Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.

That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion.

We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.

I've written a lot about America's flawed immigration policies: how the unavailability of permanent-resident visas and the growing xenophobia in the U.S., combined with expanding economic opportunities abroad, are causing a reverse brain drain. Skilled immigrants are returning home to countries like China and India in record numbers. America's leaders are accelerating the trend by pandering to uninformed and misguided segments of their electorate who demand that the country close its doors for fear that foreigners will take their jobs away.

The result is that America is giving an unintended gift to countries like China and India, where returnees are teaching locals how to build world-class companies and how to innovate. In almost every high-growth tech company in China, you find returnees in senior management positions. The New York Times reported that it’s the same in scientific research—top research labs have returnees in lead positions, which may give China the edge it has desperately been seeking. China is a long way from challenging America in innovation ability, and if it does make some breakthroughs in cleantech, health care, and science, this is not a bad thing. As I concluded in this piece about China’s entrepreneurship boom, we benefit from innovation no matter where it happens. The problem is that the American economy is stagnant and we’re exporting the people who can help boost it.  And we are creating long-term competition for our tech industry.

On my trip to Beijing, last week, what surprised me most was the number of Stanford grads that I met and how they had no regrets about leaving the U.S.—and no plan to return.

I can understand why so many international students return home from regions of the U.S. that don’t welcome foreigners—these cities always have fewer tech startups and thus fewer jobs. But Silicon Valley is the most open, inclusive place in the world and pays premium salaries to top engineering talent, especially from Stanford. And immigrants thrive in the Valley: they start 52% of its startups.

So why are the Stanford grads leaving? I asked five of them to tell their own stories.

Canada-born Robert Hsiung graduated from Stanford in 2008 and received several lucrative job offers in Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Hong Kong. But he saw far more opportunity in Beijing. He knew that Chinese Internet users were maturing quickly and that the middle class was growing rapidly.  His expectation was that they would demand social networks that provide more privacy than Facebook. So he went to China to start OneCircle.cc. After a successful exit, he is starting his next venture, FoxFly, a mobile platform that makes it easy to create private groups with which to share messages, photos, and “private” comments on content from Facebook and other social networks.

Robert says that he would not even consider going back to the U.S. He may visit the Valley for a short time to expose himself to the latest technology and business models being developed there. But, with Twitter, Techcrunch, and his China Stanford network, there really is no reason to return: his costs are ten times lower; market significantly larger; and funding more abundant, in China.

Lu Dong decided he wanted to be in China in 2004, after he completed his Stanford MBA. But he was nervous because he feared that he would face hurdles from corrupt government bureaucrats, and be at a disadvantage because his father wasn't a high-ranking government official.  He chose to start an Internet business because this would provide him with a ‘clean’ environment—where he could just deal with consumers on the web and not have to deal with business licenses or government regulations.

He started a firm called Beyond Tailors that sold made-to-order clothing, and La Miu—now the Victoria's Secret of China and China’s biggest online lingerie seller. It is growing at 300% per year, is negotiating VC financing to help it grow to a billion-dollar business, and expects to go public in two to three years.

Lu has no thoughts of coming back to the U.S. He says that China is far too exciting.

Joe Chen returned to China in 2002 to start Oak Pacific Interactive. This has become one of China's leading internet firms. It properties include the Facebook of China, Renren.com (formerly Xiaonei.com), Mop.com—one of China's largest online forums, and Nuomi.com, a group purchasing website. Joe sees at least a decade of phenomenal growth ahead for the Chinese internet market.

He believes that is a historic period of time for China to regaining its long-lost leadership in the world economy and affairs. And that "any Chinese with a passion for entrepreneurship, the right skills, and love for their motherland would jump at the first opportunity to relocate back to China". Settling down back home wasn't easy for Joe at first.  There was minor culture shock which resulted from many years of absence from China.  But the economic opportunities were endless. He found abundant risk capital willing to fund start-ups, and extensive support from all levels of government.

Stanford computer science graduate Jonathan Lin was born, raised, and educated in the U.S. and didn't have any ties to China.  But during a visit to China in 2002, he was struck by the hunger and the optimism of the local entrepreneurs and netizens.  He came to the conclusion that while an Internet company in the US could make peoples' lives more efficient and interesting, a company in China would better peoples' in more fundamental ways.

So he went back to China after completing his Harvard MBA in 2005 and started the Chinese SlideShare, DocIn, in 2007.  This site has millions of daily users, of all sorts—from college students to rural residents. Jonathan says this has the societal effect that he hoped, and plans to continue staying in China to build his dreams.

Amy Gu, started thinking of trying something in the Internet space in China as soon as she graduated from Stanford in 2009. She, and a number of students at the business school, prototyped a trading website similar to kaching.com. She returned to China in June 2009 and launched the site www.kaipan.com, which simulates stock trading. A year later, she exited from the company through a merger with a Chinese financial services firm.

Amy is glad she returned to China because of the wide-open opportunities there. She says that China is definitely more polluted than Silicon Valley, "but it’s on a way of having a clearer sky".

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Bon Jovi is getting into social gaming today by distributing the band’s digital music through games on Facebook. The band is partnering with CrowdStar to bundle its digital album, virtual goods and virtual currency together on the gaming platform’s social games—Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and It Girl.

So as users play the games, players will be given the opportunity to purchase the Bon Jovi Greatest Hits Bundle which includes a digital download of Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits, Facebook Credits, as well as branded Bon Jovi virtual goods that enable special benefits within the games, and a coupon code for the Bon Jovi online store.

The idea of downloading premium music while buying virtual currency is a compelling. It’s definitely a unique distribution strategy for musical artists to start bundling virtual goods, currency and downloads into one package. While it’s unclear how much money Bon Jovi will really be seeing, but the campaign is sure to draw eyeballs, which may be the primary reason for the partnership. CrowdStar’s games have more than 50 million monthly active players, and are competing with the likes of Playfish, Playdom and Zynga.

We could be seeing more artists flock to social gaming as a marketing platform in the New Year.

The Transportation Security Administration has banned ink and toner cartridges of more than 16 ounces from both carry-on bags and checked luggage on flights within the United States or in-bound to the United States. You know why: because of that incident from a few days ago where authorities found bombs hidden inside toner cartridges.

The TSA is in a tough spot. Does anyone really think that terrorists are going to say, "Shoot, we’ve been thwarted! Let’s stop plotting against the West and instead become responsible stakeholders in the international system"?

Read more…

OnGreen— a professional networking and collaboration website that connects clean tech entrepreneurs with potential investors— today announced that it has raised a $1.4 million series A investment of its own from a jointly owned fund between Blue Marble Ventures in Los Angeles, and China Southern Hong Kong Investment Ltd. (CSHK) in Shanghai.

The company aims to build the world’s largest database of green technologies and entrepreneurs globally, and to create funding opportunities for these through its platform. Chief executive and founder of OnGreen, Nikhil R. Jain explains:

“Entrepreneurs post deals, or standardized summaries of their business plans and funding needs to OnGreen. More than 250 deals have been posted from 30 countries, with around 30% of those hailing from outside of the U.S. so far. [Desirable teams] are contacted by investors as a result of posting, and according to our September survey half of those who posted were contacted by potential investors. But entrepreneurs can also use the site to get feedback on their business plans and to network in what is a somewhat fragmented industry.”

According to Jain, OnGreen will use the series A capital to launch a Chinese version of its site, build its presence in China and India during the next year, and to launch a patent exchange in coming weeks (Nov. 16, 2010) a collaboration with the University of Southern California Energy Institute.

Currently, OnGreen plans to generate revenue through advertising, lead generation, events, custom clean tech and green industry research, and other sources. The company is on target to become profitable by the end of 2011, Jain says.

When I visited Dublin recently for the F.ounders event, I didn’t even get around to attending the bigger event that was happening alongside it, the Dublin Web Summit. I did, however, get a chance to meet one of the co-founders of DataHug, which won the event’s Spark of Genius startup competition (and a prize package worth €30,000).

Founded in late 2009 by former consultants Connor Murphy and Ray Smith, DataHug essentially enables clients to “better understand and exploit” the collective company network. Or as one of the judges at the startup competition put it more eloquently: it’s like “LinkedIn on steroids as it not only answers who knows whom, but also how well they know them”.

The product, a Web app, is currently in alpha preview mode only and in trial by a select few customers only, but you can sign up for the beta here (and see some screenshots below).

Basically, DataHug is building technology capable of intelligently indexing corporate email systems and generating actionable insights about the everyday connections between people based on the gathered data. Which sounds bafflingly useful for any company to my ears.

We’ll update on the company’s progress once DataHug gets around to releasing the public beta of its software, which should be before year’s end.

My guess is many companies are going to hugely appreciate all the intelligence they can gather about their people’s business relationships. The great thing about DataHug is that the data is already there for the taking – they’re just putting a terribly useful layer on top of it.

Keep an eye on this one.

According to a report by SquareTrade (a company that sells extended warranties), the iPhone 4 is the phone least likely to fail in the first year but is the most likely to break due to accidental damage.

Read more…

Video search engine blinkx has been plugging away at video search for years now. Finally, six years after being founded, and already publicly traded on the London stock exchange, it hit profitability for the first time this year. For the six month period ended September 30, revenues doubled to $27 million and it showed its first profit ever of $2 million (or $0.64 per share on a diluted basis).

Blinkx has a small but healthy business powering video search for a growing list of partners, including most recently with UK-based IPTV set-top box maker Amino Communications to power search for Internet TV. The total number of video searches per day it is powering is now 31.6 million, nearly triple the 13.1 million daily average in the same period a year ago.

Its revenue growth rate is on par with a year ago. If it keeps it up, it will hit $50 million in revenues by the end of this financial year. Blinkx has been moving aggressively into video advertising with its Ad Hoc contextual video advertising and demographic targeting product. The average size for video ad deals is up 40 percent.

If it can score more Internet TV partnerships, it might have an opportunity to take what it’s learned in online video over the past few years and apply it to real TV.

Backupify, a cloud computing service that backs up data on other cloud computing services, has launched a dedicated product to back up data on Facebook Pages.

Founded in 2008 by Rob May, Backupify backs up all your data on services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, and YouTube. The service keeps all the raw data for you and creates a downloadable PDF with, for instance, all your Tweets, direct messages, followers, people you follow, and profile info.

The new version of Backupify for Facebook Pages is targeted towards businesses and government organizations that maintain Facebook Pages and need satisfy compliance audits by providing independent backups of all of a user's Facebook data. In addition to News Feeds, Wall Posts, Photo Albums and Messages associated with any Facebook Page or Profile, Backupify for Facebook also saves any Photos, Videos or Wall Posts that tagged a specific account even if the original poster removes the content. Businesses can maintain a record of all of their Facebook activity, including friends (contacts), Likes, shared content and interactions.

Also, Backupify didn’t mention any pricing, so I’m assuming the service will be free for now.

Backupify has raised $6 million in funding.

23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin‘s spouse, has raised $22 million+ in its third round of financing. The Series C round was led by Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, with current investors participating – including New Enterprise Associates and Google Ventures (ah, family …).

23andMe, which was founded in 2006, aims to help individuals understand their own genetic information through DNA analysis technologies and Web-based interactive tools.

The company’s Personal Genome Service enables individuals to gain insights into their ancestry and inherited traits, and “all it takes is a little bit of spit”.

Wojcicki briefly commented on the funding round thusly:

“We believe this round of financing will help us achieve our goal of dramatically accelerating the pace of research and could ultimately make health care research and health care delivery more efficient.”

That’s great, as long as the company can remember to send the DNA results to the right persons. And stop freaking out our own Michael Arrington with creepy zeppelins.

I can’t recall something we’ve gotten tipped about more than Google Instant Previews. Even after we wrote about it appearing in the wild a month ago, the tips kept flowing in. Even just yesterday we received two more: “NEW GOOGLE FEATURE!!!” We appreciate the tips, and I’m happy to say today that you can stop sending this specific one. Because Google is officially launching the feature.

As apparently hundreds of you have already seen, Google Instant Previews allows you to see what’s on a website right from a Google Search results page. All you have to do is simply click the little magnifying glass icon next to a result and an overlay will appear to the right of the link, showing you what’s on the page.

“This is the next step in the story of Instant,” Ben Gomes, a Google Distinguished Engineer, tells us. He notes that Google has gone from a standard text input, to autocomplete, to Instant, and now we have Instant Previews. This is all about “pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology,” Gomes says.

And truth be told, the more interesting aspect of this new feature isn’t so much the feature itself — others have done similar things before — instead, it is the technology behind it. Specifically, Gomes says Google is able to pull up these previews in less than 1/10th of a second. And they dynamically update as content changes. And Google will have them for basically every link result in their index.

And it’s not just about the preview, it’s about figuring out the words on the page being previewed as well. If you’re searching for a specific phrase, Google can find it and highlight it in these previews. This way you can get a bit more context to make sure this is the page you’re looking for.

When I asked Gomes if he thought some content publishers might be annoyed at the notion of this pre-click data, he said he didn’t think so. Instead, he thinks of Instant Previews as almost an advertisement for content sites. The Previews give a taste and draws the users in.

Again, as we’re all well aware, Google has been testing this feature out for a while now. They’ve done it both internally with all Google employees, and externally with focus groups and a small percentage of the public. The response has been very positive, Gomes says, with users feeling more satisfied with the results they end up clicking on.

How much more satisfied? 5 percent. Yes, Google measured it.

Google Instant Previews are rolling live now and will be a standard part of the Google Search experience going forward.

This holiday e-commerce shopping season is expected to produce stronger sales results than last year, but retailers and e-commerce giants aren’t taking any chances. Today, mobile payments company PayPal will allow users to unlocking a number of exclusive deals and promotions at partner retailers if shoppers use PayPal for payments.

Barnes & Noble.com will offer 15 percent off on all PayPal purchases, plus free shipping; Shoebuy.com will offer PayPal customers $10 off purchases of $80 or more, plus free shipping; and 1-800-Flowers.com will offer 15 percent off, plus free shipping on all PayPal purchases.

eBags will offer PayPal customers 25 percent off on all purchases, UGG Autsrialia will offer free shipping, and Newegg and MacMall will also offer special disounts for PayPal Users.

Of course, PayPal parent eBay is offering shoppers $10 cash back from Bill Me Later on their first Bill Me Later purchases, coupled with a six-month "no payments" so shoppers don’t have to pay until after the holiday rush. You can find more deals here.

It’s no secret the holiday shopping season could be a cash cow for both PayPal and eBay, especially when it comes to mobile payments and transactions. Exclusive deals and free shipping offers can only help boost sales.

The Story Of Electronics debuts online today, the latest in a series of short films by Annie Leonard, whose original viral video The Story Of Stuff surpassed 12 million views. This installment explains 'planned obsolescence'— electronics designed to be replaced as quickly as possible—and its often hidden consequences for tech workers, consumers and the environment.

The Electronics TakeBack Coalition— a group that advocates for sustainable design and electronics producer responsibility— joined as a co-producer, framing issues and providing research for the script, working with Leonard’s long time creative partners Free Range Studios.

The Story Of Electronics, today, is a tragedy. Its main characters include: executives in charge of consumer electronics companies who allow their designers to use toxic materials and worse; consumers who accept built-in obsolescence and cannot control their appetites for everything from smart phones to high-def TVs; and citizens of developing nations living or working around e-waste, their land and water polluted by PVC, mercury, solvents, flame retardants as a result of another country’s consumer habits.

The video (embedded below) covers some startling facts about e-waste including:

Typical “fat” TVs, dumped to make way for flat screen, have about 5 pounds of lead in them each

It costs more to repair a DVD player than it does to buy a new one today

Every year, consumers create 25 metric tons (or tonnes) of electronics waste

Computer factory workers, in a recent study, had 40% more miscarriages than the general population (thanks to exposure to toxic materials)

A national coordinator with The Electronics TakeBack Coalition who worked on this project, Barbara Kyle, added to that list:

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that we are still trashing about 85% of our electronics, with only 15% is getting into the hands of recyclers. We're exporting a lot of that still, which means [America's] e-waste strategy is to literally poison people in other parts of the globe. This has happened long enough that scientists have been able to go and find adults with high dioxin levels, and kids with high lead poisoning from our e-waste. We've got to look at the big picture here and think beyond ‘What does this product do for me,’ and ask ‘When I'm done with it, where will it go?’”

The Story Of Electronics and Electronics TakeBack Coalition websites present ideas about how to turn the tragedy around, thankfully. Kyle suggests:

Asking manufacturers to design and make more recyclable, longer lasting, non-toxic products

Sponsoring or participating in design competitions (like this one) that encourage sustainable innovation

When they’re spent, taking electronics to E-Stewards, recyclers that promise not to export them

Supporting legislation that would curb exports of toxic e-waste, at the moment the U.S. HR 6252

Buying from companies that take back electronics when they are broken or obsolete, to dispose of them responsibly

IBM today announced a plan to give away $50 million of its services and technology over the next three years to 100 municipalities through a program the company is calling the Smarter Cities Challenge.

Funded via IBM’s philanthropic division, according to an IBM press statement, the Smarter Cities program aims to help municipalities around the world— with populations of 100,000 to 700,000 ideally— solve local problems in any of the following areas: healthcare, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy, and utilities.

The approximate value of each Smarter Cities Challenge grant will be equivalent to US$400,000. The company has alrady completed or is currently conducting a series of pilot grants in Baltimore, Maryland; Austin, Texas; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Other municipalities can apply online via SmarterCitiesChallenge.org, and will be selected based on a number of criteria including their track record of problem solving, commitment to the use of technology and open data, and willingness to provide IBM with access to and time with city leaders.

Teams of IBM experts will provide chosen cities with recommendations for better delivery of municipal services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency and access to proprietary IBM technology like the company’s CityForward, a kind of social network for city leaders, academics, and citizens that is also a city data analysis and data visualization platform.

The grant giving entity IBM stands to prime their sales pipeline by increasing their experience in Gov 2.0, Healthcare and Smart Grid verticals, with their generous, charitable effort.

A few months ago, Borders got into the textbook sales race with the launch of a marketplace to buy and sell used books. Today, the company is getting into textbook rentals; partnering with rental giant Chegg to power a rental platform on Borders’ site. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed

Through the partnership, Borders' customers have access to Chegg's inventory of millions of textbook titles. Chegg will serve as the sole provider of textbook rentals through Borders.com and will be part of the Borders Textbook Marketplace, which includes 1.4 million new and used titles. As an incentive to use the platform, Borders is offering students extra cash by utilizing the site’s used textbook buyback option.

Chegg has been on a roll recently, raising $75 million in new funding, acquiring CourseRank, and estimated to bring in $130 million in revenue this year (that’s up from $25 million in 2009). It’s probably wise that Borders chose to partner with Chegg rather than competing with the book rentals powerhouse.

Zuora, a SaaS startup that offers online services to manage and automate customer subscriptions and payments, has raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Redpoint Ventures with the startup’s existing investors; Benchmark Capital, Marc Benioff, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital, also participating in the round. To date, the company has raised $41.5 million in funding.

Launched in 2008, Zuora's cloud-based billings platform aims to alleviate the need for online businesses to develop their own billing systems, especially to handle recurring payments like those associated with subscriptions.

The startup just released a billing service for cloud providers, Z-Commerce for the Cloud, which automates metering, pricing and billing for products, bundles, and configurations. Last year, Zuora extended its platform to Facebook apps, app developers charge recurring monthly subscriptions for their apps or premium features.

The company says that it has seen fast growth in revenue, bookings and cashflow thanks to the shift to the "Subscription Economy" in both the consumer and enterprise worlds. Zuora signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue in the first quarter of its fiscal year, which ended April 30. Plus, Zuora has been cash flow positive since early this year, and has grown in excess of 400% in 2009 and is on track to repeat that in 2010.

And CEO and founder Tien Tzuo says that he believes the marketplace is large enough for the company to eventually IPO.

Clients using Zuora's service include Rearden Commerce, Ning, Pandora Media, ReputationDefender and HDCloud. The startup will use the new funding for product development, international expansion, and hiring additional staff.

Online movie clips site Movieclips.com has raised $3 million in Series A funding from Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital as well as a number of angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, Naval Ravikant, Babak Nivi, Jeff Kearl, Tom McInerney, and prior investor Richmond Park Partners.

Launched in beta last December, Movieclips.com offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. And the startup launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips.

Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc. The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL's Moviefone is already using the technology on its platform.

One new feature the startup has recently added is "related clips," which recommends similar clips to users in search. So when a user searches for a particular clip, he will be exposed to a wall of 100 related clips "related by" actor, movie, action, mood, setting, theme, director, prop, cinematographer, and many more categories. Movieclips says that since launching this feature, page views have increased by over 200%, as users fall into an addictive click trance from one clip to the next.

Another strategy Movieclips will be furthering is content curation and working on developing ways for visitors to find content on the site easily and quickly. This will include more lists of clips by topic and other parameters.

While the company only has clips from 1,400 movies, Zach James says these titles are all well-known, A list movies, such as Top Gun, Casablanca, and Wayne’s World. James says the site hasn’t tackled the longtail yet but will eventually expand to include niche movies.

The challenge for the site of course is working with the movie studios, who own the rights, to put the movies online. James says that if the movies are legal published on then web, then Movieclips will have the rights to post the clips. James says that the new funding will be used for future product development.

The company faces competition from AnyClip.

That huge sucking sound you hear is Facebook, piling data from third parties into its mouth as fast as it can while it remains stubbornly greedy about releasing its own data to anyone it doesn’t like. Which is mostly Google these days, since Yahoo and AOL completely surrendered and Microsoft actually owns part of them.

Google shut them down last week, restricting API access and effectively blocking contacts exports to Facebook in any automated way. This is, I wrote, the true beginning of data protectionism.

Now Facebook has found a way around that restriction. They’re leveraging a Google feature that lets users download their own data for their own use – part of Google’s golf-clap worthy data liberation effort. They’ve hacked a solution around the block by giving users a direct deep link to the download feature. And then users can upload that file directly to Facebook.

Can Google block this? One engineer I spoke with says yes, but it will be difficult: “If Google wanted to, they could block it immediately. it’s pretty simple. just put a CSRF token on the url to block deep linking but that might fuck up other CSV flows. Maybe they have an outlook importer or something. facebook really went aggressive here.”

It’s also a big middle finger to Google.

Touch interfaces for content and social media are, thanks to applications like Pulse and Flipboard – the ‘new new thing’. They are presenting streams of information in a far easier to digest manner and generating lots of engagement. Think how long you might spend on an app like Tweetdeck and then work out what would happen if that way of consuming went even more mainstream, especially on tablets like the iPad.

Well this appears to be the ambition of a new free Android and iPhone app which launches today, My Taptu, and will appear on iPad in due course. It’s also part of the re-invention of its maker, Taptu, which has until now specialised in mobile search and touch-based interfaces for mobile, but is now bringing that expertise to bear on an app which promises to organise your social and content streams in a highly scalable way. And they appear to have the firepower.

Currently Pulse only lets you add 20 streams to the app, while Flipboard allows for 21 ‘sections’. My Taptu will let users have have 5000 mixed streams. That is a huge difference. Taptu could well have a chance against Flipboard and Pulse with its new app when it eventually launches on iPad in December.

Opera Software has released its (second) free mobile browser product for the Android platform. Grab the app, dubbed Opera Mobile 10.1 beta, now in Android Market or here.

Yes, Opera was already available for Android, in a fairly limited way. Opera Mini, has been live on the market since July, but now you can also download the company’s full-fledged browser, Opera Mobile, from the application store.

Here’s what it’s packing:

- speedy page loading compared to other browsers, particularly on slower networks (courtesy of Opera Turbo)

- smooth scrolling, zooming and panning (rather than having to tap to zoom in, which is definitely a huge improvement)

- Speed Dial

- Visual tabs for easy tab management —>

- Built-in geolocation support

- Ability to sync bookmarks across devices

- SVG support

As I had mentioned earlier, the release of the public beta version of Opera Mobile for Android was just a matter of time, as the product already existed, albeit for the Norwegian company’s OEM partners only.

Now that it’s available for direct download for end users, you’d be wrong not to check it out.

Fellow TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid installed a build of the app on his Android smartphone this morning and confirmed that it feels snappier than the native browser that came installed on it. Obviously, more robust side-by-side testing is welcome here.

The browser is available in Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

Here’s an earlier video I recorded, featuring Opera Mobile & Devices product manager Phillip Grønvold giving me a demo of the app on his Samsung Galaxy S phone:

Kik Messenger is a once in a lifetime startup success story, going from 0 to 1.5 million users in 18 days. Aside from being free, the app is available multi-platform and is insanely fast, in fact its speed is what sets it apart from competitors like What’sApp and Ping Chat.

“It’s like you can feel the person on the other side of the chat” says founder Ted Livingston. Of Kik’s 1.5 million users about 620K are on iPhones and the rest are spread out evenly between Blackberry and Android.

Hailed by its fans as a “Blackberry Messenger for the rest of us,” Kik is an example of a pivotal pivot. Founded in January 2009, the service was centered around SMS until Livingston decided to relaunch the product as in-app messaging about two weeks ago.

The app was designed for virality, making it super easy to send friends an invitation containing the install link via text, tweet or email. It also comes with Kik user suggestions from your contacts baked in, taking away the work of having to manually find them.

It’s almost poetic that the feature responsible its impressive stickiness would currently be the subject of contention.

A recent Quora thread goes into how the Kik app might be in violation of Apple’s iOS Developer Terms of Service, as it automatically imports your contacts without asking for permission, requires users to share information in order to function and does not give users ready access to its own TOS.

Here are the specific app store clauses that were brought up in reference to Kik.

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect user or device data without prior user consent, and then only to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application, or to serve advertising. You may not use analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party.

3.3.10 You must provide clear and complete information to users regarding Your collection, use and disclosure of user or device data. Furthermore, You must take appropriate steps to protect such data from unauthorized use, disclosure or access by third parties. If a user ceases to consent or affirmatively revokes consent for Your collection, use or disclosure of his or her user or device data, You must promptly cease all use.

The App Store requires both an explicit “User Permission” function as well as direct access to an app TOS, neither of which Kik has. The app also comes under some GetSatisfaction fire for similar multi-platform privacy holes and the fact that there’s no opt out for it messaging your contacts when you join.

When asked about these issues, Livingston, who commented both on the Quora and GetSatisfication threads, said that a fix (like a popup asking users for permission to share their information) was in the works, asap.

Livingston, who is concerned about user privacy, was baffled as to why the app had been accepted into the App Store four times without contest if it in fact was in violation of Apple’s TOS, which it looks to be. “It was re-approved by Apple two days ago,” he said, which is days after the first TOS issues were brought up. I am similarly confused, especially since app has been one of the top downloaded free apps in the App Store since it’s relaunch.

Livingston joked, “Maybe Apple is letting it slide as a way to crack BlackBerry Messenger’s hold on the market?”

Apple has not responded to my requests for more information. Full iOS SDK Terms of Service, embedded below.

When textbook tablet startup Kno raised $46 million in September from Andreessen Horowitz and Silicon Valley Bank, it was shooting to price its dual-screen tablet at under $1,000. On Tuesday, it will announce the pricing of its tablets at $899 for the dual-screen version and $599 for the single-screen version. It will also start taking limited pre-orders for shipping before the end of the year.

At $599, the single-screen tablet, will be $100 more than a WiFi-only iPad and the same price as a Samsung Galaxy Tab from T-Mobile without a contract. But the Kno is ginormous. Even the single-paned one, with its 14.1 inch screen, is nearly twice as big as an iPad. That one debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco (see demo video below).

Although the Kno has a color touch-screen and runs a browser and learning apps, it is competing less with the iPad than with the extra-large Kindle DX, which sells for $379, has a 9.7-inch black-and-white screen, and also targets the textbook market.

What it will come down to, though, is not so much the price of the device as much as the availability and price of the textbooks on each device. Kno CEO Osman Rashid declares that that the number of textbook titles available on the “Kindle Dx won't be more than ours.” By the time, the Kno gets into students hands there will be tens of thousands of textbook titles for sale at 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the print editions. The Kno should pay for itself within three semesters, and students won’t have to lug around a backpack full of paper textbooks. They can also take notes on the Kno.

The money is in the textbooks and apps, not in the hardware. “We don't see ourselves as a hardware platform, but as a learning platform company,” says Rashid. In a year or two, it is not hard to imagine that $599 Kno costing only half as much, opening up the world of digital textbooks to even more students. Below is the demo video if the Kno from Disrupt:

If you’re setting out to design a new website, there are few better starting places than a wireframing service: they let you quickly get a rough idea of what your site will look like, without having to deal with paper cut-outs or endless pencil erasing. And today, one of the better wireframing services is leaving beta with some major new features in tow for its official launch. Meet Mockingbird.

The bootstrapped, two-person startup launched around a year ago, offering a clean interface that’s based on the Cappuccino web framework (in other words, it isn’t in Flash, unlike many of its competitors). Since launching in a beta it’s grown to 55k users and nearly 100k projects created.

Today, Mockingbird is launching real-time collaboration, which means that multiple people can fire up their web browser (no install required) and start editing the same page layout. This is obviously a big deal given the collaborative nature of design, and in practice it looks pretty slick (you can see it in action in the video below, or you can check out the demo page to try it for yourself).

The other big change with this launch: Mockingbird is ready to turn on the revenue faucets, and will start charging for its more robust plans. There’s still going to be a free version available that supports 1 project with a maximum of two users, and premium plans start at $9 a month.

Competitors in this space include Balsamiq, which offers a desktop application rather than a web app, Mockflow, Hotgloo, and a nifty iPad app called iMockups.

By all measurements, the new picture sharing service, Instagram, is exploding. A week after their launch, they had 100,000 users. A week later: 200,000. A week after that: 300,000. And then they were made Apple’s App of the Week in the App Store. So yeah, basically they’re likely far past a half a million users already. Not a bad first month at all.

But did you know that Instagram almost wasn’t Instagram at all? I detailed some of their transformation from the location-based HTML5 app Burbn to Instagram in my initial preview of the app. But co-founder Kevin Systrom gave more insight a few weeks ago on Quora.

Systrom revealed that he and co-founder Mike Krieger actually put in about a year’s worth of work into Burbn, finally culminating in the building of a complete native iPhone app. But it just wasn’t very good in their estimation. So they basically threw the entire thing out and started over. Again, after a year of work. The result, just 8 weeks later, was Instagram.

A huge risk. Ballsy.

“We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram,” Systrom wrote.

That element to their story is fascinating to me. I was actually one of the initial users of Burbn after I got a tip about it and was able to sign up before Systrom realized who I was (he quickly emailed me later and asked me not to write about it until he was ready to show something off). I found Burbn interesting because location was getting red-hot at the time, and this was a completely-HTML5 approach that was pretty slick.

But I wasn’t sure how such a service was ever going to take off. The reality right now is that we live in a world of native apps in the mobile space. And Burbn would have been coming very late to the game with an HTML5 gamble and with rivals like Foursquare, Gowalla and others already battling for users.

But it turns out Systrom and Krieger were thinking the same thing. “Once he [Krieger] joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood. By this time, we had built Burbn into a (private) really neat HTML5 mobile web app that let you: Check in to locations, Make plans (future check-ins), Earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more,” Systrom noted on Quora. That all sounds great, but again, a crowded-space that was quickly getting more crowded.

“We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas,” Systrom continued.

And so the pivot happened.

It’s important to note that Systrom and Krieger had already secured $500,000 in funding prior to the pivot, so they had some cash to gamble with. But not all investors would be happy with such a turn. But as Systrom described it, Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz basically told them that they had some good ideas and to figure out the company they wanted to build from those ideas. They decided that Instagram, and not Burbn, would be that company.

Startups pivot all the time. Some are forced to, some are not. Want another good example? Twitter.

The podcasting startup Odeo (where, incidentally, Systrom was an intern back in the day) was more or less going nowhere when Evan Williams told his employees to break into teams to brainstorm some crazy new ideas. One of those teams had Jack Dorsey in it, and Twitter was born.

Speaking of Twitter, Seesmic started as the “video Twitter” before they pivoted to become a Twitter client. Now they’re sort of pivoting again to cater more directly to the enterprise crowd. It’s something that very well could work.

Meanwhile, the Y-Combinator-backed Fliggo earlier this year pivoted away from being another kind of video for Twitter and became Treehouse, an Instagram-competitor. Funny how it all comes around. Will they catch on like Instagram has? Who knows, but if not, the entrepreneurs behind it will undoubtedly be back at it with another idea.

Instagram’s story is a testament to the fact that pivots can and do work — even if it means tossing much of what you had poured your life into for a year or more. It’s all about timing, and learning, and vision, and a hell of a lot of courage.