Online ad spending is expected to grow nearly 14 percent this year in the U.S. to $25.8 billion, according to a revised forecast by eMarketer. Its last forecast in May projected about 11 percent growth to $25.1 billion. The market research firm also expects U.S. online advertising to keep growing at double-digit rates through 2014, when it estimates the total will reach $40.5 billion.

Obviously, these estimates are moving targets, and will be revised again, but they do give a sense of where expectations lie today. eMarketer arrives at its numbers by looking at other research estimates and coming up with its own meta-estimate. As a percentage of total media spending, the online component will grow from 15.3 percent in 2010 to 21.5 percent in 2014 (based on total media spending of $168.5 billion in 2010 and $188.5 billion in 2014).

Lump in the burgeoning growth of Groupon-style local advertising , and these estimates could end up looking too low. Below is a chart of eMarketer’s estimates from May for comparison:

Much has already been written about how Loopt was perhaps a bit too early to the location game for their own good. But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there still trying new things to keep their over 4 million users and entice new ones to join. The latest such effort is Loopt 4.0, their latest mobile app.

The first thing you’ll notice about Loopt 4.0 is that it has been entirely redesigned. More importantly, the app has been significantly simplified, to clean up the user experience. On the main screen you can now quickly jump to five areas: Me, Settings, Places, Friends, and Map. The last three are the most important because that’s where you will check-in and see where your friends are.

Below the core buttons is an area to be able to quickly toggle auto location sharing on and off. This is a core feature that is unique to Loopt among the big location players (besides Latitude, which only has this feature). Here, you can easily turn background location updates on or off. And you can determine which of your friends you want to allow to see these updates. Essentially, this allows you to let others track you in realtime — no check-in needed.

Loopt also has the nice feature of being able to automatically update when you a friend is nearby.

If the design of the new Loopt looks familiar to you, it’s probably because you frequently use the Facebook iPhone app. Like version 3.0, Loopt 4.0 borrows some elements from that, including the new Notifications bottom bar.

Speaking of Facebook, much more important is the way in which Loopt integrates with Facebook Connect. When you link your account, you’ll see all of your Facebook friends who are currently using Places. Their check-ins there will integrate seamlessly into your Loopt stream, and sit alongside your Loopt friends. And when you check-in on Loopt, it can easily be passed back to Places (as well as Twitter).

You’ll recall that the latest version of Gowalla, also has this tight Facebook Places integration. They also have Foursquare integration, but Loopt hasn’t enabled that. Instead, they’re betting heavily that Facebook will be the location platform of the future, it seems.

One other really interesting feature of the new Loopt is the new Ping/Pong feature. Previously, you could Ping a friend to ask them to update their location. But now you can send a message alongside that ping. When they see that message, they can Pong you back with their location. Essentially, this is a location-based simple texting system.

Loopt 4.0 also makes it easier to see what the hot places are around you and to see what deals are close by to your current location.

So is all of this enough to keep Loopt in the equation? The bet on Facebook is a pretty big one here, but it’s not a bad one. And with features like background location and the location-based texting, they’re certainly adding something on top of the layer.

But Loopt, like the other players, may find it hard to compete with Facebook in the deals space as Facebook ramps that up in the coming months. Can all of them keep their sales teams around when competitors start using Facebook deals through an inevitable API?

That’s a question for Loopt 5.0, perhaps.

You can find Loopt in the App Store here. (It should be live now, even if it says it’s the old version.) Find out more in the video below.

This appears to be a “viral video” for SayHiToSpace with whois records pointing to a server in Russia. While the Waterjet they use is pretty incredible, I love the guy who who steps right up to Steve at the end and asks “Where is the camera!” In a few years he’ll be an excellent I AM DISSAPOINT stand-in.

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“You wanna know what the mother of all bubbles was? Us. The human race.”

That’s Gordon Gekko in the distinctly-mediocre Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

This weekend brought a rush of stories about a “bubble” that may or may not be re-inflating in Silicon Valley. The New York Times kicked it off, venture capitalist Fred Wilson (who is featured prominently in the story) quickly responded, and then Newsweek weighed in just to make sure the “Bubble 2.0″ moniker was secure. Uh oh, right? Not so fast.

One giant nugget of information in the NYT piece (co-written by TechCrunch alum Evelyn Rusli) is a bit buried:

For starters, this is not a stock market bubble. None of the companies are publicly traded.

In other words, if this “bubble” were to pop, it wouldn’t be the mothers and fathers of the world hoping to put their children through school who would be getting screwed. It would be the private investors. It would be a handful of (mostly) rich people who would be out of some of their money.

I suppose the employees of the collapsing startups could also be screwed somewhat. But they’d undoubtedly find work again quickly. And the founders would start new companies. Just like after the first bubble.

Business Insider has a good rundown of the actually public tech companies — you know, the kind mom and pop can and do actually invest in. The consensus there? Pretty wonderful, actually. Not over-the-top outrageous, just very solid for the most part.

Now, that doesn’t mean a “Bubble 2.0″ couldn’t pop and adversely affect the overall ecosystem. In fact, I’m sure it would to some extent, mainly because less money coming in would mean less innovation across the board. But it wouldn’t cause everything to collapse.

We all just lived through a very real bubble. The housing bubble. The results of it popping almost completely brought down not only our own economy, but much of the world’s economy as well. Real people lost their life savings. People went to jail. More people should have been locked up forever. It’s almost insulting to mention this supposed new web bubble in the same breath as that.

Again, this “Bubble 2.0″, if it does exist, is mainly just troublesome for investors. Smaller angel investors, in particular, are getting squeezed out of deals because early stage valuations are getting ridiculously high in some cases.

Undoubtedly it’s true that some of those startups should not be accepting so much money at such valuations, but that’s on them. If they fail, it will be a lesson to other startups. Maybe the motto is: go big and go home (at least in the early stage).

Another underlying current here is that many private investors aren’t comfortable with the state of the startup ecosystem. And yet many of them continue to do deals that they may not be comfortable with. Again, that’s on them. They’re all doing due diligence. If they don’t think a deal is worth it, they obviously shouldn’t do it. But some don’t seem to be able to turn down their name being attached to a high-profile investment — even if projections on have it panning out to be a 2x exit. (The horror!)

Maybe some of them would actually be more comfortable investing in what Wilson calls “The Mess“. That is, startups in their awkward years. They’re neither new and sexy nor mature and money-making. Not surprisingly, no one seems to want to invest in those, besides current investors. But maybe those are where some deals are to be found.

In the press, there are two kinds of sexy stories to write: over-exuberance and death. We just got done with a week’s worth of over–exuberance surrounding the Google/Groupon deal. Holy shit, $6 billion dollars for a company that has only really been at it for a little over a year? That’s awesome! Let the good times roll.

The deal ultimately fell apart and in came the death stories. There needs to be balance in the world, after all. We know this just as well as anyone. The $6 billion Groupon deal made web investing as hot as the sun for a few days. And now it’s a bubble.

But wait. “Bubble 2.0″ has existed before. Here it is in 2005 — with Wilson worrying about some of the same things he’s still worried about. And here it is again in 2007 — with John Dvorak worrying that social media among other things would pop the bubble. And wasn’t it for sure a bubble later that year when Microsoft invested in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation? I was sure I heard that over and over and over again. Turns out, that was a pretty damn awesome investment, strategic or not.

There are dozens of other examples as well.

So maybe this is actually “Bubble 4.0″ or “Bubble 5.0″. Or maybe it’s not a big bubble at all. After all, if it pops and gum gets over only a few faces, will anyone do anything other than point and laugh, then go on with their lives?

[image: 20th Century Fox]

For the last few days we’ve been using the Google Nexus S, manufactured by Samsung, with the new Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” operating system. This is a phone that was designed with direct input from the Google Android team. And like its predecessor, the Nexus One, which was released in January 2010, it has a “clean” install of Android. That means there is no additional software layer from third party OEMs or carriers to interfere with the user experience. Like the Nexus One, this will become the reference phone for this generation of Android.

Unlike the Nexus One, the phone was not built from scratch – the starting point was the Samsung Galaxy S, released earlier this year. And Google will not be selling this phone directly to consumers. They say that experiment is over, and this phone will be available initially at Best Buy in the U.S. (on T-Mobile) and Carphone Warehouse in the U.K. Google says the phone is currently expected to be available starting December 16, although pre-orders might be taken earlier.

The phone does not fail to please. It is significantly faster than the Nexus One (and most current generation phones), has a high-end AMOLED 400 x 800 resolution screen that is second only to the iPhone 4, and is NFC-enabled. Like all Android phones it is dead simple to set up, assuming you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google contacts, etc. But it’s Google’s various apps, some of which are unavailable for the iPhone, that make it the best phone on the market today.

The phone has a sleeker design than the Nexus One, although its generic black plastic case doesn’t exactly scream for attention. The case also feels somewhat cheap, unlike the solid feel of the iPhone and some previous Android phones. But it is very thin and light – just 4.55 ounces (slightly heavier than the Galaxy S). The phone’s dimensions are 63mm x 123.9mm x 10.88mm (slightly thicker, taller and wider than the iPhone 4, and with a larger screen). It is significantly svelter than the EVO or the Droid X, previous generation Android phones that we thought were too bulky.

Hardware:

The Nexus S uses the 1 GHz Hummingbird processor, which absolutely zooms and also seems to handle running multiple apps and background processes well compared to previous Android devices we’ve used. The 4 inch Super AMOLED 480×800 touchscreen has very deep blacks and viewing angles and is, as we said above, second only to the slightly smaller but higher resolution iPhone 4 display.

Battery life is good – much, much better than the dismal HTC EVO. We’ve been getting 6+ hours of heavy voice/data usage on the removable 1500 mAh Lithium Ion battery. Google’s official specs are up to 400 minutes of talk time on 3G, 841 minutes on 2G, and standby time of 428/714 hours on 3G/2G. That may be somewhat enthusiastic, but battery life is certainly not a big problem compared to other devices we’ve used this year.

The phone has both a rear facing 5 megapixel camera, with a flash, as well as a VGA front facing camera. Both performed well. The phone also has a gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, proximity sensor, haptic feedback and a light sensor. It comes with 16 GB of internal flash memory; there is no expansion slot.

Wifi, GPS and bluetooth all behaved flawlessly.

And, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted at during Web 2.0 Summit,  the Nexus S has Near Field Communication (NFC) built in — a new feature that Gingerbread adds support for.  At this point you probably won’t have many reasons to have it activated (you can shut it off to preserve battery), but NFC is likely to prove very important over the next couple years. Eventually, the technology will allow you to use your phone in place of a credit card by simply tapping the phone against special sensors in retail stores. NFC will also allow for phones to swap data between each other with a minimal amount of hassle, as soon as developers add support for that (the Nexus S chip supports both read and write operations). This is basically future-proofing the phone, and a year from now I expect that most Android phones (and likely iPhones) will be shipping with NFC.

Google’s noise cancellation software is also present. When combined with the excellent audio hardware it results in very high quality calls. In test calls from my car the recipient said they heard very little background noise – the iPhone in particular performed terribly in a similar test.

So far, not one dropped call.

Software:

We’ve been a big proponent of using Android phones along with Google Voice and other Google apps. It makes setup of a new phone very easy – a minute or two at most – and we both continue to use our existing Google Voice phone numbers for inbound and outbound phones. The Nexus S comes with the Google Voice app pre-installed, saving additional minutes.

But the main event is Gingerbread operating system, which comes installed on the phone. No, the UI hasn’t seen a ground-up redesign (that’s coming in Honeycomb), but it’s improved in a lot of small ways, like the switch from a drab gray to a black notification bar (which actually helps save battery).

It comes with old crowd-pleasers like the on-the-fly creation of Wi-Fi hotspots. And Google has also iterated on the user interface, particularly the keyboard. It’s not as polished as the iPhone, but text entry is significantly faster than previous Android phones, with less errors. It is also much better at predicting words, and copy-and-paste has been improved as well. If the iPhone is 8/10 on text input, the Nexus One is probably 5/10 and the Nexus S is a solid 6/10.

Gingerbread also supports VoIP/SIP calling.

Best of all, of course, is the fact that the Nexus S is a clean install of Android, and a pure Google experience. There is no messy third-party software to muck things up.

The Nexus S Experience:

We can write all day about a phone, but the real test with us is whether we continue to use it after a post. The EVO and the Droid X were quickly forgotten for us. Michael tested the iPhone 4 but its lack of point to point navigation and unwillingness to play well with Google Voice made him ultimately give it up after a month and move back to the Nexus One (Google Voice has finally made it to the iPhone, but it isn’t as deeply integrated into the OS as on Android, and probably never will be). The Nexus S will almost certainly be his go-to phone for the next few months. Michael is leaving today for a week in Europe, and taking only this phone with him. The fact that it’s unlocked means he can add a sim card once he is in Paris and continue to use it without extravagant additional charges.

Google’s voice search/input applications and Google Navigation continue to make Android phones in general significantly better mobile devices than the iPhone. Conversely, Google continues to flail on media, and the device is not any better than previous Android phones at dealing with stored music. That’s why Michael will also be bringing an iPad to Europe, which integrates perfectly with iTunes.

The bottom line is this. If you are an iPhone user this isn’t going to make you switch. If you’re an Android user you will want this phone more than any other. If you’re currently neither, we recommend that you go with the Nexus S. It is better than the iPhone in most ways. What you lose with the slightly less impressive screen and iOS’s slightly slicker user experience you will more than make up for with the Nexus S’s ability to actually make phone calls that don’t drop and Google’s exceptional Navigation and voice input applications. The fact that the phone is unlocked and can be used abroad with other carriers is also a very big plus.

Seesmic, the realtime social web aggregator, is announcing a new version of its popular Android app today that includes a UI makeover, Salesforce Chatter integration, and other improved functionality.

Salesforce Chatter, the company’s social networking application for the enterprise, can now be integrated into Seesmic’s Android app, allowing users to read their Chatter feeds, comment, view groups, contacts, profiles and post updates from the app. You can also cross-post updates to and from Twitter back into a Chatter account.

The UI of the app now includes a “common actions” area at the top right of every screen, including the composer and refresh actions. Seesmic has also made Tweeting easier by adding an autocomplete of friends usernames feature on Twitter. And when you attach photos and videos to messages, you can tap an “attachment count” button to see all the photos and videos you attached, as well as their size.

Another new Twitter feature in the new version of the app is the ability to see full, threaded conversations between yourself and the person you’re replying to. And the startup has added new language functionality to the Android app, with versions in Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Korean, and Polish.

One of the bonuses to using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of other social web services, like Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare, LinkedIn and others. Seesmic had previously added Chatter to its other applications, but the Android app now has a link to the enterprise.

Just about every month for a while now there have been rumors about how much sense it would make for Yahoo and AOL (which owns TechCrunch) to merge. Reuters today brought it up again in a long article. They clearly have some unnamed sources, probably an investment banker and maybe an AOL exec, to fill in some of the details. But they don’t seem to understand the real mess that would need to be sorted out before a deal could happen, and some of their analysis is just wrong.

I remember once back in my lawyer days when I was working on a big merger between two tech companies – Aol and Netscape. Netscape by then no longer had the luster it once had – Microsoft has castrated it with Internet Explorer and the company was clearly heading in the wrong direction with little chance for a turnaround. Well, whatever. We were just the lawyers, and this was a BFD. But I do remember asking a partner why the companies were merging. He told me the classic M&A line: “They’re tying two rocks together and hoping they’ll float.”

Everyone knows, of course, that rocks don’t float (unless they are very small rocks). But for some reason deals like this happen all the time. Whatever happens, keep doing things. And there’s nothing like a big marriage to get everyone’s mind off the bad news.

I’m not saying that either AOL or Yahoo are “rocks” and doomed to die. But I don’t think that tying them together makes much sense anyway. Both companies need to be thinking about the long term as well as the quarterly financial results. And ten years from now, a merged YAOLoo won’t be in any better position to compete than if they remained separate companies.

Both companies have big challenges. AOL still relies on its dial up business as sort of a huge ATM machine. It costs virtually nothing to run it and hundreds of millions of dollars in free cash flow comes in every quarter. They (we) have to make sure that there is a viable business in place by the time that ATM machine runs dry. We have a clear strategy. Create lots and lots of original content under a number of independent brands, and sell advertising into that content. And continue to swim upstream on the homepage/portal stuff and related services while knowing full well that the younger you are, the less likely you are to not be using Facebook or Google for all that. Will this strategy work? I sure as hell hope so.

Yahoo’s different. They’re still completely in the portal/homepage world. They talk about social but they’ve failed to do anything meaningful there despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested over the last few years. They’ve effectively surrendered—most of the product and engineering people working on social products will be let go in the upcoming layoffs, we hear from sources close to Yahoo. What Yahoo’s interested in right now is cutting costs dramatically while pretending to still be a cutting edge tech company.

AOL is spending and experimenting. Yahoo is saving and cutting back. Which is the best strategy? I don’t know, but I do know that you can’t do both. Another reason why merging isn’t a great idea.

Then there’s Yahoo’s stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba. Those stakes are worth a lot, and they can’t be sold without a lot of taxes being paid. Those assets work like a poison pill for Yahoo, making it nearly impossible for private equity firms to make a hostile takeover attempt pencil out on paper. Unless Yahoo willingly disposes of those assets a deal isn’t really possible. And my guess is Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz isn’t about to dispose of the one thing that’s keeping her in charge of an independent public company. Yahoo would have been torn apart long ago if not for that poison pill.

Everyone at Yahoo I’ve spoken with says they don’t have any intention of entertaining buyout offers from AOL right now. And everyone at AOL that I’ve spoken with say that there’s only mild interest at AOL of making it happen. It’s the investment banks that are pushing hard for this, eager to make a commission on a huge public/public merger.

And that, in the end, is all we have. A story being pushed by investment banks and eagerly lapped up by the press. I don’t see this deal happening, no matter how happy I’d be to see the once great Yahoo freed of the Kryptonite chains of Carol Bartz.

Google today unveiled its long-rumored entry into the e-book sales world, not called Google Editions, as was previously speculated, but a more anonymous-sounding Google eBooks. The basic idea is to provide an entirely web-based e-book platform accessible from any device with a browser. The business model they’ve opted for is slightly less centralized than the competition, but not quite the distributed seller network I envisioned last week.

My wool-gathering regarding the decentralization of the e-book store model are all in that post, so we’ll just focus on the particulars of eBooks service for now.

One quick note: I’m going to continue to use the term “e-book,” though the service has opted to drop the hyphen. Like so many new tech-related phrases, the word and its relatives have yet to settle into a single standardized form.

The eBooks service, then, works in any Webkit-compatible browser. The reader itself is built in Java, and will be accessible on mobile devices via the browser or the standalone apps — the Android app should be available now, and the iOS app will be so soon.

They’re launching with the support of around either 4,000 or 35,000 publisher partners, depending on how you count. 4,000 is the figure for the US launch, but internationally, they’re working with the remainder of that figure for a predicted 1Q 2010 launch. All the major publishers are signed on and will be providing a total of around 300,000 in-copyright works, mostly likely including anything you could buy new at any other bookstore.

They also are proud to be working with university, academic, textbook, and professional publishers whose works are harder to come by. They’ve worked out deals with the American Booksellers Association, Powell’s, and Alibris as well. By way of a shortcut, I asked if there were any major associations or publishers that Google had not included in at least a basic partnership, and they said no. And of course there is the immense library of public domain works, over two and a half million at the moment, which swells the total Google eBooks count to around three million.

GoodReads is their first (and only, at launch) “affiliate network” partner; eBooks services will be tied into the social reading site and revenue will be split three ways. On that topic, the revenue splitting scheme is divided into several categories. The major publishers will be taking 70% of the list price, others will be taking 52%, and the many independent bookstores and publishers Google has negotiated with have their own undisclosed rates.

I’m surprised Google is grabbing at so much of the list price; for a company that makes billions off of high-volume, low-value transactions, the choice to take half of every sale is puzzling. I would have guessed that they’d play a ten-year game, betting on e-books becoming such a high-volume market that Google could afford to only take 25% or even less of every transaction, encouraging use of their service over the competition. But what do I know?

As for the self-publishing utopia I pictured earlier, that’s not quite in the cards yet. I had a vision of a sort of behind-the-scenes Google store, visible only in an embeddable purchase widget. They say they’re working on something like this, but for launch, purchases will take place at the eBooks site itself.

The reader itself is, as you might expect, a straightforward affair, in the usual Google style. There are some resolution and style differences between the platforms, but they’re similar for the most part. You’ve got your “shelf” view, presumably where you start off, where you can search your books or all e-books. Then you’ve got your reading view, with a nice search/highlight function and all the usual customization options. Your position in each book (and presumably any notes or bookmarks you add when that capability is available) are synced between devices, and you can pick up on your phone where you left off on your computer.

The team is especially proud of the page numbering scheme they use, which displays not the “virtual” page number, which would change every time you resized the text, but the actual print page number from that edition. If you have the text set to very small, it will read “pages 150-155″ or something. Though the relevance of printed page numbers is decreasing, it’s a nice compromise. The team also noted that the reader interface has gone through four full versions via internal testing, so it’s not going to be (I feel they were implying) as raw as some Google products have been at launch. Good to know.

For e-books that require DRM, Google is using ACS4, though that is only for storing and displaying the books on devices that use that format. Copyrighted books bought from Google will be able to be readable on ACS4-compatible devices, a category which unfortunately does not include the Kindle or Nook, to my knowledge.

We’ll follow up this post with our impressions of the service, reader apps, and so on as soon as we’ve had a little time to evaluate them. Of course, you can also check it now for free, if you’re in the US, and share your impressions in the comments.

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FleetMatics, a Boston-based provider of GPS tracking applications for commercial fleets, this morning announced that it has closed a massive $68 million growth equity financing round. Late-stage investor Institutional Venture Partners invested in conjunction with Investcorp Technology Partners, FleetMatics' majority owner. New World Ventures also participated as a new investor. FleetMatics provides GPS vehicle tracking applications around the world - the company says over 12,500 businesses currently use its on-demand vehicle management solutions.

Music recognition and discovery service Shazam has reached somewhat of a milestone today: growing its user base to 100 million, of which 25 million users were added in the past six months. At first glance that sounds pretty impressive, though not entirely surprising. Back in May we reported that the ten-year old London-based 'startup' had grown its user base from 50 million to 75 million members in the previous six months, and that its service had identified more than one billion songs to date. Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher predicted at the time that the company would hit the 100 million member mark by the end of this year and today he was sort-of proved right. However, these aren't necessarily active users just those that have tried the app. So take that as you may.

Netflix is currently the big dog of the movie streaming game but offerings from several established companies might put up a bit of fight. Amazon and Onlive are both said to be working on a similar service, but let’s kill something straight away. These are not Netflix killers, m’kay? Just because a massive entity such as Amazon or a lively start-up as Onlive decides to wet their feet in a different space doesn’t mean the current swimmers need to watch for shit in the pool right away. Netflix’s storied success should gently lead these companies and others into the deep end and not the very effective sink or swim method Netflix experienced years ago.

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Sweepstakes giant Publishers Clearing House this morning announced that it has acquired branded games developer and publisher Funtank along with its casual online gaming site Candystand.com.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

According to the news release, Candystand.com is host to some 11 million users on a monthly basis.

The site has recently expanded its presence to the mobile and social gaming space with the release of games for iPhone, iPad, PSP and Facebook.

Funtank will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Publishers Clearing House and maintain its current offices in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. The company will also continue to be led by co-founders, James Baker and Scott Tannen.

Online gaming site Candystand.com was originally launched back in 1997, and was acquired by Funtank from Wrigley in 2008.

With the acquisition, Publishers Clearing House hopes to strengthen its presence in the casual gaming business, enhance its advertising offerings and attempt to reach whole new audiences on the Web and through social and mobile platforms.

Tomorrow, Google is hosting a Chrome event in San Francisco for the media. While they won’t say exactly what it’s about, it seems likely that both the Chrome Web Store and Chrome OS will make an appearance. But no shortage of bug reports in the open source code area make me wonder if the latter is sort of a rush-job.

Since they first unveiled Chrome OS to the world last year, Google has said that they wanted to release it this year. And despite some talk of delays, Google reiterated recently that they would indeed have something to show this year. But they would not say if such a product would be in beta form — even though there are many indications in the aforementioned bug reports that indicate that will be the case. And some of those bug reports are a little worrisome.

Further, a report from a few days ago in Engadget had the following to say about netbooks based on Chrome OS:

Again, we’ve heard that the Atom-powered laptop isn’t going to be a mass market device — there will only be around 65,000 units available to Google’s closest “friends and family” — and that the Cloud-based OS is still very much in a beta, non-consumer-friendly state.

So is Google simply rushing the product out there to technically meet their promised 2010 deadline? They had also originally named a number of OEM partners at the launch. But it would appear that this first iteration will be a Google-branded netbook produced by one of the partners (codenamed “Mario” perhaps?), while other units will have to wait until 2011.

Simply scan this page to find any number of bugs currently hampering Chrome OS leading up to tomorrow’s launch. Many are minor UI elements, but plenty are not-so-minor software/hardware problems as well, it seems. For example, check out this report by a Google employee two days ago:

I become mad with rage because the trackpad is so flaky. Sometimes it loses a click, ending a drag somewhere in the middle. Sometimes it decides that I clicked even though my fingers aren’t even close to the trackpad. Sometimes the mouse cursor jumps around randomly.

That’s not good. He continues to say that “The trackpad is way way better than it used to be, but it’s still very hard to use.” As of yesterday, Google had yet to address this issue.

It’s not clear from the report if it’s just one type of machine affected, but the latter quote would seem to suggest that it’s a wider issue. Further, while the report didn’t state the exact device in the correct place, it does note that it’s a “dev x86-mario” machine, likely the one we’re going to see tomorrow, running the latest build of Chrome OS.

And there’s more. According to this bug, as of today, sync isn’t working. This is a vital feature to the whole OS, obviously. Here’s an issue with the power button. Here’s a pretty big cellular/wifi switching issue. Here’s a system update bug. A battery calculation problem. The list goes on and on.

Now, obviously the open-source nature of Chrome OS gives people like me a huge peek into issues I wouldn’t normally see if say a Windows manufacturer or Apple was about to launch a machine. But some of these alongside the various reports of the system launching in early beta mode do have me concerned.

And it’s fine if Google only intends for these machines to go to “friends and family”, but presumably some members of the press are going to get their hands on them as well (we’ll be there tomorrow, for example). Certainly Google has to know that if the machines aren’t up to snuff, journalists are going to call that out.

But maybe Google is confident enough in the big-picture idea of Chrome OS. That is, an OS that is only the web browser, none of that other clutter. An OS that you can sign in to from anywhere and from any machine (with Chrome OS, of course) and have access to all of your stuff. Maybe they just mean tomorrow to be an early taste of what to expect from the OS. And if that’s the case, expect them to reiterate that over and over again. “This is just a test.”

Or perhaps they’ll just make some last minute executive decisions to kill off certain features that aren’t working yet. Clearly, that has already been going on behind the scenes as you can also see in the bug reports. But some of the hardware/software issues will definitely need to be resolved, not pushed.

A lot has changed in the past year since Google first gave us the rundown of Chrome OS. Netbook sales have cooled, the iPad has come into existence, and Android has exploded in popularity. Oh and the key architect of the entire Chrome OS project, Matthew Papakipos, left Google over the summer — for a job at Facebook.

At the time, Google said not to read into that too much, that they have a very deep bench of talent. That’s undoubtedly true, but given the current landscape, Chrome OS needs to be polished at launch, not tarnished.

Juniper Networks this morning announced it has acquired Altor Networks, a provider of virtualization security technology, for $95 million in cash. Juniper says the acquisition will allow the company to deliver a robust, integrated security architecture that protects both physical and virtual systems.

Huzzah and alarums! Apple’s in-store signage is pointing to a Spring 2011 arrival of the legendary white iPhone, a device fraught with so much mystery that it is now akin to the dangerous yet loyal pink unicorn of ancient myth.

As you recall, production problems plagued white iPhone manufacturing (mostly because the button, back, and front weren’t the same color) but Apple’s team of scientists have cracked the riddle and are now setting their sights on less important breakthroughs like curing those weird white things that end up in your mouth sometimes and taste horrible when you bite them and, additionally, creating a new form of Trucoat that isn’t too expensive and can be applied by the consumer at home.

Read more…

Venture capital database VentureDeal has just released its quarterly funding report, which takes a look at the investments in the world of the Web, digital media, software and ecommerce. During the Q3 of 2010, VentureDeal reports that 343 companies raised $1.8 billion in venture capital funding which is down 14% in total funding versus Q2 of 2010 and down 6% in the number of companies funded.

Three of the four sectors showed a decrease in funding amounts and the number of companies funded. Only the Software sector showed an increase in funding amounts, jumping 19% in terms of actual investment amount.

Internet

Internet sector company fundings reversed their previous quarterly increase by registering a dollar percentage decrease of 18%. The sector received $774 million in venture capital funding during the quarter allocated among 167 companies – a decrease of 2% in the number of companies funded.

Textbook rental giant Chegg secured the largest round of the quarter, receiving $75 million in new funding. Service provider Angie’s List garnered $22.5 million during the quarter. In the early development stage, more than 30 companies received series A financing rounds for a total of $200 million resulting in an average of $6.7 million per disclosed round.

Digital Media

The Digital Media sector, which VentureDeal identifies as either video/casual game developers or ad networks, posted a decreased in both total amounts funded and the number of companies funded. Total funding decreased quarter over quarter by 69% to $128 million, with 32 companies being funded, a decrease of 22% versus the previous quarter.

Notable raises for the quarter include Brand Affinity Technologies ($20 million) and Aurora Feint ($5 million).

eCommerce

Investments in the eCommerce sector also decreased for the quarter with 8 companies receiving a total of $39 million in funding, a decrease of 50% in financing amounts versus the previous quarter's tally. Notable raises in the market include WePay ($7.5 million).

Software

Software company saw the largest investments for the quarter, raising $847 million between 136 companies. This was an increase of 19% in total funding amount and a
decrease of 6% in the number of companies funded.

The average round size registered increased from $4.8 million in Q2 2010 to $6.2 million in the current quarter, a growth of 29%.

On demand contact automation manager Contact Solutions raised the largest round in the quarter ($46 million); followed by application testing startup uTest with $13 million in new funding.

Shoutlet, provider of a social media management platform, this morning announced it has raised $6 million in Series B funding.

The investment was led by (customer) American Family Insurance, and adds to $3.2 million in previous funding.

The startup’s original backers, Origin Ventures and Leo Capital Holdings, both participated in the new round.

Shoutlet’s centralized platform boasts Facebook and Twitter management, Social CRM, and widget building capabilities for companies to leverage promotions, coupons and sweepstakes and streamline social media outreach through a single interface.

Additionally, the platform enables mobile marketing, social commerce and real-time campaign analytics.

WYGU (When You Grow Up) has launched as a "Facebook for careers advice" - that's their words not mine - and offers a mix of "social careers guidance", development and e-mentoring. It's founded by Alun Baker and is backed by £350,000 of Angel funding, which Baker says he's matched. The UK site's noble aim is to help people avoid the trappings of what WYGU calls an "accidental career", a familiar situation for many whereby they fall into a particular job or career without it being something that they're passionate about but, ultimately, end up being stuck doing.

DiJiPOP, which markets an on-demand shopper marketing technology platform, this morning announced that it has raised $1 million more, bringing its total to $2 million.

The investment round was led by Bill Cesare, who led the company’s initial investment round in late 2009.

Others participating in the round include Angel Street Capital and unnamed private investors.

DiJiPOP was launched just over a year ago out of Betaspring, a Rhode-Island based tech startup incubator. The company employs 9 people, including executive team members, and plans to use the funding to ramp up sales and marketing efforts and product development.

DiJiPOP’ basically aims to automate the digital shopper marketing process, enabling retailers to run both paid and non-paid marketing programs on their ecommerce websites.

The startup’s on-demand platform lets retailers dynamically create product ads and manage, analyze and optimize campaigns in real time.

SAP certified partner Taulia, provider of a "Dynamic Discounting" platform for corporations using SAP, announced this morning that it raised $3.2 million in financing from new investors ncluding Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. Previous backers such as The Angels' Forum also participated in the round. The company says the freshly secured capital will be used to expand its sales teams in the United States and Europe.

Boy does it suck to be Tumblr right now. The blogging service has been down for roughly half a day (yes, that would be 12 13 14 15 hours) now, due to a “major issue in one of its database clusters”. There are no more details available at this point, and a request for more information wasn’t immediately responded to.

Tumblr’s many users are understandably very frustrated and taking to Twitter and Facebook to voice their displeasure – some of them went to bed last night around the time the service went down and woke up this morning to see their beloved blogs are still not available.

Of course, technical difficulties are part of the game, and Twitter has proven that even unreliable services can maintain a growing user base if the value for the users remains apparent. But I don’t think even Twitter has ever been down for more than 12 hours.

Tumblr may be a free service, but these days, that’s not nearly enough to calm the mob.

Or as one user eloquently put it in the comment section below: “TUMBLR. Y U NO WORK.”

Meanwhile, Tumblr is raising a ton of money – we’re hearing tens of millions of dollars at a $120 million to $150 million pre-money valuation – as they prepare to hire a bunch more people to staff its brand new New York offices.

By the looks of it, they desperately need to.

Update from founder David Karp:

Some scheduled maintenance yesterday that wasn’t intended to interrupt service went haywire and wound up taking down a critical database cluster.  Rebuilding the entire cluster has been a painfully slow and manual process, but we’re almost through.  We’ll be posting a recap when we’re back up.

Was Groupon crazy to turn down Google’s $6 billion offer, or will it be worth several times that amount a few years from now? Of course, it is impossible to know right now. But if the recent acquisition dance between Google and Groupon tells us anything, it is that local advertising is going to drive a huge amount of growth on the Web—and that it is not going to look like other forms of online advertising.

Google wants to buy Groupon not just for its phenomenal growth—Groupon is selling coupons for local merchants at a rate of $2 billion a year now—but also because Groupon follows a pay-for-performance model. Groupon only makes money when somebody buys a coupon, just like Google only makes money when somebody clicks on an ad. Groupon has cracked the code for getting local businesses to spend marketing dollars online. And increasingly, those businesses are going to choose between spending those dollars on Groupon versus on Google.

You might not think of Groupon as an advertising company, but the way most merchants rationalize offering such deeply discounted deals (typically 30 to 50 percent off) is they treat it as a marketing expense. It is a proven way to get new people into their stores, spas and restaurants. Maybe they lose money that first visit, but it is the cost to gain a new customer. Those dollars come out of their marketing budgets, which are often tight.

When it comes to local businesses, Google and Groupon are competing for the same dollars, and they are both trying to steal dollars from the yellow pages, billboards, and newspapers. The tens of billions of dollars spent in local offline advertising dwarfs the amount spent online. To the extent that a local business is advertising online at all, it can buy search keywords or it can entice new customers by offering them discounts through Groupon. This new form of online-to-offline advertising is really catching on and Google wants to have its hand in all online advertising. Local could be a huge growth area for Google.

The key to this business, however, is who controls the inventory of deals. Groupon generates these deals through its large local salesforce, distribution partnerships with other sites, and now also by letting businesses create their own self-serve deals. The more inventory of deals it can control and generate, the more ways it can figure out how to distribute these deals. (Imagine a future local ad network for mobile apps filled with Groupon offers, as just one example).

Of course, Google can introduce its own daily deal ad units, and hire a few thousand local sales people to drum up the deals, or just make it all self-serve—probably for a lot less than $6 billion. But it would take time, and Google might not get it right.

Meanwhile, Groupon will keep growing, along with the hundreds of clones following in its wake. You would think with so many clones, this would be a very competitive market, but there really aren’t many meaningful players. Even the gap between Groupon and the No. 2 daily deal site, LivingSocial, is significant—Groupon is at least two to four times as large.

The question is: How big can it get?

Logo illustration by Sean MacEntee

Hertz Rent A Car is set to offer electric vehicles at an hourly rate starting December 15th in New York City, with expansion of the service to San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, up to 50 college campuses in North America, and markets in Texas and China by the end of 2011.

For what it calls the ConnectByHertz “car sharing” service in Manhattan, the company aims to make 20 electric vehicles (EVs) available by the second quarter of 2011. In total throughout the U.S. next year, Hertz plans to have 500 to 1,000 all-electric cars available.

The number of EVs that Hertz purchases for its rent-by-the-hour fleets will depend upon the availability of the cars, many of which have not begun to ship yet the company’s head of communications, Rich Broome, said Sunday.

Hertz has committed to purchase: the Nissan Leaf, the Mistubishi i-MiEV, the Chevy Volt, and electric cars from Coda and Smart, Broome verified.

The company will work with a variety of charging station makers, EV manufacturers and electric utilities to ensure there are enough chargers available to drivers where Hertz rents EVs and plug-in hybrids.

Broome explained the company’s decision to invest in and promote EVs and the “car sharing” model:

We spend in the billions a year on our fleets, and only keep cars in [them] for eight to twelve months… chang[ing] them out before a service or maintenance issue ever comes up.

At the same time, we serve customers who need cars for all different reasons. They may be families on vacation together, or people on business by themselves, people who want to enjoy a luxury vehicle, others who want something more economical.

Offering EVs is a continuation of a trend for us, of diversity and being first to market with new and interesting models. We were the first [rental company] to offer the Prius.

Traditionally in the U.S., a mark of adulthood is owning a car. Those habits are changing in some places, especially cities and college campuses for some good reasons. They’re not just environmental but personal financial reasons. We can help people think around the question: do I really need to own a vehicle?

We want people to be able to try these new EVs out, for something around or less than $10 an hour. When they do, hopefully they’ll see the cars are fun to drive, they handle nicely, the braking is smooth and they have nice acceleration.

Clean energy catalyst, investor and serial entrepreneur, Jack D. Hidary— who was a cofounder of Vista Research, Dice.com and a co-architect of the federal Cash-For-Clunkers program— worked with Hertz to set up the new EV service.

Hidary told TechCrunch:

“This will be the first car sharing provider in the country with a scaled EV program. There have been small-scale tests of EVs, but nobody has said we're going to launch EVs into our mainstream fleet, in multiple cities around the world.

One thing that made this possible [for Hertz] today, is information technology. We have the digital commons. But there is an evolving ‘EV-commons,’ too. It includes the smart grid, and smart cars and information about where are the charging stations, are they available now or when will they become available.

That did not exist back when we saw the first EVs. Now you can look at a web app or a mobile app and see it easily as a consumer.

If you were interested in an EV before, you had to buy it and spend money on the charging station at home to drive a zero emissions vehicle.

Renting the EVs by the hour, and ensuring enough charging stations in those markets is a business model innovation. I see the business model innovation as something that is at least as important as the technological innovation.”

Another day – another year, actually – another airport. This time I’m at gate A11 at SFO waiting for my flight to London. My plan was to use the 10 hour flight to write a column about how I’m looking forward to seeing London again but how I’m depressed nervous at the idea of catching up with the state of the city’s tech entrepreneurial scene.

From what I’ve heard from Brit friends who have visited the Valley, it seems that London 2.0 has remained – at best – stagnant since I was last there twelve months ago. In some cases, comically so. This time last year, we were all eagerly anticipating the imminent US roll-out of Spotify – the next big UK-based startup that was going to change the world (see previously Bebo – subsequently killed by AOL – and Last.fm – now set in amber by CBS). Twelve months on and, uh, we’re all eagerly anticipating the imminent US roll-out of Spotiy. And that’s it. As far as I can tell, there’s almost nothing else out of London that’s making even the smallest blip on the rest of the world’s radar.

I was going to write a column about that sad fact. That and the acknowledgement that I’m probably completely wrong about it. How it’s far more likely that I’ve just been stuck in the Valley bubble for the past twelve months, and that, when I get back to the UK, I’ll quickly realize how exciting and vibrant everything really is there, and how many companies are on the verge of making it big.

Or at least that was my plan until about ten minutes ago when I realized two things. Firstly, that I’ve spent so much time traveling domestically in the US that I’d forgotten that international flights don’t offer Wifi; which makes writing and posting a column from 37,000 feet a little tricky. And secondly, that this exact time last year I was taking the same flight, with the same concerns about London 2.0 – and writing the exact same last-minute column about how I was hoping to be proved wrong by the reality on the ground. Spolier alert: I wasn’t proved wrong at all.

For both of those reasons, then – as they make the final call for my flight – I figure it might be a cynically fun idea to simply copy and paste what I wrote last year, with just a couple of adjustments [marked by brackets] to bring it up to date. You might call it laziness, I might call it an ironic underscoring of the depressing rut of London 2.0. Either way, here goes.

It’s depressing how few brackets I need.

…

I'm tired. Very tired. It's a little after 4am San Francisco time – noon GMT – and I'm sitting in the arrivals lounge Heathrow airport, thanking the lord for Boingo hotspots and trying to commit these few hundred words to cyberspace before the daylight finally penetrates my brain and my whole body goes into jet-lag meltdown.

And to think I was so organised 24 hours ago. My column was written – 1000 words on a big subject of the week; a big subject that I now can't talk about, for reasons I also can't talk about. Don't ask.

Still, I'm a professional and there's no use crying over spilt milk – I've spent five [six] pounds on a coffee, opened a fresh Google Document and am all set to write an alternative column on how happy I am to be back in London, and how excited I am for the opportunity to catch up with all the amazing and inspiring start-ups my erstwhile home has to offer.

But therein lies the problem. While I'm certainly happy to be here – it's my 30th [31st] birthday tomorrow, and there is a party planned – the truth is, I'm just not all that excited about London's current crop of dot com hopefuls.

When I moved to San Francisco at the start of the year, I promised myself I'd head back to the old country twice a year – mainly to keep my cynicism topped up and to make sure I didn't lose the accent that your American women find so endearing. But also for a third, more serious reason: I don't want to forget my roots. The London technology scene is where I cut my columnising teeth, and it's Brit entrepreneurs that first inspired me to try – and fail – my hand at building a start-up. Whereas Valley entrepreneurs point to Facebook and Google as their inspirations, mine came in the form of Moo, Last.fm and Bebo. Smaller fish perhaps, but each with a uniquely British vibe that somehow made them more fun; more human. Also – say what you like about San Francisco as a technology hub, but the London scene's parties shit all over the rest of the world.

But recently [last year] something has changed. I noticed it when I last visited back in June [2009] and, in what turned out to be my penultimate column for the Guardian, I  called time of death on London's start-up scene. Everyone was running out of money, I said, people were getting laid off in their droves, and all the real action is – as ever – in San Francisco. Two days later, Guardian Tech's freelance budget ran out of money, my column was laid off and I was hired by TechCrunch in San Francisco. QED.

And since then London has only become less relevant as a home for dynamic exciting start-ups. Take 'Silicon Roundabout'. Last year, Dopplr co-founder Matt Biddulph noticed that a number of high profile start-ups – including Moo, Last.fm, and of course Dopplr – were all based within walking distance of the old street roundabout in East London. He jokingly suggested that the region be renamed 'Silicon Roundabout'. Today the Old Street roundabout remains but Dopplr – and Biddulph – have left for Berlin, Last.fm is owned by CBS in New York and Moo has opened a US base of operations in Providence, Rhode Island. A similar story is true right across the Capital, with Bebo laying off almost all [all] of its local staff and countless other London 2.0 poster children looking to the US for money or a new base of operations. The idea that a company can thrive – or even survive – in London alone seems entirely implausible; ridiculous even.  Off the top of my head I can't think of a single exciting web business that has come out of the UK in the past six months. Spotify is the nearest candidate and that was created by Swedes.

Moreover, in the few short months since my last trip back home I've gone utterly native in my attitude towards my homeland. I see plenty of my Brit friends when they visit San Francisco, but rather than asking for news from the old country, I'm more likely to ask them when they're going to come to their senses and move to the Valley. I still visit TechCrunch Europe several times a week – Mike Butcher always does a solid job at covering what's going on over here – but even there I've noticed a curious change in my attitude to what I read. Where once I read TCEU through the eyes of a local – noting new companies and inwardly congratulating the latest Belgian company to secure funding – I now look at European technology news in the way American news channels cover foreign stories about escaped bears. Not to learn anything useful, but rather to amuse myself on how parochial foreigners can be. Oh, bless, the French have launched their own rival to Facebook. Ho ho ho.

Things have got so bad that I've even started to mentally turn on my friends who are still toiling away near Old Street. A couple of days ago, one such friend – who I won't name, sufficed to say he's CEO of a hot London start-up – emailed me an amazing screed in response to a post by one of my TC colleagues hyping a Valley-based rival. The thrust of my friend's complaint was that his company has been virtually ignored by TechCrunch.com even though TechCrunch Europe had hailed it as one of the continent's rising stars. This disparity he blamed on the fact that TechCrunch (US) is only interested in local companies, created by people who happen to be friends of our writers. Six months ago, I'd have agreed with him – I mean, there really no need for ten thousand Pandora stories for every Last.fm post, or four hundred Foursquare plugs for every mention of Rummble. But on reading my friend's email this week, my first response wasn't sympathy, but apathy. Mate – I thought – that's just the way it is. TechCrunch is based in San Francisco and so are most of the companies TechCrunch covers. Those are the rules of the game. If you don't like it, stop whining and get on a fucking plane.

But the fact is, my friend is right; and I'm wrong. There are hundreds of amazing technology companies outside of the Valley, many of which haven't taken a penny of American money and are making money hand over fist without a single San Francisco-based user. Just read a couple of Lacy's recent dispatches from India or China; or a week's worth of TechCrunch Europe posts and you'll see that's true. The problem – my problem – is that living in the Valley has it easy to forget, or care, about them. The skin of the bubble is just too thick and the voices from Europe (and beyond) just too faint and distant.

And so I've taken my own advice and got on a fucking plane. In the three weeks I'm in town, I'm planning to meet as many UK-based start-ups as possible, to keep half an eye on what comes out of LeWeb next week, to catch up with friends who are still doing cool things near Silicon Roundabout, to re-avail myself of the kick-ass social scene here – and above all to remind myself that the old country is still home to plenty of new thinking. And then at the end of the month, I'll return to the bubble – re-energised with cynicism and hopefully slightly less convinced that Foursquare represents the most important thing in the future of the world. I mean, everyone here knows that's Spotify.

But all that will have to wait until next week. I've got a birthday to have first – and right now I just need to get some sleep.

Hello [again] London. And goodnight.

comScore just released its weekly data regarding U.S. online spending for the first 33 days of the November and December holiday season and the numbers are still strong following record breaking Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales. To date, consumers have spent $16.8 billion online, a 12 percent increase from the same period last year.

The day after Cyber Monday, Tuesday, November 30; reached $911 million in online spending, making it the third heaviest online spending day on record. Wednesday ($868 million) and Thursday ($850 million) of last week also were strong e-commerce sales days as well.

comScore says that larger retailers are doing particularly well this season, with the growth in spending for the holiday season remaining primarily from the top 25 online retailers. These e-retailers have seen seen their total dollar sales grow 20 percent while small and mid-sized retailers’ sales have been flat. The top 25 retailers have gained 4.2 points of market share to a level of 67.8 percent since the 2009 holiday season.

The company also held a survey amongst consumers on the importance of social media in purchasing decisions. When 500 internet users were asked how much they agreed with the statement "Recommendations from friends on social media sites are a great way to get gift ideas during the holiday season," 33 percent agreed with the statement compared to 24 percent who disagreed (while 43 percent remained neutral).

While social media is definitely gaining ground as a place for product recommendations, the market is still young and has much more room to grow.

Of course, the rise in spending this year during the holidays isn’t all that surprising considering the slightly better conditions in the economy. And as more and more consumers look online for deals (as opposed to in brick and mortar stores), e-retail sales have risen as well. comScore predicted that total online spending for the season would increase 11 percent to $32.4 billion this year, so we still have $16 billion to go.