Bizness Apps CEO Andrew Gazdecki checked in to tell us that they’ve joined the admittedly very crowded market of DIY iPhone app development platforms, but says they can do it from start to finish for just $39 a month, obviously a highly competitive price.

The fledgling company has just scored an undisclosed round of seed funding from two angel investors, namely Build.com CEO Chris Friedland (see his reasons for investing here) and founder and CEO of Collegescheduler.com Robert Strazzarino.

I’m not entirely convinced every small or medium-sized business should have its own iPhone application, but hey, your mileage may vary. At a rate of $39 a month, it sure becomes affordable for a lot of companies that wouldn’t otherwise spend money on native iOS applications.

Obviously, the applications that one can build with Bizness Apps won’t exactly become the most sophisticated ones available, but it’s not that they come completely void of useful features, either. The company doesn’t charge a setup fee, and gives business owners control over the creation, editing and management of their very own iPhone app.

Every iPhone app is custom-made for businesses, submitted to the App Store and regularly updated with new features and improvements by the Bizness Apps team.

Available features include turn-by-turn GPS directions, sharing capabilities that play nice with Facebook, Twitter and email clients, in-app messaging and push notifications, check-in and couponing capabilities, calendering options and more.

The company makes money from monthly support and maintenance fees, but also offer custom iPhone app development and design services.

As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, Google has released a study examining how consumers shop for laptops, netbooks, e-readers and tablets. The search giant interviewed around 4,000 respondents and used analysis of clickstream data from Compete’s 2 million US internet users. We’ve embedded the study below but here are some of the findings that we found most interesting from the report.

In terms of interest, new devices like tablets and e-readers are getting attention in terms of searches on the web. In terms of unique visitors to each category, tablets saw 1328% growth and eReaders saw 114 percent growth. Netbook’s visitors dropped by 50 percent and laptops dropped by 9 percent.

According to the survey, 49% of consumers did not know exactly which type of device they would purchase when the started the shopping process for a new device. Google also examined the behavior of those consumers who do know that they want a particular type of device. For example, 66% of netbook shoppers consider another device; 29% of tablet shoppers consider another device; 20% of laptop shoppers consider another device and 12% of eReader shoppers consider another device.

Of course, unsurprisingly the iPad has dominated the tablet category, caused a decline in tablet shoppers considering other devices, according to the survey. And while netbook shoppers consider other devices in the shopping process, these consumers are five times more likely to consider a laptop than a tablet.

In terms of research, consumers on average spend one month researching the type of device they should buy. And 85 percent use the internet to research their purchase. Google reports that 64% of e-reader shoppers both bought and researched online. And 37 percent of consumers interested in tablets searched online and bought in-store.

Google also reports that store or retailer sites are the most frequented among online sources (65%), followed by search engine sites (61%), brand or manufacturer sites (53%), price comparison sites (44%), review sites (29%), and social networking sites (18%). Search drove most number of visits to product detail pages across all product categories and the most qualified leads. And 58% of shoppers perform more than 5 searches on the web for a device. Shoppers who conducted 10+ search queries converted at a rate of 22%.

Google also released interesting data on demographics of users searching for particular type of device. For example, tablet shoppers skew slightly female (53%), primarily fall into the 25-34 age group; 56% consider more than one brand and the group is most concerned with appearance/style. e-Reader shoppers skew male (64%), fall into the 45-54 age group, 70% consider more than one brand, and the group are more concerned about reviews more than any other portable PC shopper.

The laptop shopper skews female (58%), with 50% of shoppers falling into the 18-34 age group, 65% of the group considers 3 brands or more, and 43% want to upgrade from their existing device. The netbook shopper skews male (46%), primarily falls within the 35-44 age group, and most shoppers are undecided on brand with 80% considering more than one device. Of consumers considering both netbooks and tablets, consumers are leaning towards tablets (37% vs. 25%).

While some of these stats aren’t groundbreaking, it is interesting to see the online habits of electronics shoppers based on device.

App store analytics provider Distimo took its monthly look at the world of mobile application stores, and this time zoomed in on the differences between Microsoft‘s Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x).

For you information, Distimo gathered data on all major app stores, but the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace data specifically was collected from 1 November until 22 November 2010, in the United States only (the store launched at the end of October 2010).

Sidenote: make sure you check out CrunchGear’s take on Windows Phone 7.

Distimo found that games are far more popular in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace than they are on Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x), mirroring the way Microsoft positions Windows Phone 7 as a more consumer-oriented platform.

In fact, all ten of the most popular paid applications in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace are games, with prices ranging from $2.99 – $6.99. There are only two games among the ten most popular free applications in the store.

Prices for applications in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace are largely the same as those in other major app stores, including the App Store for iOS devices and Android Market, but significantly lower than apps in Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x).

Note that this contradicts earlier, widely cited reports.

The price of applications in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace closely mirrors the prices in other application stores, with 57% of the 100 most popular apps priced below $2.

One difference: apps in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x) are significantly higher than those in its succesor: only 37% of the 100 most popular applications is priced below $2.

As of November 22, there are 2,674 applications in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace (Microsoft says there are roughly 3,000 apps in the store today). That’s not too shabby when you consider Windows Marketplace for Mobile had garnered only 1,350 applications since its debut, over a year ago.

Mirroring the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a large portion of the ten most popular apps in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is published by Microsoft (six, to be precise).

It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

Web designers have to deploy their finished work in a web browser so perhaps it makes sense to move the design tools themselves to the browser too. That's the thinking behind BuildorPro, which claims to be the first browser-based, web design and development environment with built in HTML/CSS tools. Or, for seasoned web designers out there, think Coda or Espresso but in the cloud. The app, from the London-based startup Buildor, is currently in closed invite-only Beta but we have 300 invites to give away.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better than the Jimmy Wales Chrome extension, 4Chan founder Christopher Poole has taken the whole unintentionally hilarious Wikipedia donation thing one step further and done us a solid by posting a Wales-esque “Personal Appeal” banner at the top of his own infamous imageboard site.

Just go ahead and click on “Read Now.” I. dare. you.

By now you will have heard about the first official Angry Birds Day when lovers of that crazy iPhone/Android game come together to celebrate the ongoing war between the birds and the pigs. However, well placed sources told us yesterday that something big was going down on that day, specifically in London’s Trafalgar Square. Now, this is becoming a big venue to launch big games, especialy console games. Here’s the spectacular Halo Reach launch with guys in JetPacks earlier this year.

There is speculation that Angry Birds for Windows Phone 7 will be anounced on the day. There is also speculation that the game’s developer, Rovio Mobile, will launch a games console version or that it will spin out a movie. Actually personally I think that maybe, just maybe, something different is going on. Here’s why.

Now that Diaspora, which is building an open-source distributed social network, has launched in private alpha, I figured it’d be a good idea to remind you that there are several alternatives to that particular Facebook alternative, some of which have been around longer and in more advanced stages of development.

Note that there may be more initiatives that I haven’t heard of or simply didn’t or forgot to mention, so this is by no means an exhaustive list. Also, all of these deserve a full review, so I refrained from making quick-and-dirty comparisons between all of them.

OneSocialWeb

(previous coverage, CrunchBase profile)

An initiative of Vodafone Group Research and Development, OneSocialWeb is being built on a foundation and uses a host of open source technologies – it’s primarily based on XMPP.

The initiators of OneSocialWeb say they were inspired by the visionaries behind other open Web standardization initiatives such as activitystrea.ms, portablecontacts, OAuth, OpenSocial, FOAF, XRDS, OpenID and others.

Tagline: free open decentralized social networking platform

Useful links: OSW roadmap, developer downloads and the code.

Video:

The Appleseed Project

Still in active development, Appleseed aims to create an open source, fully distributed and decentralized social networking software suite.

When it’s done, its website reads, users will be able to “pick an Appleseed compatible site, sign up, connect with friends, send messages, share photos and videos and join discussions. And if you decide you don’t like the site you’re on, you’ll be able sign up for another Appleseed compatible site and immediately reconnect with everyone in your network.

Tagline: The First Open Source + Distributed Social Networking Platform

Useful links: discussion forum, beta test site, source code and – haha – Facebook group.

Video:

Elgg

(CrunchBase profile)

Elgg provides a free to download and use open-source social networking engine that provides a framework on which to build all kinds of social environments, from social networks to an enterprise-ready internal collaborative or communication platform. Elgg runs on a combination of the Apache web server, MySQL database system and PHP.

Tagline: a powerful open source social networking engine

Useful links: download, plugin directory, community.

Insoshi

(previous coverage, CrunchBase profile)

An open-source social networking platform written in Ruby on Rails.

Useful links: source code (freely available under the MIT license), example site, wiki.

Also check out our ancient post: 34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network.

(Image via Flickr / opensourceway)

It seems as though Q&A network Stack Overflow has put the $6 million in funding it received back in May to good use, crossing the 10 million unique monthly visit mark as of yesterday. While Q&A sites like Quora bank on the winning model being one big monolithic site, Stack Overflow is showing success by carefully separating the Q&A game into different communities, launching 34 different sites on topics as diverse as Bicycling, Cooking and IT Security.

The company had only three fulltime developers before its first round of funding, which included rockstar angel investors like Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Naval Ravikant and Caterina Fake. Since then founder Joel Spolsky has hired 24 new employees including Stack Overflow power user Marc Gravell.

Despite (or because of) its programming roots, Spolsky tells TechCrunch that the company’s biggest accomplishment in the past six months has been building Stack Exchange, which allows users to suggest new verticals for Stack Overflow-style Q&A sites like Chess, Aviation and Cryptography. This is a savvy move, as using a consensus model to decide which sites get built ensures critical mass upon arrival and high quality answers like this one.

Stack Overflow traffic has soared, going from 6 million to ten million uniques in six months (it took two years to get to the first 6 million). Says Spolsky, “Almost every programmer in the world knows Stack Overflow and visits regularly, usually because we have the answer to a problem they’ve typed into Google–and the new Stack Exchange sites are starting to spread rapidly beyond the initial audience of programmers.” In my experience, things that have massive traction with coders often pick up mainstream and viral tread, as programmers spend the most time online.

Case in point: The new Stack Overflow vertical sites have only been up for a couple months but are already showing 33% monthly growth according to internal metrics. Aside from traffic, success is based on a variety of criteria, the most important of which is the percentage of site questions that have at least one up-voted answer. Spolsky says that all of the new sites have 90-100% answer up-vote rates.

In terms of future plans, Spolsky is focusing on Stack Exchange and encouraging the growth of even more new verticals where experts can come together, “Ultimately we think there will be hundreds or thousands of these sites providing extremely high quality answers to detailed questions, so the most important thing we’re working on is really cultivating niche communities.”

The network also recently received a small and mostly symbolic $50K spike of funding from Jason Cohen and Dharmesh Shah and just released a bunch of new features including a Campire-like interactive chat.

May the best Q&A site (or sites) win.

New startup Zediva attempts to circumvent all the licensing hassles experienced by streaming video services like Netflix, iTunes and Hulu through operating more like a traditional movie rental store, except online.

The catch? “We don’t rent digital copies of a movie,” founder Venky Srinivasan told Rotten Tomatoes, “Our users rent a physical DVD, along with a DVD player from us for a fixed amount of time. They then control that DVD player remotely over the internet — and stream the movie privately to themselves. Think of it as a really long cable and a really long remote control.”

The “really long cable” that is the Internet means not having to negotiate with content companies over streaming rights. This loophole means that Zediva can feature more recent releases at a lower price than companies who stream digital files, charging $1.99 for a movie versus $3.99 on iTunes and Blockbuster. Ten movies on Zediva are $10 versus a $7.99 monthly membership to Netflix. Users can freely re-rent a Zediva movie for up to 14 days.

It seems like Srinivasan is serious about the physical DVD legal hack. When I visited the site the movie I wanted to rent, Eat Pray Love, was all rented out, just like in a real brick and mortar store. You can even request to have your physical DVD mailed to you Netflix style, even though “additional charges may apply.”

With around 40 movies in the library at the moment, Zediva is starting small and focusing on offering “the top two or three movies of the week.” Srinivasan doesn’t think the startup is breaking digital copyright law, and in fact believes that movie studios will embrace the model. Well, here’s to being hopeful, and disruptive.

We’ve talked a lot about Diaspora, the open-source Facebook-alternative, in recent months. One of the reasons for that is the massive success they had raising money on the crowdsourced fund-raising site, Kickstarter. The project raised over $200,000 from nearly 6,500 backers in just 39 days. Now a new project has already blown that tally out of the water: an iPod nano-based multi-touch wristwatch.

Scott Wilson, the founder of Chicago-based product and design studio, MINIMAL, set out with an idea: to create two watch enclosures for Apple’s latest iPod nano. He wanted the TikTok to be a low-end model ($35) and the LunaTik to be high-end ($70). So he put his project on Kickstarter with a goal of raising $15,000. So how is he doing?

Well, he’s raised $341,895. And he still has 22 days to go.

Wow.

Wilson’s project has not only blown past the high-profile Diaspora one, it’s poised to demolish the all-time funding leader, the Save Blue Like Jazz movie. That project raised $345,992 when it closed on October 25. Wilson’s project should pass it tomorrow, if not tonight after I publish this post.

And with good reason. While the idea is a simple one (Apple CEO Steve Jobs even joked about such an idea on stage to highlight how small the nano is), but it’s something a lot of people clearly want. The project has 4,636 backers so far. And the video Wilson made to accompany the project (below) looks quite a bit like an Apple-produced video.

Wilson had a goal of shipping the TikTok by late December and the LunaTik by mid January. At first, money was the issue. Now it seems as if demand may be the bigger problem. (To be clear, given the prices he’s selling these for, the iPod nano is not included.)

Again, the project still has 22 days to go on its funding run. I have to imagine it’s going to shoot well past $500,000, putting it far atop the Kickstarter Hall of Fame.

[thanks David]

With iOS 4.2 finally out in the wild, the iPad has effectively been rejuvenated. And there’s no question that Apple is going to sell a massive amount of them during the Holiday shopping season. But what comes next? Well, the iPad 2, of course.

You don’t need to be an analyst looking for inside information to know that Apple has a pretty standard policy of refreshing their product lines about once a year. And with iOS devices, it’s more or less clockwork. Since the iPad was released in early April last year, that’s the most obvious target for when the iPad 2 will hit. But there’s a side question that will go along with that launch: what will happen to the iPad 1? Will it go cheap? Or will it go extinct?

Essentially, the question is whether Apple will follow the iPhone model, or whether they’ll follow the iPod touch model. The iPhone is updated each year, and since the launch of the iPhone 3GS 18 months ago, Apple has been deeply discounting the previous generation model while keeping it available for sale. With the iPod touch, they don’t do that. Once it’s updated, the old inventory runs dry and isn’t replenished; the new one takes its place.

Now, there’s a good reason for Apple to do that for the iPhone. The idea of a sub-$100 smartphone is very sexy to a lot of consumers — especially if it’s an iPhone, which carries the allure of an Apple product. All indications are that the newer models (which sell for $199 and $299) easily outsell the $99 version, but it helps Apple to more fully cover the market. And given Apple’s huge margins, they still likely make a pretty penny on the $99 iPhone.

Of course, a huge reason for that is the subsidy paid to them by AT&T (in the U.S., anyway) on the device. The iPad is different. There is a 3G version, but it’s not subsidized by any carrier. In fact, it’s more expensive to the consumer — both in initial price, and the need to pay a monthly cellular fee. In other words, any cost eaten on selling a cheaper iPad, would be Apple’s alone.

And the iPad is already an interesting product for Apple in the sense that it has a lower margin than they’re typically used to. Apple very aggressively priced the iPad out of the gate with prices starting at $499, which was much less than many people had been anticipating. Of course, most accounts still have Apple making close to a 50 percent margin on the device. And with costs presumably coming down over time, they probably have some room to sell a cheaper version if they wanted to.

But how cheap?

$100 off is the obvious choice. But would a $399 iPad really be all that more enticing than a $499 iPad? It might not seem so, but those type of price cuts have long worked in the video game console business. And, if looked at a certain way, the iPad is already one hell of a video game console. One that can do about 100 other things too.

But initial video game console cuts usually come before the follow-up product is on the market. A $199 Xbox looks awesome compared to a $299 Xbox. But if it were a $199 Xbox versus a $299 Xbox 360, it might not look so hot. That’s what Apple would have to contend with. A $399 iPad versus a $499 iPad 2.

What if they shaved $200 off the price? Given what the margins are currently thought to be, that would seem to be impossible for Apple. But remember that 2011 is likely to see an onslaught of competition in the tablet space. Rivals RIM and Microsoft are both slated to make major pushes into the tablet space. And, of course, Android will be coming full charge.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is quick to point out now that no one can match their tablet prices. But next year, some of these competitors likely will — and some will even go below them. Apple could blow them out of the water with a $299 iPad 1. While at the same time, keeping the watermark very high with the $499 iPad 2.

As we all know, Apple is a company that has always favored profits over marketshare. So maybe the $299 iPad is completely out of the question. But again, with the iPad, they’ve taken a little bit different approach, and shaved margins down. It’s something which has caused a few jitters amongst Wall Street analysts. Even with component prices coming way down, a $299 iPad would probably have razor-thin margins. And that just doesn’t sound like Apple.

And, of course, there’s the other scenario. What if Apple decides simply to kill off the iPad 1 when the iPad 2 comes along? That may not be nearly as fun for my juicy speculation game, but it’s at least just as likely of a scenario. Perhaps even more likely given the margin picture and the lack of carrier subsidy.

It just seems as if Apple is so far ahead in the tablet space right now with the iPad 1, that it would be a shame to kill it off without opening it up to even more users at a lower price point. But Apple makes moves like that all the time. Along those lines, here’s a favorite Jobs quote of mine from a Wired article looking back at 25 years of the Mac:

When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, 'Get it away!' and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you'll be crushed. You have to look forward.

It’s not about nostalgia, it’s about the future. And the future is the iPad 2.

[photos: flickr/bfishadow and flickr/mapgoblin]

Social news site Gather has raised another $2.4 million in funding this week, in order to pivot its core business and focus on being a content on demand platform for other publishers, like Demand Media. Gather currently allows to writers to submit content and generate ad revenue share based on pageviews and site engagement.

Gather CEO Tom Gerace tells TechCrunch that while Gather.com reached 7 million monthly unique vistors in the past 12 months (a 700% increase) the funding will actually be used to form an entirely new parent company which will include Gather. Gerace plans on taking the platform built by Gather for automating writer workflow and determining author success and offering it out to other web properties and companies like Pampers.

Despite our and others criticism of Gather for its poor design and specious business model back in 2006, the company seems to be holding strong. Gerace tells us that they’ve got four potential white-label clients in the pipeline but won’t reveal which ones or what the new umbrella company will be called. Gerace will also be using the latest financing to expand the company from 26 employees to “about 60 or 70 folks.”

Investors in the Series E round included Lotus founder Jim Manzi, VC group Allen & Co and new entrants Progress Ventures and Nick McShane.

As any scientist can tell you, there are thousands of scholarly journals out there. Some, like Science and Nature, are broad in scope, covering everything from human genetics to space. Others, like the Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, are a bit more specific. Unfortunately, the huge volume of research that gets published can made it tedious to keep track of the articles that are relevant to you. Academia.edu, a social network for researchers and other academics, thinks it has a fix.

Now, journal articles aren’t exactly hard to come by on the web. You can always search Google Scholar for whatever you’re looking for, some universities offer their own search tools, and there are plenty of topic-specific sites that can help you find relevant material. The problem, according to Academia.edu founder Richard Price, is that this content and the communities around them are very fragmented. So Academia.edu built a directory of as many journals as it could find.

The feature is pretty straightforward: head to Academia.edu, and you can browse through over 12,500 journals sorted by topic (here’s a listing of publications related to biology). You can opt to ‘follow’ your favorite publications, and relevant stories will start popping up in your Academia.edu news feed, so you don’t have to worry about looking them up yourself every month. Price also says that this feature ranks journals by how many followers it has, which could be used to gauge how influential (or at least, how popular) a given journal is.

It’s worth noting that many of these journal articles are not free; you’ll either have to pay for them (fees are often around $20-40), or you’ll have to be accessing them from a university campus that pays for a subscription to the periodical in question. This shouldn’t be a major problem for many of academia.edu’s users though, as they tend to be professors or dedicated researchers who have access to campus logins.   It’s also worth noting that a UK site called Tictocs has built a database of journals, though Price says that the site doesn’t have a social graph component.

In other Academia news, Price says traffic has picked up significantly since last summer, and that the service is now up to 830,000 monthly uniques.

Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures thinks that 2011 will be the year of the cleantech IPO…finally. So does that mean that America hasn’t totally lost the cleantech race after all?

The most optimistic case is that we’re in a clump of countries leading the pack. The glass-half-empty version: Politics, boneheaded legislation and our lousy capital markets will saddle America’s culture of innovation, giving other surging hot spots a leg up. In the second part of our interview with Goldhaber, we talk about America’s cleantech mojo.

Snaptu, a Sequoia-backed company that offers a suite of smartphone-like applications that can be installed on more basic handsets, has hit another major milestone: it’s now up to 20 million registered accounts, 5.5 million of which are active. And it’s adding users very quickly — it was only last June that the company announced that it had 10 million registered users, 2.5 million of which were active. In other words, the company has doubled its user base in only five months.

The company isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, either. Snaptu reports that it’s now adding 2.5 million new users a month — more than one a second — and that it’s drawing 3.3 billion monthly page views. Snaptu says that 43% of its users are in Asia (including India), with 26% in North America and the rest split between Europe and South and Central America.

Smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices may be all we hear about these days, but the vast majority of mobile phones are still running operating systems that are much less sophisticated (and data intensive). That’s where Snaptu comes into play: users download the company’s Java application, which they can then use to install ‘sub-applications’. Snaptu’s library of apps includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, some news sites (including TechCrunch), and a more generic RSS reader. Snaptu offers these apps for free; it generates revenue through advertising.

Many of these services, like Facebook and Twitter, offer their own mobile-friendly web apps, but Snaptu offers a more consistent interface (you can jump between apps using an iPhone-like UI) and says that it’s been highly optimized for better performance. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working.

It was inevitable, developer Jesse Stay has built a way “Like” tweets on the Twitter homepage. The winner of Kynetx’s Facebook App contest, Stay’s browser plugin uses Facebook’s iframe code to give you the option to “Like” in addition to “Retweet,”"Favorite,” and “Reply to” Tweets on Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox. Just install the extension and the buttons show up when you hover over the tweet in your stream. Well if Twitter wasn’t going to do it …

“Liked” tweets will also get posted to your Facebook profile and are a defacto way to share your favorite posts on Twitter with your social graph. Stay plans on further customizing Twitter to integrate with Facebook through plugins and is working on a “post to Facebook” checkbox below Twitter status update box as well as Twitter and Facebook profile pic synchronization.

Around 65 million people currently “Like” stuff online daily. As the universal Internet “Like” button evolved out of the Facebook status update, it’s inevitable that the “Like” disease would somehow spread to Twitter status updates as well, especially since the end result is more traffic for everyone involved.

You can download the plugins here.

Well, this is interesting. Google’s Advertising Assistance Program extends to video ads. Earlier today I published an investigative post about Google’s relationship with Publicis and other large ad agencies and incentive programs whereby Google pays the ad agencies to use its advertising platform. That post focussed on the demand-side platforms (DSPs) and trading desks inside the ad agencies which sometimes are powered by Google technology under the covers. Well, it turns out that Google also offers ad agencies incentives to adopt its video and display ads.

A reader who used to work at Google sent us a tip with some text from a PDF marked “confidential and proprietary” that was circulated to Google sales people back in 2009 detailing the “North America Display & Video Incentive Program.” The handout basically lists some sales talking points, including some stats on the disparity between consumer online video viewing and the amount of advertising dollars going to video.

Google never pays rebates, commissions, or kickbacks directly. Rather it clothes the payments in the guise of technical assistance, on-site consultations, industry research, training, and other assistance to help advertising agencies adopt new kinds of advertising formats such as video. Apparently, coming up with their own pre-roll video ads for their clients is too taxing for the ad agencies and they need some help. Google can call these payments whatever it wants, but it has no way of knowing what the ad agencies actually do with the money. Does it really all go towards “research” and “technical support” or does it find its way to help pad their bottom line. If it is the latter, then these payments effectively amount to a kickback.

Before I keep beating up on Google, I should note that Google is not alone here. Such commissions and kickbacks are standard practice in the advertising industry. And in fact, when Google tried to stop paying commissions a few years ago, there was an uproar from the agencies (who control the advertising purse strings of most of all the large companies). That obviously didn’t go so well, since Google is once again playing ball.

Here is the part of the PDF about the financial incentives:

Financial Incentive
The plan includes graduated spend incentives, as well as adoption bonuses to encourage more agencies to try out new media. Participating agencies will receive quarterly reports detailing spend and associated incentives. Incentives will be automatically calculated by Google's Finance team, and paid to qualifying agencies on a quarterly basis.
Video Research
Google will invest in research initiatives that address both large questions and client specific needs:
• Industry-wide research will cover ideal formats and mixes for consumer engagement
• Partnership with specific clients and campaigns will focus on ad effectiveness relationship between various media
Rich Media & Onsite Campaign Support
Since support for constantly evolving rich media formats is both critical and taxing, Google will provide resources to the agency. The program includes, as needed:
• Technical support to assist in transitioning video and other assets to rich media, easing the execution of these new formats
• On-site operational support to assist creative teams in the implementation of large campaigns

Min US Spend Payout %
$30M+ 10%
$20M – <$30M 8%
$10M – <$20M 6%
$5M – <$10M 4%
$3M – <$5M 2%

Min US Clients Payout %
60+ 4%
45 – 59 3%
30 – 44 2%
15 – 29 1%

• Annual plan with quarterly cash payment
• Based on billed spend during that quarter
• Agencies may aggregate to a single entity if contracted under that single entity

Payouts matched to quarterly investment Client adoption increases incentives

• Annual plan with quarterly cash payment
• Client list pre-determined (at the brand level) -exceptions/additions to be approved by Google's Finance team

I asked Google if this program is still in place and spokesperson responded that “we work with many advertising agencies and marketers to help them develop and invest in new advertising technologies and formats, including technological assistance, measurement, creative development, research funding and co-marketing.” He also pointed me to the FAQ on this Adwords Help page, which states:

From time to time Google offers participating advertisers certain incentives to accelerate the adoption and investment in Google’s advertising programs. Advertisers may receive financial incentives, including but not limited to credits, to help fund their campaigns (e.g., in the Google Display and Video Incentive Program, participating agencies receive financial incentives each calendar quarter based upon the amount of their display and video advertising spend for the previous quarter). In addition, advertisers may receive campaign assistance such as industry research and on-site consultation to support the growth of Google’s advertising programs. If you are eligible for an incentive program, you will be contacted with appropriate opportunities for participation.

But just take a look at those incentives. If an ad agency spends $30 million of its clients’ money on video or display advertising on Google, it would get $3 million back in financial incentives. On the lower end, $5 million in ad spending, would generate a $100,000 payment. I’m sure all that would go to “research.”

Photo credit: flickr/ Nathan Gibbs

Ok TRON fans, have I got a treat for you!

I just returned from a two day TRON press event with some awesome interviews from the creators, cast and crew of TRON: Legacy and the original TRON. I asked many of the questions I solicited from TechCrunch commenters  and everyone seemed to love them — especially Jeff Bridges. I mean, maybe they say this to everyone, but his handlers said they had not seen him that animated until our question came along.

Bridges was also pretty excited to talk about the tech involved in the making of TRON: Legacy. He took on the project of making the movie with enthusiasm when he realized he could do much of the acting without cameras by using motion capture.  Keep a look out for his interview in part 3&4 along with the super sexy and awesome Olivia Wilde!

Part one (video below) includes interviews with Steven Lisberger, the original writer and director of TRON and co-producer of TRON: Legacy. I asked Steven this question from TechCrunch reader “hmbguy”:

“[I] watched the original while in high school. It was a BIG reason I went into computing, the other being Tracy Kidder’s “Soul of a new machine”. I’m curious to know if the original cast thought their movie would have such a huge impact. From what I’ve heard that’s where we get cron on Unix as well.”

The second half of part one includes interviews with Bruce Boxleitner, who is well known for his roles as Alan Bradley and title role Tron in the original TRON movie as well as Bruce Sheridan in Babylon 5; and James Frain who plays Thomas Cromwell in Showtime’s The Tudors as well as Clu’s evil sidekick in TRON: Legacy. I loved all of my interviews, but I would have to honestly say that I loved theirs the most. They were super animated and Bruce even got into character for a moment, which was really cool. Boxleitner was genuinely stoked that TRON has inspired a lot of people to get into technology.

The first half of part 2 features Beau Garrett (House, former Guess model, Fantastic Four), Michael Sheen (Underworld, Frost/Nixon) and costume designer Christine Bieselin Clark who also designed costumes for Watchmen (she is an avid TechCrunch reader — go Christine!!)

My focus on the 2nd half is around the glamor of the TRON fashion world. Beau Garrett plays a role as one of the sirens (I’ll explain what these beautiful women do later..) in TRON and Michael Sheen is in charge of the End Of Line club. Christine led the team that put together the amazing outfits featured in the movie and she’s a true geek and was excited that we were actually interested in how everyone fit into those suits and still looked amazing; let’s put it this way — there’s a LOT of compression. She doesn’t advise that any of us try this at home and suggests that we become familiar with Home Depot and some reflective tape for our own suits. If you decide to take her advice, just be careful that you don’t end up looking like TRON Guy….

A new federal investigation is focusing on the legality of supply line leaks and their consequences on Wall Street. The poster boy for this would have to be Apple, around which an entire manufacturing and distribution channels has grown, and which is now too big to plug every leak — especially now that memetically propagating news magnifies every murmur into a clamor, for better or for worse.

The subjects of the probe are some research firms that make it their business to know what’s going on in, say, Shenzhen or Taiwan, where friends and industry experts dispense information that may or may not be confidential about such things as big new orders, equipment changes, and meetings with other companies. The feds say that at some point, these things must constitute insider trading. I say good luck drawing that particular line.

It’s funny watching various sectors react as their perimeters begin to come in conflict with the internet. Not only because that initial reaction usually simultaneously overreaches and underestimates, but because I relish that moment when an industry or person realizes exactly what a den of vipers they’ve stepped into. I wish I could actually be in the room when they first understand the situation.

The financial industry and its regulators demonstrate a strange mix of progressive and antiquated thinking. Not to get into political or big money issues here, but even the limited democratization of information currently underway could have serious implications, though there are channels of information deep enough and obscure enough that even 4chan might not be able to uncover them for quite some time.

In the meantime, more public forms of “inside” information are becoming public knowledge, and I think the feds are going to have a hell of a time laying down the law on what is confidential, what is privileged, what is within the bounds of journalistic anonymity, and so on. They’re getting hit with the industrial equivalent of privacy concerns.

For example, what role do confidentiality agreements signed in China by factory workers have in our laws? What about temporary agreements when they do contract work for an American company? Is a factory floor employee allowed to connect the dots by himself, with knowledge only of, say, what size the current iPad is and what size the unbranded display he’s assembling is? Is it the corporation’s responsibility to compartmentalize and enforce secrecy, or is it each individual company’s? Whose is the liability when a truck delivers an iPad 2 to the wrong address, and some Hong Kong blogger picks up on it?

The SEC and whoever else is involved here will have to make a huge number of judgment calls, and a large portion of them will be wrong. Not that I blame them, or that I could do much better myself. But I will say this: any government effort to make illegal the free passage of publicly available information will meet with failure. How can you forbid a research company from making use of anonymous information provided to an industry outlet like Digitimes? They publish “insider” information every day, and I check it every day, because that is valuable information for what I do. Is similar information made confidential simply by the fact that it hasn’t been reported yet?

There is a chance that citing such information in decisions to sell, buy, and so on will become illegal. Think about how stupid that is. Yet the regulators are caught between a rock and a hard place, and either the law must change or they must disregard the now-outdated law in light of (relatively) recent developments in technology and information markets.

At the moment, however, it’s still appears to be just a preliminary investigation, so there’s no need to get too worked up about it. Still, be prepared for some strange and labyrinthine regulations concerning what information does and doesn’t constitute a breach of confidentiality. And then watch every single party affected sidestep those regulations. “Better luck next time” is all we’ll be able to say.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs like to point out, the Android Market is great for users who want to find porn. While that may not be exactly true, other Android-based stores are trying to make it true. And perhaps perception was getting too close to reality, as today, Google has announced that in the next few weeks, they’ll be showing content ratings for all apps listed in the Market.

While Android has previously had a content rating policy, prior to this, these ratings were not surfaced to users. Nor does it seem like they were strictly enforced. As a result, it was difficult to distinguish an app with mature content from those that were meant for kids. Now, all apps in the Market will be required to show one of four content rating levels: All, Pre-teen, Teen, & Mature, Google’s Eric Chu writes today.

Starting next week, Android developers are going to be required to submit new or updated apps with one of these ratings if they want to be included in the Market. Developers not doing updates or new uploads are also being asked to add a rating to their app, and they’ll have “several weeks” to do so. But be warned: those that do not will find their apps default to the “Mature” rating.

“This new capability will provide users with additional information to help them select the best applications for them,” writes Chu.

All signs point to this holiday season being a prosperous one for retailers. Hitwise is reporting that searches around Black Friday are up 31%, and the share of visits to Black Friday websites are up 18% from last year during the same time.

Hitwise’s data also shows that more women than men are visiting the Black Friday websites with visits split 59% female and 41% male and visitors to Black Friday sites tend to be younger with 59% of visitors under the age of 35.

In terms of the retailers who are receiving visits from interested consumers, Walmart was top retail site receiving traffic from Black Friday sites for last week. Target was top retail site receiving traffic from Black Friday searches for last week and Walmart takes the top spot for searches this week.

Interestingly, referrals from Facebook.com and Twitter.com to Black Friday sites are up 36% in 2010 vs. 2009, indicating that more consumers and retailers are looking to social media to spread information about deals. In terms of emails about Black Friday deals Hitwise is reporting that email marketing volume is up 23% in 2010 vs. 2009; with Black Friday emails hitting consumer inboxes as early as Oct. 1 of this year.

While we don’t know how profitable Black Friday will be for retailers, an increase in searches and traffic shows that consumers could be pulling out the credit card more often this holiday season. Yesterday, comScore forecasted that online holiday spending would increase by 11 percent to $32.4 billion.

You can check out our Black Friday survival guide here.

In retrospect, Tesla may have been cleantech’s Netscape moment. It didn’t get off to the world’s greatest start, but like a few other venture-backed IPOs, lately it has been trading at nearly double its opening price.

Meanwhile, a few other cleantech companies have filed S-1s and several more are waiting in the wings, watching to see what the market does. To continue the Netscape analogy, 2011 could even see Elon Musk emerge as the new Jim Clark if one of his other companies SolarCity files, as some in the industry expect.

Nat Goldhaber of the venture firm Claremont Creek Ventures argues that 2011 will be the year of the cleantech IPO, and it’s not just because of those handful of hot companies are finally ready for primetime and bankers are itching to take them out. Several factors are finally coming together including general improvement in the economy, soaring global demand for energy and a sense that more favorable cleantech regulation is inevitable, at least on a state level.

Goldhaber joined me by Skype to talk about what sectors and companies could lead next year’s IPO wave and which company in his portfolio has him the most excited. (There’s also talk of jetpacks and robot butlers…)

We see cool gadgets all the time here at TechCrunch. But not many of them can help paraplegics walk again. This one does.

Berkeley Bionics has created an exoskeleton product called eLegs that literally gets these people up and walking. Arm swings on crutches control the legs and tell them when to walk. Time Magazine calls it one 50 best inventions of 2010, and they are clearly right. Technology like this may eliminate the concept of a wheelchair for millions of people with spinal cord injuries, stroke, MS, etc.. Here’s it in action:

Trials will begin next year. And the first trials will be held in Silicon Valley, at the Valley Medical Center in San Jose:

Valley Medical Center is the public hospital of Santa Clara County, and provides care to more children and adults than any other hospital in Silicon Valley. Our mission is unique – to treat everyone regardless of ability to pay. What you might not know is that we are the de facto children's hospital of the South Bay. We maintain San Jose's only Pediatric ICU and Trauma Unit, care for 145,000 kids annually at our 5 community clinics and deliver more babies than all by 7 other California hospitals. We do all this during times when patient demand is up (60% since 2000) and public dollars for health care is down ($200 million in budget cuts in the last 3 years).

The hospital, though, needs $130,000 to bridge a funding gap for the trial and to ensure it will begin in January 2011. I know we’ve already asked a lot from our readers with the UCSF Children’s Hospital, but we’re asking again. Please consider donating even a small amount to this cause. You can donate here.

Here’s what I’ll offer you in exchange – We’ve asked Berkeley Bionics to bring eLegs into our office so that I can try it out and post a video. If they agree we’ll bring in the top five donors as well and let you try it out. just as long as you’re ok with us posting the video on TechCrunch!

Donate now!

It wasn’t easy accumulating the research data displayed in the following guide. I saw horrific sights working retail for seven long years in both a big box electronic store and a major shopping center. I saw things that will haunt me the rest of my days. I watched two kids get trampled by what I call Double-Wides because Circuit City clearanced-out Dreamcasts for $80 on Black Friday. I once hid behind a massive video display just for a few moments to myself during the chaos. I’ve seen people fight, bite, and trample other members of our human race just to save a few dollars.

What follows is perhaps the most comprehensive Black Friday guide ever assembled. There are shopping tactics, buying guides, survival tips, and a thorough rundown of the different types of Black Friday shoppers you will encounter. Please, if you’re considering shopping on Black Friday, think about your family, your dog, your livelihood and reconsider. If you’re still convinced that it’s the right thing to do, be sure to click through to The Black Friday Survival Guide. Your life literally depends on it.

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In what has to be a first, luxury auto manufacturer Porsche will be celebrating its one millionth Facebook fan by carving the names of fans who sign up through the social network onto a special (and probably very unattractive) Porsche model to be displayed in the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, Germany.

Porsche has some pretty intense online outreach (A Porsche Family Tree! A Porsche Google Chrome theme!), but for most people (myself included) “Liking” that Porsche on Facebook is the closest we’re going to get to a Porsche in real life.

So here’s to hoping the company has an even better surprise planned for its relatively modest 3,305 Twitter followers. Followed.