The web and copyright sometimes butt heads as we learned from the recent Cooks Source fiasco. Google often find itself at the center of these copyright battles and DCMA takedown requests. It looks like Google has made adjustments to procedures to help respond to infringing content by “bad apples”, and address copyright issues that involve Google as a search engine.

Google says it is receiving a growing number of copyright requests to take content down and will now act on these requests within 24 hours. The search giant has actually built tools to improve the submission process for DMCA requests, particularly with Google’s blogging platform Blogger and search portal.

On the flip side, Google has improved its "counter-notice" tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed. Google has also updated autocomplete in Google search to prevent terms that are associated from privacy to appear in the search box.

AdSense’s anti-piracy review will also be improved to work with rightsholders to identify publishers that are ripping off content from others and remove these publishers from serving AdSense ads.

Google also says that it is planning to experiment with making authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. While it’s unclear how Google will filter this, the company says that it will be working to make authorized content easier to index and find.

Google notes that these changes will be rolled out over the next few months.

Photo Credit/Flickr/MikeBlogs

With all the new Internet TV boxes and services sprouting this holiday season—from Google TV and Apple TV to the Boxee Box, Shufflr, and beyond—there is a lot talk about people cutting their cable cords and just getting all of their TV from the Internet. That is not going to happen anytime soon until the best TV shows and movies become available online at the same time as on TV, but the direction is clear. Today at the SAI Ignition conference in New York City, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen declared, “Resistance is futile.”

Ronen was responding to the question of when will there be something worthwhile to watch on the Web. Getting Web video to your TV is becoming increasingly easy, but there are so many restrictions on the best video (network TV shows and Hollywood movies) that it is still not worth watching on the Web for anybody but geeks. Ronen himself admits that his modest goal is to get “from geeks to early adopters.”

Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone, who was also on the same panel, argued that quality isn’t really the issue. “At some point, 80 percent of major network TV content was online.” The problem is that “it doesn't stay there.” As a viewer, you have to know when to catch the shows, because unlike all other content on the Internet, TV shows and movies don’t stay online. They get placed online and then plucked off based on the different licensing windows the media companies adhere to in order to squeeze more profits from their shows and movies by making them available at different times through different distribution channels (theaters, DVDs, pay-per-view, cable, and now online).

Internet TV, however, doesn’t really fit into this distribution model because the generation of viewers who are growing up now on Youtube and Hulu want t watch TV or videos whenever they want to, not when the media companies tell them they can.

“The Internet is just a distribution model, it does not dictate business models,” argues Ronen. The existing media companies may not like the new competition that the Internet is bringing, but if consumers move there they won’t have a choice but to follow suit. He predicts that 50 percent of households in the U.S. will have Internet-connected TVs in five years and that “Netflix is going to have more paid video subscribers in two years than Comcast.” People will pay for broadband from one provider and pay for content from others (perhaps Netflix or Hulu or Boxee). Resistance is futile because over time, the Internet will prevail.

Below is a video interview I did with Avner a couple weeks ago on the same topic:

Every year around this time, we rush to the toy store in search of bargains for the wee ones, hoping to find that one glorious item hidden among the picked-over dross that is a post-Black Friday Toys ‘R’ Us. But be warned, shoppers: all is not as it seems. You see, lurking in the depths of our nation’s toy shelves, are some of the worst, most horrific toys you can ever imagine, toys so unusable and plain broken that we shudder to even gaze on their horrific boxes. Friends, we present the worst toys of the season.

10. Imaginarium Spiral Train Set
From The Description:

Create a 3D layout with the Imaginarium Wooden Spiral Train Set, a Toys ‘R’ Us exclusive. The track features a double spiral and runs around an airport terminal and runway to bring passengers and cargo to the jet and helicopter.

Why It Sounds Good:

Imaginarium has traditionally offered an alternative to expensive Thomas the Tank Engine tracks and trains, allowing cheap parents to give their kids a train fix without forcing them to take out a second mortgage.

Why It’s Bad:

Where do I start? The tracks fall apart (most commenters on our review recommended using a hot glue gun but I used staples), the slightest breeze will topple the entire thing, and most of the pieces aren’t compatible with other sets because of a slight incline in the track. It is a trifecta of terrible. Building it is like putting together a 3D model of Westminster Abbey blindfolded with a monkey howling in your ear.

Read more…

Someone needs to make me a “Where in the world is Eduardo Saverin?” logo. Following up on my story that he was holed up in a penthouse in Singapore investing in Facebook games, comes news that Saverin has hopped over to Indonesia to meet with some startups.

Pictured to the left is Saverin with Aria Rajasa of GantiBaju– a company I wrote about here that won the SparkxUp awards in Jakarta last month. Said one person in Jakarta’s Web scene, “It was supposed to be a secret, but some people can’t keep a photo with him to themselves.”

In case we all forgot, Indonesia is Facebook’s second largest market, and Facebook has neglected to send an executive there to check things out. (Although I should give them props for calling back Nexian after this post ran.) No doubt Saverin got a hero’s welcome as the first Facebook founder to show local entrepreneurs any love.

According to The Business Insider, ecommerce juggernaut eBay is acquiring up-and-coming local shopping startup Milo.com for a reported $75 million.

We’re independently confirming the acquisition and trying to get details of the transaction, but the deal would certainly make a lot of sense.

The company’s mission is to track every product on every shelf of every (U.S.) store in real-time. It currently covers about 52,000 stores across the United States, delivering search results for some 3 million locally available products.

For eBay, it would be a chance to bridge online commerce with physical, in-store shopping, as Milo is really good at enabling people to find the best price and availability for products they want to buy immediately, offline.

Milo has raised roughly $5 million in venture capital from several early-stage investment firms and a slew of angel investors, including heavy hitters such as Keith Rabois, Kevin Hartz, Jawed Karim, Magid M. Abraham, Brian Pokorny, Aaron Patzer and Chris Dixon, among others.

Every startup needs an inception story, and that of electronic payment service company Square goes something like this:

In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn't able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn't accept a credit card as payment. Even though a majority of payments has moved to plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience. Square was born a few days later right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.

As always, the full story of the founding of Square is a tad longer, and much more complex. That’s the first thing I thought of as I started reading over the details of this freshly filed lawsuit: Square, Inc. et al v. REM Holdings 3, LLC.

Its subject? A patent, of course.

To be more precise, the subject of the lawsuit is the fact that McKelvey – who serves as Square’s Chairman – is not listed as a co-inventor of U.S. patent no. 7,810,729, entitled “Card reader device for a cell phone and method of use”.

I’ve embedded the full complaint below, but here’s the nitty-gritty:

Square claims McKelvey, who is a software engineer and glass blower, in February 2009, in “a flash of inventive insight”, conceived of a way in which businesses and individuals could easily accept and process credit card payments, using a cell phone and a card reader for reading magnetic card stripes that was small enough to be plugged into a user cell phone with ease.

The complaint adds that McKelvey co-founded Square after discussing his ideas with Twitter inventor and Chairman Jack Dorsey, to “exploit his inventions”.

Then, still according to the complaint, this happened:

“In or about February 2009, Mr. McKelvey contacted his friend of 20 years, Mr. Robert Morley, Jr., to help build a prototype magnetic card reader that could be plugged into a cell phone input jack. Mr. Morley, a professor at Washington University, had previous experience working with magnetic card readers.

Over a period of several days, working in Mr. McKelvey's glass studio and Mr. Morley's laboratory at Washington University, Mr. McKelvey and Mr. Morley exchanged ideas regarding the design of the prototype card reader.”

For your information: McKelvey is a Washington University graduate.

According to the complaint, McKelvey together with Morley and Dorsey discussed obtaining patent protection for the magnetic card reader after successfully building an initial prototype, which allegedly used a circuit designed by Morley (but was perfected and incorporated into miniaturized cases by McKelvey).

Morley subsequently contacted a patent attorney, namely David Chervitz, to do a prior art search (and was allegedly paid by McKelvey to do so).

This is where things started to head in the wrong direction:

“On June 10, 2009, Mr. Chervitz filed the '134 Application. The Application, however, listed only Mr. Morley as the sole named inventor. That listing was in error because Mr. Morley is not the sole inventor of the inventions claimed in the '134 Application.

On October 12, 2010, the '134 Application issued as the '729 Patent. Mr. Morley was listed as the sole named inventor on the '729 Patent. That listing is in error because Mr. Morley is not the sole inventor of the inventions claimed in the '729 Patent.”

Ouch.

Needless to say, McKelvey not having any claims of invention to such a critical patent poses an enormous problem for Square as a company. Worse for them is that Morley and the patent attorney apparently haven’t yet responded to their concerns to date:

“Although a letter providing notification of the error in omitting Mr. McKelvey as a named inventor on the '729 patent was sent to Mr. Chervitz on October 21, 2010, on information and belief, neither Mr. Morley nor Mr. Chervitz has taken action to correct the error.”

Square has now pinned its hopes on the U.S. justice system, requesting a court to issue an order directing the Commissioner for Patents of the USPTO to correct the patent-in-suit by adding Mr. McKelvey as a co-inventor.

It will be very interesting to see how things evolve from here – we’ll be eagerly keeping tabs on it and have reached out to Square, Mr. Chervitz and Mr. Morley for more information.

(Image via Flickr / mira66)

I get OnLive. I’ve played with the new unit for a few days now and it’s clearly for a household like mine where video games isn’t a major affair. It allows someone like myself to pick up the controller, browse the selection of games and then start playing any of the available games nearly immediately. The just-announced PlayPack counters the biggest hurdle for casual gamers: the high initial cost of games.

Starting today for OnLive Game System owners, this flat-rate plan grants access to a sizable chunk of the OnLive library. Better even yet, since the plan is in beta until January 15, 2011 when it will be available to all OnLive members, this pack is available free of charge till then. Who doesn’t like free games? No one, that’s who.

The free trials, 3- and 5-day rentals, and Full PlayPass will still be available, where the PlayPack will only be available with select games with new-releases generally not hitting the plan. 40 titles should launch next month under the PlayPack header a fair amount being slightly older popular titles such as Prince of Persia, NBA 2K10, LEGO Batman. It’s this sort of novel approach that will makes OnLive appealing to the non-gamers like myself.

I really do not care if I play the latest and greatest console shooter. It’s just nice to be able to pick up the OnLive controller and play a mind-numbing game occasionally. The PlayPack allows for just that. In many ways, it reminds me of the philosophy behind emulators as the games might not be the latest, but instead, they’re considered classics and there’s a large selection to choose from.

OnLive’s model attempts to build upon the success of video streaming with a similar price point and thought process. Combined with the previous purchase/play options, there really isn’t a more versatile gaming solution available. That is of course if Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo doesn’t hop on the streaming train and out a similar solution, therefore absolutely killing the appeal of OnLive.

Expect my full overview of the system in a few days. So far I’m really enjoying the convenience and over all experience though.

Yandex, the Russian juggernaut of a search engine that is thought to be considering an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, has partnered with VKontakte, which is the largest social network in Russia. How big? The so-called Facebook-clone accounts for more than half of web traffic in the CIS region. Under the arrangement, the public-facing elements of VKontakte user profiles will show up in Yandex searches in realtime. So far, this has resulted in Yandex indexing over 25 million user profiles, essentially creating a people search engine since results, where publicly available, will link to and/or display a person's date of birth, place of birth, university or place of work.

Since I work from home, I often use video conferencing solutions to remotely demo products and participate in conference calls. But often adding video to these conferencing solution slows down the software and causes latency and in most cases, the video quality is poor. Fuze Meeting, the developer of an online meeting software, is introducing a new video conferencing technology, called Presence, that is definitely worth a look.

Similar to GoToMeeting or WebEx, Fuze provides a conferencing service that allows users to share screens and run meetings online. As opposed to its competitors, Fuze promises a sleeker more lightweight interface. With Presence, Fuze has essentially combined this interface with multi-party desktop and mobile video conferencing in HD quality.

I actually tested this out and it’s not only simple to use, but the video is high quality and runs seamlessly with the actual conferencing technology. The meeting host can begin a meeting from a web browser or can meet from a downloaded app on their mobile device (Fuze offers apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android). Once the host enables video conferencing, he or sh can initiate a video meeting. Those with a camera-enabled device can join in, as well as those who are not working from a device with a camera (i.e. the iPad)

The technology also includes VoIP, screen sharing, the ability to share video, slides, ad more. The Fuze Presence technology is currently optimized for 8 video participants at once.

Currently in private beta, the technology will soon be extended to the public early next year.

For background, the company, which was formerly known as Callwave, was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million.

In the summer of 2009, the company rebranded itself as Fuze Box and launched Fuze Meeting. Fuze also launched Tweetshare, a platform for branded Twitter channels, and brought on streaming media inventor Dr. Alan Lippman its Executive Vice President of Media Technology.

After a tumultuous past, it looks like things may be coming together for Fuze after all.

You don’t need to wait for Google or Apple to bring apps to your HDTV. Samsung’s been serving up custom-made apps via their connected HDTVs for some time now and just hit the 1 millionth downloaded app. That’s a mighty fine milestone for a platform not heavily discussed or marketed. Impressive, yes, but even so that this mark was hit with only 200 available apps, which seems to state that Samsung knows how to curate and approve quality applications. They seem to have all the big ones: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Twitter, Pandora, Blockbuster, Vudu. There’s even a fine selection of low-cost games although that doesn’t include Angry Birds.

Samsung introduced the connected TV back in 2007, but the apps didn’t debut until CES 2010. Before these apps, on-screen widgets were all the rage, but their functionality was limited along with the selection of apps. Within the last few years Samsung has always been at the top of the sales charts for flat panels, but the company is dominating the web-connected segment with a 66% marketshare according to NPD Group. That’s beating out everyone from Vizio, Sony, and Panasonic with these Samsung Apps estimated to be on 50% the company’s TVs sold in 2010.

So what about that Google TV rumor? Something about Samsung introducing a Google TV-powered HDTV at CES 2011? Possible?

It sounded strange weeks ago when the rumor first appeared and it possible sounds even more out of place after learning about this milestone. Samsung, as stated above, already has a significant chunk of the connected TV marketshare and soon their supposed to launch what amounts to a competing series? It just doesn’t sound right, but it’s still possible. Sony did just that.

Sony also has a line of app-ified HDTVs, but that didn’t stop them from bringing Google TV — without Sony’s app ecosystem —  to two separate product lines. The HDTV and Blu-ray player are both heavily marketed, even more though than Sony’s standard line it seems. The Samsung model would likely compete, not with its Samsung brethren, but with the Sony Google TV instead.

Either way, both companies have their own Internet-connected HDTVs to fall back on if the Google TV venture doesn’t get out of first gear. Samsung, it seems, is already racing forward without any help from Google TV.

As I believe Descartes once said, “I think, therefore I think I’ll buy an iPad.” What he was really saying, when you get past all the intellectual mumbo-jumbo, is that what we perceive is far more important than reality. I, for example, perceive the McRib to be a valuable foodstuff and I hunt it down yearly when it is available. In reality it is poison.

To wit: Pipar Jaffery’s own Gene Munster performed a survey, showing 65 consumers an iPad and a Galaxy Tab. He asked them how much they thought each of them cost as well as their preference. The results were interesting.

First, the respondents found that the iPad was overwhelmingly preferable to the Galaxy Tab and that the iPad was “worth” $417 (real price $629) while the Gal Tab was “worth” $283 (real price $599). What the folks were saying was that the iPad “felt” expensive while the Gal Tab “felt” cheap, although, in reality, the market has priced them at approximately the same point.

This is the sort of behavior the beguiles CE manufacturers to no end. Items that are meant to “feel” expensive, the Dell Adamo, for example, are undesirable when they come from anyone but Apple and so laptop and accessory manufacturers have to erect a scaffold of excitement around their products (see Droid) or go the opposite route and blow their prices down just to the end of profitability (see the $400 laptops in the Best Buy circular).

In some rare cases the former tactic works but it hasn’t worked in a long while. Perhaps the last time it worked on a large scale was with the Motorola RAZR, a product that was so beloved and desirable that Motorola bet their whole company on it and nearly lost. Why, then can Apple pull it off? It’s mostly about design as well as a halo of desirability they have maintained through their advertising and media presence. You don’t see any laptop hunter ads coming out of Apple mostly because MacBooks aren’t priced differently, for the most part, so it’s like being on a game preserve with crippled elk rather than a real hunt. But you also don’t see Apple talking up bargains because the narrative it’s created is that “this costs $X. It is different from all other objects. Therefore it doesn’t cost $X-50% on Black Friday. We may throw you a bone, but you’d need a microscope and tweezers to catch it.”

So even though the Gal Tab is a nice product it just doesn’t have that halo. The first CE company to figure out how to pull off Apple’s antics wins the prize.

via Fortune

RIM has announced a purchase today—UI developer The Astonishing Tribe (a.k.a TAT). It looks like RIM will be using TAT’s talent to help improve the UI for Blackbery’s new tablet PlayBook as well as for its mobile smartphones. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As stated in a post: “Today we are pleased to confirm plans for The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) team to join Research In Motion (RIM). We're excited that the TAT team will be joining RIM and bringing their talent to the BlackBerry PlayBook and smartphone platforms.”

Based in Sweden, TAT has worked with pretty bring names brands Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and, Motorola on UI development and design projects. In fact, TAT actually designed the G1′s Android UI.

Big move for Liberty Media, IAC and the latter’s Barry Diller today. The former has exchanged its entire equity stake in the Internet holding company for a combination of assets and cash in a transaction intended to be tax-free to both companies. Liberty has exchanged approximately 12.8 million shares of IAC stock for all of the capital stock of a wholly-owned subsidiary of IAC that holds the Evite and Gifts.com businesses, and approximately $220 million in cash.

Barry Diller is also stepping down as IAC’s CEO, and will be replaced by Greg Blatt, formerly chief executive of IAC portfolio company Match.com.

Right before Liberty’s exchange of shares with IAC, Barry Diller, who will now serve as the company’s Chairman and Senior Executive, exchanged about 4.3 million shares of IAC common stock held by him for an equal number of shares of Class B common stock held by Liberty.

This exchange took place pursuant to the terms of a pre-existing stockholders agreement between Diller and Liberty.

According to a statement, Diller says he is “not going anywhere”.

True enough, Diller still currently owns shares representing approximately 34% of the total votes of all classes of IAC stock, the largest individual voting stake in the company.

He also gets to exchange up to 1.5 million additional shares of common stock he may acquire within the next 9 months for an equal number of shares of Class B stock held in the treasury of IAC.

If he buys those shares, his shares will represent approximately 41% of the total votes of all classes of stock.

Evite and Gifts.com will become part of Liberty Interactive’s eCommerce companies portfolio.

The news comes week after IAC laid off most of its Ask.com staff and effectively surrendered its search operations to its competitors.

Diller’s statement on the exchange, in full (John Malone is Chairman of Liberty Media):

“These last 17 years of my association with John Malone and Liberty Media have been a great, and occasionally, wild ride. We began this grand tour of interactivity a few years before the internet became widely used, and we were able to create, acquire and build up substantial businesses over that time.

While I’ll continue my association with Dr. Malone in Expedia, and as significant shareholders of the multiple spun-off companies, Liberty’s exit from IAC is a turning point, and I want to state my thanks and gratitude to Dr. Malone for his support and encouragement throughout (with one brief period of mutual discontent which we both believe was an aberration).

This has been a most productive partnership and I’m glad it will continue in other venues.”

IAC in its third-quarter earning release reported that total revenues for Q3 2010 were $422 million, up 25 percent compared to the same period last year.

Mixlr, which we previously described as a UStream-for-audio, has exited Beta and with it a wider remit: No longer is the live audio streaming service aimed at just DJs and musicians but now targets the likes of conference organisers, journalists, podcasters and public speakers too. It's a pivot not dissimilar to that made by SoundCloud recently, a service that Mixlr both competes with and complements since Mixlr recordings can be sent to SoundCloud. But that's not all that's changed.

This past March, I came home from SXSW with a problem. The so-called “location war” hadn’t yielded one check-in service to rule them all. In fact, several new ones popped up just at that conference alone. Check-in fatigue set in.

Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. Now Facebook has launched itself right smack dab in the middle of the location space with Places. And others like Yelp are still pushing hard there. It’s getting even more out of control. I’m about ready to declare check-in bankruptcy. Or I was, until Gowalla decided to do something bold.

The location-based service has decided to fundamentally altered their app to allow you to check-in to not only their service, but also into Facebook’s and even Foursquare’s as well. Yes, they’ve just become compatible with their chief rivals.

Gowalla 3.0, launching today for the iPhone, is the biggest change the service has undergone since it launched at SXSW nearly two years ago. Back then, the app seemed to be more about collecting polished virtual goods at locations and swapping them around town. Now Gowalla is a straight-up check-in machine. Not only can you check-in to the services mentioned above, Gowalla pulls in all the check-ins from your friends on those services.

Yes, they’ve created a unified check-in service. You see check-ins from all of your friends even if they don’t use Gowalla at all. It’s wonderful.

And it actually goes deeper. It’s one thing to simply pull in check-ins from other services to show you, and to allow you to check-in. But Gowalla has actually done the manual labor to sync up venues between their own place database, Facebook’s place database, Foursquare’s place database, and even Twitter’s place database. It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but co-founder Josh Williams says that the majority of the hard work is now done.

The end result is that when you check-in across all the services in Gowalla’s app, they sync up to the places in those other services.

With 3.0, Gowalla has also taken steps to simplify the check-in process itself. On the homescreen you’ll now see a nice, bright check-in button at the bottom center. When you hit this, Gowalls scans the places nearby and cross-references those with the places you often go to. They then suggest a place they think you’re at, so you could conceivably check-in with just two-clicks, if they’re right.

Williams says that in their tests, they’re right about 80 percent of the time, currently. If they’re wrong, it’s just a matter of clicking on the venue to select a new one nearby. So it’s three-clicks instead of two.

And it’s from this check-in screen where you can also share your check-ins to Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and even Tumblr, all with one click. The first two obviously check you in to the same location on those other services. If you send the check-in to Twitter, you’ll tweet out a link to the Gowalla page for the place, and the tweet will be geotagged to your location. If you send it to Tumblr, the venue’s icon and name will be made into a Tumblr post on your blog with text alongs the lines of “I’m at VENUE”.

So why did Gowalla do this? Is this them conceding check-in defeat to their larger rivals? Williams doesn’t see it that way. Instead, he talks about how people often tell him that they love Gowalla’s design and functionality, but they don’t use it very much because all their friends are already checking in on Foursquare or Facebook. So Williams and his team eliminated that excuse.

One big question is how Foursquare will react to this? While sites like this one have played up the Gowalla/Foursquare rivalry, the truth is that the two sides just don’t know each other well. In fact, Williams and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley only met for the first time in late March this past year. Yes, after SXSW. How do I know? I moderated a panel that both of them were on. Awkward.

Since then, they’ve only interacted briefly at events a few times, Williams says. And he really does think that Foursquare will be okay with the new Gowalla feature. After all, they’re just using Foursquare’s public API to do all of this stuff. In a way, he hopes they’re the best app built on top of the Foursquare platform.

Facebook is likely to take the move much better. This kind of thing is exactly what they want other services to build. Facebook wants to be the underlying location platform that the best services are built on top of. Though they might have preferred that Gowalla was only using their platform, and not Foursquare’s. That’s what another player in this space, Loopt is doing.

Where things might get a little messy is if Gowalla opens up their synced places database, which Williams says they plan to do through their API. Each of these companies wants to own that data and Foursquare spent a lot of time building out what they have now. At the same time, both the public and developers have been clamoring for this. So we’ll see.

It’s definitely worth noting that Gowalla is not the first service to try to unify check-ins. A service called check.in built a way to do this via the mobile web around the time of SXSW last year. But Gowalla’s execution is much better. And Gowalla also isn’t starting from scratch, they have a lot of users already. Check.in was built by two of the founders of Brightkite, but it was a separate service. (They’ve since moved on to other things.)

Alongside the big additions, Gowalla 3.0 has several smaller ones that make it an all-around better app. These include better picture integration, Highlights (a nice feature that was on the website) integration, a new UI, and a new feature called Bookmarks. As you might imagine, this allows you to easily tag any place to add it to a list so you can easily find it later.

The other really nice addition though is a feature called Notes. This allows you to easily leave personalized messages for any Gowalla user at any location around the world. When create a note for someone, they get an email telling them about it. But they can’t see it until they show up and check-in at the venue it was tagged to.

You can also leave notes for yourself. This is useful for something like a grocery lists. You could leave a note with your list at a grocery store so that when you check in, there it is.

Williams also envisions that down the road, you might be able to leave friends things like micropayments or free drinks this way.

Again, right now, Gowalla 3.0 is iPhone-only. But the Android version should be launching in a few weeks. And the iPad and BlackBerry versions will be updated as well.

So get it while it’s hot. Or at least before Foursquare blocks their API! You can find Gowalla here in the App Store.

Today sees the launch of Viber, a brand new, free iPhone application (iTunes link, or search for ‘viber free’) that basically functions the way pretty much every iPhone user wishes Skype’s mobile application would. My educated guess is that this will become a stunningly big hit in no time.

Viber for iPhone allows you to make 100% free calls to other Viber users over 3G and WiFi, is capable of running completely in the background without draining your battery (even when the app isn’t actually running in the background, but more on that later), works over Bluetooth and still manages to boast both speedy call connections and excellent audio quality.

Everyone who has an iPhone will want this app – and no, I’m not getting paid by the company to write this, I’m just terribly excited.

Why, you ask?

Because the only thing that would hold Viber back from overtaking Skype’s dominance on the App Store when it comes to free VoIP applications is the fact that it’s a fledgling company, which means it could take a while for people to learn about the app and its capabilities.

When you install Viber, the app syncs your phone’s contact list and, by means of a logo, shows you which of your friends are also using Viber. Instantly, you can make free calls to them from your iPhone, regardless of the model you use, no user registration required.

As Viber Media founder Talmon Marco puts it:

“Skype is modeled after a buddy list – you need a user ID and password, and in order to talk to someone you need to ‘add them’, get approved, etc. Viber, on the other hand, is modeled after a phone. So your ID is your phone number (authenticated via SMS) and you can call anyone, as long as you know their number.”

Also unlike Skype, the Viber iPhone app promises to not drain your battery when it’s running in the background. I haven’t had the app long enough to thoroughly verify that claim, but I can acknowledge having Skype run in the background on my iPhone 3GS definitely makes the battery run out of juice much faster than it should.

The cool thing about Viber is that, even if the app is closed and not even running in the background, you can still receive calls through the service. The user is sent a push notification via Apple’s servers, a ring is generated, and as soon as the user clicks "Answer" on the notification, the app is launched and a connection is made in mere seconds.

The company, which was founded by the people behind the successful p2p file sharing service iMesh, says it has dozens of servers deployed all across the globe to handle the load.

Good news for Android users: the company is hard at work at a similar app for Android handsets, and aims to release it in the first quarter of next year. Also on the roadmap: free text messaging between Viber users (something Skype and a slew of other apps are capable of today) and possibly a BlackBerry app down the line.

So how does the company intend to make money, considering that its apps will be completely free? Value-added services, Marco tells me, although it seems that they haven’t quite figured out which ones those will be yet.

Hopefully they’ll come up with a solid revenue model soon, because they’ve done some truly amazing work on this one.

Betterment, a financial savings startup which launched last May at TechCrunch Disrupt, raised $3 million in a series A financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The Anthemis Group, Thomas Lehrman, and other angel investors also participated.

Betterment aims to disrupt the financial savings industry by letting customers invest their savings in a carefully-selected blend of stock and bond portfolios which are rebalanced regularly and automatically. The New York City startup is a registered broker dealer and financial adviser. The only fee it charges is a management fee that is about one percent of assets in each account (soon this fee will become tiered so that larger accounts pay a smaller percentage).

Since opening up earlier this year, the service has attracted thousands of customers and millions of dollars in savings. Annualized returns are tracking the S&P 500. Betterment will use the new capital to hire more engineers and rol out new products, such as an IRA. Expect more game mechanics to be introduced into the service as well which will reward people for making smart financial moves.

Path launched two weeks ago with a swell of buzz. Then came the backlash. It was swift and merciless. “It’s a social app that discourages large-scale social sharing — WTF?,” seemed to be the main complaint. Well, love it or hate it, Path is sticking to its, yes, path. But an update tonight brings a few nice updates.

First and foremost, you can finally use pictures taken outside of the app. Previously, you could only load up the app, hit the camera button, and take a picture to share on the service on the spot. The reason for this was that they wanted to make sure your path was being shared in realtime from where you really were. But the latest version of the app, 1.0.2, has a new “Library” button in the camera area. Hitting this allows you to pick any photo from your camera album. But read that carefully — it has to be from your camera album. In other words the picture still has to be one taken with your iPhone camera. Again, there’s a reason for this.

If you choose to upload one of your camera album pictures to Path, it looks to see where that picture was geotagged and what time it was taken. If you try to tag it to a place in Path, you’ll notice that the venues listed are those near where the picture was taken, not where you are at the time of the upload. Also, the picture is then inserted into your Path stream corresponding to when it was taken, not necessarily as the newest picture. Again, the idea seems to be to keep your path accurate.

This allows you to take all the pictures you want with your iPhone camera and upload them to Path later, while keeping your path intact. It’s an interesting solution.

Other updates in the latest app include revamped profile pages, which make it easier to stop sharing with someone or to pause them. And it’s also now slightly easier to find other Path users to share with.

One thing still not included is a way to share to other social networks. And yes, the 50 friend limit is still in place. Again, Path is sticking to its path.

You can find Path here in the App Store.

I am shown product demos in some of the strangest places. On Wednesday afternoon, I found myself in a Starbucks in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal with Rajnish, one of the founders of Althea Systems. Rajnish was in town from Bangalore and he wanted to show me Shufflr TV, his startup’s Internet TV application.

Shufflr is available right now as a desktop AIR app, but the company is also working on a simplified version for TVs and one for Android phones. In the video above, Rajnish shows me a demo across all three screens (using his laptop in place of a TV, but he did switch to a TV remote as you can see). There was a lot of distractions, including some screaming kids next to us, but Rajnish stayed focussed and powered through the demo.

Shufflr lets you browse videos from across the Web, and sorts them by recommended videos, buzz, or what your friends are watching on Facebook and Twitter. You can share, comment on, or bookmark any video. And The AIR app has this slick wall of video effect that would look great on a touchscreen. Videos are pulled from all over the Web, including YouTube, Comedy Central, and Funny Or Die. You can also browse by channel/source or by people. If you start following people, then you start to see the videos they share. It also suggests people with similar tastes.

Rajnish also gave me a sneak peak at Shufflr’s ten-foot UI, which is designed for regular TVs and can be controlled via a remote. It lets you explore different genres and zero in on what you want with related tags. Articles from the Web about particular shows could also be brought up, and it integrates with Flickr to bring your photos to the big screen. The Android app is the simplest of all, showing three different video feeds: friends, recommendations,and queue. The last one will works in conjunction with Shufflr’s browser plug-in which lets you add any video you come across on the Web to your queue (essentially a video bookmarking system).

As with every other Internet TV project out there from Google TV and Apple TV to Boxee, a lovely UI will only get Shufflr so far. It is screaming for more mainstream shows and movies. But the demo is instructive in terms of showing what a three-screen experience might one day look like. Althea Systems recently raised $3 million from Intel Capital.

It took Waze a full year to get 500,000 users. It then took another six months to hit a million. Three months after that, they hit 1.5 million. And in just the last two months, they’ve already surpassed 2 million users. In fact, they’re past 2.2 million, actually.

Yes, the Israel-based social mapping company has become a hit. And for good reason too — it’s a good idea and a fun one too. Thanks to cellphones with GPS and WiFi triangulation capabilities, they get users to build out their maps for them simply by driving around. And if there are issues on the road, such as major traffic jams, all of that information comes in through the apps and can be sent to other drivers.

So why use it? Well, first of all you get free GPS navigation. But there’s also the gaming element. It used to be that if they didn’t have an area mapped, there would be Pac Man-like pelts so entice you to go there and earn points for driving around, mapping the area for Waze. But back in August, they allowed you to make more of a personal game out of the app. You can now cruise around your city picking up treats for sending in reports and other things.

But the best part about the app may be the actual model. It used to be that you had to pay satellite or mapping companies millions of dollars for road data and information. That’s a big reason why GPS units have been so expensive. But Waze figured out a way to build their own maps and bypass the system.

It’s a model that has been somewhat challenged by Google, which offers free turn-by-turn navigation through Android, but so far they haven’t done anything with other devices. Waze, meanwhile, is spreading quickly. The company says users are spending about 300 minutes a month using the service.

Long before Mark Pincus talked about making revenue any way he could, there was Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Brash, funny, ladies-man-playboy and intensely competitive, they don’t make tech entrepreneurs like Ellison anymore. Bloomberg’s Game Changers series is taking on Ellison in a special airing tomorrow at 6 pm pacific time on Bloomberg TV. It sounds like it’ll be a juicy send up of my favorite eyebrow-less mogul, and I’m setting my TiVo now.

They wouldn’t send me a transcript before it airs, but I did get a few teasers out of them. Here are some quotes from the show by some of the people who worked the closest with Ellison:

• Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can't be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn't.  But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.”
• Stuart Feigin, Oracle’s fifth employee says, ”There was no version 1 [of Oracle software] because everyone thought, well, no one buys version 1, it's buggy. So we started with a version 2.  Well, our version two was at least as buggy as anyone's version 1…And I describe those early versions as the roach motel of databases. The data went in, but it didn't come out.”
• Gary Bloom, one of Ellison’s many heir apparents that didn’t quite work out, says, ”I have a theory that Larry's succession plan for Oracle is he is trying to figure out a way that when he's six feet under in a grave, he can still run Oracle.”

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Ellison himself was interviewed, which isn’t surprising given how media-shy he’s been for much of the last decade. Your chair is always waiting at TechCrunchTV, Larry.

Naturally, no sooner do a publish a story on Google’s forthcoming social product and some of the intrigue surrounding it, do some new sources come out of the woodwork. We can now confirm, by way of no fewer than four sources, that Google’s social product is in fact internally called “Emerald Sea”. And yes, obviously, it is being dogfood tested within the company.

In the previous post, we noted that an anonymous user on Quora stated that the project was internally called “Emerald City”. We also stated that we had heard “Emerald Sea”, but figured that perhaps we had just heard it wrong. But it turns out that Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous is actually the one that likely heard it wrong.

Still, that user’s other info remains inline with what we’ve heard. That Emerald Sea will be a social layer that spread across the majority of Google’s properties.

One tipster, a former Googler, warns that these internal nicknames shift all the time and it could even end up being known as “Emerald City” at some point. As to what Google will end up calling it when it gets released next year, that remains up in the air, it seems.

I just hope Google chose “Emerald Sea” after the John Ringo novel above. It’s just so magical.

Around YouTube headquarters, there’s a stat that management likes to throw around to make it clear that the company isn’t resting on its laurels. No, it isn’t the fact the site is the world’s second largest search engine or that its users upload 35 hours of content per minute. It’s that the average user spends around 15 minutes per day on YouTube. That would be an impressive amount of engagement for just about anything else, but it pales in comparison to the five hours that people spend sitting in front of their TV sets watching cable (yes, seriously). And make no mistake: YouTube wants to take some of that time for itself.

Today, the site is taking an important step toward that goal as it improves its Leanback product with a key new feature: personalized channels. LeanBack, which launched in July and is integrated into Google TV, lets users hit ‘play’ and then sit back and watch an endless stream of YouTube content with no input required. In short, it’s YouTube TV. And now it’s personalized TV — something that no cable network out there can match.

Before now Leanback has had the concept of channels, but these were primarily built around social activity from your friends and videos curated by YouTube. Now the site is going to try to learn what you like and generate new personalized channels accordingly. These channels will show content that’s relevant both to the things you’ve told YouTube you like, and topics that YouTube thinks you’ll like (for example, if you build a channel around funny cat videos, it may start throwing some funny videos without cats into the mix).

The feature acts a bit like a Pandora for video. It learns about your preferences based on both your explicit actions (like hitting the ‘thumbs up’ button) and implicit signals, like which videos you’ve watched and how long you watched them for. You can also manually add new topics and keywords to adjust the kind of content YouTube will display.

It sounds great, but I suspect it’s going to be a long, slow process for YouTube to really get people used to the idea. Issue number one: YouTube Leanback is supposed to let people sit back and watch an endless stream of relevant content; if they’re doing that, I doubt they’re going to want to hit the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘down’ button unless it’s effortless (at this point no Google TV remote has a dedicated button). So YouTube will probably be relying primarily implicit signals for now.

But more important, Leanback is introducing users to an experience that is very different from YouTube itself. Yes, YouTube has long offered suggested videos, and has countless channels of content, but this notion of leaning back and just watching is something that will take some getting used to. That said, YouTube reports that Leanback users are consuming 30 minutes at a time — twice as much as they do using the normal site — so obviously it’s working for some people.

And it won’t take long until a lot more people are on Leanback. YouTube is already integrated into Google TV, and it has apps on other HTPCs as well. The company has also started searching for a Product Manager to lead its ‘YouTube on TV’ projects, whose responsibilities include managing relationships with both content and hardware partners. In other words, YouTube Leanback (or a related product) is going to be popping up in a lot of places over the next few years. And once it nails this notion of personalized video content, it’s going to be tough to go back to plain old TV.

Follow the yellow brick road…

It’s no secret that Google is working on a new social project that is thought to be a layer which will be spread over many of their properties. Actually, it is supposed to be a secret. But everyone knows about it. At first, it was known as “Google Me”, but that’s probably not what it’s going to end up being called when it rolls out at some point next year. And if you believe an anonymous answer on Quora, that’s not what Google is internally calling it. And based on what we’ve heard, they may just be right.

According to this post from November 4, Google is in the process of internally testing the product they’re calling “Emerald City”. The fact that the anonymous user says it’s being dogfood tested shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone — Google tends to do this with most of their big products before launch. What’s interesting is the detail the user goes into:

Emerald City has been integrated into numerous products and is being actively used internally.

Emerald City is the project name for what people outside of Google refer to as “Google Me”. Lots of existing projects like youtube, google docs, search, calendar, groups, picassa, etc have had significant social integrations added to them. This is an ongoing project that will launch as a major initiative across multiple services at once and many of the hooks endusers will see are currently being tested internally. It is by no means done and is extremely ambitious in nature.

Here’s the thing, we had actually heard that nickname before as well. Well, actually we heard “Emerald Sea”, but this makes more sense (update: see below, nope, it’s “Emerald Sea” after all). Further, the other details are inline with what we’ve been hearing about the project. Of course, the fact that it’s thought to work with YouTube, Google Docs, Search, etc, would be an easy and obvious guess to make.

Still, unless we have the same source, the anonymous Quora user may be on to something.

But perhaps even more interesting may be the fact that the exact same answer was posted almost two weeks later to Google Baraza. Wait. What the hell is Google Baraza?

It turns out, Baraza is a service that Google very quietly launched in late October. In fact, the blogs that closely watch Google didn’t pick it up until a couple weeks ago — see here and here. Google states that Baraza is a service meant intended to be used in Africa to bring more locally relevant information online.

So why is there a question and an answer about Google’s new social product on Baraza? Because some people are using it like Quora. Probably because it is a lot like Quora — you even search and ask a question in the same box. While Google talks about Africa, anyone in the world (who speaks English or French) can use it. I just set up an account simply by asking a question. And even the idea behind it sounds like Quora — to get things out of people’s heads and onto the web.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Someone has posted the exact same answer about Google’s social product to both services. Could it be a Google employee? Certainly that would explain how they knew what Baraza was in the first place. But why would a Google employee go out of their way to answer the question and out a secret project on not just Quora, but also on another Google-run project?

Maybe it’s more likely that someone simply copy & pasted the answer from Quora. It is interesting just how much action there is around the question though.

So, we now have two new pieces of Google intrigue. First, Google may be internally testing their social product which they’re calling “Emerald City”. Second, Google is definitely testing a Quora competitor. And while it may have meant the test for Africa, clearly others are using it as a universal Google Q&A service.

Google just better hope that Emerald City doesn’t end up like Google Answers.

Update: Actually, we were right, Google's Social Product Is Definitely Codenamed "Emerald Sea"

The e-reading battle is raging hot, and while statistics ostensibly showing an insurgent iPad should be taken with a grain of salt, the volatility of the market is plain to see. The Kindle has made the most of an early lead, and promises to be a highly popular gift item. The Nook Color is receiving encouraging reviews and has just been rooted, rendering it a thrifty choice for tablet shoppers. Color e-ink is on the horizon. It’s a glorious time to be an e-book seller.

So it’s no surprise that Google is jumping into the fray with the long-awaited Google Editions service, set to launch by the end of the year in the U.S. and first quarter of 2011 internationally. But between Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, and independent publishing services like Amazon’s DTP and the unfortunately-named Pubit, is there room for another player? Not that that’s ever stopped anyone from trying — but I think in this case it may be that Google brings something new to the table: decentralization.

Google knows, I am sure, that to compete directly with Kindle-like services would be suicide for Google Editions. Amazon and the others have found success in the creation of a brick-and-mortar simulacrum. You go to the virtual Barnes & Noble the way you’d go to a real Barnes & Noble, you browse the site the way you’d browse the store, you see the book, you look inside the cover, you read a few pages. The success of the virtual store is undeniable, and it will continue to be a success. To try to shoehorn in another one, as Apple is doing with mixed success, is a project Google is just not suited for. Truth be told, they’re terrible at that kind of thing.

But they are good at creating something that people will use without even knowing it, and they’re good at collecting and organizing information. Google Editions isn’t going to be the Kindle Store with a more spartan web aesthetic: it’s going to be a network of individuals, indexed, managed, and regularly milked by Google. While the terms encourage sellers to sell via Google’s existing services (Checkout, direct referrals from search, etc, I would guess), the revenue split is only slightly decreased for resellers. The meaning is clear: Google wants to create an army of booksellers making direct sales to users visiting their site, blog, or what have you.

The advantages of not having to go through, for instance, Amazon, when selling your book, are hard to quantify. But the notion that an author will be able to place a widget on their own page, and have the book-buying transaction be self-contained rather than being transferred to Amazon, is significant. The attraction of being an independent node will be an attractive one for many to whom other e-book stores’ terms may not be permissive or customizable enough. As Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks Inc., an Illinois publisher, puts it, “Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book.”

As there has been a significant shift towards self-publishing, and an understandable drive for the monetization thereof, Google Editions might be getting in at the beginning of an expanding market. Centralized stores will of course remain popular, but the web is becoming quite the discovery engine, partially because of Google itself, which puts them in an undeniably advantageous starting position for this kind of thing. They don’t intend to take Amazon down, but they plan to be there if the virtual bookstore model takes itself down.

The actual e-reading platform Google describes is less well-formed. Amazon has, as noted above, a huge advantage in being the market leader in e-book devices as well as sales, and hasn’t even (as Apple might have done) used that position to strong-arm consumers into buying their hardware. As commenters pointed out yesterday on the iPad/Kindle story, it is possible and even likely that many of the iPads identified as e-readers in that survey were running Kindle software. Amazon knows that either service would survive on its own, as the Kindle is probably the best e-reader device on the market, and the Kindle store is the most familiar and well-integrated e-book marketplace. They want people to buy iPads! The more people reading e-books, the more people buying e-books, and Amazon is surely hard at work getting exclusive content and sweetheart deals with publishers.

The upward march of Android version numbers and the release of Chrome OS devices may give us some insight to the reading platform over time, but for the moment, it appears to be a web-bound service, perhaps best explained to wary consumers as a Gmail for your e-books. I can’t say I’m particularly attracted to such a thing, though it’s too early to trouble ourselves much about it, since not only is it unlaunched, but will likely still be raw when it goes live. We’ll assess it separately once a product is actually available. And if you’re wondering whether this affects which e-reader you should get the spouse, the answer is no, not really. No need to find a replacement gift.

There is also the question of cross-compatibility with other services. You may as well ask about the availability of personal unicorns for your cloud chariot. These services are fighting tooth and nail to keep books within their ecosystems, and it’ll be a while before official drag-and-drop support between the majors will be permitted. Technical issues also abound: while I read Google Books PDFs on my iPad all the time, the images are encoded with JPEG 2000, which isn’t supported by iOS, and so huge portions of my collection of The Gentleman’s Magazine turn up blank (pro tip: resaving the PDF in Preview fixes this). Shame on Apple for not supporting this image format — but I digress. The point is that technical standards will need to be addressed as well as digital rights and such.

The Google Editions news comes on the heels of a major announcement by Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers, to the effect that they’ve worked out their long-running issues and will be cooperating on the service. The details of the announcement can be found here and here; the gist seems to be that the key players have agreed to whatever revenue sharing, donations, legal rights, and so on were desirable in exchange for Google access to their content. Now that the hurly-burly is done, Google can launch with confidence.

It’s too late for Google to take advantage of the holidays, I’m afraid, though we can probably expect a soft launch later this month. Indeed, it would be fair to say it has already launched, since many of the terms, details, and policies have already been published. We’ll certainly be hearing more over the next few months, though, as Google makes its device and platform strategies more clear.