Cloud-based storage and sharing application Box.net is making a big data storage upgrade to its free and paid plans today. The company is increasing the data storage amounts for its personal, business, and enterprise plans.

Box’s personal subscription plans now come with 5GB of free web storage. Box’s business plan is being adjusted slightly so that companies don’t pay by the individual user (businesses were given 15GB per users previously). Now businesses will automatically receive 500GB of data storage, tripling the amount of storage the average business subscriber has access to. Enterprise customers will have access to an unlimited amount of data storage,, says Box.net’s CEO Aaron Levie, allowing companies to manage terabytes of data in the cloud (Box charges enterprise customers $35 per user per month).

To accommodate these changes, Box has built two enterprise-grade data centers, and received SAS 70 Type II certification. According to the company more than 60,000 businesses including Hawaiian Airlines, T-Mobile and ABC News use Box as a data repository. Levie’s vision in the future is that businesses and individuals will never have to worry about data storage, and Box will be the go-to platform to access what he calls the “Infinite Cloud.”

Box, which raised $15 million in new funding earlier this year, has seen steady growth for a startup that is competing with the likes of Microsoft Sharepoint. Since its launch in 2005, Box.net has accumulated more than 4 million users, with hundreds of thousands of businesses using the application. Last year, the startup increased revenue by 500% and is seeing an increase in sales this year as well thanks to deals with the Oprah Winfrey Network, Volvo, and Nokia Siemens.

The startup has also spent the past year consistently launching new features and products, including a file syncing feature, an Android app, HTML5 functionality and more.

We’re just about two weeks away from the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops, and besides the fact that it’s yet another Call of Duty game (which usually means a decent multi-player mode, and a campaign of varying quality), there’s not a whole lot of "heat" surrounding it. Yes, it’s setting all sorts of pre-order records, and the critical reaction is already largely positive (PSM3 magazine calls it "2010′s top shooter" in its December issue), but there’s no real, I don’t know, excitement surrounding it. That’s my perception, at least. Could it be that Medal of Honor, with its Taliban-infused multi-player, has already exhausted this country’s supply of outrage?

If I were a betting man, I’d bet on LinkedIn going public some time in 2011. But I’m not, so I’ll just share with you that the social networking service provider has been significantly beefing up its board of directors this year.

Case in point: this morning, LinkedIn announced the appointment of its seventh board member, Stan Meresman. We’ll forgive you if that name doesn’t ring any bells with you immediately, but suffice to say this is a man with heaps of experience serving on boards of and advising public tech companies under his belt.

In addition to LinkedIn, Meresman is a board member at Riverbed Technology, Meru Networks and HyTrust. Previously, Meresman served on the boards of directors at Polycom, VMware, Starfish Software and Lightsurf, as well as an advisor to Silicon Image, Inktomi and Real Networks.

Meresman also has management experience, having served as SVP and CFO of Silicon Graphics from 1989 to 1997, before shifting his attention to investing.

LinkedIn in a statement says it decided to expand its board for the third time this year as its membership and operations continue to scale globally – it now boasts 80 million members around the world – and as a way to “position itself for long-term growth”.

And readying a public offering in the next 12 months, I’d wager.

Last May, LinkedIn added Netflix CMO Leslie Kilgore to its board, and a month later expanded it again with the appointment of former Ask.com CEO George “Skip” Battle.

Meresman marks the third outsider to join the IPO candidate’s board of directors in a matter of months.

The four others are founder and former CEO Reid Hoffman, current CEO Jeff Weiner, Greylock’s David Sze and Sequoia’s Marc Kvamme.

After much hullabaloo, Google and the Federal Trade Commission have kissed and made up. This, only a few days after Google admitted to "accidentally" collecting people’s private data with its Street View cars. Google had promised, in so many words, that it would never do that (collect people’s private data) again, a promise that satisfied the FTC. And, scene.

Y Combinator-backed startup ReadyForZero is announcing a $260,000 seed round of funding from a number of well-known angel investors including Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube; Dave McClure, Benjamin Ling, Nils Johnson, and Maneesh Arora.

Launched in private beta in September, ReadyForZero is an easy to use web-based platform to help guide consumers out of credit card debt. ReadyForZero is trying to help those consumers who are having trouble paying their debt off, as opposed to those who are already in collections or bankruptcy. Essentially the site is trying to help people be able to eventually not carry any balances month to month. The company says that in the US alone there are 100 million people with revolving balances, meaning they carry credit card debt from month to month. Combined they owe $900 billion to banks and credit card companies.

You import your credit card information, including what types of cards you have, the amount owed, and the startup will then walk you through the same steps a trusted financial advisor would give you. Based on your minimum payments, salary and balance, ReadyForZero will figures out an optimal strategy for what to pay and when. The site will also send you reminders and you can track your progress online. While you cannot actually pay your bills directly from ReadyForZero, the startup will eventually allow users to do this directly from the site. Currently in private beta, the startup will use the funds to help launch to the public early next year.

The idea behind ReadyForZero is no doubt a noble cause that wants to add legitimacy to a notoriously shady industry. And credit card debt is certainly an issue that’s relevant to the current economic conditions.

As a side note, the startup’s co-founder and ex-Googler, Ignacio Thayer is behind the parody video on fundraising, “Stupid Questions VCs Ask.”

With more than four million users, Mint’s personal finance platform no doubt has a massive amount of data that it can mine regarding consumer’s spending habits. In fact, the site already uses some of this data to show seasonal trends. Today, the Intuit owned company is launching its realtime customer data insights to the public, after soft launching the product almost two months ago.

Mint Data aggregates anonymous spending data from Mint’s users to give you realtime insight on what people are spending on across the country. For example, the platform lists the most popular restaurants in San Francisco (by visits), the top shopping spots in New York City (by highest average spend), and the highest spending cities in the U.S.

Mint Data will also show spending data both by average purchase price and by popularity, which is defined by number of transactions per month. The rankings can be viewed by category, such as "food and dining," by specific business, and broken down to the city level. For example, Mint Data shows that the average spend at a Starbucks in New York City is $5.38. The site also compares this to the average spend at coffee shops overall, which is slightly higher.

In terms of actual regional data, you can choose from 300 cities in the U.S. to compare spending. And Mint.com users can compare their own personal finance and spending habits by category or merchant against averages in their area, or against the national average.

As a consumer product, this data is pretty fascinating, and a great way to get a little more insight as to how your spending stacks up against the rest of the consumers in your city or at a particular store. I can imagine that that some of this data could be mined even deeper to compare demographics and spending.

Milo, a startup that highlights local inventory at brick and mortar stores in product search results, is taking its platform mobile today with the release of a free Android app. Milo.com tracks the real-time availability and prices of more than 3 million products at over 50,000 stores across the U.S., including Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, Crate & Barrel and more.

Using the Android’s phone geolocation, the app will identify a user’s location and return realtime results for a product’s availability at stores in the area. Users will also be able to access where stores are located and how the price compares to other stores in a given area. So if I searched for a juicer in Palo Alto, Milo would return availability of the device at the stores nearby, including Target, Macy’s and Crate & Barrel. The app will also give me driving directions to local stores.

While Milo does have a HTML5 optimized site for smartphones, this is the first native app launched by he startup. In all honestly, I think that Milo’s service could even become more popular on mobile phones than on the web. The idea that I can simply look up a product’s local availability on the go or even while I’m at a competitor’s store is incredibly appealing.

And it’s no coincidence that Milo is launching as the holiday shopping season ramps up for the year. Milo co-founder Jack Abraham tells me that he expects the app to immensely popular amongst users, especially as consumers use the app for price comparisons on the go.

Abraham says that a similar app for the iPhone will also be released shortly. As to why he launched on Android first, he said that the process of developing an app for the Android platform was simply easier.

Of course, there’s also another factor to consider for Milo’s move to publish on Android first. Google recently launched a similar feature, called Blue Dot, on the mobile version of Google Product Search, Similar to Milo, Blue Dot allows users within search to see if a product is in-stock at nearby stores. But as Milo countered, Google doesn’t have the inventory reach that Milo has. Milo also recently launched a deal with comparison shopping site Pricegrabber to show local inventory in search results.

Earlier this year, Forrester reported that the "online research, offline buying" consumer market represents $917 billion in consumer spending, which was 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales at that time. This market is significant and if Milo can develop a loyal userbase on its mobile apps, it can grab a piece of a pretty big pie.

Google TV, more an internal project than a real business unit, has been moved under YouTube manager Salar Kamangar. This means little in terms of real change to the platform but it will give Google TV, thus far plagued with refusals by many content providers to allow streaming over the device, a bit more leverage with stations and studios.

Read more…

Cybersecurity solutions provider Endgame Systems has raised a whopping $29 million in first-round funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and TechOperators. Coinciding with the financing announcement, the company is today releasing ipTrust, a cloud-based botnet and malware detection service.

Sometimes it feels that the likes of Brightcove and Ooyala, and their myriad competitors, are something of a hammer to crack a nut in the world of enterprise video platforms. To small and medium sized firms these players can appear pretty expensive and complex in their pricing, so smaller businesses often grudgingly revert to cheap or free consumer platforms like YouTube where the the constraints don’t suit enterprises. It’s a little like the days when online publishing was ruled by CMS systems like Interwoven, before platforms like Typepad and WordPress came along. So a new video platform launches today with the aim of bringing a simpler, all-you-can-eat pricing and service package which could well attract a lot of firms.

The 23Video startup has come up with it’s own technology platform to allow companies to create a full, out-of-the-box video site, mapped to your own domain, with a branded videoplayer for $675 a month, which includes 1 Terabyte of traffic (equivalent to an average of 160,000 videos a month). Extra traffic is $250 per TB. While Ooyala offers a $500/month package, you need to contact their sales people. And the same sales process happens over at Brightcove, where your $99 / mo will get you just 50 Videos and 40 GB of bandwidth. With 23Video you can get up and running with a credit card.

Something is definitely up at uber nerd site and “Directory of Wonderful Things” BoingBoing.net. A trip to the front page brings up the charming image above, which seems to be some sort of vulgar message from someone called “the|one” to site editor Cory Doctorow. The hack also ingeniously incorporates the “Jessi Slaughter ‘You Dun Goofed’” viral video.

Diehard fans have found a workaround URL for now. And the official BoingBoing Twitter account seems to have a sense of humor about it, tweeting stuff like “So much for the 100,000 Hours Without a Hack T-shirts,” “Someone’s gonna get a subpoenis… I mean a subpoena” and “Look, at least it’s not the new Gap logo.”

Update: The hack has been taken down and the site is back up. TechCrunch reader Machika Kuro informs us that this was most likely a SQL injection attack.

Via Mark Frauenfelder

We’ve learned that former Digger and teen entrepreneur Brian Wong has just wrapped up a $300K angel round for his mobile gaming ad startup Kiip. You first read about Wong when our own Mike Arrington wrote about the 19 year old being the youngest founder to ever receive venture investment.

Now Wong has racked up a laundry list of investors from big brands including True Ventures, SimpleGeo CTO Joe Stump (in his first angel investment), CMO Rohan Oza of Vitamin Water, PopChips CEO Keith Belling, Doug Chertok and Paige Craig in a round of funding conspicuously bereft of the usual Super Angel suspects.

Along with the financing, Wong is announcing that Kiip is bringing on former Digger Courtney Guertin as co-founder and CTO and Amadeus Demarzi as co-founder and design director. Wong plans on using the newfound cash for further hiring and distribution partnerships and Kiip will be rolling out in alpha in the coming months, with a public launch date in January.

Wong says that Kiip (prounounced “Keep” as in “Keep me”) will attempt to move “beyond the banner ad” and leverage in game elements without compromising game play; “We’re doing the first catered ad product for the mobile games space, beyond the virtual goods and virtual currency folks [who are] potentially our main competitors.”

It looks like Kiip might be stiff competition. The startup, still in stealth, has already wrangled five game publisher partnerships (Wong would not disclose which ones) and currently boasts an audience of over 2 million active users monthly.

When can you really declare your game a smash hit? When it cracks through 10 million downloads? Eh. When you’ve got a full line of plush toys coming based on its characters? Sure, I guess that’s alright. But here’s the real challenge: dig your game deep enough into the hearts and minds of your fans that you’ve got people dressing up like the characters for Halloween.

With that in mind: Congratulations, Angry Birds. You’ve (sling)shot your way into a VIP area generally reserved for the likes of Master Chief, Mario, Samus, and other gaming legends. That’s right: you’ve got cosplayers.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Yesterday, both the New York Times and Robert Scoble unveiled publicly for the first time what a company called Kiha Software has been working on for about three years in stealth now: a piece of software called Aro Mobile. With $20 million in backing from the likes of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, they’re obviously getting a lot of buzz. And that should continue when they fully show the system off in a few weeks at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. But for now we have a video sneak peak of it in action, and 1,000 exclusive beta invites for TechCrunch readers to try out the software themselves.

So what is Aro? Currently, it’s a piece of software that runs on top of Google’s mobile Android OS. But it’s not just another layer like some of those awful skins that OEMs design for Android. Instead, it weaves itself into the OS and uses AI and machine intelligence to make sense of what you’re doing with your phone. It natively ties into your email, phone, calendar, address book, and browser to make them potentially much more useful to you when you’re on the go.

Maybe someone sent you an email mentioning an address, the Aro system can recognize that and with the click of a button give you all kinds of actions you can do with it. The same is true with names — of both people and companies. And dozens of other things.

But it really is one of those things that’s better when you see it in action. So watch the videos below. And if you’re interested in signing up to test it out, use this link. The first 1,000 people who do will get priority access to the beta program (though it is still rolling out in waves as they ramp up).

Like other hot startups there is a healthy secondary market ecosystem for Twitter stock. The current street value of a share of any series of Twitter stock? At least $7 per share, say multiple sources with knowledge of transactions. With 225 million shares outstanding after a three for one stock split earlier this year, that’s a $1.575 billion valuation.

There aren’t nearly as many early Twitter employees with sizable amounts of stock to sell compared to Facebook, but the demand is there for those that are in the market. There are even a few funds that have been created with the sole purpose of buying stock from Twitter employees and investors, and the Twitter board of directors generally doesn’t interfere by exercising its right of first refusal.

The $7/share valuation is generally considered the “fair” price for larger transactions of at least $1 million. Smaller transactions, which can attract a more robust number of potential buyers, are sometimes closing at higher valuations, we’ve heard.

Twitter was last officially valued at $1.1 billion post money when it raised $100 million late last year. The company is still effectively revenue-free.

Sencha is making a big bet on HTML5. The company, which was formerly known as Ext JS, raised a hefty $14 million round led by Sequoia Capital in June.  Since then it has been perfecting its HTML5 framework Sencha Touch — a framework that lets you build mobile web apps for iOS and Android that feel almost native and are also cross-platform. And today, the company is adding another big addition to its product suite: Sencha Animator.

If you’ve used Flash before, Animator should be fairly easy to pick up. It’s a tool for creating CSS3-based animations that will work on WebKit browsers — drag a few objects and images onto the screen, set up some keyframes, and you should be off and running. And, unlike Flash, these animations will work on iOS devices (and Android, BlackBerry, and anything else that supports WebKit). Here’s how the company is describing the product:

Sencha Animator allows you simply place objects (text, shapes, and images) onto a re-sizable stage area, configure their properties and then animate to bring them to life. You can move, scale, skew and rotate objects singly or at various levels of nesting, in 2D or 3D space. With Sencha Animator, you can also take advantage of CSS3 capabilities like gradients, blurs, reflections and shadows. You can create basic animations quickly and easily. But Animator is also designed to be a CSS3 power-tool. So when you need to add HTML or custom CSS, it's easy to do that too. Best of all, Sencha Animator outputs pure CSS3 animation code, so it's hardware accelerated on Apple iOS, which creates incredibly smooth animations. This also means it's ready to work with any JavaScript library, not just Sencha.

The application is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s still rough around the edges — this is a beta release, and additional features, like a gradient maker, are still in the works. It also doesn’t support some major browsers like Firefox yet (Sencha says that Firefox hasn’t implemented support for CSS3 keyframes). You can see some demos of HTML/CSS-based animations at the bottom of this page.

Sencha will be selling a standard version of Animator for a price in the “low hundreds of dollars” for each user. This also obviously has a big appeal to advertisers — Sencha will be offering a version with additional functionality specifically for them.

Sencha isn’t the only company building HTML5/CSS3 based tools. Adobe is also hard at work on its own products, including a HTML5-editing tool called Edge (which hasn’t been released  yet). In the advertising space, Sprout offers Advine, a tool for authoring ad creative that supports both HTML5 and Flash.

This morning Pinterest co-founders Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Yashwanth Nelapati woke up to a barrage of tweets, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators. [sic]“ Myspace revealed its new redesign last night and Pinterest users quickly picked up on the similarities between the two site aesthetics, leading to an intense Twitter debate.

The offsite grid layout used by both Myspace and Pinterest is nothing new; Lazyfeed, http://enjoysthin.gs and countless other sites have a similar design (there’s even a Tumblr theme). But the fact that former Myspace Director of Technology Dave Peck emailed Pinterest back in March asking for an advance invite is interesting, especially when you read the email.

Founder Silberman told TechCrunch, “The Myspace product team joined our site really early and so I’m sure they took inspiration from it. Our impression was that they took some information and we were touched that our users were vocal about it.”

However, Silberman who retweeted the accusations from the official Pinterest account this morning, emphasized, “I wouldn’t go as far as saying they ripped it off. They’re probably in tune with organizing friends around interests after they missed the boat on friends,” referring to how you can now use Myspace to follow Topics pages.

Pinterest is still invite only and is currently seeking funding. Despite being in stealth mode, the social cataloguing startup has 17,000 users and is about to experience its one millionth “pin.” Silberman plans on launching in a couple of months, encouraged by all the user support today, “It’s cool when you’re a small company and your users stick up for you.”

Myspace had 90 million users this September according to comScore, marking a 18% drop from last year. This recent design and concept overhaul was an attempt to win back some of the traffic lost to competitors like Facebook.

Myspace screencap via The Guardian

Earlier today, Apple’s 10-K form was released for their 2010 fiscal year. The long document is full of tidbits about the state of Apple’s business. One thing of note is just how much Apple ramped up their advertising spending in 2010.

For 2010, the company’s advertising costs were $691 million. That’s up from $501 million last year. And it’s the first huge jump for Apple in recent years. In 2008, for example, they spent $486 million. And in 2007, they spent $467 million. In other words, in previous years, the ramp up in ad spending has been about $15 to $20 million. This past year? A $190 million jump.

But what’s pretty incredible is that even despite this huge ramp up, Apple continues their trend of lowering the percentage of revenues they spend on advertising. While the spend was $691 million this year, total revenues were over $65 billion, so Apple only spent about 1 percent of their revenue on this. Last year, that percentage was 1.37. In 2001, it was 5 percent.

So even though Apple is ramping up ad spending, they’re bringing in money much quicker so the overall percentage of money they’re spending keeps getting less and less.

And while $691 million may seem like a massive amount of money, it’s still less than half of what Microsoft spent on advertising last year. And it’s less than what Dell spent last year.

So what did Apple spend that extra $200 million on? They don’t break it down, but you can bet a bunch was their new category: iPad. And those great Don Draper-like iPhone 4 ads.

[image: AMC]

It’s very apparent within seconds of sitting in the 2011 Ford Edge Sport that it’s different. It feels like the future. There are two LCD screens flanking a lovely analog speedometer, flush mounted inductive-type controls on the center stack and of course, a large infotainment screen. It’s like a car from the future! (It’s not)

Inside is the latest generation of Ford’s in-vehicle system. Dubbed MyFord Touch, it’s reach and capabilities are unlike nearly anything else in the same price range. But this system isn’t just stuck in the center stack, tasked with the job of controlling the climate and radio. The MyFord Touch is also in the dash cluster in the form of two LCD screens. This is where it gets interesting and validates its place in Ford’s future.

Yahoo has hired Ross Levinsohn, the former President of Fox Interactive Media, as EVP America’s Region, we’ve confirmed. AllThingsD first broke the news that he was close to taking the job.

Levinsohn will replace Hillary Schneider. Yahoo announced Schneider’s departure last month.

Levinsohn will take control of Yahoo’s Americas business, including content, advertising and partnerships. Some 2,000 employees will report into his organization.

This is also the first high profile executive hire at Yahoo since bringing in Chief Product Officer Blake Irving earlier this year.

Levinsohn is currently a partner at Fuse Capital, a venture firm with ties to Best Buy. Levinsohn’s former partner at Fuse Capital, Jonathan Miller, now runs News Corp.’s digital business, effectively the same position Levinsohn held.

While at Fox Interactive Media Levinsohn oversaw the $580 million acquisition of MySpace as well as the nearly $1 billion advertising deal with Google.

Many of his previous employees have gone on to do interesting things. Adam Bain is now President, Revenue at Twitter. And Heather Harde, our CEO, ran M&A for Levinsohn.

And for once, we have nothing negative to report about Yahoo.

You can watch an interview with Levinsohn by Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch50 last year here, and we’ve embedded it below.

At the beginning of this year, I was very excited. You see, at Google’s launch event for the Nexus One, they made one thing clear: they were going directly after the dominating carrier lock-in model that had held everyone in the U.S. captive for years. Then Google chickened out. And things are now getting just as bad as they have ever been. Unless Apple has the cojones to do what Google wouldn’t, that is.

To be clear, the report today from GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham isn’t about the U.S. She notes that Apple is working alongside SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto to make a built-in hardware SIM card that could work with many carriers across Europe. Essentially, this would allow customers to jump from carrier to carrier as a better deal came along or as they were traveling without having to swap SIM cards.

The thing is, in many European countries, this already isn’t nearly the problem that it is in the U.S. because the market is much more competitive. But here’s the key to all of this from Higginbotham:

Then customers will then be able to choose their carrier at purchase at the Apple web site or retail store, or buy the phone and get their handset up and running through a download at the App Store as opposed to visiting a carrier store or calling the carrier.

Sound familiar?

That’s almost exactly what Google’s plan was to sell the Nexus One originally. They created a web store where customers could pick their phone, their carrier, and a plan. Of course, at launch, Google only had the Nexus One with T-Mobile on board. But they noted that soon other carriers like Sprint and Verizon would be on board as well. That never happened.

It’s true that the Nexus One wasn’t selling well that way. But the reality is because it was the carriers’ fault. Google’s original plan was to sell the Nexus One for $99, unlocked, on their website, we’ve heard. Let me repeat that: $99. Unlocked. But when they ran this idea by the carriers (which they had to work with because they control the networks they need, remember) they were told to go to hell.

And so what we got was a Nexus One that you could either buy unlocked for several hundreds of dollars — which basically no one did. Or a carrier-subsidized one. Just like the good-old days.

When the Nexus One didn’t sell well on their site, the other carrier partners bailed on the Nexus One altogether (undoubtedly patting themselves on the back as they did). And Google stopped selling it to consumers. In other words, the entire idea blew up in Google’s face.

They should have stuck to their guns, sold the Nexus One as they wanted to. And told the carriers to screw themselves. Of course, had they done that, Google wouldn’t have had the buddy-buddy relationship with carriers that they now enjoy. That gamble could have risked the success of Android. And Google wasn’t willing to go there. It was a smart business maneuver, but it sucks for us, the consumers.

Enter Apple.

The company has proven time and time again that they don’t care who they piss off in order to push their own agenda forward. That agenda includes creating the best consumer experience possible. A big part of that in the cellphone business would be allowing customers to buy a phone and pick carriers based on who has the best deals/options.

Obviously, that hasn’t been the case with Apple in the U.S. as they’ve been tied exclusively to one carrier, AT&T. But that’s about to change. And that time spent with AT&T wasn’t a total waste. They’ve been able to build themselves from literally nothing into a force to be reckoned with in the mobile space. The iPhone is now by far Apple’s largest source of revenue. And customers from all of the other carriers are demanding the phone come to their network.

Now Apple is in position to make a move. But the main problem in the U.S. is that the carriers run on networks powered by different technologies. That’s not the case in Europe, so it makes sense to start there with this carrier-killing SIM, while the U.S. transitions to the much more universal LTE technologies that are forthcoming.

And let’s not forget a huge part of this equation. Apple, unlike Google, runs their own retail stores. Hundreds of them. Around the world. Does anyone doubt that the iPhone would still be a massive success if it was only sold through their stores and website? If they do, they’re foolish.

So Apple can absolutely do what Google couldn’t/wouldn’t. The question is, would they really be willing to possibly alienate their carrier partners by screwing them over? Again, the iPhone is Apple’s biggest business, but that’s largely thanks to the subsidies the carriers pay them. Could Apple risk that?

It looks like we may find out shortly.

[photo: flickr/protohiro]

CRM and cloud giant Salesforce.com is shelling out $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan, from VC firm SunBridge and other stockholders. The subsidiary was formed in 2000 as a joint venture between Salesforce and SunBridge. Until now, Salesforce has the majority control (with 73 percent) but is purchasing all outstanding shares from the VC firm and other stockholders. Salesforce says the joint venture agreement has subsequently been terminated with the acquisition.

It appears that the reasoning behind the move is financial. Salesforce says that Jaapan is the largest revenue contributor in Asia Pacific for Salesforce, and “acquiring full ownership in Salesforce Japan allows Salesforce.com to further benefit from the growth in the Japanese cloud computing market and integrate and align its financial and operational functions.” In the first half of 2010, Asia Pacific sales accounted for 14 percent of Salesforce.com's revenue, which is an 11 percent increase from the same period in 2009.

A few weeks ago, Salesforce announced that it would be adding a new data center in Tokyo to support a growing customer base in Japan. Clearly the company sees the country as a valuable revenue stream and counts Japan-based Canon and Fujitsu as customers.

Since the Yankees are not in the World Series this year, my allegiance shifts to the San Francisco Giants. And, yes, while I may be a fair-weather baseball friend, I am willing to go to bat for my new favorite team, at least through this series. What better way to show my support than to “beardify” my Facebook photo with the Brian Wilson Beardifier app? (You can become a fan of his beard on Facebook too).

Brian Wilson is the Giants relief pitcher with the 95 mph fastball and pitch-black beard. He intimidates his opponents, who have learned to “fear the beard.”

And now you can intimidate all your friends by spreading the fear and Brian Wilson’s beard on Facebook. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take over your profile pic for every status update, unless you upload it as your new pic. It’s not quite the same as turning your Twitter avatar green last year to support democracy in Iran, but it is probably just as effective.

Americans exporting renewable energy resources to the Middle East? It’s not opposite day.

A Mountainview, Calif. company, SolFocus, announced a deal with a major construction company in Saudi Arabia— Advanced Vision Electro Mechanical Company (a.k.a. Vision) — that is building a new, commercial solar power plant in Bahra.

The plant will be the first in Saudi Arabia to use concentrator photovoltaic solar power systems, or CPVs according to a joint press release from SolFocus and Vision. In general, CPV systems consist of solar cells and optics that concentrate sunlight onto the cells increasing their power output and, in the end, decreasing the cost of solar-generated electricity in sunny, dry environments.

SolFocus sells warranty-backed, concentrator photovoltaic solar systems that it manufactures primarily in Mesa, Arizona. To date, SolFocus has raised $143 million in venture funding.

The new solar power plant in Bahra employing SolFocus technology will deliver around 300 megawatt hours of solar energy per year, representing a 132 kilowatt nameplate capacity.

Saudi Arabia is the world's largest producer and exporter of total petroleum liquids according to theU.S. Energy Information Administration.

At the 2009 United Nations’ Summit on Climate Change, Saudi Arabia’s negotiator Mohammed Al-Sabban expressed disbelief that global warming is caused or accelerated by humans, and was concerned about the likely economic impact to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) if others reduce their use of oil.

Still viewed as an obstructionist by global sustainability advocates, Saudi Arabia began investing in renewable energy recently. Why would the OPEC leader warm up to solar? First, the region gets a lot of sun.

Co-founder and chief of technology at SolFocus, Steve Horne, also explained on Wednesday:

“The Saudi king has recognized climate change, and wants to reduce the carbon footprint of the country. A significant percentage of the oil that's extracted from Saudi Arabia is used internally. That's what they'll be able to offset by using renewable energy. The king is interested in exporting renewable energy as well. There is a process of putting together a transmission line that runs up the east coast towards Kuwait, now. The king has a long-term vision for the country as a generator of renewable energy.”

Mark Crowley, chief executive officer of SolFocus said in a press statement:

"The high sun conditions of the Middle East provide an ideal environment for reaping large-scale, low-cost solar energy from CPV systems. Together [we] will bring the world's most efficient and resource-friendly solar technology to Saudi Arabia, providing energy diversification for the country."

The project developers, Vision, will also build and install additional solar power plants within the research centers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and throughout Saudi Arabia.

Hassan Chahine, general manager at Vision said in a press statement: "This is a breakthrough in Saudi Arabia's thrust for energy diversification. We believe the Bahra plant will serve as a model for the further research and study of clean water and power solutions that diversify the region's energy mix."

Many sellers on sites like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon have created profitable small businesses out of opening up online storefronts on these e-commerce platforms. But these storefronts aren’t conventionally considered small businesses by the financial community and it can be difficult for them to raise working capital from banks. Kabbage is entering the space as a way for online merchants and sellers on eBay and Amazon to get capital they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for at a bank.

Kabbage uses technology to analyze online merchants’ sales and credit history; customer traffic and reviews; and prices and inventory compared to competitors. Via PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API, Kabbage will make cash advances available to eBay and other online marketplace sellers fairly quickly (Kabbage says that many transactions take as little has ten minutes).

Kabbage makes money off of fees charged to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the capital (6 month maximum) and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from 6 percent to 16 percent of the original advance amount.

While the startup only supports eBay for now, Kabbage, which has raised $2 million in funding, plans to extend its services to Amazon and Etsy sellers in the near future. It actually seems like a pretty good idea, that is, as long as sellers continue to pay Kabbage back.