For years, we’ve been hearing that the future of productivity is in the cloud. But while visions of real-time collaboration leave technophiles like me starry-eyed, it’s a prospect that means one thing to millions of people: leaving the familiar turf of Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 so that they can learn their way around yet another application, not to mention some pricey upgrades. But Google wants to let you have it both ways.

Today, Google is launching a new plugin for Microsoft Office called Cloud Connect, which will tie Google Docs directly into the ubiquitous productivity suite, free of charge. Editing a document in Word? It’ll automatically sync to your Google Docs account each time you hit ‘Save’. Want to share a preview of your document without worrying about what file format your coworkers can open? Just send them a link to the Google Docs file. The plugin supports Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and it’s a big deal for Google’s strategy with Docs.

Now, Microsoft is integrating online collaboration with its newest version of Office, but Google is doing them one better: this will work on Office 2003, 2007, and 2010, and there’s no fiddling with SharePoint required, either. Google also points out that Microsoft’s version doesn’t offer Excel support yet.

The new plugin is a result of Google’s acquisition of DocVerse back in March (note that it only took Google around eight months to get this out the door — obviously a lot of people want it). Installing the plugin should be fairly painless; the download takes around thirty seconds, and the installation process doesn’t take much longer.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll notice a new ribbon toward the top of the Office UI, which gives you a Google Docs link for the document you’re currently working on, as well as a notification to let you know when it’s been synced with Google’s servers. Documents being edited locally save to your Google Docs account whenever you hit the ‘Save’ button, but unlike the normal Google Docs web editor, changes aren’t saved as you type them. Google Docs product manager Jonathan Rochelle says this is done because of user expectations — Office has always required that you hit the Save button to save (safety recovery versions notwithstanding) so it makes sense to leave it this way.

Multiple people can edit the same document and have their changes synced with each save (hooray for the cloud). But because these changes aren’t reflected in real-time, there’s the potential for conflict creation — I could edit a PowerPoint slide to say one thing, and my coworker could put something else on the same slide. Google deals with these clonflicts by presenting users with an alert prompting them to choose which version they’d like to save; if they want to go back and switch again later, they can using the document’s version history.

In practice it looks like this should work well, though there will be a bit of a learning curve as people navigate through syncing and version conflict resolution the first few times. And then there’s actually getting them to use the features that Google Docs affords. Baby steps.

And that’s really the theme here: baby steps. Google says that it often speaks with businesses who are eager to switch to Google Docs, but who have a significant number of users who still want to stay with Office for whatever reason. This plugin will help clear that hurdle. And in the longer term, Google is hoping that as users get more familiar with Docs, they’ll be more comfortable abandoning the Office client altogether.

There is one significant caveat to the integration with Office, but it’s a bit complicated to describe so bear with me. If you save a document from Powerpoint to Google Docs, and then edit that file using the Google Docs web editor, you will not be able to sync those changes back with the native version of the file. You’ll be able to generate a new PowerPoint file that reflects the changes, but they won’t sync automatically. This is because Google is still working through fidelity issues, and the conversion from native document to Docs document may introduce some formatting changes that the user didn’t intend to make.

You may also recall a company called OffiSync, which we’ve been tracking over the last couple years. OffiSync has offered much of the same functionality that Google is launching for some time — but now that there’s an official solution, it seems like it could hamper their progress. Not so, says Rochelle, who explains that OffiSync actually has more features that Google’s product.

Spoiler Alert: Probably not, but rumors are already floating so let’s see what we can make of them. With folks like TJ Maxx selling the cheapest iPad for $100 off, it seems like we’re right at the edge of the next iPad iteration, probably occurring after CES in January. Apple obviously wants to milk holiday sales from her until after Kwanzaa, so there will be no new iPad before Q1 of 2011.

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Google has taken the very brave decision to delete all the Wi-Fi data it had accidentally collected in the UK. The move signals the end to the long-running feud between Google and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The BBC notes that not all people will be happy with the decision, particularly those who wanted to see Google punished for collecting the data. Maybe a fine, maybe something more than this public embarrassment. But no, Google essentially gets off clean as a whistle, excepting the possible damage to its public image. You’ll recall that Google has maintained since the very beginning that the data was collected accidentally.

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For those of you who have never watched Oprah’s “favorite things” episodes of her show, the talk show host airs an annual segment each holiday where she lists her most desired products and subsequently gifts these things to her studio audience. As this is the last season for her show, this year’s segment (she held two in honor of the occasion), Oprah has made this year’s “favorite things” one to remember. First off, she announced that the iPad is her “number one favorite thing ever.”

She says about the device, “words cannot describe how I feel for this device.” She added that one her favorite apps for the iPad (besides her own app of course) is Scrabble. She then gifted each member of the audience an iPad (it’s unclear how many people were in the audience but it is generally in the hundreds). We’re also not sure what type of iPad she’s giving her audience but because Oprah’s such a generous gal, we’re assuming it’s the $829 64GB with Wifi and 3G).

Of course, it’s not a surprise that Oprah loves the device. She has been “gushing” about the iPad since Steve Jobs first revealed the device earlier this year. And she gave all of her O Magazine staffers an iPad this year in honor of the publication’s 10th anniversary.

Other technology gadgets and gifts that made this year’s ultimate favorite things episodes include a five-year Netflix subscription, a Sony 3-D television, a Sony Blu-Ray Player and a Kiva-Groupon partnership. Microsoft’s Bing also got a shoutout, giving the audience gift cards to donate money with.

Bringing social commerce to Facebook is a big opportunity attracting a lot of capital these days. Social swap meet Yardsellr just raised a $5 million series A financing, led by Accel Partners. Harrison Metal Capital, which previously put up $750,000 in seed funding, also participated.

Yardsellr is an eBay for Facebook, except without the auctions. In fact, the company was founded by three former eBay executives, CEO Daniel Leffel (a former manager at eBay), VP of Marketing Jed Clevenger (who used to run the paid search team at eBay), and VP of Community Rachel Makool (who used to run the community team at eBay). Investor Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal is also a former SVP of eBay.com. Yardsellr is currently run out of the Harrison Metal office in Palo Alto.

Sellers list items at fixed prices in different categories, or “blocks.” such as guitars, legos, jewelry, purses. Generally these are items people love and tend to talk about fanatically. Buyers can also follow blocks on Twitter, but most of the action is on Facebook. Yardsellr appeals to women in their thirties, which is not a strong demographic for Twitter.

Buyers can get a steady stream of new items within any category by liking a block. This functions as an opt-in social marketing stream right in people’s feeds. “Facebook has one product essentially, which is that stream,” says Leffel. “You cant be social commerce without living fundamentally in it.” The service launched in January, but didn’t really get a big push until April. All told, 1.3 million people are following Yardsellr blocks. About 100,000 or actively comment on the items in their feed, and thousands of transactions have occurred, with that number starting to ramp up every month.

Although Leffel wouldn’t go into details, a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the value of goods bought and sold over Yardsellr is in the tens of thousands of dollars to low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead of charging sellers to list fees, as eBay does, Yardsellr charges the buyers a fee of around ten percent. Yardsellr competes with Oodle, which is runs the official classifieds app for Facebook.

Since we first reported on a company called Tiny Speck back in July of 2009, there has been a lot of interest in what they are working on. You see, it’s a company founded by a bunch of people who helped start Flickr, and their project, Glitch, is actually a return of sorts to Flickr’s gaming roots. Last February, we did an early preview of the game. And in August, we noted that testing was well underway. An update to Glitch today brings a brand new website and a new video to explain the game.

This new exposure comes after a weekend in which Glitch underwent its most extensive user testing yet. The game was open for some 74 hours over the weekend, and thousands of users (of the tens of thousands in the waiting line) were let into the game to try it out. The test looks like it was a successful one, and the new website says that the game is now on track for beta testing early next year, with a tentative launch also slated for early next year. The company promises that going forward, they’ll move all updates from their private alpha blog, to the company blog.

But the key to Glitch (if you can’t play it) is to see it in action. So check out the video below. Yes, it’s weird. Yes, it’s awesome.

As previously announced, Groupon is kicking off the holiday season today with its ‘Grouponicus’ deals. Interestingly, one of the first up is … a deal for recorded music, namely Rihanna’s fifth studio album, ‘LOUD’.

Groupon will no doubt turn out to be a massive distribution channel for the singer: the album is being offered to U.S. users as a $5 digital download, knocking 50 percent of the normal price, and will be featured in an email to millions of Groupon subscribers across the country. The Grouponicus Store formally opened for the season at 12 AM Eastern Time today.

Furthermore, Rihanna’s new album will be heavily promoted throughout the Groupon site and among Groupon's North American networks on Facebook and Twitter.

It’s not super surprising to see Groupon move into the realm of digital music distribution, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fascinating move to make. No doubt, we’ll see more of this from a wide range of music artists from around the world soon.

Let’s hope the company shares some numbers about this particular deal and its overall holiday blitz – Grouponicus will offer a total of 650 deals throughout the season – shortly.

Update: as some have correctly pointed out, Amazon for one often runs special deals for music, and currently offers Rihanna’s Loud for $4.99. But Amazon’s a “traditional” online retailer, and Groupon is not, which is exactly why I think it’s interesting to see this evolution.

Internet TV network Revision3 is today formally debuting a new TV-optimized website and bringing its full catalog of online content to multiple platforms including Google TV, Yahoo! Connected TV, Windows Media Center, AppleTV, Boxee and Roku.

Revision3, which was founded by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and David Prager, is porting its full line-up of more than 20 programs to the television screen, including shows like Tekzilla, Diggnation, AppJudgment, Dan 3.0 and Film Riot.

You can use either customized applications for the various Internet-enabled television sets or combos, or you can simply visit TV.revision3.com to watch the shows.

The application’s user interface was designed to make finding content simple, according to the company, as it sorts shows by name, category, featured content and most recent episodes. Viewers are also able to manually search for their favorite episodes and “lean back and watch” fresh content.

Will you be tuning in to the no-longer-strictly-Web-only Internet TV network from your TV?

As we near Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon is launching a new way to comparison shop on the go. Called Price Check, the free iPhone app allows users can scan the barcode of a product, take a picture of an item or say the product’s name to access product listings on Amazon.com’s marketplace. If the product is listed on Amazon, customers can then purchase the item with one click.

The beauty of the app is that you can use several ways to search for an item when you are in a store. Using Amazon's barcode scanner, which was recently added to the company’s primary iPhone app, you can simply scan the barcode and the app will match an item and provide pricing from Amazon.com and other online merchants.

You can also use the app to snap a photo of the item and match the picture to books, DVDs, CDs and video games (Amazon says it will be adding more categories to this soon). You can also speak or type the product’s name into the app.

The app by default will display prices sorted from lowest to highest and will also show if the item is available for free shipping. Amazon says that Price Check includes prices on “millions of products” and also includes access to customer reviews; sharing via Twitter, Facebook, text message or e-mail link; and immediate purchasing using 1-Click ordering and Amazon Prime.

For online retailers like Amazon and eBay, comparison shopping apps that include barcode scanning is a way to draw in-store shopping to online marketplaces. As we wrote this morning, eBay launched a similar comparison shopping feature this morning that leverages barcode scanning technology.

The company also recently launched a new shopping app, called Window Shop, for the iPad.

Watch out, Hulu Plus. Netflix has your number. Actually, the same number — $7.99. That’s the price of the just-introduced streaming-only Netflix plans and the price that Hulu Plus dropped to last week.

It’s not all double rainbows though. Netflix also bumped up the price of the unlimited DVD plan across the board. Where it only cost $8.99 for one DVD at a time but an unlimited amount per month, it now costs $9.99. The spread gets a little more wild as the amount of DVDs rented increases proportionality with the three DVD plan costing $3 more, the five DVD plan costing $5 more and the eight DVD plan costing $8 more.

But let me join the ranks of Netfix subs only interested in streaming content in one joyous “huzzah!” The day is finally here when Netflix has a streaming-only plan.

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Over the weekend, some rumors were circulating that Apple might be on the verge of making MobileMe free to some iOS users. This news (which seems to come up about once a quarter) sprung out of some code in the latest golden master build of iOS 4.2 (which was officially released today). Well, sadly, the rumor isn’t true. Well, it mostly isn’t true.

You see, with iOS 4.2, Apple is making one part of MobileMe available for free: Find My iPhone/iPad. Users will be able to sign up for a free MobileMe account for the first time in order to use the service, which works on iOS devices in the form of an app. However, those users signing up for free accounts will not be able to use the other MobileMe services without paying the regular $99-a-year price, we’ve confirmed with Apple.

Find My iPhone/iPad allows users to remotely find a missing or misplaced device by using location based services to locate it. You can send messages to it, tell it to make noises so you can find it in your home, remote lock it, or remote wipe it (if it is stolen).

Just among people I know, the service has saved many an iDevice from being left at a venue, or being buried for months in a couch cushion. One friend, who shall remain unnamed, even found their’s in a bush outside where they may or may not have been using the restroom. There are also the stories of the feature recapturing iDevices from thieves. And now that it’s free, would-be robbers better think twice before climbing in your windows, and snatching your iPads up.

As the holiday shopping season ramps up, retailers are expected the use of mobile phones for shopping activity to be big this year. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, 59 percent of mobile consumers plan to make use of their mobile phone for shopping and planning purposes this holiday season and 64 percent of consumers plan to use their mobile phone to help scout out deals before leaving for the stores. With that it mind, eBay is launching a new version of its popular marketplace iPhone app, which allows users to browse, bid and buy from eBay auctions.

The app, which has seen 13.5 million downloads, will now consolidate its buying and selling iPhone apps. Previously, eBay had a separate iPhone app for sellers that allows users to quickly take photos of items and post them on eBay. Now sellers can do this directly from the primary eBay iPhone app, and access research sales trends and more.

A new 'Quick View' home screen allows both buyers and sellers to see instant updates on items. If a seller is listing a similar item sold or selling on eBay, users can simply use eBay's "Sell One Like This" feature to create a listing that is automatically populated with information like category and item condition.

eBay is also adding technology from RedLaser, the barcode scanning iPhone app that eBay acquired from Occipital in June, to the iPhone app. eBay says that total RedLaser iPhone app downloads have tripled since eBay bought the technology, but I wonder if that growth will continue now that the app is included in eBay’s primary app.

One of the great benefits of RedLaser’s scanning technology in the app is the ability to comparison shop on the go. Users can scan a barcode on an item at a store and then automatically access any eBay listings of the product on the marketplace. Sellers can also use the scanning technology to scan and item and list the product in very little time.

Other features included in the new version of the iPhone app is a featured Daily Deals listing, a more integrated PayPal experience and the ability to save searches and set up reminders.

eBay is on pace to reach a whopping $1.5 billion worth of goods sold via its mobile apps in 2010 if all goes well this holiday season. eBay has made it pretty clear that mobile shopping is a key part of its future business. This year alone, the company launched apps for iPad, Android and Windows 7 devices for its auction business. And eBay added a new Half.com app, and a Fashion-focused app to its library.

Sigh. This is getting a bit much. Turns out there isn’t much to watch on Google TV after all. Google TV is apparently viewed by big media as the devil, as the horned one himself and the only way to counter its/his takeover plans, is to disallow access/worship. And so, just like that, Viacom joined the ranks of News Corp, NBC Universal, Disney, and CBS in their stance of blocking the evil Google TV units access to its online content. This leaves Time Warner and its subsidiary Turner Broadcasting System as the lone media company still playing nicely with Google TV.

So where does this leave Google TV? Sony and Logitech are heavily promoting their wares rocking the platform and there’s a rumor circling that Samsung is about to announce a Google TV-powered HDTV. But without access to these online sources, the platform is nothing more than a glorified Netflix and Amazon streamer — and an expensive one at that.

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Attachmate Corporation has agreed to acquire technology giant Novell for $6.10 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion. Attachmate is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. The $6.10 per share consideration represents a 9% premium to the business software maker's closing stock price last Friday. Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft, for $450 million in cash, which payment is reflected in the merger consideration to be paid by Attachmate Corporation.

Back in June, Apple unveiled something that was both a blessing and a curse for the company: iOS 4. It was a blessing because it was the most stable, fastest, and most feature-rich version of iOS yet. But it was also a curse because it wasn’t yet ready for the iPad. That meant that Apple’s latest flagship device was left running old software. For months. Well, not anymore.

Yes, after rumors of an impending launch for weeks now, iOS 4.2 is finally here. And with it comes a true unification of the iOS platform for the first time since the iPad was released. That means the iPad will gain a bevy of new features that have so far only been on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Fast app switching, background tasks, unified inbox, email threads, Game Center, and folders are all now here for the iPad. Plus, two addition features come alongside iOS 4.2, specifically: AirPrint and AirPlay. “It feels like an entirely new iPad experience,” is how Apple puts it.

Having used the developer builds of 4.2 for the past few months, it’s hard to imagine ever going back to life without it. That was a legitimate complaint I had shortly after iOS 4 launched for the iPhone — it made my new iPad feel somewhat old. I found myself double clicking the button to fast app switch, and nothing would happen. The lack of folder organization drove me insane.

But all of that ends today. (And kudos to The Loop for pretty much nailing back in March that the unification would take place around now with a version number very close to what we got.)

So since the developer versions have been out for a while, plenty of you probably already know what to expect. But just in case you don’t here’s a rundown of the key features:

Folders: It used to be that you could have 11 screens on your iPad with up to 20 apps on each screen. With iOS 4.2 folders, you can have 11 screens with 20 folders, each of which can have 20 apps in them. That’s 8 more than the iPhone/iPod touch can hold in folders, thanks to the larger screen on the iPad. That’s over 4,000 apps you can potentially hold on the device.

Email: There is now a single unified inbox view for email which gives you one place to see all of the mail from each of your connected accounts. (You can still click on individual accounts if you wish to see them separately.) And threading has been added to the email app for the first time on the iPad, so you can more easily follow conversations. Also big: the iPad can now support multiple Exchange accounts for the first time.

Multitasking: You’ll finally be able to quickly switch between various iPad applications with two clicks and a tap. And certain tasks will be able to run in the background — such as Pandora. Other features, such as geolocation and downloads/uploading will be able to run in the background now as well in apps that are coded for it (to minimize battery drain).

New Global Controls: If you double-click and swipe to the left, you’ll find the new global control panel. While it’s the same idea as the version for the iPhone, it’s larger thanks to the larger screen on the iPad. Here you can not only control your media that’s currently playing, but you can also set the brightness of your screen. And here’s where you now do the orientation lock (yes, the side switch is now officially only a “silent” switch).

Game Center: iPad games will finally be able to take advantage of the social gaming network that iPhone/iPod touch users have been using for months. I got a chance to test out a racing game for the iPad with Game Center and it was smooth sailing. I’m told that thanks to the iOS 4.2 unification, you’ll be able to play certain games across iPhones and iPads as well.

But the two features that haven’t been talked about too much because they’re new to iOS 4.2 specifically, may be the coolest: AirPrint and AirPlay.

Despite rumors of the death/postponement of AirPrint, it is definitely here in 4.2. I was given a demo of it in action with a compatible printer made by HP. It worked flawlessly. You can print all kinds of things: web pages, Pages documents, Numbers documents, etc. The process for doing it is dead simple. And, as the name implies, it’s all done wirelessly over WiFi.

Sadly, it will only work for now with the specially-made HP printers that have incorporated AirPrint. But Apple says more should be on the way. And while the people I spoke with weren’t sure about it, they didn’t rule out the idea of being able to retrofit older printers via some sort of add-on.

But the best new feature of iOS 4.2 is AirPlay. While Apple demoed it originally over the Summer, it’s now fully functional. With it, you can send not only audio from your iPad (or iPhone/iPod touch) to your Apple TV to play over your living room speakers, but video as well. It’s fairly amazing how well it works.

This evening, I watched an HD movie streaming wirelessly from the iPad to the Apple TV. There wasn’t one hiccup during the entire two-hour film. And while you might think something like that would be a battery hog, because you can turn off the screen on the iPad while it streams, running one entire movie only ran the iPad battery down from 100 percent to 94 percent. In theory, I could have played almost 20 full-length movies this way.

If you do have the screen on while you’re streaming, you can control the playback (pause, fast-forward, etc). And you can click a button to bring the video/audio back to your iPad. And while you’re using AirPlay to stream, you can do other things on your iPad and it won’t interrupt a thing. I surfed the web for the first 15 minutes the movie was streaming. Again, no hiccups.

Currently, only Apple’s own Video app and their YouTube app work with the video AirPlay functionality. But there are rumors that Netflix may as well with an update. Audio works with many more services, such as Pandora.

Right now, you do need an Apple TV (or AirPlay device like AirPort express for audio) to get AirPlay streaming into your living room. But the plan is to let other partners build it in to their hardware as well. And they should, it’s a pretty killer feature. Imagine being able to take your iPhone/iPad over to a friend’s house and streaming any movie you have with you to their screen. There’s no need to enter any passwords, or jump through any copyright hoops, because it’s all streaming from your device to the TV.

Apple TV will require an update (4.1) to do AirPlay video, but that should be available today as well, I’m told.

Oh, and you can send pictures video AirPlay as well, if that interests you.

iOS 4.2 brings one other interesting thing for the iPad: Find My iPad — for free. Yes, Apple is letting people sign up for free MobileMe accounts for the first time. To be clear, those with free accounts will only have access to the one feature. But still, it’s free. With the feature, you can send an audio alert to the iPad to help you find it, or remote lock/wipe it.

Look for iOS 4.2 to be released shortly. It will be a free update. Many of the 40,000+ iPad-specific apps are already 4.2-compatible, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing a huge wave of updates in the coming days as well.

So there you go, the iPad is finally up-to-speed with the must-have features of iOS 4. It’s as if the nearly eight-month-old device has just found the Fountain of Youth. And now the speculation about the iPad 2 can truly begin.

More: No, MobileMe Isn't Totally Free, But Find My iPhone/iPad Now Is

Sites like Fashism, Go Try It On and Weardrobe have shown that there is intrinsic value in the ability to share photos of what you are wearing and get feedback on your style. So it makes sense for fashion magazines to start launching similar efforts as a way to build a community around their online content. Conde Nast’s Teen Vogue property is launching its own user generated street style fashion platform today, called Fashion Click, which is powered by content marketing company Tidal Labs.

Using Tidal Lab’s ContentMetric technology, the Teen Vogue Fashion Click platform allows fashionistas to contribute looks and descriptions of what they are wearing as they post to their own blogs. Tidal Lab’s algorithm identifies the more influential bloggers creating fashion looks and showcases content based upon posts most likely to be viewed.

Tidal Labs will soon launch a blogger dashboard where content contributors can see publisher/brand opportunities available, personal influence & content quality scores and pageviews/click-thrus on contributed content. And the magazine will be providing incentives for contributing content including the opportunity to be featured in print editions.

A user-generated street style site seems like a no-brainer for a site like Teen Vogue to build a community around online content and attract pageviews. I wouldn’t be surprised if Conde Nast started launching similar platforms for its other fashion titles. This is also a win for startup Tidal Labs, whose other clients include Neutrogena, Atlantic Records and Penguin Books.

Music blog Musically has jumped on the new accounts of Spotify’s UK Limited company to reveal some interesting figures, to say the least. The accounts also reveal that at the end of 2009, Spotify's parent company Spotify Technology SA was negotiating further funding.

The most interesting stat, to me at least is that Spotify started 2009 with around one million users and ended with seven million users across Europe, of whom over 250,000 were paid-up subscribers. That is a sevenfold increase.

The latest official Spotify numbers, says the company, are that they had over 10 million registered users (in October this year) and over 500,000 subscribers across Europe (a figure revealed in June).

But assuming the growth rate in the second year was slower, let’s call it a two to threefold increase, then Spotify could well be heading toward 15 million users by the end of the year, and 750,000 to 1 million paying subscribers. Let’s hope for their sake they are.

Seven months after reaching the 50 million download mark, Facebook’s mobile applications have been downloaded by more than 100 million people on GetJar, the vendor and carrier neutral, platform-agnostic app store, the latter company says.

This makes Facebook the most downloaded mobile application ever through a single app store.

Facebook uses GetJar's App It! link, which enables users to jump to the download page of a particular app in one tap, regardless of their phone make or model. Other brands using this service include Yahoo, Fandango, Photobucket and OpenTable.

GetJar hopes its App It! service will become as ubiquitous as placing Facebook “like” and retweet buttons on publishers’ sites, giving them a way to lead people interested in their mobile applications to a single download page with a straightforward URL (http://getjar.com/appname), after which GetJar detects which app is most fit for the device accessing the page and provides an easy way to instantly download it.

Every app that is uploaded to GetJar will automatically get its own App It! URL. The company recently said it is currently seeing over 3 million downloads per day, on par with Nokia’s Ovi Store. GetJar also says it has seen over 1 billion downloads to date, thus 1/10 was for Facebook apps alone (of some 75,000 apps currently in its library).

GetJar also provided some interesting stats on the most popular platforms for the Facebook mobile apps, at least as far as their open store goes. The company says that, while Android is the fastest growing platform, over 50 percent of the 100 million Facebook downloads were downloaded to Nokia handsets.

GetJar, fresh from raising a $11 million Series B financing round led by (Facebook investor) Accel Partners, has recently scored deals with the likes of Yahoo and AT&T to expand the potential audience for its catalog of instantly downloadable mobile apps.

“Over the next five years every product vertical will be rethought to be social. Get on the bus”

– Mark Zuckerberg

Waking up and opening your laptop on Monday mornings has become a terrifying process. Between Gmail, Twitter, Yammer, Skype and Facebook, etc it seems like hundreds of people known and unknown are trying to contact you at any given time. Information overload and fragmentation has gotten so bad that there was even a The Office episode spoofing the still outstanding need for a Universal Inbox (what they called WUPHF) for all your messages.

Prioritization of the deluge of information thrown at you is a huge problem, and one that currently only has imperfect solutions. Some set up an auto-reply declaring email bankruptcy, some do their best to train (when they can) their messaging system to prioritize and most of us just ignore everything but the most pressing stuff. Last Monday, Facebook announced its foray into messaging and took a unique stance on one of the most pressing problems of our time by taking the solution social.

Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox describes the philosophy behind Facebook’s attempt to use its concept of social design to leverage your social graph and get you the messages that matter most, “People have collaboratively built a network of who matters to them. We are living in a world where people are actually online. You’re not scared when you’re on a website and you interact with the people you know mainly.”

Yes there are countless ways to communicate online, but very few with built in restrictions. Adding Facebook’s hat toss to the pile, we’ve recently seen three novel attempts at dealing with information overload, each with advantages and disadvantages:

Gmail Priority Inbox

Gmail Priority Inbox is an example of a whitelist solution. While the Priority Inbox algorithm theoretically sorts your email into only things you want to see, in order for it to work users must tweak a list of  Like and Don’t Like rules. You have to train Priority Inbox to recognize what is “Important” and “Everything Else” for you personally.

The problem with this is there is no one intelligible overarching filter, and the user ends up doing a lot of work. It takes me more time to flag my messages as “Unimportant” than it does to manually avoid junk mail so I get lazy about training, which just leads to more junk mail.

Gmail’s greatest strength (openess) is also its downfall i.e. random emails from sexyfreeipod@hotmail.com. But, if your business depends on open communication and receiving messages from people you don’t yet know, then it currently is the most flexible of your message filtering options as it still allows for spontaneity but doesn’t throw you entirely to the spam wolves.

Twitter DMs

Many people say that Twitter Direct Messages have become their most efficient mode of messaging thus far due to their size restrictions and incorporation of the Twitter follow social graph into who has or doesn’t have access to you. In fact, as a messaging service it currently is my favorite one to use — I consider my DMs my inbox and my @replies a form of everything else/junk mail.

But anyone who’s ever tried to DM someone who is not following them will point out that Twitter is not without its flaws. In terms of a communication tool, Twitter fails in some ways because someone shouldn’t have to subscribe to all your inane ramblings and mediocre Instagrams just so they can send you a private message. And at 175 million users Twitter still doesn’t cover a wide enough segment of the population that it can be used by itself.

Facebook Messages

Facebook announced three new elements in its messaging system revamp: Seamless Messaging, Interoperable Messaging and Social Inbox. As it is currently in slow roll out, most users won’t understand the ins and outs of the first two features (and maybe even the third) until the product reaches critical mass (Imagine trying to explain the Facebook Newsfeed to someone who hadn’t yet seen it).

While I don’t really care much for all my messages showing up in a thread and the idea of receiving an email as a text sounds too much like WUPHF for my taste, I am psyched about Social Inbox’s potential.

Why? Well I almost never receive messages from humans, and humans are all I want to receive messages from, at least when I’m on Facebook. Affirming this, Cox says that the social design strategy behind Social Inbox’s creation it is an attempt to combine the algorithmic and whitelist filtering solutions with the knowledge inherent in your social graph, “It really is about the people.”

Social Inbox is split into three parts, Messages, Other and Junk. The two main parts, Messages and Other, are sorted by whether messages are from Friends or Friends of Friends or a part of everything else like pitches and newsletters. Think about it, you can give out your @facebook.com email address to stuff like Groupon and only have to deal with those emails when you’re good and ready, no algorithmic training involved.

Like Gmail, the social graph that gives Social Inbox value also limits it, but there is something amazing about receiving an email sent from outside Facebook that shows up front and center in Facebook Messages prioritized by the fact that the sender is your Facebook friend. If anything this cleans up the Facebook messaging system (Win). Now if only there was an easier way to cull your Friends list.

The revolution in social messaging will be specialized

None of the above options will necessarily kill each other, just like the existence of Yoga doesn’t kill the existence of Pilates as a form of exercise. No matter what the Contacts wars lead us to believe, I won’t be trading in my Gmail for Facebook Messages anytime soon and I don’t think anyone expects me too. Besides, Mark Zuckerberg himself referred to Gmail Priority Inbox as “pretty cool.” Not exactly fighting words.

I’m pretty sure the 350 million active Facebook Messages users (most without the new features), 363 million Hotmail users, 303 million Yahoo Mail users, 175 million Twitter users and 171 million Gmail users all have some overlap, each using whatever service is most efficient in each particular use case.

Right now I wouldn’t Facebook message a potential client just like I wouldn’t @reply a relative with the details of what my family is doing for Thanksgiving. But this, like anything else in the volatile realm of human communication, is subject to change.

Image: 10ch

The big brand camera companies are committing seppuku in front of our eyes. It’s fascinating.

Last week, I bought a brand new Canon S95 camera. It’s a great point & shoot. Maybe the best out there right now. It captures beautiful 10-megapixel images. It’s great in low-light. It’s fast. And it shoots HD video. I anticipate I’ll take about 5 percent of my pictures with it in the coming year. The other 95 percent will be taken with my iPhone. How do I know? Because I had the S90 last year and that was my exact usage pattern.

Obviously, the 10-megapixel, $400 S95 is the superior camera when compared to the 5-megapixel, $200 (with subsidy) iPhone 4. But the fact that I always have my phone on me easily trumps the specs. But to me, there’s actually something other than just the portability factor that leads to my usage being so heavily skewed towards the iPhone: connectivity.

Smartphones are always connected. Point & shoots never are. When I take a cool picture, I often want to share it right away. With my smartphone, it takes 20 seconds. With my point & shoot, it’s impossible. I have to wait until I get home, upload it to my computer, then upload it to the web.

It shouldn’t be surprising at all that smartphones are eating point & shoots’ lunch when it comes to percentage of pictures uploaded to sites like Flickr. Currently, the most popular camera in the Flickr community is the iPhone 3G. Below that are several prosumer-level DSLRs. There are no point & shoots on the top list.

And if you look at the popular point & shoot list, you’ll see that all of them are trending downward. Fast. Meanwhile, cameraphones are going the opposite way. Soon, I imagine that several Android phones will join the iPhones at the top of the popular list.

It’s a little dumbfounding that point & shoots have been so slow to hop on the connectivity and social bandwagon. The iPhone is now three and a half years old, and plenty of people were taking picture with their crappy RAZR phones and uploading them to the web years before that. The writing has been on the wall for a long time.

It stands to reason that as smartphone cameras continue to improve, they were going to squeeze out point & shoots anyway. We’re heading towards a world where the smartphone is the everyday camera and the DSLR is the special occassion camera. But we’re not there yet. I still have some need for a good point & shoot. And so do plenty of other people — the S95 is currently the 19th best-selling electronic on Amazon heading into the holiday shopping season.

But the big camera companies like Canon almost seem like they want to speed the process of killing point & shoot camera along. They just don’t seem to get it.

“Point and shoot has become point and shoot and share,” Twitter’s Josh Elman tweeted earlier. “It’s sad that cameras haven’t evolved to be networked and make sharing easier. I’m shopping for a new camera now and very disappointed,” he continued.

Elman must be going through the same process I went through a couple weeks ago. With no better solution, I ultimately settled on a sort hacked-together one: the S95 with an SD card from Eye-Fi that will add WiFi capabilities to your device. It’s okay. It does allow you to share photos when you take them — provided you’re connected to WiFi. WiFi which you have to configure on your card via your computer beforehand. In other words, unless you’re at home, it’s not much of a solution.

Further, given that everything else in the world is hopping on the geolocation bandwagon, you would have thought that the point & shoot makers would at least go there with GPS chips. Nope. Again, the only solution for most of these cameras is the Eye-Fi card. And again, it’s a pretty lame solution. Instead of using a combination of GPS and WiFi to get your location and pin it to a picture like most smartphones do, the EyeFi card simply records the nearest WiFi router address and it will only tag it to your photo if you run it through their (rather lame) software when you get home.

Ugh.

And don’t get me wrong, what Eye-Fi is doing is rather amazing given what they’re working with. They’ve essentially hacked the memory card input to make these cameras somewhat connected. But there really needs to be some sort of native hardware/software solution.

I know that there are some “social” point & shoots out there, like Kodak’s EasyShare products. But the reviews of those things range from mixed to poor. If I’m going to spend the extra money, I want it to be on the best point & shoot. Like the S95. Sadly, I can’t have the best of both worlds. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to until after the smartphones have already killed the genre.

In the smartphone world right now, we’re already evolving to the next phase. We’re seeing an explosion of interest is social apps built solely around the camera. Instagram, Hipstamatic, Picplz, Path, DailyBooth, CameraBag, Treehouse, IncrediBooth, Diptic, Burstn, etc. There are hundreds of apps with new ones launching each day. The point & shoot hasn’t even entered phase one yet. It’s really pretty pathetic.

Smartdate announced a €2 million round in February of this year so that you could stop poking and start actually dating the friends of your Facebook friends. But now the company is kicking it up a notch and announcing that it's raised an additional €3.5 million with the fonders of PriceMinster, Pierre Kosciuscko-Morizet and Pierre Krings. Oh, and just in case you forgot, French Ebay competitor PriceMinister went to Rakuten in June for €200 million (about $250 million) so maybe that's why the founders have a bit of cash to spare. As with a number of French dating sites, like the likes of Adoptaguy and Meetic, Smartdate is rapidly developing and already has a 25 person team in place.

This morning, I pulled out my iPad to read The New York Times feature entitled Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction. After reading a few hundred words, I tweeted about reading it. Then I realized it was something like 4,000 words, so I took a break to go check Twitter. Then Facebook. Then my email. Then Yammer. Then I came back to reading — for another 1,000 words or so, before an Instagram Push Notification popped up. I hopped over there. Then I came back and finished the article.

This is pretty much the standard way I read things nowadays. It has taken a while to get used to, but now I’m fine with it. And increasingly, like it or not, this is the way the world is going to work.

There are two underlying currents in the NYT piece that are never fully stated: 1) That 17 year-old Vishal Singh is actually drawing something very educational and meaningful from his technology addiction. 2) That eventually someone will come up with some sort of cure for this digital overload.

There is no cure for this. If anything, it’s going to get much worse. So we can either bitch about how much that sucks, and how it’s ruining society. Or we can adapt and change some of the fundamental concepts of what learning is.

That latter idea isn’t going to be easy for some people to swallow. Parents, in particular, I imagine. I’m not a parent. But I’m also not that far removed from being a kid. I didn’t grow up in a world where everyone had a computer in their pocket (smartphones), but I wish I had. Instead, my high school years saw pagers give way to the first truly portable cellphones (not the Zack Morris/Gordon Gekko variety). But it was already a time when everyone had a computer at their home that was connected to the Internet.

The Internet was a magical place at that time. It still is. In fact, with all of these different ways to use it and access it now, it’s even more magical. I’m tempted to be cautious in the way I say this, but I can’t come up with a real reason to be, so I’ll just say it: I have definitely learned a lot more on the Internet than I ever did in high school.

High school, at least when I attended it, was much more about learning social skills than educational information. The education side of things was more like one big game. You had to figure out how to play the game so you could get into a good college. It was about memorizing things for tests that you’d forget a week later, and figuring out how you could do your homework in the free period before the class in which it was due. I more or less remember nothing from high school beyond the times I spent with friends. And I know I’m not alone there.

One major problem with high school learning is that you are forced to take certain classes which you couldn’t care less about. I understand that the rationale behind this is that it makes you a more “full” person, and you might learn you love something that you didn’t realize you would. But that mentality is from a pre-connected world. I would guess that a lot of students these days know what they’re really passionate about at a much earlier age, thanks to the Internet. Kids like the aforementioned Singh figure out a passion for video editing and filmmaking not through high school, but through the web and technology. And his high school doesn’t cater to that passion. Instead, they want him to take a Latin class. Yes, Latin.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that it’s the Latin teacher that seems the most concerned about technology distractions. He’s teaching something that was infinitely more useful in 10 A.D. than in 2010 A.D.

Other teachers mentioned in the article, to their credit, seem much more open to ideas about utilizing technology to augment their teaching. In my view, that’s the only way forward here. You can try to ban the use of technology in the classroom, but it will find a way in. Or kids will find a way out. Resistance is futile.

What’s also sort of humorous about all of this is that it sounds a lot like the “television will rot your mind” stuff of yesteryear. And probably radio before that, etc, etc. New technology is going to keep coming at us that’s going to alter the way we live. To try to pretend like it doesn’t exist, or to automatically assume that it has to be a bad thing that’s going to lead to the corruption of our youth is ridiculous. Embrace and change. I just don’t see a reason why all of these great tools can’t help us learn more, rather than less.

I’m also reminded of what Bill Gates said at the Techonomy conference this past August. He extended the idea of learning via the Internet to college as well. “Five years from now on the web for free you'll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university,” he said. Easy for a college drop-out who subsequently became the richest man in the world to say. But he’s very likely right.

Certain people will need to go to places of higher education for the access those institutions have to tools that a person would otherwise not be able to get access to. And there’s no denying the value of a good teacher/professor. And certain people will definitely always benefit from the combination of social environment mixed with structured learning. But not everyone learns the same way.

If you’re a self-starter, why shouldn’t you be able to get your education on the web? Because there are too many distractions? Please. Those distractions don’t seem to be an issue for Singh when he’s doing what he loves (filmmaking), just when he’s doing what he’s forced to do (Latin). Funny how that works.

[image: flickr/underminingme]

Nlyte Software (formerly Global DataCenter Management) closed a $12 million series C investment led by NGEN Partners with Balderton Capital, Ruffer LLP and Montalcino Holdings participating in the round. The Menlo Park green IT company provides data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software and services.

Nlyte Software’s chief executive Joe Temple says, “We help data center managers with capacity planning, so there’s an efficient use of power, cooling and space, and optimal placement of data assets [within their facilities].”

Datacenter owners and managers can use nlyte to understand and predict: what’s in their ever-changing inventory of equipment; where every server or rack is located within their facilities; how systems that are run by this equipment may be effected as it is moved around; and how the data centers can be tweaked to operate more efficiently.

According to a new study from KTH's Centre for Sustainable Communications, the global IT and telecom sector in 2007, defined in a way that excludes the impact of the increasingly digital media and entertainment sector, accounted for at least 1.3 percent of the world's total greenhouse emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions from cloud computing alone are expected to triple by 2020, according to forecasts by Greenpeace.

DCIM solutions— like those offered by nlyte, Emerson Network Power, and Modius— reduce data center energy consumption by 20% on an annualized basis according to Gartner research. Nlyte’s website claims its software can extend the lifetime of an existing data center facility by 75% or about 5 years.

Nlyte sells to businesses that have 100 or more racks in their data centers. “We've only seen one data center in one hundred today taking advantage of this type of technology which represents a huge opportunity for us,” Temple said.

IDC researchers have counted more than 106,000 data centers of this size in operation today. Cloud computing, outsourcing and other trends are contributing to increased demand on existing data centers, and the build of new data centers, Temple says.

Nlyte plans to use its series C growth capital to market its services in North America, primarily, with some expansion plans in continental and Eastern Europe, and Asia-Pacific Rim. With the investment, NGEN’s managing director Rosemary Ripley, will join nlyte Software's board of directors.

In about 3 hours I’m heading over to a press event to interview some of the major cast and crew for the upcoming Disney release of TRON: Legacy.

I was working on my list of questions to ask last night and realized that the TechCrunch community should really be asking them instead of me. Interviews take place from 12:30p – 4:30p (Pacific Time) and I’ll have my computer with me to look at the questions & comments here.

I don’t know about you, but I have been waiting for a TRON sequel my whole life. When IMDB launched, there was a teaser that something called TRON 2.0 was coming out and was constantly in a state of production.

TRON was a huge part of my childhood, teen years and early adult years. I got something from it at different times in my life and I  still consider it one of the most beautiful movies ever made. The technology Disney used at the time was ground breaking and the hand drawn backgrounds were breath taking. They created a world that has developed a bit of a cult following and I’m looking forward to how they do it for our next generation of children. The great thing about TRON vs other films I grew up with, is that visually a sequel can only get better because it is a plot based on technology and video games. Just think about how far both have come since the first release of TRON in 1982. We went from Discs of TRON the arcade game vs what you can play on your console at home now.

I’m taking the interview footage back to the TechCrunch office Monday, so hopefully we’ll have the videos up on TechCrunch TV starting on Tuesday. Here’s the list of folks I’m scheduled to interview:

• Olivia Wilde "Quorra"
• Jeff Bridges “Kevin Flynn”
• Michael Sheen "Castor" AND Beau Garrett "Siren Gem"
• James Frain "Jarvis" AND Bruce Boxleitner "Alan Bradley"
• Joseph Kosinski (Director) AND Sean Bailey (Producer)
• Daniel Simon (Vehicle Concept Designer)
• Eric Barba (VFX Supervisor)

It’s a very old trick, and arguably a mighty effective one. Ask people to set your website as their homepage, and it will become their entry point to the Web, the very first thing they’ll see when they open their browser. Venturebeat noticed that Facebook started prompting visitors to set the site as their homepage before the weekend, by means of a bar at the top that actually shows some pictures and names of your Facebook friends.

Others have reported to see the bar popping up as well, and reader Ryan Merket from Appbistro just checked in to tell us that he’s seen it as well. You can see two other pop-up messages below, and you’ll notice that they differ from the one embedded above.

From the looks of it, Facebook is A/B testing this with a small subset of users, and trying out a variety of messages and pop-up layouts to figure out which one yields the best results.

This is undeniably a significant move, particularly when it will roll out to the site’s roughly 500 million active users in full. Keep in mind that Google and other search engines benefit greatly from being a genuine starting point to the rest of the Web, which is why so many people select such services to come up as soon as they open their Web browser.

Being people’s homepage is good for branding, great for ‘stickiness’ and phenomenal for traffic.

But for many people, social networking sites are slowly taking over at least part of the role of search engines, which is mainly to retrieve information. When you can tap your entire social graph for answers to your queries, sites like Facebook have the ability to push aside search engines like Google as the first site that springs to mind when people think about surfing the WWW to find information, connect to other people, communicate with friends, and so on.

I can easily see why more and more people would eventually switch to Facebook as their homepage of choice, and actively prompting them to do so might be just what some Facebook users need to actually configure their browsers to do just that.

Come to think of it, I’m wondering why Facebook hasn’t been doing this forever.

Facebook’s traffic is still very much not going anywhere but up, but the social network could still see a massive bump in total pageviews and time spent on the site if they can convince even just a tiny percentage of their total user base to set Facebook.com as their homepage.

That said, you’ve set TechCrunch as your homepage, right?