829.99 for the 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB variations, respectively. Yes, those are the exact same prices that Apple is selling the iPad with built-in 3G from AT&T for. But again, the MiFi is a stand-alone product, so Apple/Verizon are selling you the WiFi-only version of the iPad to use in conjunction with this device.

Normally, this MiFi device costs $269.99 for the full retail price, but considering Apple sells the 16 GB WiFi-only iPad for $499.99, customers are clearly getting a steep discount on this bundle. Who is eating that cost? It’s hard to know for sure, but my guess would be Verizon since they’re gaining new or additional data users (customers) with the iPad deal. Let’s say Verizon is the one eating the fully discounted cost. That means they’re selling their $270 MiFi for only $130 — a nice $140 discount.

Yes, Verizon will give you a MiFi device for either $100 (or for free online), but that’s with a 2-year contract commitment. The iPad+MiFi deal requires no contract commitment on the user’s end, and there’s still this huge discount being offered. Again, that speaks very well to the prospects of a continued Apple/Verizon relationship going forward—especially if it was actually Verizon that was willing to give something back.

But even more fascinating and perhaps telling is that Verizon is also allowing customers to buy the iPad in their stores without having to buy a MiFi device with it. In that case, the iPads are being sold at the regular retail prices ($499.99, etc). That suggests that if nothing else, Verizon wants to use Apple’s device to get people in their stores. And the fact that Apple is letting Verizon “use” them in this way says something (hint: future partnerships). And again, it seems to suggest that Verizon is the one eating the cost of the MiFi device if customers opt to buy one.

And let’s look at the data plans Verizon is offering for these MiFis sold with iPads. For 1 GB of coverage a month, it’s $20. For 3 GB, it’s $35. And for 5 GB, it’s $50. Each of these are similar (or better) to the already good deals that AT&T offers for their iPad plans. AT&T’s cheap plan is $14.99, but that’s for only 250 MB of data a month. They also have a $25 a month plan for 2 GB. When Apple initially unveiled the iPad, CEO Steve Jobs touted how remarkable these plans were (of course, at the time there was an unlimited data plan for $29.99, which AT&T quickly killed). Now just a few months later, he has been able to talk the nation’s largest carrier into the same type of deal.

I still want to remain skeptical and not get my hopes up, but it looks as if Apple and Verizon are kicking off the beginning of what could be a nice little partnership here. This sort of thrown-together component is step one. You could easily see the CDMA iPhone 4 in January being step 2. Then step three might be a CDMA+GSM iPad (and/or iPhone) sometime later in 2011 that works on both Verizon and AT&T—no MiFi required.

When I talk to entrepreneurs in other countries— whether they are other Western countries like France or England or developing countries like Brazil and India—the biggest reason they say they envy Silicon Valley is a culturally subtle one. It’s not all the venture cash, and it’s not the concentration of talent. Indeed some people say those things make life in Silicon Valley too competitive to have room to thrive.

It’s the Valley’s culture of stock options; the usually misguided hope that any startup can be the next Google and any receptionist can be the next multimillionaire. Stock options, so the story goes, are the reason everyday employees are willing to trade a steady job with a large company for a riskier post with a startup. It’s the reason companies—allegedly—don’t have to pay startup employees a market rate, meaning more of that venture funding can go towards building the business, not paying outsized salaries. Whenever there’s a movement on Capitol Hill to change how you account for or tax options everyone in Silicon Valley goes nuts. It’s options that keep this place humming—whether it’s the misguided “feeling” of wealth that comes from them and keeps people slaving away to build a great company or it’s the actual wealth that results from them and gets turned into local purchases and angel money for future startups. There was a time when landlords would take options over rent payments.

But lately, it seems like the Valley is falling out of love with options. That is weird, because people keep saying we’re in an early stage funding bubble. Typically when you’re in a bubble people put more unrealistic expectation on options, because it seems a near-certainty stock will keep going up. But, instead, we’re seeing a bigger emphasis on cash compensation. That’s because this isn’t a bubble based on exits and liquidity, it’s a bubble based on too much early stage money throwing itself at too few good ideas.

This week we’ve seen evidence of this shift in compensation demands with a study showing how out of control CEO pay is getting at venture backed companies– up from $238,000 last year to $250,000 this year with an expected bonus of another $100,000 or so. Bonus? Isn’t the bonus going public one day? Anecdotally Om Malik muses about the talent grab exploding in Silicon Valley, saying the biggest cost of startups—salaries—is going to get a whole lot bigger. Note his examples include people paying more, not necessarily giving bigger grants of stock. Malik compares the ebullience to the 1990s, but back then people were angling for more stock. Cash would have been a sucker’s bet at a time when companies were going public in 18 months. It seems like there’s something different happening, partially driven by companies and partially driven by employees, but all tying back to the lack of huge homeruns that make everyone rich.

On the employee side, there’s increasingly a disconnect between when founders and investors make money and when employees make money. In the past when it took large amounts of venture capital to build a successful business, investors owned the lion’s share of the company and founders and employees both needed a huge exit to make a life-altering amount of money. But now that the Web is so much more capital intensive, angels love to talk up that founders can have a huge payday with a relatively tiny acquisition and the angels can do pretty well too. But what about the employees? Instead many are finding themselves churning through a series of companies built to flip, never making much money themselves and just jumping between treadmills.

Even companies that sell for large amounts, like Slide, have this disconnect of incentives. Slide was not the hit that founder Max Levchin was hoping for, but because he did the first round of funding himself, he personally made a large amount of money. But most of the employees—who worked hard for several years at what they hoped was the next PayPal—didn’t make anything other than their paychecks. It’s not that they were wronged. Planning your finances based on unrealized gains from options is like taking a home equity line of credit on an inflated house just to pay for a vacation. Who on earth would do something like….oh right. Most of America over the last few years, that’s who.

America’s 1990s love affair with options and 2000s love affair with debt aren’t so different from one another. If you buy Peter Thiel’s argument that the Internet bubble never popped, rather if shifted into the housing market, it’s as if the promise of something-for-nothing just shifted from the geographically constrained group of employees at dotcoms to everyone who could get a crazy mortgage on a house. So, broadly as a culture, it’s probably appropriate for us to be in a mood to take the bird in the hand and give up on those two in the bush.

What about those reports of people flooding out of Google no matter what they pay them, lured by Facebook’s pre-IPO stock? They’re not exactly buy-and-hold investors. Even employees that do have stock in hot companies can’t seem to cash it out fast enough. This week, Bloomberg reported that companies like Zynga and Facebook were having to start charging higher rates and place more restrictions on how employees could sell stock on secondary markets because they were concerned about the rate at which it was all changing hands. If that trend continues—we’ll see even more restricted grants of options, making them less of the compensation conversation to begin with.

This has already started to happen inside large public tech companies, where options have been almost completely replaced with restricted stock units or RSUs, which give employees far less flexibility around how and when they can cash out. This was driven mostly by the change in accounting rules around options, and when the rules were first enacted a few years ago, it was mostly lower-level employees who suffered. But increasingly RSUs are climbing the corporate compensation ladder as part of the standard executive package. Recently I was talking to a human resources executive of a large public Internet company who said that fewer employees were focusing on the stock part of packages anyway, doubtful it would turn into much and favoring a higher paycheck instead. So why would the company take pains to offer them?

A grounded reality that most of us won’t make millions by joining a small venture is a healthy truth in some ways. But there was something about the irrational belief in them that was unique to the Valley, and made its ecosystem more bullet proof. It’s like we’re a bunch of kids that no longer believe in Santa.

But unlike Santa this sense of “reality” can go too far. The danger is we get to a point where we don’t care about options at all. When employees don’t demand options, employers aren’t going to just grant them out of the goodness of their hearts and that leads to a place where everyone is working for a paycheck.

It’s natural that employees are jaded—but it’s in the Valley’s best interest for employers to keep giving them stock nonetheless. At some point we’ll have IPOs again and the stories of the receptionist who becomes a millionaire will drive a new generation of the best and brightest here. That or you’ll have the Skype effect: A company sells for more than $2 billion, the founders get rich, but the broader ecosystem is still just as wary about joining a sketchy startup.

It looks like the future may be paved with solar panels after all.

In early August, we told you about an out-of-the-box green tech company, named Solar Roadways, that had the audacious plan to replace America’s asphalt roads with textured, glass solar panels that could collect energy, distribute it and simultaneously serve up LED-powered signs (see video below). According to Solar Roadways’ founder Scott Brusaw, the idea is to install a massive solar panel network laid out end-to-end from California to New York that would dramatically change the energy landscape and the country’s literal landscape.

Sounds like a pipe dream, right?

At least that was my first impression— I wondered how the United States with its shoddy infrastructure (asphalt upkeep is hard enough) and burgeoning deficit could pay the $4.4 million per mile of road (per Bursaw’s calculations) to fulfill Brusaw’s vision. But I guess I was wrong. The collective web spoke and of the 3,500-plus applicants in GE’s Ecomagination Challenge, Solar Roadways won the first Challenge Award and $50,000— the equivalent of 5, 12′x 12′ panels.

Akin to the audience choice award, this Challenge prize was based on the community’s vote— roughly  74,000 submissions.

For those unfamiliar with the GE Ecomagination Challenge, it’s a partnership between GE and venture capital firms, Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, KPCB and RockPort Capital, to invest $200 million in green tech technologies and startups. The core of the contest is five Innovation Awards, worth $100,000 each, which will be announced in early November. GE may also offer commercial relationships to the applicants.

Still far from the Innovation Award or a lucrative contract with GE, Solar Roadways hasn’t won the homecoming crown just yet. However, Bursaw told us on Thursday that the buzz around the Ecomagination challenge and their recent win has brought new eyeballs (about a 5x increase) to the website and the startup’s Facebook and Myspace pages. The win also doesn’t hurt the company’s chances in securing future funding. On top of the $50,000, Solar Roadways has already secured $100,000 from the Federal Highway Administration and is currently applying for a $750,000 FHWA contract.

Nine hundred thousand will not get Bursaw anywhere near his end goal— and Bursaw acknowledges that his dream would take several decades to complete, if it’s even possible— but he says there are smaller, pragmatic ways to deploy Roadways’ technology. For instance, the company has talked to national retailers like Wal-Mart about putting their panels in parking lots and powering the adjacent store/restaurant with solar energy. Of course, there are about 1,000 steps to go before Bursaw even gets there, like designing the glass structure and texture, improving traction, testing durability, manufacturing the panels on a large scale, etc.

So for now, I’ll believe it when I drive on it.

For full disclosure, GE is a sponsor of TechCrunch’s GreenTech section.

Placecast is announcing a fairly significant partnership with European carrier O2 to enable geo-fence marketing campaigns for a number of brands for the carrier’s users.

Via, O2 More, an opt-in service for O2 customers; brands like Starbucks and L’Oreal will send the carrier’s users exclusive offers and information via SMS and MMS on their mobile phones when they are inside a geo-fenced area around a store or other location.

All of this is powered by Placecast’s ShopAlerts, which are location-triggered mobile text messages sent from brands to consumers. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. ShopAlerts' technology uses "geo-fences," which are virtual boundaries that can be targeted via location-based marketing. Retailers can customize alerts to fit their brand and strategy.

Over 1 million O2 customers in the UK are opted-in to the service. And until now, O2 More’s messages were based on age, gender, and interests. But now Placecast has created over 1500 geo-fences around Starbucks and L'Oreal stores in the UK. For example, O2 will send an SMS alert to an opted-in users offering a 50 pence discount for its new line of coffee, VIA.

This is the first carrier partnership for Placecast, which has licensed ShopAlerts to a number of retail partners, including American Eagle Outfitters and the North Face.

During Google’s third quarter earnings call today, CEO Eric Schmidt was asked, “With the Web becoming more social and realtime, how does Google compete in that world?” The question comes on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by Bing that it is bringing in more data from Facebook to make its search results more social.

Schmidt’s response essentially is that the Google’s search algorithm will absorb more realtime and social data over time: “With respect to social and realtime, we use complex signals to do ranking. Over time we will add realtime and social cues.” Some of this comes in the form of direct data feeds, such as Google gets from Twitter. But to really be social, search needs to be personalized to each individual’s own social stream.

Schmidt acknowledges as much: “We are quite convinced that produces a better search result for people who choose to give us that information. We want people to be more logged into Google.”

In other words, Google will give you better search results if you share your social data with them. He was later asked what can Google do if it does not have a direct relationship with all of the major social networks (meaning Facebook)? How then does it capture the social signals? Schmidt was careful not to answer that one too directly other than to say, “There are ways we can do that.” Another option he hinted at was for people to volunteer that information to Google.

And you wonder why Facebook only allows you to take your personal data in the form of a downloadable .zip file rather than an ongoing stream you could simply hand over to someone like Google. No, Google’s best bet is to get you to start generating a social stream through Google itself.

During regular trading hours today, Google’s stock was down a little over $2 a share, or about half a percent. Ho-hum, nothing big, probably just some investors worried they might mildly disappoint once again this quarter. Instead, Google blew away estimates for Q3 and as a result, the stock has now surged about $50 a share in after-hours trading.

While it ended the day around $540 a share, the stock is now approaching $600 a share after the nearly 10 percent jump in price. This surge means that Google has added over $15 billion to their market cap just now. While Google had fallen over $100 billion in market cap behind Apple, which continues to see their stock surge (it’s now past $300 a share for the first time ever), they’re now approaching a $200 billion market valuation themselves.

It’s also worth noting that Google, like Apple a few months ago, is now in striking range of Microsoft when it comes to market cap. Microsoft now stands at $218 billion — about $60 billion behind Apple at this point — and they don’t report earnings for another two weeks. Might Google rally to catch them as well?

Over the last few months, there’s been quite a bit of buzz (and some unease) building around a new kind of fragmentation that’s coming to Google’s Android OS. Up until now, the primary way people have downloaded third party applications has been through the official Android Market, an online app marketplace run by Google that’s analogous to Apple’s App Store. But things are going to get more complicated very soon.

Verizon, which has been Google’s biggest ally in helping Android get massive distribution, is launching its own app store. Amazon is planning to launch one as well, and there are doubtless more to come. And while these new App Stores seem like they could confuse users, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made the company’s stance very clear: he says that multiple Android app markets are a “net win for everybody”.

The issue came up during Google’s earnings conference call, when an analyst asked what Google thought about these new app markets that are popping up. Here’s Schmidt’s answer (we were transcribing from a live call so it is a bit paraphrased):

The goal of the stores is to make money for people writing the applications, not a revenue goal for Google. There will certainly be multiple stores – including a key one from us. It’s a net win for everybody.

This jives with Google’s messaging around other Android issues: competition is good, and the market will decide what works and what doesn’t. In the long run, I think they’re right, but in the short term this could spell frustration: what happens when an app store demands exclusivity from a developer? And how will a user react when they can’t use the same payment mechanism from store to store, or the pricing and availability differs? Consumers may be used to having to shop around in the real world, but this is a totally different paradigm from what’s been established on smart phones for the last two years.

Yes, according to multiple reports and our own experience (see left) Yahoo.com, the Internet’s biggest portal is currently down for the count, both in the US and abroad. Maybe the traffic behemoth couldn’t take all the “merging with AOL” speculation and just decided to take the day off?

From what it looks like Yahoo! subsites like mail.yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com are still up. The “Connection Refused” problem seems only be affecting Yahoo.com itself.

This is indicative of some serious issues as, in contrast to more mercurial services like Twitter, I’ve never seen the Yahoo homepage itself go down in my lifetime. And I am not alone, according to a former Yahoo employee commenting on Hacker News:

“This has to be Yahoo! Frontpage’s first downtime in over a decade. I know we’re not supposed to be posting articles about sites being down but: wow. I worked at Yahoo, and I firmly believed that it was literally impossible, at the architectural level, for frontpage to be unavailable.”

This outage also comes at completely the wrong time as the much beleagured Yahoo is rumored to be in buyout talks.

I have contacted Yahoo for more information and and they have confirmed that it is just the homepage and that they’re working on a fix. Comment

Update: It’s back up!

From Yahoo:

"For a brief period this afternoon, Yahoo.com was inaccessible to some users. We have identified the issue and are working to correct it immediately. We know that this may have caused some inconvenience and we apologize to our users who might have been affected."

GOGII’s free text group text messaging service textPlus today announces its first direct carrier partnership with Metro PCS Communications Inc.

Currently the textPlus app allows you to send text messages for free to any number using the in-app advertising. In this next iteration the service will be available separate from an app and not just piggy backing but directly integrated into a product.

Metro PCS is a European style pre-paid carrier and the above textPlus arrangement is specific to $45 and $65 service plans. Participating users can send the message “!chat” to the 60611 short code, enter in their contacts and let the free texting begin.

Launched in June 2009 as an alternative to costly carrier provided messaging, textPlus now boasts over 9 million downloads, in a network that reaches 24 million people and over 3.5 billion messages sent.

Funded by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers to the tune of $13.3 million, GOGII is currently available on the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android phone. When asked what its future plans for carrier partnerships beyond Metro PCS are, textPlus’ Director of Community Drew Olanoff could not give me any specifics responding.

“Our goal has always been to have a relationship with the carriers.  We find that working along with them results in happier customers. Unlike some of the folks doing similar things, we prefer to go through the front door.”

Google did something pretty interesting during their Q3 earnings call today: they gave some actual break-out numbers. Google CFO Patrick Pichette noted that this isn’t something Google has done before, nor do they plan to do it in the future, but he wanted SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg to share three big numbers that Google is particularly proud of. So what are the three numbers?

Display ad run rates, YouTube monetizable views, and mobile revenues. All three numbers are in the billions, Rosenberg noted.

Rosenberg brought up the fact that people keep asking what the next billion-dollar business is for Google. “It’s display and it’s already here,” he said. Google is looking at a $2.5 billion run rate for non-text display ads, he specifically said.

He then moved on to YouTube. The world’s largest online video platform is now monetizing 2 billion views per week, Rosenberg said. For some perspective, there are about 2 billion total views per day through the service. This monetization rate is up 50 percent year-over-year. These numbers have been previously reported.

The final number that Rosenberg wanted to share was one billion. As in, the annualized run rate on mobile for Google is now one billion dollars. “It’s the future of search on the Internet,” Rosenberg said. He said that mobile search queries have grown five times over the past couple of years. And recently Android is fueling this.

And finally: “All of these businesses are growing,” Rosenberg concluded with. Obviously, this is all in response to the growing concern that Google is a one-trick pony when it comes to making money (text-based ads). That’s already not the case, is Google’s perspective.

Moments ago on its earnings call, Google took an opportunity to talk about the success of its latest products. The first in line: Google Instant, the totally revamped search interface that Google launched last month, which displays search results as soon as you begin typing (rather than requiring the user to hit ‘enter’ or click the search button).

At the time of the launch, there was much speculation on what impact Instant would have on Google’s bottom line — was it designed to boost the number of ads displayed? Well, now we have an answer: Jonathan Rosenberg , SVP Product Management at Google, said on the call that “from a revenue standpoint impact [of Google Instant] has been minimal.” He added that it’s also expensive from a resource standpoint. They launched it, he says, “because it’s so much better”. As evidence of this, Rosenberg said that according to Google’s data, the more people use Google Instant, the more they like it.

Rosenberg then launched into some stats around AdWords to prove that Google does in fact care about money. But, for now at least, Google says Instant is all about the user experience, and not the bottom line.