LinkedIn has just updated its iPhone app with better communication capabilities, focusing on improving the inbox and recent activity of connections.

The iPhone app includes a newly designed inbox that allows you easily navigate the messages you have received on LinkedIn. At the bottom of the app you tap to access both sent and archived messages in your account.

LinkedIn has also made it easier to access recent updated from your connections, and has added a “Recent Activity” tab to connections’ profiles. Similar to regular updates, you can like or comment on any one of the updates, or re-share it with your network.

LinkedIn consistently updates it’s iPhone app, most recently adding company buzz and support for Retina Display.

The company recently announced that it now has 85 million members and is adding a member per second.

Here it comes! The Swill-Drinking Event of the Season! I will drink, over the course of an hour not one but two Four Lokos. You can watch me here or pop over to the main page to chat. I’ll also show off the Galaxy Tab and the NookColor while I do it, but those are ancillary to our goals.

Why am I doing this? Partially because it’s funny and partially to express outrage at the potential FDA ban as well as outrage at Four Loko for releasing this junk into the wild. But then again, who am I to judge? I used to drink far worse in my college days and I worry that my aged carapace will shutter and fall in onto my emaciated, jerky-tough body like the Skeksis in Dark Crystal.

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With the holiday shopping season in full swing, retailers are clamoring to publicize their sales, deals and more. Amazon issued a release today that customers can now give any of the 725,000 Kindle books to anyone with an email address. So a recipient doesn’t need a Kindle to even receive an e-book. The normally data shy Amazon also revealed that the Kindle is the most gifted item in the company’s history, and that “millions” of people are using the Kindle or Kindle apps to read books.

Of course, those without a Kindle can read their e-books on the Kindle App for the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices. Gifters can choose a book in the Kindle Store, and send give the e-book as a gift by simply inserting the recipient’s email address. Recipients can redeem the gift in the Kindle Store to read on any Kindle or free Kindle app.

This is clearly a way to encourage and alert Amazon shoppers and the general public to the fact that they don’t necessarily need a Kindle device to access Amazon’s e-books and use their Kindle apps for e-book reading.

There’s no doubt that Amazon is betting on the Kindle as a big holiday seller, and is launching new ways for consumers to buy into the Kindle platform. A few months ago, Amazon revealed that magazines and newspapers will be available on Kindle apps and that users will soon be able to lend e-books for a two-week period.

Amazon.com this morning announced fresh visual search capability in its men’s and women’s shoe stores. Basically, the feature allows Amazon customers to search and browse for shoes based on how they look (example).

The styles are presented graphically as silhouettes within the existing navigation of search refinement, allowing customers to easily handpick shoe shapes from a pre-defined palette without the need to know what the styles are called.

Amazon says the capability is driven by its proprietary visual search technology, which is able to analyze product images for shape, color and appearance information and classifies similar looking products together. The algorithms were developed at Amazon subsidiary A9.com.

It’s the same technology that powers the "Items That Look Like This" feature that you can find on Amazon.com product detail pages (example).

Visual search technology is increasingly finding its way to ecommerce sites in innovative ways. Google acquired visual search engine company Like.com and earlier this week debuted Boutiques.com, a fashion-focused shopping site that relies heavily on the company’s core visual search technology.

The first ever electric vehicle with Quattro is still a few years away, but we were invited to Ingolstadt, Germany to try one out. E-tron is the name of Audi's new line of electric vehicles including an R8 and an A1. We didn't get to drive the red concept E-tron that's all over the internet, instead we drove one that looked and drove more like a real production car. The supercar was pretty interesting to drive even though it's not complete. The main difference is that nowhere in the car is a gasoline engine, instead batteries take up the place of the engine and electric motors power the wheels. There are four electric motors, one for each wheel, combined to offer a peak output of 313 hp and 3319 lb-ft of torque and will propel this futuristic transport to 100 km/h in 4.8 sec--not bad for an electric. Not only is the acceleration fast and linear, but the E-tron R8 keeps all the driving character that made the gas R8 so fun to drive. The Quattro system is a bit more relaxed on this car versus something like an A4, keeping the torque balance at 30/70 front to rear means more fun if you have the skills.

Given the massive success of Groupon (and the huge number of clones out there), it’s no surprise that existing publishers and businesses are keen to take advantage of the craze themselves. Some of them have turned to white-label deal services, which allow these publishers to manage their deals without having to reinvent the wheel. And today a company called NimbleCommerce is making its press debut by announcing that it’s got deals with “25 large newspapers; business directories and local media companies”.

You’ll notice I put that in quotes — NimbleCommerce won’t list off many of the companies it’s partnered with, but says that 50% of its clients are publicly traded and that it is “five to ten times bigger than Tippr” and other close competitors. Again, they won’t give hard stats, but the clients NimbleCommerce can name are solid: OpenTable uses its platform to run deals, as does Valpak and Canada’s Yellow Pages. The company says that it’s largely avoided press until now, and it’s finally ready to start talking about its progress.

NimbleCommerce’s platform lets publishers put together their deals using templates or customized designs. It also includes a dashboard for managing a businesses’s email contacts (which can number in the millions for NimbleCommerce’s largest clients) and handles the coupon distribution and fulfillment. The deals themselves are coordinated by the publisher or business that’s running them — NimbleCommerce doesn’t offer its own sales force.

The model may sound a little familiar — we wrote about a new startup called DealQuad earlier this month that caters to college newspapers. And there are also plenty of other services that offer white-labeled group deals, like Tippr and ChompOn (you can see a good list of them on Yipit’s blog.

France-based Jolicloud's Jolibook will reportedly hit the (UK) market starting today at a £279 price point (roughly $380). I'm one of the first to have received a review unit, which runs the all-new version of the company's eponymous Linux-based cloud OS, Jolicloud 1.1. I'm not much of a hardware reviewer, unlike the CrunchGear team, but fortunately there isn't all that much to review when it comes to the hardware. All in all, it's a pretty standard package for a small-sized computer at a fairly steep price considering it doesn't include Windows, which many, far cheaper netbooks with the same configuration do. Still, Jolicloud 1.1 is the reason I'd recommend some people - not everyone, and mainly people who travel a lot and have made the switch to Web-based applications for most of their work-related or personal activities already - to purchase a Jolibook, over any netbook that comes with Windows in that - rumored - price range.

Since the launch of New Twitter in September, things have been pretty quiet on the new feature front. Yes, they’re testing out a new analytics product, but in terms of features that the majority of end users will use, Twitter has mainly been letting people get used to the new layout of things. But now they’ve started testing something new. A new top nav tab called “People”.

The area, which Twitter has confirmed their testing among a limited number of users, is basically a way to pull together all of the work they’ve done with features like “Who to follow” and “Similar to”. This new area, which resides to the right of the Messages tab, is all about finding new users to follow.

The initial tab on this new page shows you personalized follow suggestions based on who you are already following. This is the same as the “Who to follow” area in the right pane of New Twitter, but it’s expanded to show more accounts at once (the “view all” link on Who to follow on the main page takes you here as well). And not only can you follow these people, from here you can add them to lists (very nice just in case you don’t necessarily want to follow all of these people but are interested in seeing their updates sometimes).

The next tab is a “Browse Interests” one that is essentially the suggested user list broken down into 20 or so categories like Books, News, Politics, and Technology. The idea here is obviously to pick something you’re interested in and follow the accounts that Twitter considers to be the most interesting about those topics. This is the same area that new users see when they’re going through the onboarding experience.

The third tab in the People area is for Finding friends via Gmail, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Messenger. This is fairly standard, and basically the same as it has been for some time. But you’ll note that Facebook is nowhere to be found. There’s a reason for that.

Like New Twitter itself, the People area also features a right pane with other information. Here you’ll find a pretty cool new feature that shows you who you have recently followed and if you click on their icon, below them are two users that are similar to that user, who you can also follow with the click of a button.

You can also invite friends to join Twitter from this side pane, and Twitter recommends related services like Listorious and WeFollow that help you find new users to follow on Twitter.

Again, all of these things have existed in some form or another on Twitter before, but now Twitter is testing adding them all in one area front and center in the main top nav. And that makes sense, each of these tools are great for pumping up Twitter’s social graph and making the service more interesting to users.

Update: Others who are reporting seeing the new area note that it’s called “Who To Follow” or “Directory” in their nav. It looks like Twitter is testing out a bunch of different names. It’s worth noting that the URL is “who_to_follow”.

Update 2: And Twitter notes that the area is actually available now to all users now here — but the nav is in testing.

I can’t say I know a whole lot about fashion. But, having accidentally walked into a few boutiques over the years, I’ve gathered one thing: it’s expensive. And I’m told it’s also a very competitive market — designers vie to have their products manufactured by clothiers, who in turn have the question of whether consumers will actually buy their products looming large. These clothing companies do have outlets like Gilt Groupe in case they wind up with excess inventory, but there’s always significant risk involved whenever a new item is produced.

Now Y Combinator-funded startup Fabricly wants to reverse and improve the model, by crowdsourcing designs and using a voting process to only manufacture pieces that people actually want, all while saving customers a bundle. The company also has some funding news to announce: it’s recently raised a seed round of $400,000 from Atomico Ventures.

Here’s how it works: first, designers submit their product ideas to the site; depending on the product, it will either become part of a ‘competition’ where users vote on which item they like best, or it will go straight to a ‘pre-order’ stage. Note that it doesn’t simply go on sale — there’s a pre-order process that acts a bit like Groupon’s deals. When you place a pre-order the site will take down your credit card information, but you’ll only get charged if a certain number of people also pre-order the item, at which point Fabricly has it manufactured. If this threshold is not met, then the order is canceled.

Assuming the tipping point is reached, Fabricly then works with factories in Los Angeles and New York to have their items produced (founder Ari Helgason says you can expect to get something you’ve ordered within a few weeks). Because these goods are being produced on demand, Fabricly doesn’t have excess inventory to deal with, and Helgason says that users can also expect steep discounts, because it doesn’t have to maintain any retail outlets either. Each time a designer’s item is purchased, they receive a 5-15% commission. And Helgason says this model opens the doors to tapping into undiscovered talent:

The unwillingness of buyers (retailers) to take risks means that many great designs never get produced. In my experience going around fashion trade shows over the years buyers wait for a few seasons before placing orders to see if the designer stays in business and can consistently deliver on time, even when their products are great and likely to sell. Often designers give up before they get a chance to prove themselves.

This model could potentially be disruptive, but it’ll need to attract both designers and customers, which, as always, is no given.  It’s still much too early to tell how much traction Fabricly will get— Helgason says that the site currently has nine items available for pre-order, but they won’t ship til late December. After that things will pick up, and it has a handful of designers that will be added in January.

Update: Also see Garmz, a European startup that has a similar model. Our coverage is here.

Oh, the crazy Palins. If it isn't crazy Sarah, it’s crazy Todd. And if it isn't crazy Todd, it's their crazy, dysfunctional kids. And so it was this week when Willow and Bristol Palin took to a teenager's Facebook wall to protest his review of their mom's TV show, "At Home With The Palins".

Of course, it's only right and proper that kids want to defend their mother even if, as is frequently the case with Palin, her words are generally indefensible (hell even Elizabeth Báthory probably got a mothers' day card). But unfortunately, the language used in the Palin kids' rebuke to the claim that “Sarah Palin’s Alaska, is failing so hard right now” was somewhat – shall we say – unfortunate.

“Haha your so gay," posted Willow in response to the kid (identified only as ‘Tre’) "I have no idea who you are, But what I’ve seen pictures of, your disgusting … My sister had a kid and is still hot.”

For clarification, she added… “Tre stfu. Your such a faggot."

Bristol, as the only proper-nouned one of the brood, showed slightly more mastery of grammar: "You’re running your mouth just to talk shit,” she insisted, before turning her fire on the crowd, telling a commenter “You’ll be as successful as my baby daddy, And actually I do work my ass off. I’ve been a single mom for the last two years.”

Oh, yeah, she went there.

But of course it was the "homophobic outburst" that really got the media excited. "Homophobic and profane slurs" was how the NY Daily News described the posts, while the Boston Globe characterised Willow Palins 's words as a "homophobic, hateful Facebook rant." The story was also picked up by CNN, MSNBC and even Fox News, the news channel on which mama Palin is a paid contributor. CNN in particular went to town on the story, wheeling out a succession of commentators to opine on the dangers of letting children use social media unsupervised, and how most teens don't understand the difference between public and private.

These are all valid points, of course – and I've written before that today's kids apparently have no comprehension of the damage they're doing to their future selves when they post crap like this on social media. But what's truly remarkable about the Palin kids going rogue on Facebook is how unremarkable it is.

For one thing, they're kids – and kids using slurs like "gay" and faggot" isn't news. That's how kids talk; they shouldn't, but they do, and they will until they're about 18 and they start having openly gay friends and co-workers and grow out of it. More unremarkable though is the fact that Sarah Palin's kids would feel it’s appropriate to use social media to turn on critics, using incendiary and ill-thought-out language. After all, kids learn from example.

Sarah Palin has been in public office since 1992, when Bristol was two years old and Willow was two years from being born. During that time both kids have had ample opportunity to learn how to behave in a world where your actions reflect on your family. And what lessons have they learned from their mother?

That name calling is wrong? Uh-uh…

“The lamestream media throughout our country…” – Sarah Palin

Or the importance of disagreeing with dignity…

“How's that Hopey-Changey Thing Working Out for Ya?” – Sarah Palin (to Obama supporters)

Avoiding inflamatory rhetoric…

"Our opponent though is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” – Sarah Palin

Checking your spelling on Twitter…

‘”Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’ - Sarah Palin (on Twitter)

Or how about thinking before you post something stupid on Facebook…

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.” – Sarah Palin (on Facebook)

Yeah, one long series of strong messages from Sarah Palin to Willow and Bristol. Keep ramping up the social media idiocy, kids, and one day you too might become the darling of the frothing, racist tea-partying right.

You fucking betcha.

NRG Energy— a wholesale generator and publicly traded company— announced plans to build a network of 150 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in Houston starting in February 2011, then to expand this network throughout Texas and the United States.

According to the most recent, annual Green Cities Index, 78% of Houston commuters drive alone, and the city ranked 38th, meaning it is one of the worst out of 43 measured U.S. cities in terms of air quality.

A spokesman for the NRG eVgo Network said, “We hope to use the infrastructure we have to reduce co2 emissions and put a dent in our addiction to overseas oil.” Houston’s new charging station network will include 150 of NRG’s eVgo brand ev charging stations, 50 of them rapid charging stations that can fully juice an electric vehicle in 30 minutes.

The stations will be installed in parking lots at retailers that partner with NRG, including Walgreens and Best Buy, and in the lots of large corporate and school campuses along Houston’s major thoroughfares.

The charging stations will be positioned at locations within twenty-five miles of the city center, easing what automakers refer to as “range anxiety,” (a fear that an electric car, if taken far from home, will wind up stranded and battery-depleted).

Electricity retailers including Direct Energy and TXU Energy partner with NRG to supply power plans to EV drivers. NRG also considers its own electricity retail divisions, Reliant Energy and Green Mountain Energy eVgo partners.

Customers who buy eVgo brand charging stations for their homes will be able to subscribe to plans from $49-$89 per month. At the highest end, the plan includes the cost of electricity, and unlimited charging sessions at their home and publicly placed, Houston-area charging stations. All the plans include the installation and maintenance of a charging station at home. At the lowest end, users pay for the cost of electricity and do not have prepaid access to publicly positioned stations.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker held a press conference with NRG on Thursday to unveil the charging stations network. According to the Houston Chronicle, she also announced the city would open its carpool lanes on local freeways to highway-safe electric vehicles, and that the city would try to get toll road operators to reduce fees for EVs.

Document sharing hub Scribd has just announced a new feature that will allow publishers on the site to more accurately measure how their content is performing. Dubbed Scribd Stats, they’re likening it to a ‘Google Analytics for Documents’, and it’s an apt description — the product looks quite similar to Google’s popular web analytics product, but it’s obviously been tweaked to suit the documents, presentations, and other files that have been uploaded to Scribd.

CEO Trip Adler says that until now, publishers haven’t really taken advantage of the features that the web affords — they might know how many hits a given document has received, but there’s much more data waiting to be unlocked. That’s where Scribd Stats comes in. After logging in, you’ll see an overview charting your overall document popularity (your aggregate read count, the number of times embedded versions of your docs have been read, etc.). You can also see this broken down on a per-document basis. Graphs look similar to Google Analytics, allowing you to quickly adjust the date range.

You can also select individual documents to do a deeper dive, with features that include: a heatmap for each document you’ve uploaded, allowing you to see which portion of a document people find most interesting; data on which search queries led people to find your document, and what they’re searching for within your doc; and graphs that led you track a document’s popularity over time. The feature will also allow publishers to analyze the performance of Scribd’s ReadCast feature, which lets users share the content they’ve recently read to Facebook and Twitter.

During the event, Adler took the opportunity to list of some of Scribd’s growth stats: it’s now home to one billion HTML5-based pages and is growing 15% month over month, which he says makes it the largest and fastest growing corpus of text online. The site saw 60 million uniques in the last month, and ranks a among Alexa’s top 100 sites worldwide.

Adler says that this is part of Scribd’s transition to a site where people read and share what they’re reading with their friends (before this year the site’s big pitch was to publishers looking to get their content online, now Scribd wants to be able to tempt more publishers by offering a sizable audience as well).

Scribd Stats probably isn’t going to increase readership directly, but it will allow publishers to hone in on what their readers like, which will (hopefully) help them produce more engaging content.  It could attract new publishers to the platform — perhaps authors will start releasing excerpts of their books on Scribd before publication, using Scribd Stats to figure out which pages are duds.

Scribd says that the product will be rolling out slowly to users over the next few weeks.

While photo sharing has always been a popular feature of social networks like Facebook and Myspace, we’ve recently seen an explosion of services that specifically revolve around sharing photos. In the past couple of months apps like Instagram, Picplz, Path all have made huge debut splashes and are scaling fast.

DailyBooth CEO Brian Pokorny holds that the sudden focus on photo sharing can be traced to three things 1) An increase in quality of cameras on mobile devices. 2) Ease of in-app photo consumption. 3) A 3G Internet Broadband connection that allows for faster photo uploading. Because of the confluence of these factors, “Photos rather than text have become a mode of communication for their users.”

Pokorny holds that DailyBooth differentiates itself from the other photo sharing apps because it is a “front of the phone” app i.e. it exists primarily to capture user faces which is faster than making a phone call or sending a text if you want to communicate a sentiment. “Inherently there’s friction in writing text, taking a photo is the quickest and richest way to share something,” he explains.

Google TV is a mess. Apple TV is a joke. Using a Roku is about as exciting as cleaning my gutters. I like the Boxee Box, but my wife doesn’t understand why; she doesn’t get it and that says something. Downloading torrents or NZBs is time consuming and only a small portion of the population actually has the know-how and hardware to do it. Sorry. Cord cutting is a lost cause.

Listen, I’m all for canceling Comcast and joining the ranks of the cord cutters. I hate Comcast so much. If Comcast had a large, fluffy mascot, I would punch it in the face. That’s saying something if you know me. But the fact remains that there is simply no way to replicate Comcast’s or any other cable provider’s service right now. If you want to watch TV, you have to pay for it — but you can still complain along the way.

Cable is damn expensive and so through various media streamers, game systems, and services, I’ve tried just about everything to replace it, but nothing gives you the same experience and service as *shock* cable — or satellite — TV.

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We cornered SimpleGeo founder Matt Galligan yesterday and talked to him about SimpleGeo’s newest hire, Mike’s infamous “What Is It You Do? The Need For Simplicity” post (which focused on the fact that it’s difficult to pinpoint what SimpleGeo actually does) and the difference between a location-based service vs. a location-aware service.

At the center of the geo-locational explosion, SimpleGeo provides infrastructure tools (like a Software Developer Kit) to developers who want to add location services to their apps. Potential clients run the gamut from a huge corporation that wants to integrate “some fancy check-in thing” to homegrown apps that want their app to do something simple like providing data on the weather.

Location is increasingly becoming a layer as opposed to a core feature in web services, much like social has become a layer with the conceptual shift from Friendster to Facebook. Galligan holds that eventually most apps will have to integrate some kind of location element, “It’s no longer the area of location based services, it’s the era of location aware services.

Galligan also underplayed the entrance of social incumbents like Facebook into the location space, “It’s only matter of time before we stop saying ‘Omg they just added location now they’re going to own this’ because the reality is that eveyone is going to use location in this way.”

With Web 2.0 Summit now over, looking back, in my mind, easily the best panel was the one entitled Point of Control: Finance. It featured venture capitalists John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) talking with New York Magazine’s John Heilemann about the state of both investing and the state of the web ecosystem at large. What made it so interesting is that Wilson and Doerr clearly don’t agree on many of the big issues.

This was best exemplified during the portion of the talk when the two give their views on where we are now. While Wilson worries that we may be in the midst of the next “bubble”, Doerr thinks of it as a “boom”. They’re both talking about the same thing, they just view it completely different ways.

Then they go into starting companies on the east coast versus the west coast, the state of angel investing, iPhone versus Android, Facebook versus the web, Google’s ability to innovate, ideas versus innovation, investing in Twitter, etc.

Watch it all above, things start to get more heated about 20 minutes in.

And here are the links to posts they reference:

A VC: Storm Clouds

Silicon Valley’s IPO Anxiety

BizDev 2.0

“Meebo did widgets super early. Guess what we learned? Don’t build stuff that sits in a box.”

Better than a box? A bar. No, not one with hotties and booze– a toolbar.

In part two of our interview with Meebo’s co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg, we talk about the value of reach online– given the gargantuan reach companies can get on platforms like Facebook in no time. Like a diamond, if everyone can get it, it’s no longer as valuable. Sternberg pokes a big hole into one of the hottest storylines of the early Web 2.0 days– that you could build a big business off of widgets.

Reach only matters if you can make money off of it. To that end, Sternberg gives some sexy revenue details: Meebo ads boast 1% click-rates (compared to .1% for the industry) and on average people watch the ad for sixty seconds.

Wait. Really? That sounds a lot like that hackneyed claim that people love advertising as long as it’s well done. I asked Sternberg who on earth is sitting around watching these ads while the rest of us ignore banners and groan at floating ads. (CC: AOL)

The key, he says, is advertising to people not at the moment when they want something else, but when they have a moment of boredom. Yep. Pre-rolls suck as badly as widgets.

Video below.

The Yahoo Connected TV service, which provides widgets and apps on TVs, is expanding its developer program today. Originally launched earlier this year, Yahoo’s API that allows developers to build app for connected TVs is now providing developers the opportunity to create Paid TV Widgets to be featured in the Yahoo Connected TV Store expected to launch in the Spring of 2011.

The Yahoo Connected TV service allows users to access more than 80 Yahoo TV Widgets, including those for Twitter, Pandora, eBay, CBS, and USA Today, and thousands of content sources.

The company has struck deals with TV manufacturers including Sony, Samsung, VIZIO, LG, and Toshiba, to include the service on their TVs at sale. Yahoo says that up to 70% of the TVs sold with Yahoo Connected TV are connected to the Internet and up to 60% of TVs sold with Yahoo Connected TV become monthly users.

Now developers can create paid TV widgets through the widget development kit. Paid Widget pricing will be a one-time purchase between $0.99 to $99.00. Yahoo will handle payment processing for the Paid TV Widgets and deliver payments to Paid TV Widget developers, based on a revenue share of 70% of the purchase price. The Paid TV Widget developer program is initially open to developers and publishers in the US, UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, France, Canada and Australia.

It’s unclear how much of a future Yahoo Connected TV has now that Google has introduced a similar service with Google TV. Yahoo partner Samsung TV is planning to integrate Google TV into its televisions.

This is seriously the best Mark Zuckerberg interview I’ve ever seen. Fresh off of the announcement of Facebook Messages (yes, that’s what the product is called) Facebook CEO Zuckerberg took the stage at Web 2.0 Summit to talk about the state of Facebook.

Zuckerberg went into the recent scuffles with Google, how soon every major product will be rethought to be social, why Facebook’s been on a recent acquisition tear and more. But the most insightful part of the interview was when Zuckerberg called out John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly on the inaccuracy of their Web 2.0 “Points of Control” map.

"Your map is wrong. 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."

Sometimes amidst all the competition, it’s difficult to remember why we got into the game in the first place.

Mozilla has just published their annual “The State of Mozilla” report. They do this once they’ve filed their audited financial statements for the previous year, so these numbers are for 2009. Still, they’re impressive numbers given how much competition their is in the market — particularly from their biggest benefactor: Google.

For 2009, Mozilla reported revenues of $104 million. That was up 34 percent from 2008 when revenues were $78 million. Notably, that revenue number includes a $104,000 loss from long-term investments, but that’s a huge improvement from 2008 when the same loss was $7.8 million. So where does Mozilla make most of this money from? Firefox, of course, thanks largely to their search deal with Google. In the FAQ section of the report, Mozilla addresses this:

The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. Mozilla’s reported revenue also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants as well as other forms of income from our investable assets.

While they list a few companies, Google is clearly the key here as further down, they address both their relationship and their contract with the search giant specifically:

We have had a productive relationship with Google since 2004 and that relationship remains healthy. To date, we have renewed our contract three times, in 2005, 2006 and 2008. The current version extends through 2011. We believe that search providers will remain a solid generator of revenue for Mozilla for the foreseeable future.

The relationship between Google and Mozilla is an interesting one because Google has its own browser, Chrome, that competes with Firefox. And by all measurements, Chrome continues to gain market share at a rapid pace. While it still looks as if most of the share they’re taking is from industry leader Internet Explorer, Firefox’s growth has slowed down significantly since Chrome started to take off.

In the “Competitive World” section of their report, Mozilla dives into why they believe Firefox 4 is going to take the browser to the next level. The latest version is in late-stage beta testing and should be out shortly. Here, they also rattle off some big numbers for Firefox, such as more than 400 million total users, over 140 million active daily users, and 800,000 Firefox 4 beta testers.

Going forward, Mozilla outlines how they’re putting an emphasis on mobile, apps, sharing and syncing, their Drumbeat project (promoting the open web).

In case you missed it, here’s the video of yesterday’s Web 2.0 Summit interview with Evan Williams on Twitter’s relationship with Facebook, developers and the Twitter firehose, #newtwitter, the million ways Twitter will make eventually make money and Williams’ recently stepping down as a CEO. “It’s kind of a sucky job,” he said.

Enjoy.

It’s no secret that most people are remarkably lax when it comes to online security. They’ll reuse the same password everywhere, and will connect to open Wi-Fi hotspots without a second thought as to who might be sniffing their traffic (Firesheep, anyone?). Which makes it all the more frustrating when startups launch their products without industry-standard security features that help keep consumers a little safer.

The most recent offender is Instagram, the hot photo sharing app that managed to get hundreds of thousands of users in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately the app sends its passwords in plaintext, and it’s doubly bad because it also asks for your Tumblr and Foursquare credentials, which are also sent in the clear.

Now, Instagram is hardly the first startup to have this flaw. We’ve seen identical issues from the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, and there are surely countless less well-known iPhone applications that commit the same offence. On the other hand, this problem was making headlines only three months ago, and yet again we have another application with hundreds of thousands of users that made security a secondary priority. This sort of thing really needs to stop, especially as hacking tools like Firesheep make stealing this kind of data easier than ever.

Instagram says that the issue has already been resolved in its next release, which sends password information via SSL for both your Instagram account and any third-party services (the company expects Apple to approve it in the next day or so). We considered holding this post until after that update was approved so as to minimize any possible abuse of the exploit, but this flaw has actually been listed on the company’s GetSatisfaction page since November 4, and was one of the top stories on Hacker News over the weekend. In other words, the ‘bad guys’ already know about it, but consumers may not.

Let’s hope other startups stop making the same mistake. No, Instagram, and even Foursquare, aren’t sharing information that’s especially sensitive (after all, many people broadcast their posts to the public). But when so many people reuse their passwords everywhere, that isn’t a good enough reason to put security second.

There is definitely some bad blood between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikileaks, the controversial organization which posted thousands of pages of classified Iraqi War documents. On the Charlie Rose last night, towards the end of his interview, Wales says, “If I had some information, the last thing I would ever do with it is send it to Wiikileaks.”

He prefaced that remark by noting that he has “mixed feelings about Wikileaks.” People with information about wrongdoing in open societies should have the opportunity to make that information public. His concern is the way that Wikileaks chose to do that without regard for the safety of people “who are not the wrongdoers.” ” I think they should be slower in releasing things,” he says.

So what would Wales do with that information? He would send it to the New York Times or some “responsible” journalistic enterprise. The relevant segment is in the video above, or you can watch the entire interview here.

Wales has criticized Wikileaks before. Some of this bad blood stems from the fear that some people might associate Wikileaks with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia foundation. Wales gets into that as well with Rose, noting that he has traded emails with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange “about the domain name.” He describes a dispute there, with the Wikimedia Foundation registering defensive domains and then transferring them, which seems to be in the process of being resolved.

In what they’re calling a throwback to the original comic book they released to announce the launch of Chrome, Google has today unveiled a new site meant to educate users about browsers and the web. 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web is actually an interactive web app meant to look like a children’s book. And while the book’s content is all about web technology, the interactive book itself shows off some of that technology as it’s built entirely in HTML5. And it’s very slick.

In fact, it looks a lot like an Apple iBook — the book platform that Apple created for the iPad. It has a nice and clickable table of contents, a quick-jump area along the bottom, and if you hover over the corner of a page, it will even curl (clicking on the curl will turn the page). But again, all of this is done with HTML5.

Other cool things include the bookmark which doubles as a share button. If you hover over the area, the bookmark will drop down and reveal buttons to share on Facebook, Twitter, or Buzz. And because each page is actually a different HTML page with its own URL, you can share any individual page rather than the entire book itself. But despite each book page having its own URL, there is no reloading that goes on as you page through, it just looks as if you’re leafing through a book. Again, very slick.

As you might expect from Google, the entire book is also searchable. And there’s a way to “turn down the lights” (make everything but the book’s pages dim). And, thanks to HTML5, once you load the book, you can disconnect from the web and it will still work (assuming you’re using  an HTML5-compliant browser).

Google worked with illustrator Christoph Niemann on the book.

Plastic Jungle, a marketplace for gift cards, has just raised $10 million in new funding led by Jafco Ventures with Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Bay Partners, and First Round Capital participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to over $23 million.

Plastic Jungle lets you buy, sell and exchange gift cards online. Instead of receiving cash for your gift card, Plastic Jungle also lets you trade the value in for an Amazon gift card or give your money to charity. Users can receive cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount.

The company is also trying to partner with online retailers to power a payment portal in the checkout process that will allow shoppers to use a credit from a different store to make an online payment.

While Plastic Jungle doesn’t reveal revenue numbers, the company’s former CEO Garry Briggs told us earlier this year that revenue is eight times more that what it was a year ago. The company also revealed in the release that it is on track to transact more than $10 million in gift card value in 2010. Plastic Jungle faces competition from CardPool and others.