Discovery engine StumbleUpon recently announced App Discovery, a free beta feature of its Android app that basically suggests mobile apps based on a user’s individual interests and preferences and those of friends and like-minded users.

Turns out people love to stumble, even on the go.

Asked if the feature has taken off, the company told me that, in the 2 weeks following its release, they’ve recorded more than 1 million App stumbles already. Considering the fact there are over 100,000 apps for the Android platform at this point, there’s clearly a need for such app discovery services.

StumbleUpon’s Android app not only recommends native applications, but also Web content. The company tells me, already, 25% of all stumbles are for applications, which means the large majority of people still use StumbleUpon the same way they do on their desktops.

Either way, StumbleUpon tells me downloads of its free Android app have soared, doubled even, since the new feature was introduced.

And here are the top 5 most installed Android apps that were discovered by users through StumbleUpon’s App Discovery feature:

- Angry Birds (but of course)

- Camera 360

- Google Sky Map

- Gmote 2.0

- Alchemy

If you’re interested in checking out the app and feature, you should also size up other app discovery services for Android, such as Appsfire and AppAware.

The UCSF drive to build a children’s hospital just got a little help from Zynga. Starting December 1 Farmville players will be able to purchase Candy Cane seeds for their farms, and 100% of proceeds will be donated to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. It’s an excellent cause that we are participating in an well – see details here.

This is a proven way for Zynga to raise cash for charity. They have, for example, raised $3 million for Haiti over two campaigns. And our understanding is that Zynga has ditched their occasional and controversial policy of keeping a percentage of proceeds from sale of charitable virtual goods.

We’ve also suggested to Zynga that they consider building a virtual children’s hospital as well to deal with childhood obesity, diabetes and other medical issues that may pop up from all of this candy cane growing. They didn’t seem to think that joke was funny.

The winner of the challenge will be given the right to name "The Link," a children's activity space for learning play and discovery in the new Hospital. I asked Zynga what they’ll name it if they win. I don’t think they’ve decided.

If you’d like to donate to this amazing project you can play Farmville and buy the seeds from December 1 to December 15. Or you can donate via Team TechCrunch, and I’m matching the first $10,000 in donations personally.

Dscover.me is launching today as a way to share and recommend what you are reading or watching on the Web. Using a Chrome or RockMelt add-on, you can share pretty much any link – sorry, “Discovery” – with friends and followers.

Using Facebook Connect, you can sign in to Dscover.me and start sharing websites with friends via a so-called “Discoveries Stream.” A Whitelist feature allows you to check which sites you’d like to share and which sites you’d like to keep private. With these settings, Dscover.me will automatically add Whitelisted sites that you’ve visited to your stream.

After setting up an account, users can follow friends and people with similar interests, as determined by their browsing behavior. Dscover.me says that in the future it will provide content recommendations to users as they browse the Web.

Privacy is an issue here because essentially Dscover.me will share whatever you are browsing (if it’s on the Whitelist). But the company says that the Whitelist allows users to specify what they are comfortable sharing when it comes to browsing. Dscover.me also allows users to remove posts from the system and modify their Whitelists at any time.

Here’s the biggest issue Dscover.me faces, though: sheer indifference and puzzled potential users.

Honestly, there are so many ways to share interesting links these days (from bookmarking to Facebook likes, posting links on one’s blog or Twitter account to good old emailing and whatnot) that the unique proposition of this service completely eludes me. The majority of links I visit in any given day isn’t worth sharing at all, let alone “automagically”.

Your mileage may vary – give it a peek and tell us what you think.

First came the local daily deal sites: Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe. There were so many it was hard to keep up. Then came the daily deal aggregators like Yipit and 8coupons. Even Yahoo is starting to aggregate daily deals. Then the daily deal sites started to expand from local deals to national deals, like Groupon’s Gap promotion which brought in $11 million in one day. There are now at least 30 daily deal services focussed on national or brand deals, including Amazon’s Woot!, UrbanDaddy, Lot18, and Cinderalla Wine.

So you know what that means. Yup, the daily deal aggregators are going national. Yipit just launched Yipit Nation, which filters out the national deals from the local ones. At sign-up you mark what kinds of deals you want to hear about, and then you get a daily email or can visit the site. Some national deals on the site right now include discounts on organic coffee, a smokehouse tailgating package (sausages!), men’s dress shirts, wine, and power tools. I’m sure they have other stuff, but that’s what was tailored for me. I do love me some power tools at a tailgating party!

Yipit, which is based in New York City, raised a $1.3 million A round earlier this year from SV Angel, RRE Ventures, IA Ventures, Michael Yavonditte, and Peter Hershberg.

There’s a new twist to the Facebook-Google contact data export brouhaha. It looks like the warning Google issued last week to Facebook users who tried to export their Gmail contact to the network has been removed. If you try to import your contacts from Gmail now on Facebook, Google’s warning to you that your contacts information will be effectively trapped inside Facebook without the ability to re-export the data, no longer appears. But the warning still exists on the web. Weird, huh?

So several things could be taking place here. Facebook either found a way to workaround this warning or Google and Facebook came to an agreement over this. Or Google decided to stop showing the warning without an agreement with Facebook.

For background on the whole issue, Google blocked Facebook API access to download Google contacts. Facebook hacked its way around that, and Google subsequently issued a statement that they were "disappointed". Facebook Platform engineer Mike Vernal then responded in the comments of one of our blog posts about the slap fight, defending Facebook’s policy and calling it – cough – “consistent”.

Last Friday, Google started posting the warning to users who tried to import their Gmail contact to Facebook. They still allowed users to export the data but the warning was very clear. Not it’s not there.

One thing is for sure. If Facebook did find a workaround, this will surely escalate the battle between the two companies.

Pivot. It is the new buzzword seemingly taking on a life of its own ala “SUPER ANGEL” after this iconic, viral talk by Mike Maples. Ngmoco did it and cashed in big time. Instagram did it and became an app sensation. Twitter did it, and became, well, Twitter. And now Meebo has done it and raised another $25 million from Khosla Ventures to continue building its business.

Seth Sternberg, Meebo co-founder and CEO, stopped by our studio after Web 2.0 to tell us about how the site became so much more than Web-based IM and how he says the company is nailing the discovery problem in a new, more powerful way than Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and everyone that came before.

They reach 180 million uniques world-wide every month. How’d they get there? Moving from a product the founders wanted to build to a product other sites and users wanted them to build, and an emphasis on “building a product for normal people, not Silicon Valley.”

Sternberg explains what he means in the video below. Tomorrow, we’ll be posting part two of our interview with Sternberg where we talk about the value (declining value) of “reach” in an age of huge platforms with instant distribution. I also pry a few revenue details out of Sternberg. You won’t want to miss it.

Online advertising revenues in the U.S. hit $6.4 billion in Q3 2010, representing a 17 percent increase over the same period in 2009, according to estimates presented moments ago by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in tandem with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

This marks the highest quarterly result ever for the industry.

This is not the first time IAB and PwC got to announce record numbers this year.

Last month, they said Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. were at $12.1 billion in the first half of 2010, setting a new half-year record that represented an 11.3 percent increase over the first half of 2009. Numerous Adblock Plus users be damned.

The first quarter of this year alone was good for $6 billion in online advertising revenues in the United States, so a massive increase this ain’t.

Nevertheless, as you can tell from the chart, IAB estimates have been consistently growing year over year since the beginning of the decade, with the notable exception of 2009, when a massive slump occurred in the U.S. due to the global economic recession.

The previous industry record was set in the fourth quarter of 2009, when Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. climbed to $6.3 billion.

Fourth-quarter results always see an uptick because of increased spending in the holiday period, which means IAB and PwC will likely be reporting another record quarter soon.

In online classifieds, as with any marketplace, the more buyers and sellers a company can bring together, the more listings it can generate. Oodle is about to add 1.6 million groups to its social commerce platform. Oodle is acquiring Grouply in a deal which could be announced as soon as today.

Oodle powers social classifieds on Facebook and MySpace. Now, presumably, it will offer classifieds as an option on Grouply sites as well.

Grouply is a do-it-yourself social network built on top of Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. It takes those groups out of forum and mass email hell, and gives them their own sites. It competes with Ning, and in fact is trying to attract Ning refugees who don’t want to pay for that service. The deal might save the startup from having to compete with Ning.

The size of the deal is likely modest. Grouply raised a total of $2.6 million, most recently $1.3 million in January, 2008. Whereas Oodle has raised a total of $23 million. Investors in Grouply include Reid Hoffman, Jeff Clavier, and the Harvard Angel Group.

Social commerce startup LivingSocial is expanding to Australia, acquiring a majority stake in the existing leading social shopping site, Jump On It, rather than competing with them head-on. The agreement involves an investment of $5 million by the Washington, DC-based Groupon rival, and Jump On It will be folded into LivingSocial's branded Daily Deals.

Together with LivingSocial, Jump On It says it will now reach more than 1.2 million Australians via email and Facebook – where it has attracted over 550,000 ‘fans’ – every day.

This recent expansion means LivingSocial is now operational in most English-speaking countries, including Australia, the U.S., Canada, UK and Ireland.

The company recently acquired social adventure company Urban Escapes, enabling LivingSocial to offer its subscribers trips that promote a "fun and active lifestyle and a chance to escape the day-to-day rat race".

LivingSocial says it currently boasts 10 million subscribers across more than 100 markets worldwide, earning them $1 million a day, and adds that they project to book more than $500 million in revenue in 2011.

The startup has raised just south of $50 million to date, putting it in an excellent position to snap up smaller niche players to grow in other ways than organically and by launching in new cities and countries worldwide.

Apple is announcing a new board member today—Dr. Ronald Sugar, the former chairman of the board and CEO of the Northrop Grumman, a U.S. defense company. According to a release Dr. Sugar will serve as the Chair of the Audit and Finance Committee.

Dr. Sugar was Chairman and CEO at Northrop Grumman from 2003 until his retirement in 2010. Prior to working for the defense company, he held positions at Litton Industries and TRW Inc., where he served as chief financial officer.

CEO Steve Jobs said this about Dr. Sugar:

“Ron is an engineer at heart, who then became a very successful business leader. We are very excited to welcome him to Apple's Board…In addition to having been the CEO of a high-tech Fortune 100 company, Ron has a Ph.D. in engineering and has been involved in the development of some very sophisticated technology."

On Apple’s board, Sugar joins former U.S. Vice President Albert Gore; JCrew CEO Millard Drexler; former CEO of Intuit, Bill Campbell; Avon Chairman and CEO Andrea Jung; Genentech Chairman Arthur D. Levinson, and Steve Jobs himself.

Board member Jerry York, CEO of Harwinton Capital, passed away earlier this year, so it’s assumed that Sugar will be filling this spot. And Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board last August.

I rarely attempt to get things done via my admitedly short soapbox and, as anyone who knows me will attest, I’m a bastion of sweetness and light on the Internet. But dammit, Google, give me my email back.

See, we run Google Apps for Domains. This allows us to run the crunchgear.com mail accounts independently of oversight by our Master and Commander and eventually, I’m sure, we’ll have to move over to AOL’s Phoenix Platform provided we are able to get enough free hours in the mail (I have 1000 right now and the rest of the guys have like 750 each so that should keep us until February.) On Sunday night, my email, john@crunchgear.com, went into maintenance mode and hasn’t come out. I haven’t had IMAP/POP/web/WAP/WebTV/Gizmondo access for three days now. The other guys all have working email addresses. Only I have been chosen to suffer.

Read more…

You sure love blocking ads when you’re browsing the Web, don’t you?

Adblock Plus, the hugely popular Firefox add-on, has been downloaded over 100 million times, its creator is set to announce soon. That’s a record number of installs for a browser app, and one that will be hard to beat, too.

In hopes of avoiding the wrath of my fellow TechCrunch staff writer Jason Kincaid, here’s another interesting key stat that will be announced later today: more than 12 million people apparently use Adblock Plus to browse the Web advertising-free every day.

Adblock Plus is an open-source project that aims to “put users back in control” of their browsing experience, enabling them to block online ads and halt tracking by marketing agencies and publishers.

In a recently published blog post, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant revealed that he had recently secured funding from an unnamed Samaritan, enabling him to quit his day job at Songbird and work on the ABP project full-time for the next two years.

Based on the add-on’s popularity and growth rate, he appears to have chosen wisely.

Do you use Adblock Plus or similar tools to block ads on TechCrunch and other sites?

Update: the press release is out:

New record: Adblock Plus for Firefox Becomes First App to Reach 100 Million Downloads

Most Popular Firefox Add-on Averages More Than 80,000 Downloads and 12 Million Users Per Day

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Adblock Plus, the popular add-on for the Firefox web browser, set a record today by being the first browser application to reach the milestone of 100 million downloads. Every day, more than 12 million people use Adblock Plus to browse the Internet advertisement-free. As online ads become bigger, flashier and more intrusive, Adblock Plus enables users to view the real content of websites without distractions or wasted bandwidth.

Adblock Plus can be downloaded for free and without registration at www.adblockplus.org or directly from the Firefox website at https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/1865. Setup takes less than a minute.

Electronic payments solutions company VeriFone Systems has just announced the acquisition of Hypercom, a company that sells secure electronic payment and digital transaction technologies. The deal is an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $485 million. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2011.

Hypercom’s products range from countertop and mobile card payment terminals and PIN entry devices to server-based payment systems that consolidate, manage and route transactions for the retail, petroleum, ticketing and parking sectors.The company also supplies the medical industry with e-health terminals for new electronic health cards, and self-service payment devices for mass transit rail ticketing, road tolls and parking meters, vending machines, kiosks, petrol forecourts and more in Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and North America

Hypercom’s says its revenues have increased from almost $290 million to approximately $450 million. Verifone is acquiring the company to expand its presence in European markets.

Verifone is on a bit of an acquisition spree and just acquired Way Systems and Semtek. And the company just struck a deal with PayPal to offer mobile payments acceptance with PayPal in the company’s products.

PixelActive, a 16-person company that provides 3D urban modeling software for video games, simulation, navigation, and urban planning, has been acquired by NAVTEQ for an undisclosed amount. The map, traffic and location data provider says it is buying the firm primarily to help it move from 2D to 3D maps.

They’re arguably quite late to the party, if they’ve only now realized we’re moving to a world of three-dimensional maps fast, but let’s not digress.

PixelActive, founded in 2003, specializes in tools and technologies for 3D modeling of detailed road networks, buildings and terrain. The company’s Cityscape product has already been utilized by NAVTEQ in the development of products such as 3D Junction Objects and 3D City Models, so the company is familiar with PixelActive’s technology.

Other clients include Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Autodesk and Lockheed Martin.

Steve Rotenberg and Michael Kelley, the founders of PixelActive, will stay with NAVTEQ and continue their current roles in the company’s R&D organization to expand its ability to build products in a 3D environment.

Both men are veterans from the gaming industry, having both worked in the computer graphics and video game industry for over 15 years.

Roternberg was at Angel Studios from 1992 to 2002, and he was involved in development of real-time technologies such as physics simulation, character animation, rendering, playing a key role on video game titles such as the Midtown Madness, Smuggler’s Run and the Midnight Club franchises.

Kelley worked for Angel Studios / Rockstar San Diego from 1996 to 2006, achieving the title of Technical director. His work there helped ship titles including Red Dead Revolver and the Midnight Club series.

Travel search engine Kayak just filed an S-1 statement with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering. The company hopes to raise $50 million, according to the filing.

Here are some interesting stats included in the filing. For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, Kayak generated $128 million in revenues, growing by 48% from last year. For the third quarter ended September 30, Kayak generated $48 million in revenue, representing a growth of 80% from last year. Net Income was actually down for the first three quarters to $6.2 million from $10.4 million in 2009.

From January until September, the travel site processed more than 469 million user queries for travel information, which grew by 37% from last year. For the last quarter, query volume increased 50% compared to the same period in 2009. Kayak’s mobile applications have been downloaded nearly four million times since March 2009. In the third quarter alone, Kayak saw one million downloads, representing growth of 152% compared to the same period in 2009.

Another interesting tidbit from the filing refers to ITA Software, the flight information giant that Google is trying to buy. Kayak says that one of its risks is that it depends on a third=party to query airfare results. Kayak licenses faring engine software from ITA under an agreement which expires on December 31, 2013. ITA’s software powered 42% of Kayak’s overall airfare query for the year. Airline travel queries accounted for approximately 85% of the searches performed on Kayak for the year and distribution revenues from airline queries represented approximately 26% of its revenue for the past nine months.

Here’s what Kayak said in relation to the Google-ITA deal:

“If completed, Google could pursue the creation of new flight search tools which will enable people to find comparable flight information on the Internet without using a service like ours. According to Experian Hitwise, in September 2010, approximately 30% of travel searches began with Google. Upon completion of its acquisition of ITA, this number could substantially increase, as Google may choose to offer services that directly compete with the services we offer. Google may also cause ITA not to renew any agreements with us, or to renew agreements with us on less favorable terms. If ITA or Google limit our access to the ITA software or any improvements to the software, increase the price we pay for it or refuse to renew our contract and we are unable to replace ITA with a comparable technology, we may be unable to operate our business effectively and our financial performance may suffer.”

That seems to be a significant risk for Kayak-and many thought that the Google-ITA deal would put off Kayak’s IPO for some time. But The Google-ITA deal under investigation, it’s unclear whether the Justice Department will give Google a pass on this one, especially since the online travel industry has been very against the deal.

The company said that Orbitz accounted for 18.8% of Kayak’s revenue for the year, and Expedia accounted for 24.9% of revenues for Kayak. And Google supplies 8.1 percent of Kayak’s revenue via advertising.

Kayak, which has raised $22 million in funding, was formed in January 2004 by co-founders of Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. The company co-founders include Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terrell Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia.

Social business services company Dachis Group has acquired Archrival, an youth marketing consultancy agency. Earlier this month, Dachis acquired Stuzo, a provider of social marketing applications and programs.

In both cases, the acquired company is a early Facebook Preferred Developer. In both cases, Dachis Group declined to share the terms of the purchase.

Archrival specializes in youth-oriented marketing services, including social, mobile and digital strategy consultancy, app development, social content creation, user experience design and interactive marketing. The company’s clients include Foursquare, Red Bull, ESPN and HP.

With the acquisition, Dachis aims to extend its “Social Business Engagement” execution capabilities, allowing large companies the ability to target and engage the youth market across social, mobile and digital marketing platforms.

The transaction also extends the company's ability to execute strategies using Facebook Pages, Applications and Connect integrations for its global clients, it adds.

The acquisition expands Dachis Group to roughly 150 employees in nine cities and five countries worldwide, although it remains unclear how many of those are coming from Stuzo and Archrival, exactly.

Dachis Group was founded in 2008, by CEO and chairman Jeffrey Dachis (cofounder and former CEO of Razorfish).

Its growth strategy, which consists of rolling up smaller companies in the social business services space as well as growing organically, is backed by a financial commitment of up to $50 million from Austin Ventures (Dachis Group is headquartered in Austin, Texas).

Let's face it, bug tracking is a chore. It's by far the least sexy side of software development and, frankly, many of the tools available to handle the process reflect this. That's something that London-based startup PlayNicely Labs is trying to change with its first offering, PlayNice.ly, a web-based bug tracker that focuses on speed, UX and, well, fun. Yes, you read that correctly. PlayNicely is attempting to actually make bug tracking fun. It does this in part by adding gaming metrics via Foursquare-style badges, which as gimmicky as that sounds, Flickr's own internal bug tracking app already does this. So perhaps it was inevitable that a publicly available offering would do something similar, and PlayNice.ly might just be the first. To that end, Beta testers will have already got the "Early Adopter" badge, while 20 bugs cleared unlocks the "Squasher" badge and so on. (And to think PlayNicely Labs co-founder Basheera Khan, a former TechCrunch Europe alumni, left us to squash bugs. It takes all sorts.)

Hulu has formally launched its premium online video subscription service Hulu Plus after a preview period that started back in July.

Pleasant surprise for those who are interested: the monthly subscription fee has dropped from $9.99 to $7.99, a 20 percent price cut.

Pleasant surprise for those who already signed up for Hulu Plus: early adopters will get a credit for the difference from the $9.99 preview price to be applied automatically to their next billing cycle. Starting today, all new subscribers to Hulu Plus will also receive a 1-week free trial.

In addition, Hulu has announced that its premium streaming service will henceforth be available on more devices (the company claims that, combined, all supported devices boast a total installed base of over 50 million in the U.S.).

Here’s the list of supported (and soon to be supported) devices, from the press release:

- Connected TV and Blu-Ray players: Samsung, Sony BRAVIA® HDTVs and connected Blu-ray Disc™ Players, and coming soon: LG Electronics, Panasonic, VIZIO

– Connected Set-top Boxes: Roku, Sony Network Media Player, and coming soon: TiVo Premiere DVRs, Western Digital's WD TV Live Hub Media Center and WD TV Live Plus Network Media Player

- Gaming Consoles: PlayStation® 3, and coming soon: Xbox 360

- Mobile Devices: Apple iPad, iPhone, iPod touch

- Other network appliances: Sony Dash

HD-available programs will stream to users in 720p on capable devices.

In a blog post, Hulu adds that updates to the Samsung, PS3, and Apple iOS Hulu Plus apps will be available, sporting bug fixes and “feature and performance enhancements”.

Hulu says it will continue to announce additional supported devices and platforms (Android, anyone?) in the coming months. The company also states that it will continue to grow its current library with more content (there’s already a fairly wide range of TV shows from ABC, FOX, NBC, and others available today).

Last week, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar spoke at GigaOm’s NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, where he revealed that Hulu now has 30 million monthly users and that he estimates the company will rake in $240 million in 2010, more than double its $108 million revenue booked in 2009. Hulu is said to be preparing for a $2 billion IPO.

For more perspective, please read this guest post by Mark Suster: “Why Hulu Is The OPEC Of Online Video” and our own Jon Orlin’s “Internet TV and The Death of Cable TV, really”.

As an avid online shopper and someone who loves fashion, I have always found Google’s product search to lack any sort of aesthetic appeal. Pictures are small, filters are too basic for power shopping and for the fashion-focused crowd; the overall design is unappealing. While product search’s format may work for searches for electronics, it doesn’t work for people looking to buy clothes, handbags or shoes. Generally, Google has lacked a proper visual search option for soft goods shopping experience. Which is why Google bought Like.com, a visual search engine and network of fashion-focused shopping sites. Today, Google is finally stepping foot into the world of fashion, e-commerce, visual search, personalized shopping and designer recommendations with the awaited launch of Boutiques.com.

Simply put, Boutiques.com melds the best of what Like.com had to offer within a fast Google search engine. Boutiques.com combines elements of shopping personalization engine Covet.com; street style social network Weardrobe, and visual styling tool Couturious.

The site serves as both a search engine for all things fashion and provides a personalized shopping experience through collection of boutiques curated by celebrites, stylists, and designers. Users can also create accounts and post their own boutiques. Like.com’s CEO and founder Munjal Shah, who now is an employee of Google and helped lead product design for Boutiques.com, walked us through the site’s interface. I’ll address both of the components of Boutiques.com below.

SEARCH

Search on Boutiques.com is similar to search you’d find on Like.com, but on steroids. You can search for a particular item and filter by color, silhouette, pattern, size, style, merchant, and more. Next to your search results (which will be in a view all mode by default), Boutiques.com will feature looks that match your search from Weardrobe and Couturious. So if I searched for a turquoise dress, Boutiques will show me user contributed looks including a turquoise dress from Weardrobe as well as professionally styled looks matching my search from Couturious. And the site will also surface outside styling options from Polyvore (which Google does not own).

BOUTIQUES

Shah compares the element of Boutiques on the site to Pandora, where you can create your own stations and receive personalized music recommendations based on your preferences and actions. On the site, you’ll find mini Boutqiues of clothing, shoes, styles, handbags and more curated by designers and celebrities. Users can also create their own boutiques with their picks as well. And all items in boutiques are able to be purchased (like any search engine, you’ll click-through to the merchant site to purchase the item).

Users can register with Boutiques.com and begin to follow certain boutiques from celebrities and designer and other users for recommendations. Using Covet.com’s personal styling tool that asking you a number of questions to determine your style, Google will also recommend similar boutiques to you. Users can comment on boutiques as well.

As of now, Google has accumulated a who’s who of celebrities and designers to curate their own personalized boutiques. There are over 30 designers who have sponsored boutiques at launch, including Tory Burch, Isaac Mizrahi, Kate Spade , Lulu Guinness, Marchesa, Oscar de la Renta , Rag and Bone, Rebecca Taylor, Tracy Reese, Betsey Johnson, Diane Von Furstenberg, Halston Heritage, Nicole Miller, Anna Sui and Badgley Mischka.

Celebrities who have curated boutiques on the site at launch include Anna Paquin, The Olsen Twins, Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, Carey Mulligan, Elisabeth Moss, Iman, Jane Krakowski, Kelly Osbourne and Rashida Jones.

IPAD APP

Shah says the iPad has become a go-to device for shopping and browsing the web, so it made sense to launch a companion iPad app for Boutiques.com. The free iPad app will contain all of the same functionality as the site.

Similar to Like.com’s business model, Boutiques.com will make money on a cost-per-click basis where online merchants will pay Google by the number of clicks a user makes into the products on their sites.

Like.com, Weardrobe, Couturious and the other sites in the visual search engine’s network will eventually be retired, but there isn’t a set timeline for this says Shah.

Boutiques.com is certainly a different direction for Google, whose e-commerce and shopping options have not been much to talk about. The other interesting addition to the site beyond just search is personalization and a social aspect through the ability to follow. I’m also curious whether Google will add any other social shopping features (such as integration with Facebook or Twitter) down the line. In the end, the search capabilities, which is Google’s bread and butter, are impressive and no doubt will make the site appealing for online shopping. And Google just boosted its general product search earlier this week.

Another important thing to note about Boutiques.com is that it seems to appeal to women. One shopping for this demographic represents a huge market and one the eBay has been pushing hard as well.

But Google’s edge is in its ability to collectively source products from retailers all over the web rather from a single e-commerce platform. As Shah says, in the end “Google’s vision is to help people find and shop for all the world’s products.”

There are very few people that give better interview than Federated Media’s John Battelle. I am seriously impressed with how he manages to moderate high level speaker after high level speaker without breaking a sweat. Especially since I usually run out of smart things to say 5 seconds into a conversation.

This will be Battelle’s seventh year at the helm of the venerated Web 2.0 Summit franchise and auspiciously I’ve heard a lot less lame “Why isn’t it Web 3.0?” jokes this year. Battelle attributes this to the phrase Web 2.0 finally sticking, “It’s always like, what’s next? … There was some serious pressure to iterarate.”

The theme this year is “Points of Control” and Battelle explained that he tried to select speakers based on whether they were incumbents or insurgents in the race to control mind and market share in the social and mobile web, “I’ve never had a theme that played out so much onstage.”

Interview highlights: Um, John Battelle, how giddy I get get when I say that Google is a node of control, what a mistake wearing two (!) different horizontal striped shirts was, the reverential discussion about Baidu’s Robin Li and Battelle’s subtle yet astute commentary on why Apple is the only major player missing onstage.

We finagled our way on board the Zappos “Happiness Bus” at Web 2.0 Summit and spoke with CEO Tony Hsieh about why Zappos is such happy place to work, why the company is hiring another 2000 people in 2011, and how it’s positioned itself brand-wise to give Virgin a run for its money. Key takeaway: The best business strategy is being yourself.

Enough said.

I have no idea why it seems to be “Europe week” for me, but here’s some more news from across the pond: Seedcamp has raised a new €3 million fund. I’m a huge fan of Seedcamp, even though I’ve given the co-founder Saul Klein a hard time about some of its winners in the past.

It is a combination of Y Combinator, a competition like TechCrunch Disrupt and a super angel, but one that aggressively takes itself on the road every month to find the best startups in emerging markets, particularly Eastern Europe. (It’s not unlike my own obsessive emerging market reporting. Oh wait, it’s completely different. They have actual money to invest.)

We caught up with Seedcamp’s other founder Reshma Sohoni to find out more about Seedcamp’s newly enlarged global ambitions. The video is below.

More than money, Seedcamp gives crucial mentorship for these early companies and has a decent track record over the last three years of helping these diamonds-in-the-rough connect with big Western investors like Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures, who is also a backer of Seedcamp.

This is just a first close, and Seedcamp is hoping to raise more money in coming months. This seems a no-brainer investment for a VC firm with too much cash that wants a savvy eye on up-and-coming companies and talent in Eastern Europe. Just throwing money at someone who is crazy enough to kill himself (or, ahem, herself) scouring emerging markets for unknown companies is a lot easier than doing it yourself. (cc:Michael Arrington/AOL)

Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $3.6 million in new funding from Qualcomm Ventures Worldview Technology Partners, and Vesbridge Partners. Earlier this year, the startup raised $4.5 million from Qualcomm and others. The startup has raised a total of $8.1 million to date.

Visage Mobile’s SaaS application basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband.

The company’s service is currently being used by over 150 companies and is tracking over a 100,000 devices. Visage Mobile says that the new funding will be used towards product development and customer acquisition.

The final speaker during the second day of the Web 2.0 Summit was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was joined on stage by John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. The scope of the interview was broad — Zuckerberg answered questions about the recent slapfight with Google over contact information; whether or not Facebook was focused on building out its own application or more on the web ecosystem, and much more.

First, one thing to note given how much flack he’s gotten in the past: Zuckerberg did really well on stage. Sure, he had some answers that I’ve heard verbatim at previous Facebook events, but that’s par for the course here.

He also had one insightful comment to make about the Web 2.0 Summit backdrop, which consists of a map charting out the online ‘turf’ that has been claimed by tech companies. “Your map is wrong,” Zuckerberg said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory — this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.”

One topic that the conversation came back to a few times was Facebook’s stance with regard to exporting email contacts (which is what Google has objected to). “I'm not sure we're 100% right on this.” Zuckerberg said, explaining that it’s a gray area as to whether or not users have the right to export their friends’ email addresses. He contends that Facebook’s decision to block users from exporting their contacts has more to do with user rights and their expectation of control than it does with Facebook’s competition with Google. Of course, as our comments remind us, Facebook is happy to let Hotmail and Yahoo Mail import these email addresses (Facebook has a deal with both of them, but Google won’t agree to one).

The conversation also turned to Facebook’s habit of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Zuckerberg didn’t really address this directly, choosing instead to discuss the value of the relationship between people who have deemed each other friends. Yes, it’s possible to tag someone in a bad photo or add them to spammy groups, but the user made the decision to add this person as their friend, which confers that power to them. The answer Zuckberberg can’t say: pushing the limits without asking for permission is what allowed Facebook to grow this much, this quickly.

Regarding Facebook’s sometimes-controversial policies, Tim O’Reilly actually took Zuckerberg’s side: “It’s a tough position and I think the approach you're taking is right. Figure out where the boundaries are now, because if we set rules too early we won't figure it out, ever.”

Asked about Facebook’s long term vision, Zuckerberg says that Facebook will be an “enabler” for many companies that will disrupt verticals by introducing social functionality over the next five years. And while Facebook will continue to build its own products (which have drawn criticism for being copycats and steaming over startups), Zuckerberg claims that the company only wants to work on products that it views are being core to the social experience.

Zuckerberg also had an explanation for why the company had not partnered with Apple to let it pull in social data for Ping. He says that Facebook has had to invest tens of millions of dollars into infrastructure to enable games from large developers like Zynga, which is why Facebook and Zynga agreed to a formal alliance. Zuckerberg says that if the company is going to make an investment like this, “we want to have an understanding that you won’t just import our data — and that you try to contribute back. We're working through that.”

Obviously there’s more to it than that — I doubt Steve Jobs would have said Facebook requested “onerous terms” if it had only been for infrastructure costs.

Image by Nchacko on Twitter.

If you are one of many who has spread the Twitter flames, signed an online petition or joined a Facebook group to hate on Cooks Source, congratulations. You proved the power of the Internet mob. In a post today, Judith Griggs apologizes (again) and tells everyone that this scandal and the harassing of advertisers has most likely killed the magazine.

If you are one of the few Web-heads who has no clue what I’m talking about, here’s the gist: An editor of an obscure food-related publication reprinted an article from a journalism student without permission, editing it first. When the student, Monica, reached out to the editor, Griggs wrote back a sarcastic email saying that she helped the poorly written article with her edit and that it was Cooks Source that should be compensated. Monica went public and a mob ensued that included even Drunk Hulk weighing in. As she should, as a writer trying to earn a living who had her work stolen and had a beyond inappropriate response to a private complaint about it.

Was Griggs a total jerk who deserved to be called out? Yes. Plagiarism is obviously never OK and when called on it, even if you’ve had a bad day, you don’t ask for money. It was just mind-bogglingly stupid.

Is she as great of a copy editor as she claimed? Not judging by the typos in the above blog post.

Was Cooks Source likely going to go out of business anyway if this is emblematic of how it acts and it was tipped into insolvency so quickly? Maybe.

Did she deserve to have the Internet destroy her business over– from what most of us know– was one series of mistakes? No.

The honest reality is two people know exactly what happened and the rest of us are going by second hand accounts. If we let anonymous mobs have this much power, the world — the real, flesh-and-blood human one, not the virtual one of Tweets, blog posts, comments and LiveJournal feeds– is going to get worse, not better.

Mobs are a part of reality on the Internet, so this isn’t a post meant to exhort people to think before they flame someone, or imagine how they would feel getting ugly hate mail and death threats. Being the subject of several Internet mobs myself, I know how horrible it is. Many of us at TechCrunch do.

But guess what? Most mobs don’t actually cause people to lose jobs and businesses to be run under. (I mean, read the TechCrunch comments on any given post for evidence of that. And that’s after heavy moderation.) Most people are smart enough to realize anonymous mobs are mostly made up of cowards, haters and people miserable with their own lives looking for a bandwagon.

But click through and read that post by Griggs. If you don’t experience an ounce of empathy there’s something wrong with you. I admit I thought it was outrageous and in my head high-fived Monica for publishing the whole thing. (I still do actually.) But the difference is I didn’t send Griggs personal hate mail and I didn’t actively try to run Cooks Source out of business. Reading Griggs post affected me, because she’s a human being who made a series of really bad mistakes. Assuming Cooks Source did have some merit as a publication, shame on advertisers for being that cowed by a “scandal” everyone will forget about as soon as the next scandal shows up.