The Kinect is an impressive gaming accessory; no one is going to dispute that. But it’s the fact that the hardware is a $150 USB device that is so impressive that it warrants its own Wikipedia article:

” The device features an “RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software”,[21] which provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities…The Kinect sensor’s microphone array enables the Xbox 360 to conduct acoustic source localization and ambient noise suppression, allowing for things such as headset-free party chat over Xbox Live.”

Clearly, Microsoft hit a home run on this one.

The development community instantly latched onto the device and nearly immediately started working on mods, hacks, and shenanigans. The Kinect put up a bit of a fight at first with its locked down codebase, but a $3,000 bounty drew attention to the cause and someone ultimately cracked the code. Seeing how the Kinect is just over a month old, it’s ’bout we round up the best hacks so far and seriously, judging by the list of accomplishments done in just over 30 days, the Kinect will probably be playing us this time next year.

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It has now been two months since TechCrunch started seeing browsing traffic coming from the Google TV devices. Not surprisingly, this was just about the time of the Logitech Revue launch, the first official Google TV device. Google TV was going to be the device that finally heralded an age of browsing the web in your living room. So how’s it doing? Well, if browsing traffic to TechCrunch is any indication, not so hot.

We’ve already gone over why quick massive price cuts probably aren’t a good early sign for the platform. But the browsing stats we’re seeing are actually much more grim. Specifically, since the first devices started showing up in our logs two months ago, they’re coming in at number 18 on the list of top devices visiting TechCrunch. That’s one spot behind the Danger Hiptop, aka the Sidekick — a device that’s roughly eight years old.

Percentage-wise, Google TV is providing an amount of traffic that is statistically too small for Google Analytics to say anything beyond than it’s greater than 0.00 percent. Yep.

Now, before the apologists start whining, a few things. Yes, it’s obviously very early in Google TV’s lifespan. And yes, the product will undoubtedly get better. And yes, there will undoubtedly be more devices to come. And yes, perhaps the platform is more geared towards media content from the web that’s optimized for it — though that’s not looking too hot either. (And yes, it runs Android, but like the iPad with iOS, Google Analytics breaks it into a separate category.) But this still was supposed to be about bringing the Internet into your living room. And unless the device is selling to a demographic that aren’t the typical early-adopters that read TechCrunch — something which probably isn’t the case — it’s just not looking too good right now.

More likely is that people just aren’t doing a lot of typical web browsing from the device. And for good reason — it’s not very good for that. But again, that was part of the promise of the device. Surf the web, from your couch. Instead, it seems to just be: search for video that’s likely being blocked but can probably be found elsewhere on other devices, from your couch.

Further, other devices beyond the traditional PCs and laptops have been very good at introducing a new kind of web browsing experience. The iPhone, iPad, and Android devices are all sending a lot of browsing traffic our way on a daily basis. And it continues to grow each day.

When the iPad launched, we noted the huge browsing numbers it was sending our way. Some people thought this was a fluke, that people were simply testing out the device and browsing as sort of a novelty. But all these months later, the iPad remains the number four device when it comes to browsing TechCrunch. It’s behind only Windows machines, Mac machines, and the iPhone.

Perhaps more importantly, the browsing traffic coming from these devices have continued to go up as time has gone on. The Google TV? Not so much. Its single best day sending traffic to TechCrunch was on October 23. It’s been mainly trending downward since then. Though it did manage the pass the Danger Hiptop to become the number 17 device in the past 30 days. So that’s progress, I guess.

Shortly after Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange’s arrest in London today, rumors spread rapidly on Twitter that Assange had been removed from the Time magazine Person Of The Year poll.

It looks like the rumors got started when the @Anon_Operation Twitter account tweeted out a link to the wrong poll which got re-tweeted about a hundred of times, and the meme was passed on by influencers like Business Insider’s Henry Blodget and our very own John Biggs.

The @Anon_Operation account itself is affiliated with Anonymous, the Internet vigilante group responsible for voting 4Chan founder moot Time Person of the Year in 2009. It seems as though Anonymous’ subsequent campaign to drive Assange to the top of the list has been successful as the controversial figure is now at 251,202 votes, versus Steve Jobs at 20,767 and Mark Zuckerberg at 14,599.

Despite the Assange being in police custody until December 14th, the WikiLeaks Twitter account is still tweeting and more cables are apparently being released tonight. Along with moot, other notable Person of the Year winners include Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Joseph Stalin and Barack Obama.

The Time Person of The Year issue hits the stands the last week of December.

[12/7/10 7:52:20 AM] Alexia Tsotsis: great

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a London court today that he will fight his extradition to Sweden on sex crime charges. Assange has been refused bail and will be remanded in custody till 14 December. It appears the reasons given by the court were that he has a “nomadic life”, refused to give his address and there is no record of his entry to the UK.

This means there will be a long drawn out legal battle, during which, potentially, any number of other actions might be filed while Assange is way-laid in London. Assange turned himself in to Scotland Yard – the HQ of London’s Metropolitan Police – earlier today to face the Swedish arrest warrant.

Threadsy, the startup behind the eponymous all-in-one Web-based communication client, has raised $3 million in second-round funding, according to this SEC filing. This brings total funding for the TechCrunch 50 (2009) finalist to $6.3 million.

We’re still digging for who the investors are, but likely the fledging company’s previous backers, which include Maveron, August Capital and Harrison Metal Capital, participated in the round. We’ll update when we learn more.

We haven’t heard much from Threadsy since they opened their social stream reader, which allows users to access a single interface to retrieve and respond to updates from their contacts by email, Facebook, Twitter and whatnot, to the public last May.

The latest company blog post dates back to September 2010, when Threadsy announced a slew of new features, bug fixes and client enhancements.

We’ve contacted Threadsy CEO (and former eBay and Shopping.com exec) Rob Goldman to learn more about how the company is scaling, and what they plan to use the freshly raised financing for, but haven’t heard back yet.

Threadsy competitors include Inbox2, MailSuite and Silentale.

Well, there you have it: Julian Assange has been arrested in the UK. You knew this was coming, but it still speaks to the nature of our wonderful little system we have here that a man who had become the public face of an organization that passed along information that probably should never have been kept away from the citizens that information purports to serve was branded as some sort of chaotic evil malcontent hell-bent on, what, exactly? Causing destruction by exposing the truth? A nice lesson for the children out there: if you tell the truth, you will get nailed.

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Like a European AngelList, Seedcamp has put together the new Seedsummit site to showcase largely European Angels – although it does include US ones as well. It’s a sign that Seedcamp is becoming more international and less geographical. The initiative has grown out of a “Seedsummit” event which the programme put together in London last year where Angels chewed the fat about startups. Angel gate? Hardly – more like the first time European Angels had properly met eachother in a dedicated conference. The idea behind it was to help to create a forum for active European seed investors. Quite why it’s taken this long for them do a site off the back of the event is a mystery but those Seedcamp guys do travel a lot.

In its attempt to bring social streams into the enterprise, Salesforce is taking its Chatter messaging service and making it freemium. Unlike most freemium services which start out free, and then add on premium features for a price, Salesforce is going in the opposite direction. Chatter started out as an additional $15/user/month service, but perhaps the uptake wasn't what CEO Marc Benioff had hoped it would be. Now most of the basic features will be free (as, arguably, they should have been from the beginning), and premium features will be available for power users at the $15 price as Chatter Plus. Chatter first launched in private beta last February, and then opened up in June. Chatter gives employees a realtime feed of what is going on in their company. You can follow other co-workers, but also documents, data, and accounts. It is tied into Salesforce.com, and all the apps built on top of the Salesforce platform (although that is now extra, see below). So for anyone who uses Salesforce, Chatter provides a realtime intelligence feed.

Well, that didn’t take long. Ecommerce giant eBay is already adding local shopping results from Milo, a startup it has just acquired, to its RedLaser iPhone and (freshly released) Android applications.

RedLaser is eBay’s very own barcode-scanning application (at least since they acquired its makers), and thanks to the integration of Milo, people can now use it to instantly discover, through a single scan, which nearby retailers have which products in store, and at what price.

Milo has data from approximately 50,000 stores all across the United States.

eBay failed to mention how many downloads its RedLaser apps have seen to date, but it did boast about total downloads tripling since June of this year (when the RedLaster acquisition was announced).

The company is today formally launching RedLaser for Android, although it will release the SDK for the platform at a later time.

Both the Android app and iPhone app are free of charge.

Back in April, we wrote about a very cool new feature that Google was working on alongside Chrome OS: Cloud Print. Essentially, it’s a service that takes all of the printer drivers you normally need on a computer and puts them in the cloud (on Google’s servers). This way, you can easily print from a machine regardless of the OS. This means you can print from Chrome OS or from any mobile device. And it appears that it’s now just about ready to roll out.

As you can see here, there’s already a live landing page for Google Cloud Print. From this page, you can print a test page. This shouldn’t be too surprising given that Google is believed to be unveiling a beta version of Chrome OS at an event in San Francisco later today.

But one caveat on the beta is that is says you currently need Windows 7, Vista, or XP to use it. It says that Mac and Linux support is coming soon. This doesn’t seem to have much to do with the user end, but rather the printer end. Currently, you need to have a Windows PC connected to a printer to set it up, it seems.

Earlier reports said the feature would require Chrome 9 as well (the dev build of Chrome is currently version 9). And it is slated to be a Chrome 9 feature. But as of five days ago, the feature was being passed through the Chrome marketing team for final approval. One possibility seems to be that Chrome OS will launch with stable, beta, and dev channels just like Chrome, and this Cloud Print feature could be enabled on the dev (and possibly beta) channels as that will likely run Chrome 9 instead of Chrome 8 (yes, inside of Chrome OS itself).

WebSonic.nl has some screenshots of the feature actually working on a Windows machine. The ones in this post are from my Mac machine.

StockTwits, which curates conversations about stocks, nailed down another impressive business development deal today. Yahoo is now pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages – here’s Apple (AAPL) for example. StockTwits has similar deals with CNN, MarketWatch and Bloomberg.

The stream is added under a new area Yahoo is calling Market Pulse, located in the left sidebar of any company page. Here’s the Market Pulse page for Apple, for example. Conversations are in the middle of the page and link back to StockTwits. On the right are trending stocks based on velocity of conversation.

StockTwits originally curated only twitter conversations that included a $[stock symbol] – like “I love Apple $aapl. Last year it moved to its own platform as well as continuing to grab Tweets using the $symbol. Yahoo is only pulling content created directly on the StockTwits platform, however, further distancing the company from it’s Twitter reliance.

StockTwits has raised $8.6 million in venture capital.

Yesterday, Google released their eBooks initiative, a project to make the reading and annotation of books on the web easier and more efficient. Google ostensibly has 3 million books available in their eBook “store,” an impressive number to be sure, but Amazon, makers of many fine reading devices and apps, is trying to do them one better by offering current titles (books people actually want to read) available through a web interface.

According to a ComputerWorld report, the new website “store” will “enable users to read full books in the browser and [enable] any Website to become a bookstore offering Kindle books.” Basically it’s a version of the Kindle Reader for the web, presumably with some safeguards in place to prevent piracy.

This makes a lot of sense for Google and Amazon both. With the rise of multiple reading platforms, there is no reason to dedicate resources to developing standalone apps for multiple platforms. However, this does make us wonder how you would read titles in offline mode on a Win7 tablet, for example. It makes sense, then, for Amazon to offer the web reader for stationary PC reading and apps for Android, iOS, and presumably WinPho7/Win7 down the line. What doesn’t make sense, however, is the maintenance of standalone readers like the Kindle and the Nook.

Obviously most folks don’t like to read books on their computer monitors. I’ve been doing it for the past two years doing research for my book and I’ve found the experience to be frustrating at best. Presumably a better interface will fix things and presumably the next generation will move to screen reading as their primary source of input, but there’s just something nostalgic about curling up in a chair with a cup of Kaluha-spiked kochumba and a blanket and slowly, methodically pressing the “Next Page” button on a dedicated e-reading device. I worry our kids won’t be able to experience the visceral feel of the e-reader in their hand and that delicious “old e-reader” smell you get after storing it away for a few days. The web can do a lot of things, but will it be able to recreate the thrill of stumbling into a cloud-based WhisperNet bookstore on a rainy day with a person you’ve just met (and maybe think you could fall in love with) then browsing page after page of new titles until finally selecting the title you both want and downloading it using invisible radio waves to your e-readers?

I think not.

Following on from the recent addition of IM powered by Meebo's web-based client, Bebo has rolled out a video chat feature called bChat. Think Chatroulette "sans-private parts" was the line given to me (phew!). It's provided by Vchatter, the social video chat service that is already available on Facebook and as a standalone offering, and is part of a wider strategy by Bebo to become relevant again by making its platform more realtime and interactive. And about time too. A quick re-cap: After Bebo sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008, the platform was left to languish, with AOL eventually shutting it down for tax purposes and selling it for about $10m to Criterion Capital Partners. However, as we recently reported, the new team of 20 or so employees (and growing) has already made the site profitable and it's now coming back in user numbers. Today's news is another sign that the social network has a new spring in its step.

Oracle has dominated the database market, especially following its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. But today, its “frenemy” Salesforce.com will become more of a competitor with the launch of Database.com, the company’s enterprise database built for the cloud.

Database.com is essentially and plug-and-play storage infrastructure for any developers, using any language, platform or device. Salesforce is leveraging on the same technology that it uses to power its own applications, and is now making this a stand-alone service for developers to create their independent applications. As Salesforce’s primary database in the cloud, the company touts Database.com as one of the largest enterprise databases, containing more than 20 billion records and delivering more than 25 billion transactions per quarter at an average response time of less than 300 milliseconds.

As Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff says: "We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that will power the shift to real-time enterprise applications that are natively cloud, mobile and social.”

Built to power cloud-based applications, Database.com will offer an infrastructure for enterprise apps to deliver updates and information in real-time. Developers can write their applications in Java, C#, Ruby, PHP or more and can run their apps anywhere – on Force.com, VMforce, Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure or Heroku.

Apps can also run natively on any device, like an iPad, an iPhone, Android or Blackberry. Salesforce says that these apps can all call the Database.com APIs whether it be for a small application or for an app that supports hundreds of thousands of users.

For example, Android developers ca write Java Apps that connect to Database.com; or iPhone app developers can write apps in Objective C using Apple tools that connect to Database.com over the web. And web developers can build apps on Amazon EC2 using Python, PHP or Ruby that run against Databse.com.

Features include user management, row-level security, triggers, stored procedures, authentication and APIs, all in an easily scalable cloud infrastructure. The product’s relational data capabilities include tables, relationships, support for a variety of field types, triggers and stored procedures, a query language and enterprise search. All types of filed, including documents, video and images, are supported for storage.

Database.com includes standard web services APIs and a pre-built social data models and APIs for feeds, user profiles, status updates, and a following model for all database records. For example, developers can request data feeds to display real-time data updates.

The infrastructure promises automatic tuning, upgrades, backups and replication to remote data centers, and automatic creation of sandboxes for development, test and training. Database.com offers enterprise search services, allowing developers to access a full-text search engine that respects enterprise security rules

In terms of pricing, Database.com access will be free for 3 users, and up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month. The platform will $10 per month for each set of 100,000 records beyond that and another $10 per month for each set of 150,000 transactions beyond that benchmark. The enterprise-level services will be an additional $10 per user per month and will include user identity, authentication and row-level security access controls.

Analysts estimate that the database systems marketplace represents a $21.2 billion market so it’s no surprise that Salesforce is looking to take a piece of the pie. And as the cloud becomes a more reliable form of infrastructure, a database in the cloud makes sense for apps.

Test prep app developer Watermelon Express has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Lightbank, the fund operated by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

Watermelon Express develops cross-platform apps to help students prepare for a number of standardized tests including the GRE, SAT, GMAT, LSAT and MCAT. The startup actually collaborates with educational publishers to integrate content into its platform, which will work across a variety of devices including the iPhone, iPad, computers and more.

Apps include a collection of games, practice quesrions, test prep materials and diagnostic tests. But Watermelon Express also offers a number of unique features that could make it appealing to a broad base of test takers.

For example, the apps will give students progress reports to show where performance needs work and where students are excelling. Another compelling feature is the ability to compare performance with other test takers using the platform and access real time percentile scores for the five diagnostic tests and performance.

One useful functionality of the platform is the ability to sync the apps across mobile, desktop and web platforms. So you can access the app on an iPad, and access the same sport your left off in the app on the web.

Launched in 2009, Watermelon Express’ apps have been used by 75,000 students and test-takers across 20 countries. Apps cost around $30 each, which is a drawback in some ways for students. Users have to pay separately for apps on different platforms (i.e. a web app vs. an iPad app). But the startup says that it hopes to offer bundled apps in a suite soon.

In my opinion, the key to the startup’s success will be publisher deals. Since Watermelon Express doesn’t actually create the test content, partnerships with big-name publishers of test prep materials will help the startup gain traction.

CitySocialising, the subscription-based social network that lets members find local and likeminded people to socialise with in the real world, has secured £1m in a Series A round led by PROfounders Capital, the European VC fund backed by the likes of Brent Hoberman and Michael Birch. PROfounders' previous investments include Made.com, TweetDeck and Keynoir, while CitySocialising's original early-stage funding in March 2009 was provided by the London Business Angels network. The new investment will be used for product development and expansion, including mobile, along with recruitment of "key Executives" including Marketing and Business Development Director and Product Manager.

The video of Andy Rubin’s talk at the Dive Into Mobile event is up, and you can watch the juicy bit above, where he takes out the prototype Motorola tablet and toys with it for all to see, demonstrating the new Google Maps and “accidentally” teasing video chat capability and some other things.

The industrial design and OS are still in a relatively early stage, but every word Rubin dropped was another clue as to the specs, timing, and capabilities of the 2011 wave of Android tablets.

Continue reading…

Paper.li, the startup out of Switzerland which has gotten potential investors hot under the collar after garnering a lot of traction for a Twitter app in a short amount of time, has gone and added Facebook status updates to its armoury. Currently it’s best known for auto-magically curating a daily newspaper from the links shared by the people you follow on Twitter. This time it’s public Facebook status updates.

A Twitter virus is on the loose this evening, replicated by people clicking on mobile links shortened with Goo.gl like in this Twitter search. Thus far I’ve seen it spreading through two different urls http://goo.gl/od0az and http://goo.gl/R7f68 but there’s a good chance there are others. The worm also seems to be creating and/or hijacking a number of newer accounts for the past seven or so hours.

The Next Web has traced the http://goo.gl/od0az URL back to http://artcan-development.fr/tw.html through Securi but the real URL for the second link does not match up, showing a http://www.csrimini.it/tw.html instead.

Twitter @support representative  Troy Holden tells TechCrunch Twitter is on the case, “We’re aware and have sent out password resets for affected users. We’ll monitor the situation in case of further iterations.” In the meantime, don’t click on any suspicious links. Especially if you’re on a cell phone, as it seems to be originating at http://mobile.twitter.com.

Customer support startup Zendesk has raised $19 million in Series C funding led by Matrix Partners with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Charles River Ventures participating in the round. This brings Zendesk’s total funding to over $25.5 million.

Launched in 2008, Zendesk offers a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk / support ticketing application that gives companies a simple way to manage incoming support requests from end customers.

Over the past two years, the startup has managed to gain an impressive client list, including Groupon, Twitter, Yammer, Sony Music, TriptIt, Lonely Planet, Foursquare and MSNBC. And Zendesk is adding around 20 new customers per day, recently hitting the milestone of 5,000 businesses using the customer service platform.

Most recently, Zendesk added a deep integration with Twitter, allowing users to turn a Tweet into a Zendesk ticket. You can also respond publicly to a complaint on Twitter from Zendesk's platform and record any Twitter conversation that is taking place within Zendesk's platform.

The startup is also announcing a tighter integration with Salesforce today, which is interesting because Salesforce's Service Cloud also has much of the functionality that Zendesk offers.

Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane says that we can stay tuned for a Facebook integration with the customer service platform. He adds that mobile will also be huge for Zendesk in 2011. The company already offers native apps for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and has seen more than 50,000 downloads of its iPhone app..

The startup’s price ranges from $9 to $59 per support agent per month, after a one-month free trial. The new funding will be used for sales and marketing efforts.

Speaking at the Dive Into Mobile conference today, Google’s Andy Rubin (besides showing off Honeycomb) had a few interesting, but not too controversial, things to say about Android and its competitors. The primary message he seemed to be pushing was that the consumers were being allowed more than ever to shape the market, and that Google is subject to their whims as much as anyone else, though perhaps (in his opinion) more willing to accommodate.

Although Android is a runaway success by many measures, it has its weaknesses, a couple of which were probed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who were conducting the interview. First on their minds seemed to be the small impact, not to say failure, of the Nexus One, and the efforts of carriers to “personalize” Android.

Rubin’s response to the Nexus One issue was the sentiment that’s been adopted for some time now, that they bit off more than they could chew. The European model (as he called it) of choosing a phone and then a service to go with that phone isn’t ready to be adopted here yet. He says they’re shooting a little lower with the Nexus S in that they’re selling through normal retail channels.

As for the bloatware found on so many phones, including the Nexus S’s forbear, the Galaxy S, Rubin said that consumers are voicing their opinions and voting with their wallets, which I think was his way of tacitly admitting that Carrier garbage is a bad decision and people will reject it one way or another. I suspect once there’s a really consumer-friendly root or just vanilla install available, people might start doing that to rid themselves of the dozen sponsored apps on their new phone.

Rubin had nothing but kind words for Apple, praising them faintly but clearly avoiding any real opinions. He reserved a fair amount of venom for Microsoft, actually, disagreeing with their design decisions and mentioning that even the ultra-modern Windows Phone 7 is saddled with “this package of stuff that was invented before the Internet.” I suspect there’s plenty of legacy code in Google’s borrowed libraries as well, but that’s neither here nor there. He softened these remarks later by calling it “a good 1.0 product.” I’m sorry Andy, did you see Android 1.0?

On the business and income side of things, he stated that if Android were to break off of Google right now, it’d be profitable, though that’s kind of a hard statement to justify. We can probably just take it to mean that their revenues from ads served through Android devices and such are greater than the costs of development and administration. He adds, though, that he would never have made it as a start-up.

Mossberg pressed Rubin on a potential Nokia connection, but Rubin was coy, saying only that the company has new leadership and is evaluating options. Damn, they better be. They’ve been cruising for a long, long time now.

On tablets, he makes this excellent analogy to cars: once you learn to drive one car, you can pretty much drive them all, reflexively (it helps to learn on a manual, though). We’re not at that stage yet, as I tend to point out whenever this issue comes up, and it’s not until we develop a relatively standard gesture and UI language that tablets will be able to be truly pick up and play.

It was pointed out, and correctly if you ask me, that Google has a reputation for being voracious for user data, collecting every little scrap it can. By reputation, though not necessarily in practice. Being a company that deals in this kind of information has a cost, though, and Rubin said the only way to combat it was to be open and transparent about it. Consumers (hopefully) will eventually recognize anything else as FUD.

For this post, I was working from the All Things D liveblog here; I’ll update if a full transcript or video becomes available.

[image credit: Asa Mathat, All Things D]

Andy Rubin is, as I type this, in the middle of a demo of Android 3.0 (AKA Honeycomb) at Dive Into Mobile. The rest of his talk I’ve got written up elsewhere, but this was too cool to pass up. The software is running on a prototype MOTOPAD that looks really slick, though it was only out for a moment and there are but few pictures at the moment. I’ll be updating this post as more information breaks.

First thing he showed off was a new lock screen and then what appeared to be a brand new “desktop” with widgets and buttons in the corners. Different UI aesthetic than earlier versions of Android. He then launched the new, 3D-and-vector-based version of Google Maps that should be coming to your phone in just a couple days.

Honeycomb will be out “next year,” which is a pretty vague deadline, but if I remember correctly, we’ve heard Q2 for the Moto tablet. Another improvement he notes is the ability to split applications into multiple “fragments,” i.e. a mail app would have two panes for mail and inbox, which would be viewed sequentially on a phone but simultaneously on a tablet. There’s a new app grid and Gmail appears to have gotten a much nicer version of itself, which I would bet money is a lot like what they’re going to show off tomorrow at their Chrome thing.

The tablet itself looks to me to be larger than the 7″ we heard a while back, but it’s really difficult to tell without actually being there. I’d guess 9″ at 16:10 from these pictures. I don’t know how big Andy Rubin actually is, so my frame of reference is a bit off.

I’ve always said the Android versions we’ve had are a bad fit for tablets. This looks like a different story. I’m looking forward to Honeycomb.

[UI images: Engadget's liveblog; header image: Asa Mathat/All Things D]

The Google Map App on Android phones will soon get a major upgrade which will allow it to render map images a lot faster, incorporate 3D buildings, offer offline caching, and use the compass to orient the map. In a talk this evening at the D Mobile conference, Android chief Andy Rubin gave a sneak peak of the new app.

At the heart of the new app is a dynamic map rendering engine which draws maps as you use them, and offers smoother transitions when zooming in and out of different levels. The dynamic rendering will also make it possible to start to show 3D buildings as you zoom into the street-level view. The touch screen will allow you to tilt and rotate the map and buildings.

The new maps load faster because they require 100 times less data each. Instead of downloading the entire map image for each level, the app downloads meta data which describes the entire map at all different levels and then renders the appropriate sector on the fly. This will start to give Google Maps offline capabilities on mobile phones. It may be possible to cache a map of an entire city on the phone. And for people who use the turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps, when the new app comes out it will be able to recalculate the route even without a data connection.

The Google Maps app will also use the built-in compass on Android phones to automatically flip the orientation of the map to the person holding the phone. That orientation feature will come in handy when you are coming out of a subway station in an unfamiliar stop, or exiting a building.

If Groupon’s rebuke of Google last Friday taught us anything, it’s that sometimes the coolness conferred by just saying no is worth more than any amount money no matter how astronomical.

But still, you can’t help but think of what might have been if Groopon, Groogle or whatever you had chosen to call it had actually come to fruition.

For those of us with not so vivid imaginations, artist Azhar Bande-Ali has mocked up some of the possible outcomes if the coupon network had succumbed to the hypothetical and not so hypothetical advances of some of the biggest players in the field, above. You saw it here first.

Popular blogging service Tumblr is finally recovering from its seemingly endless downtime. The final tally: over 24 hours, based on the tweet Tumblr sent out around 4PM PST yesterday announcing that it was “working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters.” Tumblr followed that up over the ensuing day with some intermittent (and overly optimistic) status updates, and tweeted an hour ago that “All blogs are online and we’re incrementally restoring access to the Dashboard.”

Note that Tumbr isn’t fully functional yet, as only some users can add content to their sites now. But at least visitors aren’t getting an error message any more.

Obviously this was a horrible day for the startup, which is raising a big new round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. It’s usually a big deal when popular platforms go down for an hour or two — I can’t remember hearing about a site as popular as Tumblr going down for a full day. The site has a famously small headcount — hopefully the new funding will help it ensure this was a one-time issue.

Tumblr founder David Karp gave this statement about the downtime last night; we’ll update once the site posts an overview of what happened:

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.