This post was written by Mike Su, Vice President of Games at dude-centric video network Break Media, where he created the social gaming group.

So there was this guy named Ken who was working a 9-to-5 at some giant software company writing tons of code for something whose importance and value was exceeded only by its monotony. Ken’s wife, Roberta, had been playing some newfangled PC game and thought to herself, “Man, this game sucks! Ken and I should totally make a better one!” The husband-and-wife team then worked nights and weekends for three months building a game. The final product? Mystery House. And it was awesome.

On the heels of this success, they raised money, made more hit games, and eventually sold their gaming empire for $1.5 billion. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this story, it could just as well be the founding story of a Playfish or a Zynga today. But this is the story—or my version of it—of the founding of Sierra Online back in the ’80s.

It was an exciting time back then. Technology had enabled game developers to develop new game mechanics and immerse players in new worlds in ways that had never been imagined before. And the best part? A husband-and-wife team could work nights and weekends and knock out a meaningful and entertaining game in three months.

Past is prologue

It’s an exciting time now as well, with the rise of the social game. David Maestri built the OG mafia game Mob Wars on top of his day job (a point that was disputed by his employer, but that’s another story). And CrowdStar still doesn't have the need for any venture funding. In fact, we read every day about new games that add more users in a few hours than the entire population of Guam.

Yet in the same way that a husband-and-wife team can no longer build a competitive PC game in three months, we’re entering a time when it will no longer be possible for a few guys in a garage to build a successful social game. Many of the most successful games in the market today were built on the backs of the free viral marketing channels Facebook provided. But Facebook has clamped down on that in recent months, in response to users who were tired of reading about one of their friends finding yet another lonely pink cow. For social game developers, the free ride is over, and success in the social game market will come down to two things: the ability to build audiences for your games, and the ability to develop genuinely compelling games.

If a tree falls in a forest…

On the first count, I think there's an interesting parallel to the way the online video industry evolved. In the early days of online video, there were a few breakout hits from content creators who were smart enough and fast enough to get in on the wave early. These folks, like the Diet Coke and Mentos guys, LonelyGirl15, and others, were among the first to deliver compelling content on a highly viral platform (i.e., YouTube and its embeddable player). Soon the gold rush was on, and the market became flooded with content.

Eventually, content creators who were late to the party could break through only by coming to terms with the fact that it was no longer enough to simply create a funny video — you either needed built-in reach, or a marketing strategy that included SEO, SEM, and various other online user-acquisition techniques, to make a mark in the industry. Those who failed to do so were stuck with great content and 500 views.

Likewise, the gaming industry is now entering a phase where just making a fun game is not enough. Game developers now must devote significant resources toward building audiences for their games, and the user-acquisitions guys on most teams are going to be just as important as the game designers.

And just as we see bigger and bigger budgets for marketing PC and console games these days, I expect bigger and bigger budgets will need to be set aside to market social games. The only "free" user acquisition will be for those who already have a significant distribution footprint (i.e. the big guys like Zynga, or a distribution company like 6 Waves).

Yes, the game still matters

When it comes to the importance of gameplay, in the first generation of social games, we witnessed huge success with games being built by people with traditional web developer backgrounds. This is because what made a game attractive and go viral took a lot of the same muscles that make websites successful. These were people who cut their teeth on figuring out landing pages, conversion funnels, A/B testing, and so on. All these elements took games that were pretty basic from a gameplay standpoint and turned them into runaway hits.

The success of the next generation of games, as Zynga demonstrated with Frontierville, will depend less on the "hustle" of virality and more on real and impactful gameplay. High-concept games will tend to be easier to market and therefore, will perform better as an advertisement, resulting in lower user acquisition costs. In short, the "art" of the game will matter more, and as a result I think we'll see social gaming companies reach out more and more to the traditional gaming community to find talent.

So, with all this in mind, who will the new games come from? I believe it will be a mix of the successful incumbents who have built-in distribution (Zynga, Disney/Playdom, Crowdstar), startups that have enough funding to market games as well as develop them, likely with a veteran team (A Bit Lucky, Funzio), or companies with existing businesses and audiences that are entering the field (media companies like Sony, Fox, Sugar Inc, or yours truly – Break Media). And the games that come from these companies should continue to become more sophisticated and more fun to play. The days of Ken and Roberta coding in their spare time are once again coming to an end.

The Indian technology industry got its start running call centers and doing low-level IT work for western firms. Then, in the 2000s, it started taking on higher-level IT tasks, offering management consulting services, and performing sophisticated R&D. Now there is another transition happening, one far more significant: a transition to development of innovative technology products.  Instead of providing IT services as the big outsourcing companies do, a new breed of startups is developing high-value products based on intellectual property. The Indian industry group NASSCOM estimates that in 2008, the country's software product revenues totaled $1.64 billion. It forecasts that this will grow to $11 billion per year by 2015.

I attended the NASSCOM Product Enclave in Bangalore, this week, and gave several talks to the 1000+ entrepreneurs in attendance. I was surprised at the changes that are powering the new transition: its tech workers are leaving high-paying jobs in IT services, and kids out of school are ignoring social taboos against failure and defying marriage customs to become entrepreneurs.  A few Americans are also joining the fray, starting their ventures in India rather than in Silicon Valley. Though in China, returnees from the U.S. are fuelling the entrepreneurship boom, they aren't as important in India. Sadly for my Indian friends in Silicon Valley who are looking to return home, returnees—formerly in high demand and treated like rock stars—are out of vogue and now treated like rocks.

Why are highly paid workers in an industry that does lucrative contract work for multinationals jumping ship? It's the same dynamic as you observe in the United States.  Entrepreneurs start their companies when they are, on average, 39 years of age. They have 10 to 15 years of work experience and ideas for products that solve real customer problems; they get tired of working for jerk bosses; and they want to build wealth before they retire.  So they defy their fear of failure and take the plunge into entrepreneurship.

India's outsourcing industry is about 20 years old and has hundreds of thousands of workers with 10 to 15 years of experience and ideas for innovative products.

At the NASSCOM event, I met dozens of tech-service industry workers who had become entrepreneurs. A surprisingly high proportion weren't developing products for their former customers, but were instead looking inward to solve India's problems. The one who impressed me the most was K. Chandrasekhar, of Forus Health.

Chandrasekhar learned that that the vast majority of the 12 million people in India who are blind could have maintained their sight if only their problems had been diagnosed and treated on time. The diagnostic equipment for a single hospital cost at least US$60,000—which put it out of the reach of most regional clinics—and required ophthalmologists to perform the diagnosis. Chandrasekhar and Forus cofounder Shyam Vasudev decided to leave their jobs as senior executives at NXP Semiconductor (an offshoot of Philips) to create an affordable, all-in-one intelligent pre-screening device that is non-invasive and can be used by minimally trained technicians in rural India. The device provides an indicative report in 10 minutes for five major eye-related problems, including diabetic retina. This frees the doctor up to treat patients rather than administer tests. The product costs less than $15,000, and Forus expects the price to drop to half that in volume production.

Another impressive entrepreneur at the NASSCOM event was Vishal Gondhal.  In youth entrepreneurship, Gondhal is the Bill Gates of India. He dropped out of college to start his first company when he was 16, and launched his big success—Indiagames—when he was 23. He sold part of his company for a multi-million dollar sum 2005. He now mentors young entrepreneurs and invest in startups via his fund called Sweat & Blood Venture Group.

But college-dropout tech entrepreneurs like Gondhal are extremely rare in India. Most make the wise choice to complete their education before joining a startup. So far, the biggest inhibitor of youth entrepreneurship in India has been the social stigma associated with failure and the low social esteem bestowed on startups. In the arranged-marriage system—which is still the norm in India—a young male who joined a company such as Infosys or IBM would command the best marriage proposals, and those who took the startup path risked trading down. No longer.  All of the young entrepreneurs I met said either that they had told their parents that they would find their own partners, or that their parents supported their decision.

It also used to be that nearly all the graduates of India’s prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) would join investment banks or take senior positions in the outsourcing industry. Given the huge salaries these workers commanded, entrepreneurship was out of the question. Yet I met dozens of entrepreneurs who had left these institutions and were now risking it all on entrepreneurship.  Two such are Pavan Thatha and Rakesh Thatha.

After completing his MBA from IIT-Bombay and working in the outsourcing industry for four years, Pavan Thatha persuaded his brother Rakesh, an IIT-Madras graduate, to leave his job at Computer Associates India and start a security-software firm called Arrayshield. That was in May 2010. By October 2010, they had hired two more IITans who left new jobs at Oracle India and John Deere. The new recruits took 75% paycuts. The recruits received intense pressure from their family not to take the risk. Their parents couldn’t understand why they would leave prestigious, high-paying jobs to risk it all.  But they were determined to be part of the journey of the brothers, who has set out to do something to make a difference and change the world.

And it isn't just the Indians who are seeing opportunity in India.

Valerie Rozycki had always wanted to be an entrepreneur and was keenly interested in emerging markets while a student at Stanford University. She believed India's growing economy would provide great opportunities for someone like her. She had an idea to build a mobile engagement platform based on dialing numbers or “missed calls” (most Americans are not familiar with the concept of “missed calls”, but in the developing world, they are a common way of sending a short message: "I'm on my way home", "pick me up", "I love you", etc.). So, in February 2010 she started a company called ZipDial, in Bangalore. The company leverages "missed calls" in marketing campaigns—to log votes.

Valerie clearly has many great opportunities in Silicon Valley. When I asked her what a (white) gal like her was doing in a place like Bangalore, she smiled and said, "when all of the action is in Bangalore, who needs Silicon Valley?"

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.

It’s a bad month to be Foursquare or Gowalla. Ten days ago, 900-pound gorilla Facebook announced Facebook Deals for Facebook Places (i,e., location-based coupons) and check-ins for third-party apps. A day later, Pew Research reported that, despite all the hype, the use of location-based services is actually declining in America, from 5% of the online population in May to 4% last month. Forget the fabled hockey stick; that’s more like a broken pencil.

Why? Because they’re not giving us any good reason to use them. Look at their web sites. Gowalla proclaims, “Discover the extraordinary in the world around you.” Foursquare says, “Unlock your city.” To which I say: “Oh, come on“ — and it seems I speak for approximately 96% (formerly 95%) of the population. I have no interest in enlisting in a virtual scavenger hunt, or unlocking merit badges — what is this, the Cub Scouts? — or becoming the narcissistic “Mayor” of my local coffee shop. Thanks for the offer, but I’m afraid I already have some semblance of a life.

I do want to keep up with my friends, and (sometimes) let them know where I am. But if you’re competing with Facebook in social networking and your name isn’t Twitter or Google, I’m sorry, but I don’t like your chances.

Don’t get me wrong. Foursquare and Gowalla have done really well building ecosystems that attract early adopters. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that they only attract early adopters. If they want to reach the majority who don’t care about making it to Mayor, they need to abandon their pretense of fun, stop pussyfooting around with silly slogans, and make their value proposition stark, simple, and profoundly unsexy: “Check in and get coupons.”

Look at Groupon. Do they have a cutesy motto? No, they just have the fastest growing company ever. Location-based services can and will be at least as big. But they need to make it clear that what you get is the ability to announce I’m downtown, I’m hungry, and I don’t know what I want to eat! or I need to buy a Kris Kringle gift, and I don’t much care where! – and then sit back and watch the discounts roll in.

It’s true that location-based games will eventually be huge, too, but such games imply interaction with friends. By the time they really take off, Facebook will own the mobile social graph, and direct competition will be disastrously dumb.

Location-based discounts, however, have little to do with social networking. That makes them a poor fit for Facebook — and hence still an opportunity for Foursquare and Gowalla. But if they don’t move fast to make it clear that that’s what they do, Shopkick is going to leave them eating dust.

Google Earth’s ability to provide a visually compelling view of the world’s terrain, cities, oceans, weather data, treks, and more never ceases to amaze me. It looks like Google has added another way for users to view the world in Google Earth: panoramic photos.

Google Earth now includes a Photo layer which will allow users to find 2D photos taken from Panoramio (a photo community Google acquired in 2007), as well as panoramic photos sourced from 360cities.net, which collects panoramic photography on the web. Google had previously integrated 360 Cities into Google Earth under the Gallery layer, but this appears to be a deeper integration of the photos into the viewing experience.

In Google Earth, the panoramic photos from 360 Cities are marked with red square icons and the photos from Panoramio are marked with a blue icon. If you click the icon, you’ll be shown a bubble with a panoramic image. You can click again to see a larger version of the panoramic image in photo viewing mode.

360 Cities has a pretty vast database of panoramic photos thanks to its vibrant community of photographers and travelers. The new photo layer not only allows you to get an immersive view of a city or landmark, but it could save you from buying a plane ticket as well.

"Meet the new boss
same as the old boss"
-The Who

"'Cause hustlers hit the block when police change shifts
New York, California different toilet, same shit."
-The Game

Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called "the consumerization of the enterprise." They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will "consume" enterprise products proactively like consumers pick up Twitter.

But when I talk to the most successful new enterprise companies like WorkDay, Apptio, Jive, Zuora, and Cloudera, they all employ serious and large enterprise sales efforts that usually include expensive people some of who indeed wear Rolex watches. In fact, companies like Yammer who originally started with new age models have transitioned to more traditional enterprise sales approaches after experiencing the market without them.

So what gives? Are all these smart people out of their minds? Has nothing changed since the early days of IBM? Some things have changed, but others are exactly as they were.

The Order of Adoption Has Changed
20 years ago, the technology adoption curve generally conformed to the following order:

1. Government, specifically Defense and Intelligence organizations.
2. Businesses, with large businesses going first and smaller businesses adopting later.
3. Consumers

Today things have completely reversed. The latest technology goes to consumers first, followed by small enterprises that behave like consumers, then larger ones, then the military. The stunning reversal is one of many profound side effects of broad scale Internet adoption.

In the old days (before the Internet), no technology products were free, because distribution costs made it impossible to offer anything without some commitment from the end customer. As a result, new technology adoption generally started with the deepest pockets (the military) and worked its way down to the shallowest pockets (the consumer). Since the introduction of the Internet, many technology products can be distributed for free, and therefore have some free or free trial version. Interestingly, the order of adoption now follows decision-making speed rather than deep pockets. That is, consumers who can decide very quickly adopt first and the military — who has a notoriously complex decision making process — adopts last.

This reversal first initially stunned businesses. I remember dozens of CIOs at large companies being shocked that it was easier to find things on the Internet via Google than it was to find things in their own companies. We've seen the phenomenon repeat many times with the most recent being that it's far easier to get background information on complete strangers via LinkedIn than it is to know the skill sets and backgrounds of your co-workers.

Encouraged by the new trend, innovative entrepreneurs imagine a world where consumers find great solutions to help their employers in the same way that they find great products to help themselves. In the imaginary enterprise, these individuals will then take the initiative to convince their collegues to buy the solution. Through this method, if the product is truly great, there will be little or no need to actually sell it.

The actual enterprise works a bit differently. Meet the new enterprise customer. He's a lot like the old enterprise customer.

Meet The New Enterprise Customer
At the D8 technology conference, Steve Jobs made a statement about selling to enterprise customers that many missed but was extremely insightful and revealing: "We want to make better products than them. What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow. It’s not like that in enterprise . . . the people who make those decisions are sometimes confused."

Why are the enterprise people so confused? Why don't they just quickly adopt the best products without requiring these complex sales processes?

Big Companies Don't Have Credit Cards
Purchasing anything in a large organization requires a rigorous justification process that generally culminates in a purchase order (PO). They do not allow their employees to use their credit cards to buy technology off of the Internet. In fact, at many companies, doing so and attempting to expense it after the fact is a fire-able offense.

If you work in a startup, you might wonder why large organizations don't just trust their people to make smart purchasing decisions. If an employee needs a new technology, why wouldn't the company just let him do the right thing? There are many reasons:

1. The employee may not know what's appropriate in the context of the larger organization. The more people in an organization, the more diverse the set of needs. If the organization purchases, for example, social networking software it must attempt to take these needs into account.

2. The company may already own the technology or a similar technology. If you work with 100,000 people, how do you know what the other 99,999 have already purchased? When EDS was a customer of ours, they had a $1B annual credit with Computer Associates. Computer Associates sells hundreds of products and is constantly developing new products (many of which can only be learned about via special meetings with the company). How would any employee at EDS possibly know about potential conflicts without a formal process?

3. The employee may be corrupted by side incentives – If an employee of a large organization can make significant purchases without review or proper process, it's quite possible that he will be corrupted by an agent of a vendor. For example, an enterprise sales rep might buy a networking engineering a new Porsche in exchange for a $10 million order.

4. Public companies must comply with Sarbanes-Oxley compliant expense controls. Generally, when a company designs its expense controls, it must have in place a method for approving significant expenses before they are made. If a company lets an employee make significant a purchase or even a small purchase that leads to a significant purchase on his credit card, that will violate the company's financial controls, because the purchase was not pre-approved.

As a result of these and other factors, large companies employ complex processes to ensure that major purchases make sense. These processes generally span many different organizations and stakeholders. It is not unusual for a purchasing decision to include people from many different IT departments (e.g. development, security, operations) and business functions (e.g. Finance, IT, Legal). The decision often involves technical decision makers, economic decision makers, and risk management decision makers.

Often these processes are so complex that almost nobody inside the company knows how they work. Excellent enterprise sales reps will guide a company through their own purchasing processes. Without an enterprise sales rep, many companies literally do not know how to buy new technology products. A top notch enterprise sales person not only knows her customer's process better than the customer, but will be skilled at characterizing the value of her product to each decision maker independently. This will involve product demonstrations, proof of concepts, complete return on investment analysis and even competitive positioning. The sales rep will work with the various constituents to help characterize the value proposition to their management teams.

Large Enterprises Like Their Old Products
One thing that all large businesses have in common is that they have purchased a huge amount of technology over time. In fact, many of these technologies enabled the companies to become big in the first place. Naturally, the technology deployed in an enterprise varies widely in age. Some of the systems are outdated, complex, and downright arcane. Nonetheless, once deployed, enterprises develop great affection for the technology that runs their companies. They may complain about it, but like an old woman speaking of her spouse, the underlying love is far stronger than the criticism. And big companies expect you to love their old products too – by integrating with them.

But how do you figure out which old systems you need to integrate with and which ones you can afford to ignore? Like most things in the enterprise, it's complicated. Great enterprise sales forces sort through the myriad of existing systems and help guide their companies to find the essential few.

People in Big Companies Work to Live
If you work in the technology industry and particularly in Silicon Valley, you become used to employees who work tirelessly to improve their companies. It is not difficult to imagine one of these employees independently finding a new technology then championing it inside of her company simply because she wants her company to become great. Outside of technology and especially in very large companies, people generally don't do things like that. Most large company employees like to stay within the scope of their defined job. If they must make a choice between potentially advancing the efficiency of their employer via new technology or getting home to see their 8 year old's pee wee baseball game, it's not a difficult decision. As a result, expecting them to adopt your product with no help is probably not a good idea.

Final Thoughts
If you are selling to consumers or companies that behave like consumers, then moving away from the old channel models may make perfect sense. However, if you plan to sell to a large enterprise, keep in mind that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Ben Horowitz is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of Opsware.

Google has had a tough time in the past couple months or so, being more or less being positioned by the media as a company that is in danger of losing its top talent to Facebook. Especially when the news of its 10% across the board raises comes off as reeking of desperation during one of the worst talent crunches Silicon Valley has ever seen. Wait a minute, since when is a company giving raises to employees something to disparage?

Brian Heifferon, COO of Aftercollege (a site that helps connect students with the companies they want to work with after college) has shared with us some insight into how the rest of the country views Silicon Valley’s current talent arms race.

Despite the fact that over 12% of Facebook is currently comprised of former Googlers, popular assumption is wrong Heiffernon asserts. According to the Aftercollege dataset of students who want to be matched up with certain companies, Google still tops the list of requests for employer connections, especially among engineering majors at the top 50 schools.

“Two months ago my company rolled out a new feature for our users (college students looking to start their careers) that allows them to request companies that they'd like to work for.

We then go out on their behalf and pursue opportunities from those companies. Anyway, although it's only been two months, we're seeing some pretty clear sentiments when it comes to who students would prefer to work for. Google is #1, by a wide margin. Facebook is currently ranked #7.”

While it does not jive with the current media hypestorm, Heifferon show that interest in being employed by Google has not waned. And while that #1 vs. #7 margin is pretty shocking, the results show an even wider gulf when narrowed down to students who majored in engineering at top schools. Facebook is at number #12 vs. Google at #1 when the data is sorted by student requests through top engineering programs like Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, Michigan, etc. So maybe Google HR can take a deep breath and relax, at least for the moment.

Full data set below.

Image: hung-truong

So, LeWeb ’10 is coming up. Let’s say you’re looking for some good ideas of where to stay and what to do in Paris while you’re there. Where are you most likely to turn on the web? Google. A search for “paris vacation” yields TripAdvisor as the top result. You click on that link.

Oh. My. God.

You’re greeted at the top by a banner ad. Below that, you get 10 sponsored links. To the right of that, affiliate links. Below that, hundreds more affiliate links. And more banner ads. There is not a single piece of actual content on this page. It’s one giant ad. And there are 76 pages of this.

Vomit.

This is basically the state of trying to do research online for travel. It’s one giant SEO play which drives the winner a ton of traffic that they then monetize the hell out of with ads and affiliate links. It’s more or less then worst experience in the world for an end user.

You’re doing research on a vacation, you want to see big, beautiful pictures of the place, some reviews, recommendations from people you trust. Instead you get hundreds of links that are bought and paid for. It almost seems like a joke.

Google search results for hundreds of cities around the world are no better. Maybe this is exactly why we do need something like Blekko. Maybe we need humans, who can’t be gamed, helping with results. And if they are being gamed, we need transparency to see how and why and by whom. I don’t know. All I know is that this current system is really broken.

And shame on TripAdvisor for putting such garbage out there. It’s enough to make you want to go to a travel agent.

Did you get this far? Impressive.

This whole Facebook Mail thing is getting curiouser and curiouser.

After our post on Facebook taking control of fb.com, a number of people have reached out to say that mail.fb.com actually resolved to mail.thefacebook.com (that doesn’t seem to be the case for all people). What’s interesting about that is that mail.thefacebook.com (and mail.facebook.com) is live for all to see. It’s an Outlook Web App with a nice big Facebook logo that asks you for a username and password.

What’s really interesting about this is the report from All About Microsoft yesterday that Facebook’s new mail system may integrate with Office Web Apps. Obviously, Outlook is a part of those. Could this be the way that users are going to log in to check their new Facebook mail?

Probably not. Based on what we’ve heard, mail.thefacebook.com is actually the domain that Facebook employees use to remotely log in to check their work email. The fact that mail.fb.com is pointing to it, just seems to suggest that Facebook may be pointing all fb.com domains to their corresponding facebook.com domains (again, at least for some people).

But here’s what everyone really wants to know: are we going to get @facebook.com or @fb.com email addresses? Earlier today, Inside Facebook wondered if fb.com would be used for employees only, and facebook.com would be opened to the public. A report tonight in The New York Times cites two sources also saying that the public will be given facebook.com addresses (that’s what we initially heard as well).

But there could be a third scenario. It could be that Facebook allows people to have pick between the two domains, or simply have both. For example, you could email someone on Facebook at vanityname@fb.com or vanityname@facebook.com.

Or maybe Facebook isn’t planning on doing anything with the fb.com domain at this time other than redirect it to Facebook. But we’re heard one story of a Facebook employee boasting that starting next week their email address will be getting a lot shorter.

Stay tuned for more on Monday.

Update: Heard from a few more people in the know that mail.facebook.com is definitely Facebook’s employee mail access, like I said above. They’ve long used Exchange to handle their mail though it’s not clear if they’ll switch to use whatever this new mail service is yet (Google, for example, uses Gmail, obviously).

Nor is it clear if they’ll make mail.facebook.com open to this new mail product. For example, mail.google.com is Gmail, not their internal email login.

Project Titan is coming. On Monday. That’s what we’ve heard from sources with knowledge of Facebook’s secret mail project. And since we broke that news, there has been a lot of speculation about what domain Facebook might use for these new email addresses. Currently, the popular choice is fb.com. But while it seemed like Facebook acquired it earlier this year, no one knew for sure. Now it looks like we do.

As the site Domain Name Wire points out, the Whois record for the domain name has just been updated. While Markmonitor.com is still listed as the registrar name, Facebook is all over the records now as well. Most importantly, the domain namespace servers are now pointing to facebook.com. And Facebook is listed as both the administrative and technical contact.

All of this doesn’t mean that Facebook will use the domain for their mail project, of course. But the timing is interesting, obviously. AllFacebook also reports that Facebook is using fb.com internally now.

Markmonitor.com is a service used by many big-name clients to hide their domain transactions. It was thought that fb.com sold to Facebook in September, but no one knew for sure because of this mask. But the nameserver change doesn’t lie. Facebook is the father!

More: Hmm, Why Is Mail.Facebook.Com Pointing To An Outlook Web App Login?

[thanks Andrew]

My guest on Ask A VC this week is Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures. He’s also a professional kiteboarder. You may ask: Why would a guy who has been a VC since 1991 need kiteboarding sponsors? That was my first question.

Generally in this video we talk about how the venture business has changed during the last 20 years and how kiteboarding has changed over the last 10 years. There are a lot of parallels. Both games have become safer and more mainstream, but does that mean they’re less fun?

Video below.

Andy Sjarif has an almost weird, man-crush on Google. No matter what crazy things Eric Schmidt may promise shareholders, Sjarif is in no doubt that the great and mighty Google can achieve them. Self-driving cars? Trips to the moon? Wind farms? All in a day’s work at the Googleplex. Google with its execution, its Ph.Ds and its algorithms is Sjarif’s mahaguru.

But – all that said – he still wants to slaughter them in the Indonesian market.

To that end, his company Sitti has indexed more than 20 terabytes of data; comprising 12 million articles, 12 million Twitter accounts, 800 million pages of websites and blogs, 10 million Facebook conversations, 20 thousand words of slang and 2.7 billion Google search terms– all in Bahasa Indonesia and all to make mathematical sense of Bahasa language context, so that it can match ads to content better than Google.

Google has been supporting an Indonesian language version of Chrome for a few months, but it only launched Adwords and announced it was ready to serve the market October 8… about a week after Sitti just launched a trial of its contextual ad engine consisting of that consisted of 2,700 individual ads for 529 brands. It must be doing something right; not only did Google come into the market almost immediately but, the day after the campaign launched, Google bought the keyword in Bahasa for “Sitti.” See the screenshot, grabbed by Sjarif below.

A few weeks later, Google sent a team to Indonesia and held dozens of job interviews. Sjarif claims a few candidates were told that Google was going to crush the small upstart. They are said to be hiring a local team of about a dozen employees in 2011.

Of course, the timing could all be coincidence. Indonesia is a hot market that, as I’ve argued before, only a fool would completely ignore. But, if nothing else, it certainly makes Sitti look good to the locals. There’s that nationalistic pride issue of Google making more than anyone else when it comes to Indonesian Web advertising, but not employing many locals and not paying much in local taxes. Sitti is undoubtably a gnat in the Google universe. But every once in a while, a gnat gets your attention and you swat at it, right?

Whether he helped provoke it or not, Sjarif is thrilled Google is coming into the market, because he thinks it’ll drive more professionalism, attention and revenues for the ecosystem as a whole. Google Adsense tailored for Indonesia means local Web companies can better bootstrap companies with Google ads, the way the early Web 2.0 wave of companies in the United States did. The two could co-exist the same way mass players like Google and more tailored ad networks like Federated Media did for US startups.

Google brings heft to the market, but it will never get as deep into the nuances Bahasa indexing as Sitti is. Sitti cites the example of ZAO Begun in Russia, which Google tried to buy for $140 million before it was blocked by the Russian government, as evidence that language can be a powerful differentiator on the Web.

More than a year ago, Sjarif tried to raise funding from Valley VCs and one very well-heeled one he asked me not to name said, “It’s not that your technology isn’t hot, it’s the fact that you’re here. In the Valley, people would be fighting over you.” So Sitti raised money from a handful of local angels instead. They were offline moguls who didn’t know a thing about the Web, but backed him anyway. This is a running theme among Jakarta Web companies I met this past trip. Knowing the big families is important as entrepreneurs shape a new industry in a country with infrastructure issues and little local venture capital. One of these angels called him the day after he committed the money and said, “Andy, do two things for me. The first is don’t die, because this is going to be big. Now, explain to me what you do.”

Indonesians complain about a lack of sophisticated Web expertise and mentorship, but it’s one of the only emerging markets where I don’t hear complaints about a dearth of angel money. Sitti’s angels have given the company a long leash, deep pockets and helped open doors to the country’s old media elite. Sjarif now turns down traditional venture firm money, bootstrapping the company’s growth by giving big brands local media consulting advice for digital campaigns. “I want to talk to VCs when I don’t need their money,” he says. Smart plan. Venture money can come and go quickly in markets that don’t have a track record of returns.

But back to the product. Sjarif is so deep into how, when, where and what Indonesians say on the Web that he can tell you a lot about this phenomenon. He says three things drive the Indonesians love affair with Tweeting and Foursquare for instance: They’re narcassists; they love to gossip about one another (more than celebrities, unlike the US) and they get bored during urban traffic jams. He says he can map the traffic flows in Jakarta based on the volume of Tweets he indexes at any given time.

Here’s a visualization Sitti did of part of my Bahasan Twitter connections, created in part to embarrass me at an event. In true polite Indonesian style there was little embarrassing on it, except for the fact that ARRINGTON is the biggest hub on this map. And, what the hell is Mashable even doing on there? I might get fired for that if the big yellow dot ARRINGTON sees it. Interesting that @katharnavas in India is the same size dot as @arrington. Thanks for the links, whoever you are. The yellow dots are my connections; the red dots are connections to them or connections with smaller networks that have mentioned me; and the size of the dot indicates how frequently.

And this is a relation of most common words associated with “Sarah Lacy” into Google.co.id’s engine:

It’s certainly different than the words most related to me in an English-language search. It seems in Indonesia, haters don’t gotta hate quite as much. Good to know. The company also did a visualization of topics on my personal blog and conversations over Twitter they’ve indexed that relate to me.

Sitti wasn’t the only company I met trying to build a business out of social media sentiment in markets that were ignored by companies like Google up until recently. There are several companies in Asia generally seeking to make sense out of the wave of pages being created on the Web in Asian languages in order to turn all that traffic into actual cash. Since, most of those pages are being created over social media, it takes a company that can understand slang, context, and meaning in just 140 characters. And a lot of these companies put the Valley’s self-proclaimed “social media consultants” to shame with highly scientific and proprietary approaches.

Two very different examples are Brandtology in Singapore and Scraplr in Indonesia. Brandtology promises to  make better sense of what social media is saying about a brand by hiring an army of smart college grads to sit and parse queries so the machines don’t mis-read things like sarcasm and local slang. While, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there are certain things an algorithm doesn’t get, the economics of this company didn’t quite sense, and didn’t quite hold up the more questions I asked. How do you hire enough college-educated locals to filter all those keywords and still have a cost-effective solution? The answer is it’s not a free product. It costs between $1,000 and $10,000 a month depending on what percentage of keywords you want examined. Without paying extra, you don’t really get better relevance. I’m not sure that scales as the cost of talent rises.

Scraplr takes a totally algorithmic approach, that is specifically tailored to Bahasa, not emerging market languages broadly. Because it takes a machine-only approach it has a freemium model. That means more people can see how good the site is, but making money will be a bigger challenge. There is probably room for all three, as long as they perform as advertised. Indonesia and social media are both black boxes the West is struggling to understand.

Aol (err, us, I guess) will relaunch Aol Mail on Sunday afternoon, we’ve confirmed from sources close to Aol (hah). The company is currently the no. 4 webmail provider with around 30 million users.

We’ll have a chance to play with it before then and post a full review along with a conflict disclosure. Things we know now – it’s completely focused on speed, there will be a variety of domain names to choose from (not just aol.com) and it will be available on phoenix.aol.com. The old Aol Mail will stay available for the foreseeable future.

Not exactly the best launch timing I’ve ever seen. And yes, Aol told us we absolutely cannot post that the launch is coming. But the PR person who told us this is also now apparently our own PR person even though we haven’t requested a PR person and really wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway. Apart from doing things to drive her crazy. Thus, this post.

Go team!

Tumblr is attracting a lot of attention right now There is talk of a big funding round in the works and it is making significant hires. Why all the interest?

Sometime last June, blogging service Tumblr hit an inflection point. It’s visitors and pageviews just took off. According to comScore, Tumblr served up 1.2 billion pageviews in the U.S. in October, up a mind-boggling 1,540 percent from the year before (see chart above). Unique visitors from the U.S. hit 6 million, up 150 percent (see chart below). Worldwide visitors in September were around 14 million.

But something definitely started to click this summer. As you can see by the charts, that is when growth really took off. U.S. pageviews were only 373 million back then. In August, it passed its one billionth cumulative post. All those posts add up. The more people who use the super-easy blogging service (there are nearly 9.7 million different Tumblogs now), the more overall readers the platform attracts, which creates a virtuous cycle of more publishers.

Update: I asked a couple VCs why they think Tumblr is growing so fast. Bijan Sabet, the partner at Spark Capital who is on Tumblr’s board, told me via a Twitter DM:

I don’t think it was one thing. It was a series of things (web improvements, network effect, david’s obsession, iPhone, etc). 100% organic.

An Fred Wilson, whose VC firm Union Square Ventures is also an investor, alyhough he is not the partner on the board, replies:

I have no idea but my daughter came home from college this weekend and told me that all her friends have tumbles

In other words, all the kids are doing it.

People say that I never say anything bad about the iPhone. Here’s something: its notification system is awful. In particular, I’m talking about the way notifications are managed. They aren’t. Any Push Notification that comes in overrides another one. Apps can get badged with updates, but you’ll have no idea what’s new. That’s why Boxcar is a vital app.

We’ve written about Boxcar a number of times over the past year or so. They’re now launching version 4.0 of the app, and it’s by far the best yet. The entire app has been overhauled from the ground up. The result is a killer management system for Push Notifications. Apple needs to buy this company.

While previous versions of the app gave you a time-ordered stream of your notifications, it was somewhat daunting to look at. And you couldn’t do much from in the app itself. The new design makes everything much easier to manage and more visually appealing. For example, notifications from Twitter now show up complete with the user’s profile picture. And you can retweet or reply to any of those message right from within Boxcar.

The app itself has taken a design cue from the excellent Facebook iPhone app and features a home screen with nice looking big buttons for each service you have activated. There is also now Retina Display support if you have the iPhone 4. All of this works on the iPod touch and iPad as well.

And 4.0 brings Support for a host of new services. Google Buzz, Google Voice, Github, App Recommendations, and a few others are all now included and can be installed with a few easy steps. These App Recommendations are done by Boxcar themselves.

Boxcar is now a team of 5 people based in New York City. To date, they’ve delivered over 500 million notifications to iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.

Boxcar is a free download in the App Store (though it’s $4.99 if you wish to disable in-app advertising). You can find it here. Version 4.0 should be live shortly.

We had the chance to interview YouTube Product Manager Hunter Walk at Gigaom’s NewTeeVee conference and talk to him about some of the milestones YouTube has reached since it was founded in 2005 (Warning, my voice is LOUD).

Along with the impressive statistic that there are now 50,000 hours of new video uploaded daily (35 hours of video uploaded every minute, up from 24 hours a minute a few months ago), Walk revealed that YouTube now boasts over 2 billion video playbacks a day, 150 million of those being on mobile devices.

Walk also said that the company’s two main priorities are improving personalization features as well as search. With hundreds of YouTube partners making six figures a year, Walk says that YouTube will be focusing in 2011 on giving its community more tools to create better content, such as a livestreaming functionality for all users as well editing tools and improved ways of finding programming. Says Walk, “We’re not really a media company, we’re technology driven.”

One of the ways YouTube is using technology to improve user experience is through the recently launched experiment YouTube Topics, which are metadata tags that if implemented will eventually allow you to search YouTube for stuff like whether a music clip is live, in HD or about snowboarding, for example.

Walk said that YouTube is committed to making the specific content people want more accessible, “It’s a challenge, how do we find the few hours that everyone cares about? How do we program for you, and how do we give you an easier way to browse through the site?”

Whatever the answer is, they’re working on it.

Zachary Allia is just 26 years old. He’s either really lucky, is a negotiating savant or a combination of both. Back in 2007 when Facebook first opened their platform, Allia and a graphic designer pal came up with the Free Gifts app– mostly because he was a poor college kid and paying $1 to send someone a picture of a cake seemed exorbitant. He launched it and woke up the next morning to find it had 1 million users. It soared to ten million before he sold it to SGN in 2008.

Three things are notable about that deal: It was for a small undisclosed amount but Allia owned 100% of the company at the time, so it was likely a life changing amount of money; he chose selling to SGN over selling to Zynga (doh!); and he came to regret the deal once SGN abandoned the product to move more towards games. When Facebook abdicated its own virtual gifts product last summer, Allia decided he wanted the company back. Getting it took some doing, as he explains in the exclusive interview with TechCrunchTV below.

He enlisted two important allies: The first was Dave McClure who gave him $100,000 in funding. He acquired the company, and still had money left over if that tells you how cheap it was. The second was Narendra Rocherolle who is the master of selling, buying back on the cheap and reselling– having sold Webshots for $85 million, bought it back for practically nothing and sold it again for $70 million. Rocherolle got to know Allia before he even built Free Gifts and has taken him under his wing, serving as an advisor and co-founder in the new company, which is called 64 Pixels. The goal is to spin the company into an egreetings 2.0 powerhouse.

Watch the clip to hear more about the deal, any regrets, the company’s future and Allia’s advice for any kids coding in dormrooms.

A few days ago I requested that Facebook finally allow us to download email addresses for all of our friends. Facebook says this isn’t allowed because you only own the data you add to Facebook, not data that your friends add.

Their statement was, in part (entire statement here):

The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends' information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends' private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends' private photo albums.

We pointed out that Facebook already allows mass exporting of friends’ private email addresses via deals with Microsoft, Yahoo and possibly other partners. And we suggested Facebook amend their statement to add the following bolded language:

A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends' private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends' private photo albums, unless it's with a partner that's making it worth our while.

Anyway, for those of you who want to download all those email addresses, here’s how.

1. Create a Yahoo email account. Even if you have an old one, create a new one so that the imported contacts are clean. It only takes a minute. You’ll get a confirmation screen that looks like this, below. Click on import contacts “Get Started” link and then choose Facebook. Note – do not use Chrome for this, it doesn’t appear to work in that browser.

2. Authorize Yahoo in the Facebook pop up and then wait a few seconds. You’ll see a confirmation screen like this:

3. Ok, you’ve now imported the names and email addresses of all your Facebook friends into Yahoo. Now just click “tools” in Yahoo mail and export. CSV format is a good format for uploading to Gmail or your desktop contact book. Save the file to your desktop, and you’re done.

4. Enjoy your new contacts. You’ve just done something that Facebook says you have no right to do, using tools provided by Facebook.

Google is bleeding talent. As companies mature, that tends to happen. But the fact that a large number are defecting to rival Facebook clearly has Google worried — enough to offer massive retention bonuses and across-the-board salary increases. But it’s not totally stopping the talent drain, as another Director of Engineering has left. But Google can relax a bit as at least he’s not going to Facebook.

Location-based service Loopt has hired Aditya Palande to be their new Vice President of Engineering. He’s leaving Google after just about three and a half years there. Most recently, he was in charge of the entire portfolio of applications in the CRM space for the search giant. In total, he has about 20 years of engineering experience at various companies.

Loopt was one of the pioneers in the location space, but has since been overshadowed by rivals like Foursquare. But the company has recently taken the approach of aligning itself more closely with Facebook, as the social network makes a heavy push into the location space with Places.

They’re now charged with providing additional utility on top of Facebook’s location graph. And Palande will be in charge of the technical details behind that. He notes that the space is still in its nascent stages.

Hey it’s Friday, and usually Fridays are when people send out the “more fun” press releases. Like the one we just got from Commonwealth Toys about the preorder launch of Angry Birds plush toys at Shopangrybirds.com and Toywiz.com.

The release said that industrious fans of the world’s #1 selling mobile game might also be able to buy the stuffed birds in limited quantities at Suncoast and FYE retailers in “just a few days,” whatever that means.

Almost forgot the most important part! The email included the first photos of the Angry Birds pig characters. Behold the pigs, available in early 2011, below.

Want more bird action? Check out Gregory Cortez's animated tribute to the game.

Email newsletters may be ready for a comeback. The fact is that despite the communications mechanism being old-school, publishers can put in less effort to get more views in an inbox than on a blog. AOL exec Bob Pittman has bet big on email newsletters, funding a number of media startups built around the form of communication. Philip Kaplan (a.k.a. Pud), the founder of FuckedCompany, AdBrite and Blippy, has created his own email newsletter platform called TinyLetter.

TinyLetter is a dead simple way to create email newsletters. You pick out a name for your newsletter, and TinyLetter will create a URL to send to contacts via email, Facebook, Twitter and more so they can sign-up. You can then write your newsletter, customize your newsletters by design, add subscribers, read replies from subscribers and track old newsletters. You can also turn on the option to charge per month for your newsletter.

For background, Kaplan had an email newsletter about 10 years ago called the “FuckedCompany Sporadic,” which had about 250,000 subscribers. He felt like resurrecting the email newsletter because he didn’t want to put the work into writing a blog. His point is that if you don’t blog daily, you won’t build an audience, but email newsletters can be sent out weekly and have a built in audience. And people check their email everyday. And people can reply to emails, says Kaplan.

Speaking like a true entrepreneur, Kaplan said he was tired of using poor email services for sending newsletters, so he decided to build his own. He actually built and launched it in one day, on Oct. 31. You can subscribe to Pud’s own newsletter here.

He’s not the first entrepreneur to quit blogging to try to create a legitimate email newsletter platform. Sam Lessin, the CEO of Drop.io and new employee of Facebook, launched Letter.ly, a similar service that allows people to create and sell subscription newsletters.

Between Soundhound and Shazam, I wouldn’t have thought the world was really begging for another service that could identify that song playing on the radio. Sometimes, though, something comes along that solves that problem we didn’t know we had and makes the whole thing worthwhile.

You see, Soundhound and Shazam do a great job of identifying tracks.. but then what? You can buy the track on iTunes… which is great, for all the people who buy their music from iTunes. For folks who use services like Grooveshark, Spotify, or Rhapsody, though, that song they heard in the bar is gone from their noggin’ by the time the next beer hits the table.

Enter Limili.

A new SEC filing revealed today that NanoICE— a Seattle-area startup using molecular ice to chill and preserve meat, seafood and other raw materials as they are transported or stored— has secured a $500,000 investement (in the form of convertible debt financing). According to its website, the company’s customers include fishing vessels and food retailers today.

The systems sold by NanoICE produce molecular ice fractions, or ice crystals that are less than one micrometer in diameter. The “nanoice” can be delivered through something as small as a hypodermic needle, or in large quantities through hoses and pipes. NanoICE aims to curb food waste and end hunger, especially in the U.S., while displacing more energy-intensive refrigeration technology.

According to reports by the United Nations Environment Programme GRID-Ardenal (UNEP G-A), in the U.S. 30% of all food, worth some $48.3 billion, is thrown away each year, which means about half of the water used to produce this food is wasted. (Agriculture is the largest human use of water.) Food retailers lose about 26% of the food they store and try to sell.

Earlier this year, NanoICE won the Zino Zenith Award for Best Investment Opportunity from entrepreneurs and angel investors in the Pacific Northwest.

The company is also testing its technology in a medical context, while selling it within food industries; it may be successful in preserving human organs allowing them more time to travel from organ donors to transplant patients. Executives could not be reached immediately for comment.

Earlier today, a Business Insider report indicated that Tumblr has landed a “very big and competitive” new round of funding from Sequoia Capital. We’re still looking into that, and they’re not commenting, but here’s one thing we do know about the company: they’ve just hired a new Director of Product.

Derek Gottfrid will be joining the company from The New York Times where he was the Senior Architect in charge of many of the interesting things they do with technology. It looks like today is his last day of work for the Times, and he’ll be joining team Tumblr shortly, Tumblr President John Maloney confirms. “We’re thrilled and excited about what Derek will bring to the team/product,” Maloney writes in an email. Gottfrid had been with the Times for 12 years.

The move continues the recent trend of Tumblr hiring from old media companies, as back in August they hired Mark Coatney away from Newsweek to be their media evangelist.

In terms of growth, Tumblr continues to be on a tear. They publish all their numbers publicly via Quantcast, and the growth rate is pretty amazing. Back in July, we reported they were doing 1.5 billion pageviews a month — that number is now past 2.5 billion, with half of those coming from the U.S. They’re about to become a top 40 site in the U.S. In August, they shot past a billion total posts.

Given the growth and assuming the funding talk is true, expect the New York-based Tumblr to begin ramping up hiring shortly. Their staff blog only shows 12 employees, and one of them, co-founder and CTO, Marco Arment left in September to work on his successful side-project, Instapaper.

Tumblr last raised money in April of this year. They’ve raised just over $10 million in total so far leading up to this new funding.

Prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator has just announced that it’s adding two new partners: Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and founded FriendFeed; and Harj Taggar, a former participant in the YC program who has been working there over the last year to help advise startups.

Buchheit is the better known of the two — in addition to Gmail and FriendFeed, he also created the first prototype of Google’s AdSense and coined its motto “Don’t be evil”. To take the new position Buchheit is leaving Facebook, which he joined last summer when the social network acquired his company Friendfeed. Given Facebook’s rapid growth this is a bit surprising, but
Buchheit is financially secure and Y Combinator is surging as well.

Taggar founded Auctomatic, a service that helped users sell things on eBay that was acquired by Live Current Media in March 2008 for $5 million in cash and stock.

Given Y Combinator’s success, these are certainly coveted spots. Y Combinator hasn’t added any Partners to its team since it launched in 2005; other partners include Anybots founder Trevor Blackwell, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris. YC also recently named Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian as its ‘Ambassador to the East’.

Here’s YC founder Paul Graham’s post on the news:

In case anyone doesn’t already know who he is, Paul Buchheit was responsible for three of the best things Google has done: he wrote GMail, built the original prototype of AdSense, and came up with the phrase “Don’t be evil.” After leaving Google he started FriendFeed, which last year became Facebook’s largest acquisition to date. He’s a good friend as well as one of the world’s best hackers; for years we’ve considered him an honorary YC partner.

We hired Harj Taggar earlier this year to work advising startups alongside me. He wasn’t technically a partner, but we quickly realized that he was one de facto—that among us his opinion carried as much weight as any of ours—and that it would be mean of us to delay recognizing this officially. Harj’s arrival significantly improved how well YC operated. He’s a large part of the reason we were able to fund 36 startups in the summer 2010 cycle.