ZipList, which lets you manage and share your grocery lists online and on the go, has raised a little over $2 million in funding, a SEC filing reveals.

ZipList combines a robust recipe search engine with a free shopping list management service that allows users to easily create and manage grocery lists and efficiently share them with others.

Family members can add items to the list by email, IM, text message, on the Web, from a mobile web browser, or from an iPhone or Android application.

Any changes to shopping lists get synchronized in real time, which guarantees users that they are always up-to-date, no matter how they’re accessed.

Essentially, the tool wants to help you cut down the time you spend creating your grocery lists, planning meals, and actually doing the shopping at the store. An admirable goal.

ZipList was founded by CEO Geoff Allen, who previously founded digital media production solutions provider Anystream (formerly Grab Networks), which was acquired by Telestream last September.

I’ve contacted the company to learn who the investors are, and what the startup plans to do with the capital, but a spokesperson said she couldn’t immediately answer my questions.

Update: just got word that this round brings ZipList’s total raised to $4.5 million. Investors include Softbank Capital, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and unnamed angel investors.

New York City art world startup Art.sy, which launched at our first TechCrunch Disrupt and won the Rookie Award, is raising $1.25 million from a very impressive group of super angels on both coasts.

The investors include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Wendi Murdoch (wife of News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), VC Jim Breyer, art “czarina” Dasha Zhukova, Founder Collective, Keith Rabois (Square, Slide, PayPal), David Tisch, Charlei Cheever (Quora, Facebook), Dave Morin (Path, Facebook), and David Kidder (Clickable). The round was led by Josh Kushner through Thrive Capital. Some of these names were reported earlier by Business Insider, but not the amount.

Art.sy previously raised about $160,000 in seed funding. After launching at Disrupt, 24-year-old founder Carter Cleveland decided to take the site completely private again while he shifted focus from a general-interest art-buying site to one more focussed on high-end art dealers and collectors. He signed up powerful New York city art dealer Larry Gagosian as an advisor and is negotiating with other world-class galleries to highlight their artists on Art.sy.

Cleveland is also scrapping a lot of the original features originally targeted at a younger audience, and instead trying to make it more of an art discovery tool for wealthy, older collectors. The new capital will go towards hiring engineers to help build out the startup’s “Art Genome” algorithm, which is modeled on Pandora’s Music Genome, except for fine art. The Art Genome algorithm breaks down artworks and artists into 170 different dimensions, and combines them into resultant vectors to help people find clusters of art similar to other works they might like. The core technology is about making better art recommendations and making it easier to discover art.

It is an ambitious project with many moving parts, but the art world definitely needs help becoming more Web-friendly. Art.sy is now planning open up publicly in the spring of 2011.

If you’ve been rocking out to SlingPlayer on your laptop, this is pretty good news. SlingPlayer for iPad is now available for $29.99 from the app store. Yeah, you read that right. $29.99. But hopefully if you love Sling the way most people love Sling, this will be a small price to pay.

Not much else to say. If you’ve used SlingPlayer, or any other media player/DVR for that matter, you’re looking at the same features. Sling, obviously, allows you to transfer video from your own set-top-box to any other device, including laptop browsers. It works with the Slingbox SOLO or PRO-HD.

Sling Media, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation (Nasdaq: SATS), today announced the availability of the SlingPlayer Mobile™ player for the Apple iPad. Available for purchase on the iTunes App Store, SlingPlayer Mobile software for iPad lets Slingbox® owners extend their living room TV experience to their iPad and takes advantage of the iPad’s high-resolution, 9.7-inch LED-backlit display for great video quality. The revamped program guide uses the iPad’s intuitive native interface, and a recent channels feature puts a viewer’s recent channels at his fingertips.

Read more…

We can’t say we’re really surprised: according to market research company Gfk, smartphones are getting increasing popular in Asia, with Android now being the region’s most popular OS for this type of handsets. Cell phones with the Google software on board have reportedly enjoyed brisk sales in that region in the second and third quarters of 2010.

Read the rest on MobileCrunch.

Nokia has appointed Jerri DeVard as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, a new role that comes into effect as of January 1, 2011. DeVard is a 25-year marketing vet, with relevant experience in the telecom industry - she served as Senior Vice President for Marketing and Brand Management at Verizon from 2003 to 2007. DeVard started her own marketing consultancy agency, called DeVard Marketing Group and based in New York. As a Principal at the firm, she provided counsel to Microsoft, among other consumer-focused companies. I mention that, of course, because Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, hails from the Redmond software company. DeVard will join Nokia's Group Executive Board and report to Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President and head of Nokia's Markets unit.

Opera’s mobile browser, Opera Mini has had a big year. It’s iPhone app was approved, saw one million downloads in the first day and since the mobile browser has been growing like gangbusters. Today, Opera released its state of the mobile report showing that Opera is continuing to grow in terms of usage.

In October, Opera Mini had over 76.3 million users, a 7.1% increase from September 2010 and more than 92% compared to October 2009. Opera Mini users viewed over 41.6 billion pages in October 2010, which is an increase of 142% since last October.

In the past month, Opera Mini users generated over 616 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since September, the data consumed went up by 15.1% and dat traffic is up 134% since last year. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 5.7 petabytes of data in October.

The report also took a look at usage in the countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. From October 2009 to October 2010, page views in these countries increased by 128%, unique users increased by 44% and data transferred increased by 119%. The most popular sites include Vkontakte, Yandex, Odnoklassniki.ru, Google, and Mail.ru.

Another interesting data point in the report related to a survey of how Gen Y users are interacting with their mobile phones. Almost 90% of respondents in the United States aged 18-27 have used their phones to share pictures. Respondents in the U.S. were least likely to have asked someone out on a date via SMS (44%). Respondents in China (84%), Germany (84%) and Vietnam (83%) are most likely to have used SMS texts to ask someone out on a date.

Opera reports that 53% of respondents in the United States and 57% of respondents in China rarely or never read physical newspapers. And 44% of U.S. respondents were somewhat to very uncomfortable sharing their personal information online.

Google is blowing the doors off with its display advertising business, which is doing so well that the company bragged about that it is on a $2.5 billion annualized revenue run-rate just in display. A big part of that growth is coming from YouTube and Google’s own sites. But another big driver of display advertising growth both for Google and across the industry is coming from a less well-understood source: the big advertising agencies themselves and their so-called trading desks and demand side platforms (DSPs). By one estimate, these DSPs already account for 10 percent of online ad spending, and could grow to as much as 50 percent over the next few years.

One advertising agency in particular, Publicis, is pushing a ton of advertising dollars through Google in return for what two industry insiders independently refer to as “kickbacks” or “rebates.” Kurt Unkel, an SVP at Vivaki (the digital arm of Publicis) flatly denies there are any payments of this kind. “There isn't a rebate in play. We have a strategic partnership,” says Unkel. Any suggestion that Publicis is accepting payments from Google in return for driving online ad spending through Google is “an utter crock of shit,” he says. He adds, “That is illegal in the U.S.”

Google is a bit more circumspect. “There are incentives,” admits a Google spokesperson. “I don't now that there is a wad of cash,” he adds, “payments are predicated on a bunch of things.” Those things are more along the lines of investing in the trading platform, co-marketing, and training if Publicis and Vivaki hit certain milestones. “There is no commission being paid,” says the Google spokesperson. So there are payments, but they are framed as technology incentives to help Vivaki test and prove out its exchange.

Direct rebates would be a big no-no and could raise antitrust concerns. It would mean that Google is essentially buying market share in display advertising. If its rising share in display is based on better performance then that is fine. But if there were some sort of financial incentive for Publicis (or any other ad agency) to throw display ad spending its way, that would raises all sorts of concerns. The question would be whether Google could pay such rebates because it is making a higher profit from its display ads than competitors, or whether it is using its profits from search advertising to fund the growth in display in this manner. If it were the latter (and, again, to be clear, there is no evidence other than anonymous hearsay that this is happening), that could have antitrust implications, especially if this rebate practice extended to other ad agency DSPs.

Again, Google and Publicis are adamant that there are no kickbacks and that there are not even any obligations to drive a certain amount of spending through Google. But one thing that is certain is that the DSPs are driving growth for Google. One source, who is an employee of Publicis and requested anonymity to protect his job, estimates that in 2010 Publicis will run $1 billion in advertising through Google, a figure Unkel does not dispute. Most of that is still search advertising, but about $200 million is display, according to the employee, and that portion is growing quickly. Soon the employee estimates that half of all online display advertising bought on behalf of Publicis clients will be going through Google. What’s more, he argues that “Google's growth in display and agencies profits are tied together.”

Digital is certainly driving growth at Publicis, a huge ad agency holding company that controls $60 billion in advertising spending. In the third quarter, the digital business accounted for 29 percent of Publicis’ total revenues of 1.3 billion Euros and 44 percent of its North America revenues of 666 million Euros. North American revenues grew 36.5 percent, faster than any other region, and digital revenues grew 28.1 percent, which is quite a bit faster than the industry average of 17 percent growth for U.S. Internet advertising in the third quarter.

The Google spokesperson agrees that ad agency DSPs account for “a significant part of the growth in display, not just at Google but in the industry as a whole.” Moreover, he notes that the number of transactions on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange has tripled over the past year. But according to Google’s own analysis, publishers are getting higher prices for their ad inventory, on average 130 percent higher than on competing ad networks.

To understand what is going one here, we need to do a deep dive into the netherworld of the advertising industry. Big advertising agencies like Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic are setting up their own quasi-ad networks in-house to protect their relationships with their clients. These are called “trading desks” and “demand-side platforms.” They are supposed to be ad-network agnostic, and utilize the best technologies to place and target ads on behalf of their clients across the Web. But the ad agencies don’t have their own technology. They have to license it from Google and others, although most of their clients may not be aware of this fact.

Publicis, for instance, runs its digital business through a subsidiary called Vivaki. Google recently strengthened its partnership with Vivaki, and also has a deal with Omnicom. In fact, all six major ad agency trading desks purchase ads through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Vivaki’s DSP technology is called Audience On Demand, but it is really based on technology Google acquired when it bought Invite Media last summer. Invite Media is a realtime bidding platform for online display advertising and buys ads through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, among others. DoubelClick, of course, is also owned by Google. Says the Publicis employee of his counterparts at Vivaki: “They are like Gods internally, they are bringing in the profits now.” At the very least, it is obvious that these DSPs are creating tension both within ad agencies and between agencies and ad technology companies who fear that the rise of the DSPs will cut them out of the spoils.

On the surface, the Vivaki DSP is supposed to operate at an arms-length relationship with the other parts of Publicis. Media planning teams assigned to each client are supposed to look out for the best interest of the client and allocate advertising dollars where they make the most sense. But it doesn’t always work that way in practice, claims the employee. Media planners are often 26-year-olds who are easily cowed by other executives at the ad agency. Increasingly “client buys” for online ads are funneled through Vivaki’s Audience On Demand platform.

Unkel says this is not true and that Audience On Demand has to perform well or lose the business, just like an outside ad network. “We used to have a reliance on intermediaries,” he explains, “who gave the appearance of adding value. They were able to take on risk and remove complexity. I now can create that inhouse, and don't have to pay as much.”

As a result, independent ad networks are beginning to feel the heat. One executive at one of the largest competing ad networks confirms, “We are losing deals to Vivaki.” Even though Vivaki’s DSP is supposed to be evaluated based on its merits, it is becoming increasingly difficult to win those deals for outside ad networks. The executive explains it this way: “If you are a guy hiring for your department and bring in candidates for a job. One is a great candidate, one is your son. You are going to hire your son.”

In this case, however, it might actually be more profitable to hire the son. Since Google controls a lot of the inventory through AdSense, it can make money at different points along the chain, from publishers as well as advertisers. And therefore it can “pay” for a bigger share of ad agency’s display budgets in different ways. “Only somebody who aggregates those pieces together can get the price to an attractive point,” argues Unkel. “The aggregation is my best chance to get it super cheap.” But another way to look at it is that the more intermediaries there are, the more they parties take their cuts along the way before the money is spent on an actual ad. It is all a black box to clients, many of whom have no idea their ad spending is running through Google. “If it is so above board, the clients should know about it and the dynamics behind it,” argues the Publicis employee. “Our clients are so clueless it is a joke.” What they see is a list of Websites where their ads are placed. The Google relationship is obscured through Vivaki’s white-labeling of Google’s technology.

Vivaki still buys through other ad exchanges, including Yahoo’s Right Media, especially for ads on Yahoo sites. But the growth is definitely going to Google, which is the “primary” partner. This pursuit of short-term profits may turn out to be short-term thinking. “They think this is what is saving the agency model,” warns my source at Publicis. “I think this is what will kill it. They think Google will be a partner forever. But the client will be gone, and Google will say you can buy directly from me.” The executive at the competing ad network agrees that longterm, “The battleground is the client.”

Photo credit: Flickr/ Noah Wesley

Last year TechCrunch partnered with Founders Fund on an innovative awards program called the TechFellow Awards to recognize top high-tech entrepreneurs. The 2009 TechFellow Awards recognized 22 inaugural innovators across four categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation.

Founders Fund is expanding the awards program this year and added New Enterprise Associates (NEA) as co-host. Together, Founders Fund and NEA will grant each TechFellow $100,000 to invest in a start-up of their choice, more than doubling last year's award size. Additionally, a new fund structure will allow each TechFellow to share in the interest of all 2010 TechFellow companies. Last year’s TechFellows helped fund and found fFlick, Bidfire, Quora, Flipboard, HipChat and others. Check out last year’s winners.

We invite the tech community to nominate candidates for this year’s 5 award categories:

1. Engineering Leadership

• Engineering Leadership candidates are people who have demonstrated technical excellence, built amazing technology infrastructure and products, or led teams that together built complex and elegant solutions that changed our lives. They are the uber geeks who calculate 10-digit squares in their heads, and write a thousand bug-free lines of code on the fly without skipping a beat.
• 2009 TechFellows: Michael Abbott, Adam D’Angelo, Sandy Jen, Elaine Wherry, Eric Ries, Rich Skrenta

2. General Management

• General Management candidates are people who have built the teams and organizations that create and deliver great technology and products to the world. They are company builders who provide foundations and processes for all the rest of the geeks and dreamers to make their dreams reality. They are the folks who wake up at 6am and open the doors, make the donuts, play reveille, and lead the charge to take the hill. They make it *happen*.
• 2009 TechFellows: Scott Dietzen, Mike Jones, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, David Sprosty,
  Jason Rapp, Scott Weiss

3. Product Design

• Product Design and Marketing candidates are people who have designed insanely great products, who have made technology beautiful, who have created the marketing campaign that blows you away and make you want to go out and buy ten of them for your whole family. These are the storytellers, the artists, the people who make our dreams come alive.
• 2009 TechFellows: Michael Birch, Daniel Burka, Adam Goldberg, Zach Klein, Jeffrey Veen

4. Disruptive Innovation

• This category is meant to highlight the visionaries, the starry-eyed fools who believe when no one else will. They are undaunted when told NO by stern parents, when told it WON'T WORK by a thousand dismissive VCs, when failure after failure would dash the hopes of lesser mortals. These are the men and women whose incredible ideas burst forth like Athena from their foreheads, and they know what it means to make Fire, the Wheel, and the Printing Press.
• 2009 TechFellows: Scott Banister, Andrew Frame, Will Harvey, Blake Krikorian, Mike McCue

5. Life Science Innovation

• New category for 2010 to recognize new leadership in the life sciences

To recommend an innovator for TechFellow consideration by the nominating commitee please fill out the form below. Nominates must be submitted by 6 pm PST on Monday, November 29.

The 2010 TechFellow Awards Nominating Committee members are:

• Michael Arrington (Founder, TechCrunch)
• Peter Barris (Managing General Partner, NEA)
• John Battelle (Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media)
• Ron Conway (Managing Partner, SV Angel)
• Esther Dyson (Chairman, EDventure)
• Shawn Fanning (Founder, Napster, SNOCAP, Rupture)
• Drew Houston (Founder/CEO, Dropbox)
• Max Levchin (Founder/CEO, Slide; Co-Founder, PayPal)
• Andrew Mason (Founder/CEO, Groupon)
• Dave McClure (Founding Partner, 500 Startups; Former Director, Founders Fund II Angel Program)
• John McKinley (Founder/CEO, OurParents)
• Jonathan Miller (CEO Digital Media, News Corp)
• Tim O’Reilly, (Founder, O’Reilly Media)
• Sean Parker (Co-Founder, Napster, Plaxo, Causes; Founding President, Facebook; Managing Partner, Founders Fund)
• Aaron Patzer (Founder/CEO, Mint.com)
• John Pleasants (CEO, Playdom)
• Geoff Ralston (CEO, LaLa; former Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!)
• Terry Semel (Chariman/CEO, Windsor Media; Former Chairman/CEO, Yahoo!)
• David Sacks (Founder/CEO, Yammer; COO, PayPal)
• Scott Sandell (General Partner, NEA)
• Peter Thiel (Managing Partner, Founders Fund; Chairman & Co-Founder, Palantir Technologies; Former Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, PayPal)
• Michael Yanover (Business Development, Creative Artists Agency)

Final fellowship selections will be announced at the second annual awards ceremony to be held Thursday, December 2, in San Francisco.

Newly launched ad network RadiumOne is announcing a new hire today—Bill Lonergan. Lonergan joins RadiumOne from Offerpal, rival to RadiumOne’s offers platform gWallet, where he was chief financial officer.

Prior to Offerpal, Lonergan was CFO of online ad network Blue Lithium, which was launched by RadiumOne’s founder Gurbaksh Chahal and later sold to Yahoo for $300 million in 2007. Lonergan joins other former Blue Lithium execs Kamal Kaur, Mike Werner and Eugene Kislyi as part of the RadiumOne team.

At RadiumOne, Longeran will lead all aspects of RadiumOne's financial, administrative and corporate development activities. We hear that the hiring of Longeran is also related to RadiumOne raising a major funding round in the next few months. We hear the round is in the $50 million range on a $250 million valuation.

RadiumOne aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads. The platform mines social data and use this information to identify relevant consumers for brands. Through what Chahal calls "social retargeting,” RadiumOne analyzes how users interact with one another on social networks to find the consumers that identify with a brand's current customer base, and then serves advertisements to this audience. RadiumOne is also the parent corporation to offers platform gWallet.

RadiumOne gets this data directly from social networks (although not from Facebook), which sell anonymous user behavior data to advertisers, its own gWallet offer platform, blogging platforms, microblogging platforms (i.e. Twitter), URL shorteners, photosharing websites and other applications.

A child is born on a roadside as a Google Streetview car swishes by. It’s almost good too good to be true. And it is.

The photo, which was apparently taken in the German suburb of Wilmersdorf, exactly outside No. 37 Hubertusallee, Berlin, looks like it was snapped by one of Google’s camera cars. It’s doing the rounds of Twitter and Facebook right now.

A man cradles a newborn baby in his hands beside a car which has been parked hurriedly on the street with its door open. Uh huh…

German website pcgames.de has called it out as a hoax, and it’s not hard to see why.

Here’s where the photo is supposed to have been taken. Notice how close it is to a nearby hospital?

Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com this morning announced the appointment of JP Rangaswami, an internationally acclaimed thought leader in the tech industry, to the newly created position of Chief Scientist.

Rangaswami, an expert in enterprise software, had recently stepped down from a similar position at BT Group, after nearly five years with the company.

According to the press release, Rangaswami in his new role will “help European customers think about innovative ways to use the real-time, mobile and social capabilities provided by Salesforce apps and the Force.com platform”. He will report directly to the company’s founder, chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff.

Prior to joining BT, Rangaswami was global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, which he joined in 1997. An outspoken advocate of open source technologies, Rangaswami is chairman of School of Everything, an educational startup that teaches a range of socially focused topics via the Web. He is also a venture partner at Anthemis Group.

Rangaswami was born in Calcutta (as the name of his blog suggests) and moved to the UK in 1980. You can – and should – follow the man on Twitter.

(Image via Flickr / dsearls)

Earlier this month, we noted that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, together with Nick Nguyen (the former director of add-ons for Mozilla) and Paul Rademacher, the ex-Googler known for creating "the first true Web 2.0 application", was working on a new stealthy startup called Tasty Labs.

This morning, Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger revealed on his blog that the firm has invested in Tasty Labs together with Andreessen Horowitz and unnamed angel investors. It’s unclear how much Tasty Labs raised, but we’re trying to find out.

Oh, and according to this (new?) line on their intensely sparse website, they’re going to try and put “the useful back into social software” and looking for software engineers and UX designers in Silicon Valley to help them accomplish that goal.

Union Square Ventures of course knows Schachter well – they invested in Delicious back in 2005 (the company was acquired by Yahoo the same year). USV’s Wenger knows Schachter even better – he served as Delicious’ president prior to joining the venture capital firm.

Schachter left Yahoo in 2008 and joined Google in 2009, before leaving earlier this year.

Tasty Labs’ two other co-founders have built up quite some experience too. Rademacher just quit his engineering position at Google, and Nguyen (who has worked for Schachter at Delicious in the past, too) has just left his post at Mozilla.

It’ll be interesting to see what these guys come up with.

I had the privilege of joining the Monaco Media Forum in Monaco recently. It was a fairly star-studded event: opened and closed by Prince Albert, dinner at Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo, great hotel etc. But to be honest it was the debates in the conference room that were the best thing about the event, and I had a lot of fun on my closing panel of the week: “Silicon Envy: Will Europe ever build the next new media giant?”

Now, admittedly with such a subject we had to run through the usual arguments, which I hope are now well known. Silicon Valley is the product of over 50+ years of history, Europe is only just getting going, America has one big unified market, Europe is splintered into many etc etc etc.

Luckily, however, I think my fellow panelists and I moved the debate on to what I call “New Tech Europe”. Namely, people in their 20s now coming out with agressive startups which go international from the word go and where the founders are not afraid to get out of their home markets and scale globally. Ironically this takes far less money than it used to, hence why VCs are having to adjust their model and Angel investors are being asked to step up to the plate.

Angry Birds, the best-selling mobile game from Europe’s Rovio, is turning into quite a cultural phenomenon. No doubt, you’ve seen the viral video featuring the angry birds and pigs in peace treaty talks – I’ve embedded it below in case you’ve been living under a rock the past few days and haven’t seen that one yet.

Here’s another that’s bound to rack up a significant amount of views in the next few days: Queen Vs. Angry Birds Rock You – Noy Alooshe Remix

(Thanks @Orli)

RockYou founder and CEO Lance Tokuda is no longer leading the company, we’ve confirmed. Tokuda helped found RockYou back in 2005, and led it through several funding rounds totalling nearly $130 million. The change comes at a critical time in RockYou’s life, as the company attempts to reinvent itself and bounce back from substantial layoffs.

I spoke with RockYou COO Lisa Marino, who says that Tokuda told the company he would be stepping down last month, around the time that it pivoted to focus primarily on social gaming. A significant but undisclosed percentage of RockYou’s workforce was laid off as part of the transition, and the company hired former EA exec Jonathan Knight to serve as SVP of RockYou Games.

Marino says that Tokuda’s role is now being filled by an ‘Office of the CEO’ team that includes CFO Steve Van Horne, SVP President of Technology and Engineering Shamik Sharma, and herself, and that the company is currently in the midst of a search for a permanent replacement. Despite RockYou’s recent problems, Marino says that things have been “going really well” at the company since its pivot last month, and that it “is going to be very relevant in social games in around 70 days”.

However, Tokuda’s role change may not have been quite as smooth as RockYou is claiming. I called him to see if he had a comment of his own, and it sounded like the situation is still murky — he directed me to RockYou’s PR team, and said that he is very much still with the company (I’ve reached out to RockYou PR to firm up what his current position is). Granted, I did call him without warning so he may well have simply been caught off guard. But it does seem a little odd that he is still listed on RockYou’s management page as CEO, and that his role change was not announced as part of the press cycle around RockYou’s hiring of Knight.

Update: Marino had clarified that Tokuda is indeed still with RockYou, and that he is working on ‘innovation and strategic initiatives’, such as exploring new areas for RockYou to expand into. That might include platforms (for example, mobile) or game genres.

photo © 2009 Andrew Magill | more info (via: Wylio)After an 11 day trial whose highlights included the hilarious “Where In The World Is HP CEO Leo Apotheker?“ the Oracle vs. SAP intellectual property case has finally ended today in a whopping $1.3 billion dollar verdict, “The largest amount ever awarded for software piracy” according to Oracle co-president Safra Catz.

Before the trial, SAP admitted that its 2005 acquisition TomorrowNow pirated Oracle’s intellectual property and used it in order to pilfer customers from Oracle. Evidence presented during the trial showed that key SAP executives were aware of what was happening. “"For more than three years, SAP stole thousands of copies of Oracle software and then resold that software and related services to Oracle's own customers," said Catz.

The amount of the verdict was the biggest point of contention, as Oracle lawyers pushed for $1.7 billion in damages while SAP legal thought that the number was more in the $40 million range.

According to Bloomberg, the $1.3 billion award is the 23rd largest jury verdict of all time, and the largest amount for a verdict involving copyright, by far overtaking the previous $136 million settlement between the RIAA and Media Group Inc.

Whether the verdict will actually get paid out is a whole other ballgame. An SAP spokesman told Bloomberg that “We are, of course, disappointed by this verdict and will pursue all available options, including post-trial motions and appeal if necessary.”

I was just logging into me.com today to find that my password would not work. Strangely, we also received this tip that describes a security breach in Apple’s own accounts. I’m asking around at Apple right now but has anyone else noticed a password problem?

Apparently a hacker has a list of logins and passwords and they’re being systematically changed. Correlation is not causation and all that, but it’s awful fishy. At the very least pop over to your Me account to check it out.

Read more…

You remember RockMelt, right? After the social browser launched two weeks ago, talk about it exploded — then seemed to die down just as quickly. But today brings an update that may get people interested again.

The service has just rolled out their first big update to their browser. Version 0.8.36.74 (sexy name) contains a number of bug fixes and stability improvements. It also updates the underlying Chromium browser to version 7 finally (for those keeping score at home, the Chromium open source project is already well into version 9). But the real keys here are the functionality improvements. Namely, the new RockMelt makes it even easier to be social.

With the first version (there have been small updates since the launch), to tweet or leave a Facebook status update, you had to click on your icon in the main toolbar. Even though Twitter and Facebook were a part of the Edges, you could only view updates from there. Now you can actually tweet and update your status from Edge apps themselves. That’s a nice update that should have been there in the first place.

You can also now right-click on any of your Facebook friends in the Edge to message them, write on their wall, etc.

Perhaps even better is the new Gmail Notifier App that RockMelt has built. Previously, you could add Gmail to your right Edge, but it seemed to be using RSS to see when you had new messages. In other words, it was slow. Their new app seems to update in realtime, to let you know when you have new mail.

With the update to Chromium 7, RockMelt does feel a bit snappier now. And the Twitter and Facebook updates seem to be rolling in more reliably. Overall, it’s good to see RockMelt moving quickly to address issues people are having.

But there are still some underlying problems with the product itself. It’s the right idea, but the execution still seems a bit off. And don’t try using it if you have more than 3,000 friends on Facebook, there’s a bug there that hasn’t been fixed yet, but they’re working on it. Remember, it’s still in beta.

You should be alerted to this new update automatically if you’re using RockMelt, or you can get it manually be clicking on the “About RockMelt” are in the menu. The product remains in closed beta testing, but they’ve also updated the invite system, so perhaps you’ll be able to track one down.

Here’s the full list of the changes listed in the latest version:

• New Gmail Notifier App to let you know when you have new email. To install, just go to gmail.com, sign in, and click on the "Add Apps" button at the bottom of the App Edge
• Tweet directly from the Twitter App using the new "compose" button at the top
• Update your status directly from the Facebook App by clicking on the new "compose" button at the top
• Search within the Facebook, Twitter, and News Apps by typing in the new filter box (Windows users press CTRL+F to invoke)
• Compose messages, write on walls, or go straight to a website through richer context menus when you right-click on a Friend or App in the Edge
• Faster, more consistent Twitter and Facebook feed updates and notifications
• Look for more invites and improved notifications in the enhanced Invite App
• Hide or show edges while in full-screen mode, just like in the normal view
• Upgrade to Chromium 7 for improvements in speed and stability and better HTML 5 support

Aviary is very good at what they do. That is, offering relatively powerful tools for amateur artists to edit content online. But all of those tools are Flash-based. And some of Aviary’s partners didn’t like that too much, feeling they were too cumbersome. And some users were interested in the tools, but also wanted something more lightweight. So Aviary went to work, and came up with a new editor built entirely with HTML5.

The project, which they codenamed “Feather”, is an HTML5 photo editor that resides on both Aviary’s site, and can be easily integrated with any third party site. The tool, which appears as a small square widget overlay, allows people to quickly edit photos without Flash. And it gives third-party sites an option for a light tool that their users can use right on the site.

The tool has the core functionality that Aviary felt users and partners would want. These include the standard: Rotate, Flip, Resize, Crop, Redeye, Blemish, Colors, and Saturation. And Aviary threw in a couple of fun ones as well: Instant, Toy Camera, Old Photo, and Retro. These effects give photos looks similar to those found on some of the currently popular mobile photo apps.

But this is just step one for the editor. Aviary plans to add the ability to customize the editor’s theme, add more editing tools, and they’re even going to open source all the code for the tool. Plus they plan to give partners usage statistics.

And the plan is to get the tool working well on mobile devices too. Currently, it works on some but they’re working on making the experience better, Aviary co-founder Michael Galpert tells us. This tool will allow Aviary to build for every platform, he says.

Aviary has lined up some launch partners for the new tool. They include: Digital Youth Network, Everloop, Fashism, HowMutch, Market Publique, Rrripple, Saw You At Sinai, and Shopify.

Aviary is offering the tool for free for anyone to use and/or embed on their site. You can create and customize your own widget here. They will also have some premium features (new effects and functionality) down the road, Galpert says.

Good news for online retailers this holiday shopping season. According to data collected by comScore, e-commerce spending should increase by 11 percent this holiday shopping season. Already, consumers have spent $9 billion online in the first 21 days of November, which is an 13 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

comScore is forecasting that online spending from the November to December period will reach $32.4 billion, representing an 11 percent gain versus year ago. In 2009, consumers spent $29 billion on holiday e-commerce purchases. Last year’s e-commerce holiday spending rose by 4 percent from 2008.

Of course, we haven’t even hit Black Friday or Cyber Monday, which are expected to bring in big sales for online retailers.

The company also surveyed a small group of respondents (500) to measure sentiment around the holiday shopping season. According to the survey, 36 percent of respondents said they are seeing more discounts, sales and promotions. When asked how important free shipping is for making an online holiday purchases, 77 percent of consumers said that this was an important factor.

It’s no surprise that free shipping is popular this holiday season; 41 percent of online retail transactions for the third quarter of 2010 included free shipping. Consumers are increasingly looking to save on free shipping and retailers are responding with promotional offers.

This font doesn’t have an apostrophe, so don’t freak out

It's high time to recommend y'all some video games for your holiday perusal. Oh, I know my opinions aren't always appreciated by some of you, but therein lies the beauty: if you wanted "safe" and/or "popular" you could always watch Good Morning America. You know, "Golly gee, this is so much fun!" Balderdash, I say. Balderdash. So let's get on with this.

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photo © 2009 Kyla Buckingham | more info (via: Wylio)Facebook is just a payment away from trademarking the word “Face.” As of today the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office has sent the social networking site a Notice of Allowance, which means they have agreed to grant the “Face” trademark to Facebook.

All Facebook needs to do is pay the issue fee within three months of today and the “Face” trademark will be issued and be published in the official USPTO gazette and everything.

For all intents and purposes today’s status update bodes well for Facebook’s hold over “Face” usages in “Telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”

While it seems so bizarre that a company should have the right to trademark a word as common as “Face” apparently the USPTO isn’t at all disturbed (what’s with the “related to motoring or cars” restrictions?). Something tells me Facebook won’t have any problem forking over the cash.

Update: A commenter points out that aside from the issue fee, Facebook will have file a Statement of Use and use the trademark on its own in commerce before it has actual legal claim over the word “Face.” Right now it only uses the word “Face” in conjunction with “book,” but that will have to change if it wants to have any right to the trademark.

Yes, as Steve Jobs likes to point out, Android has at least one third-party App Store that is dedicated to pornography and other ‘adult’ content. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Google — it’s made by a company called MiKandi (NSFW). And while it draws plenty of snickering and sneers from the Apple faithful, it capitalizes on a fact of life: a lot of people watch porn. And some of them are willing to pay for it.

Today, MiKandi has released a new version of its adult app store. The company says that it’s been rebuilt from the ground up, and it also includes one major new feature: support for paid applications. Previously MiKandi apps have been free; now developers will be able to generate revenue through a channel other than advertising.

Instead of selling applications individually (and conducting a different transaction for each app) MiKandi is selling a virtual currency that can be used to purchase premium apps. This means that charges can be consolidated under one innocuous-sounding item on a credit card statement, and it also lets MiKandi take advantage of an ‘Offers’ system similar to the ones have been so successful on Facebook. At this point there are no Offers available, but MiKandi says they are coming soon.

Yes, I’m sure some of you are shaking your heads, but remember that there are plenty of premium porn sites on the web, and their ubiquity seems to indicate that they’re making money. Combine that with the impulsive buying mentality driven by the iPhone’s App Store and Android Market, and it’s not hard to imagine that some of these apps could do pretty well for themselves. And MiKandi has 300,000 installs so far, which isn’t anything to scoff at.

If you are eager to give the new MiKandi for a spin, you’ll need to install it from their website (it isn’t in Android Market for obvious reasons). You can get an idea of what the store looks like in the video below, which does not contain nudity but may still be considered NSFW.

In the venture business being ahead of your time can be almost as bad as being late to a market. But the other great thing about the venture business is there are exceptions to every rule. Craig Donato is hoping that Oodle is the exception to that one. He’s spent more than ten years building a social classified company, powering the marketplaces for Oodle.com, MySpace and Facebook and growing to more than 14 million unique users. It’s backed by some of the smartest investors on the Web like Reid Hoffman and David Sze from Greylock, who both invested in Facebook and LinkedIn so they know a thing or two about the social graph.

Now one of Facebook’s other hot venture capital investors, Accel Partners, has funded Yardsellr which claims it’ll be the “eBay of Facebook;” meanwhile Groupon’s runaway success has made everyone reevaluate social shopping. So what does all that mean for Oodle?

For one thing, the company isn’t slowing down. Last week, Oodle acquired Grouply.com to help people sell things beyond just their friend circles to the friend-of-friend circles. The deal underscores a core tension that has held online classifieds from becoming bigger faster: Do sellers and buyers want trust and relationship or do they want huge marketplaces of buyers and sellers? Because by definition, only buying and selling from people you know limits the market.

Donato joined us to talk about the market, the Grouply deal, why he says classifieds are “social but not viral,” and why he has stuck with building out a market this hard for this long.

Duke Energy and ITOCHU Corp. announced a partnership today through which they will evaluate and test new uses for old electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Once they are too spent for life on-the-road, EV batteries could store power and deliver a charge elsewhere, the companies reason.

EV batteries falling below 80 percent of their original capacity when fully charged will be candidates for replacement and reuse. Duke and Itochu promised to begin their project by testing Ener1 lithium-ion batteries extracted from a fleet of 80 EVs in a Duke Energy facility in Indianapolis.

The automaker GM embarked on a similar initiative with The ABB Group in September, specifically looking for ways to use spent Chevy Volt batteries in the smart grid. One vision of reuse for EV batteries proposed by GM would see them storing power from renewable sources in EV charging stations, which are used to charge plug-in vehicles.

Other ideas (as reported by MSNBC.com and Gas2.org) include using the weakened EV batteries to keep cell phone towers up and running during blackouts, or to stabilize the grid by storing power generated either during off-peak hours or from intermittently available renewable sources, like wind or solar, finally dispensing it during peak demand hours.

EV skeptics believe that production and recycling of EV batteries— at least until battery design and reycling related technology improves— might make electric vehicles more harmful to the environment than the highest-efficiency diesel models. That’s especially if a majority of electricity used to charge EVs comes from non-renewable sources, like coal.

Giving batteries a new life beyond the vehicle, and using them to shift electricity production to renewables as much as possible would quiet many of these worries. At the same time, companies like GM, Duke, ABB Group and Itochu hope that increasing the total lifetime value of EV batteries would ultimately reduce the cost of producing them as well.