After picking up local product inventory and shopping site Milo.com for $75 million, eBay has been fairly quick to start integrating the startup’s technology into its products. With the holiday shopping seasonin full swing, eBay added Milo’s local results in its barcode scanning apps, RedLaser for iPhone and Android, as a comparison shopping tool. Today, eBay is debuting its most significant Milo integration thus far—local shopping tool GiftsNearby.

GiftsNearby essentially shows shoppers gift options available for pick up at local retailers in their neighborhood. From electronics to home appliances to toys, shoppers can access products that are available at local retailers nearby their zipcode. GiftsNearby shows local retail prices for each item, directions to the closest store with inventory availability, and an option to browse eBay for the gift. And eBay assures that GiftsNearby will only show items that are actually in-stock and using Milo’s existing partnerships, shows products from 25 national retailers including Target, RadioShack, Toys R Us, and Sears.

One of these retailers, Best Buy, has forged a deeper integration with eBay, allowing users to reserve and purchase the gift online, and then skip the lines by picking the item up at their local store. And users will earn eBay Bucks, the company’s rewards points, in the process.

For eBay, Milo represents a way to break into the local shopping market. Forrester estimates that online research to offline buying is a $917 billion market that will eventually reach $1.3 trillion and account for nearly 50% of total retail sales by 2013.

eBay’s CTO Mark Carges recently told us that the company eventually plans to integrate Milo into its search results on the marketplace. So if you search for an Apple iPad on eBay, you’ll be shown the sellers who are offring the product as well as local retailers nearby who have the product in-stock.

Of course, Google also sees the potential in this market and is also integrating local product listings into its search offerings. Earlier this year, Google Product Search launched Blue Dot, on mobile search. Similar to Milo, Blue Dot allowed users within search to see if a product is in-stock at nearby stores. A few weeks ago, Google unleashed a new version of Product Search, with more inventory listings from 70 popular retail brands, many of whom also list with Milo.

One advantage eBay has over Google is its established reputation as an online shopping destination. While the search giant has been trying to improve its shopping experience, Google is not an e-commerce platform.

You have to hand it to eBay for buying and integrating Milo so quickly. Clearly eBay is looking to expand its footprint in local commerce and isn’t wasting any time in offering these features to holiday shoppers.

Been looking onto this whole OnLive gaming thing with a bit of curiosity? Well then, let the us here at CrunchGear play the part of Santa and put one under your Christmas tree this year. We’re giving away three OnLive gaming systems today and just like our other contests, a simple comment is all it takes to enter. Oh and we’ll take peanut butter chocolate chunk for the customary Santa Clause offering. Click through for the rules and instructions.

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We’ve been having an excellent little conversation around the Notion Ink tablet – and tablets in general – over at CrunchGear these past few weeks and I thought it might be interesting to address some of the magical thinking that poisons tech, especially hardware, discussion. Because you and I are reading tech blogs and because tech blogs, primarily, cater to early adopters, there is a consistent and constant litany of specs, speeds, feeds, and quite a bit of “wishful” maundering by fans and anti-fans alike describing this future feature or that future devices from certain manufacturers. “The new Motorola tablet will kill all the rest of the tablets,” we cry, sure and right! “Android is better than Windows Phone 7 forever,” we scream! And then someone replies with an opposing opinion and it’s on like Donkey Kong. Case in point: today I was encouraged to take my own life for my admittedly negative opinion of a particular device. Thank god this isn’t a political blog or I’d be bashed dead in a ravine somewhere.

Let me address my first and most important point: 99% of the earth’s population cares not a whit about Android, iOS, OS X, Windows, Honeycomb, Tegra 2, Sand Hill, or SSDs. They want to turn on their computers, tap out an email to a friend, and turn it off. They want to get orders through their Blackberry, email their employees, and go back to their job as florists, carpenters, and bank tellers. To paraphrase Louis CK, they own a landscaping business, they’re respectable, why do they need the “hot” device? They sure as heck don’t have time to meander through spec sheets let alone give a damn what those spec sheets say.

Microsoft, of all companies, understands this perfectly. From their original WTF commercials featuring Jerry Seinfeld to their recent crop of Laptop Hunters commercials and, finally, their “get stuff done” treatment of Windows Phone 7, everything about Microsoft’s marketing is about the reduction of man-machine interaction. The company that created the nerd now wants you to understand that it knows you’re not a nerd and that you want to do fun stuff in your life other than surfing the web.

Technical issues rarely escape into the mainstream. In fact, it can be said that the last time a real, honest to goodness technical issue made it out into wider world was the entire antennagate scandal. Nothing similar has piqued world-wide interest as much as that scandal and the lead-up – the leaks, the countless interviews, the already popular device – added frisson to what is essentially an argument about radio dynamics. When’s the last time any other scientific topic aside the age-old arguments about evolution and childhood vaccination passed through the barrier of topical interest and into the mainstream? Sure, the Science section of the NYT does some great reporting, but it’s hard to stick high-tech news between sports and weather on Ten O’Clock News With Lisa Hughes, Scranton’s #1 Anchor.

Other than that, all of this spec-quoting and fanboism is a sort of entertainment and, at my own peril, I agree with much of the fanboism inherent in these entertainments. We report news, to be sure, and the vast majority of our posts have some kernel of news in them. We very rarely bloviate, although there are often exceptions to that rule. But when a friend of mine calls Steve Jobs a fascist, I’m required to remind him that Mussolini is probably closer to a fascist in the great book of life. Steve Jobs will be remembered like Edison – wild-eyed, driven, prone to fits of intellectual theft, and charmingly adept at creating important hardware.

So, that said, what is my first point? My first point is that this stuff isn’t nearly as important to the “world” and to manufacturers as we think it is. Most products are in a pipeline six months long. Items coming out at CES were probably complete or at lease prototyped by last CES and the things that are going into R&D and production today will blow your mind this summer. That’s how this industry works. It is very rare that a company even pays attention to our ceaseless, maudlin dirt-kicking and when they do it is a pleasant and funny surprise. Take Google TV, for example. Google’s TV team actually called us and asked us about our opinions regarding Google TV and, in some small way, we hope that we did a bit of good in the world. But for every Google TV team (and Google doesn’t make hardware, so they can afford to putz around with bloggers a bit), there is an Apple or a Sony or a Dell, companies that think we’re a bunch of needy parasites.

Second, the goal of tech writing is first to inform and second to steer consumers from the shoals of obsolescence and treachery. Manufacturers know that no one reads or cares about specs so they’ll sell all kinds of garbage, from $99 “tablets” at Walgreens to crippled laptops full of bloatware. This is not to say that all manufacturers hate us, but they definitely don’t love us. They need to sell out their stock before the Next Big Shipment comes in. Whether that means reducing the price ridiculously or selling their products to even more unsuspecting folks in the SkyMall catalog. This is a business. A business requires product, distribution, and customers, and the ideal customer is one who doesn’t know the difference between the Donut, Danish, Honeycomb, and Fruit Trix versions of Android.

So huzzah, brave reader, you are of a rare breed. You actually care. And, for the most part, manufacturers care about you, if only because you are what their marketing people call “influencers.” But next time you hitch up your underwear tight against the insides of your thighs and prepare to write a long, outraged screed against one item or another, just remember: we’re the only people really listening, and our underwear is as tight as yours.

Comcast this morning announced that it has doubled the amount of movies available on demand that were released the same day as the DVD in 2010, offering customers more than 200 “same-date movies” this year alone.

The company also revealed that its On Demand service reached a total of 18 billion views, this year (that is: the total number of views since the service was launched with a few hundred choices back in 2003).

This year, Comcast says, customers viewed content On Demand 4 billion times, with an average of 350 million views on the service every month.

Today, Comcast works with a number of studios to bring same-day-as-DVD movies to its customers, including Warner Bros/New Line, Fox, Universal, Sony and MGM.

Comcast says movies available the same day as its DVD release continue to rise in popularity and are consistently among the top-performing content available On Demand.

Customers can now select from 25,000 choices On Demand, including 6,000 in HD. This ranges from new release movies and TV shows to kids, sports, lifestyle and local programs.

StudioEX, a Los Angeles-based online game developer, has raised $1.9 million in funding from private investors from around the world (or rather, its parent Camelot Media Investments Media Group did).

StudioEX recently launched the beta version of its first game – a social, turn-based ballistic action game dubbed Galaxy X – on Facebook.

It’s pretty addictive, and I like the quality of the graphics and sounds a lot.

The company plans to launch the game commercially at scale in early 2011.

Check out the beta and tell us what you think.

We haven’t covered file storage and synchronization service Egnyte before, but it’s been around since 2008, and is now syncing roughly 5 billion files with more than 500,000 user licenses. In other words, there are quite a few people using it.

Egnyte can best be described as a Dropbox-like service that focuses primarily on helping small and medium-sized businesses sync their files. But it isn’t entirely cloud-based. Instead, it’s using a so-called hybrid solution, where businesses keep a Network-Attached Storage device linked up to their office’s computers, which serves as a ‘local cloud’ — all files are synced and backed up on this local, network connected hardware. Because these files are available on-site, Internet access isn’t required to access them, and latency is minimized. These Local Clouds can consist of Netgear ReadyNAS devices, or VMware-based virtual appliances.

But this same, ‘local cloud’ NAS is also hooked up to Egnyte’s servers, and any changes made between the client computers and the files on the NAS are also synced up to the web for remote access. Once these files are in the cloud, company admins can enable file sharing between employees and also to business partners, who can be given restricted access to specific files. This cloud portion also serves as a remote backup, and files can be accessed from Macs, Windows, and mobile phones.

So why would a business use this over other sync apps? CEO Vineet Jain explains that when you have a team of seven or eight employees, where all necessary files can be replicated across everyone’s computer without running into storage constraints, than solutions like Dropbox and Sugarsync are fine. But he says that when it comes to managing storage for fifty people, or hundreds, then that can become untenable, which is where Egnyte comes in.

Jain says that the company has focused on SMBs from day one, and that Egynte is increasingly drawing larger clients. Egynte used to see an average order size of around six seats per account — now, over the last two quarters, that number is trending up toward over 25 seats per account. He also says that monthly recurring revenue has been growing 20% month over month for the last seven months.

Egnyte was founded in 2006 and has raised over $6 million in funding, including a Series A round in July 2009 from Maples Investments and Polaris Venture Partners.

It’s worth noting that Dropbox recently launched Dropbox for Teams, which makes it better suited for multiple users under one main account, and its 1.0 release includes selective sync (you no longer have to copy all synced directories to all linked computers). But it seems like Egnyte’s service is, at this point at least, catering more directly to larger businesses. There’s also a Sugarsync for businesses and Syncplicity for businesses , but none of these use the same hybrid storage model as Egnyte.

Achim Berg, Microsoft's VP of business and marketing for Windows Phones has revealed in a faux-interview with Microsoft News Center that partner phone manufacturers have sold over 1.5 million Windows 7 Phone devices to carriers and retailers in its first six weeks on the market. Windows Phone 7 launched in Europe and the Asia Pacific region on October 21 and in the United States and Canada on November 8.

Apple just issued a release announcing that it expects to sell one million units of its newly released Apple TV later this week. Apple also announced that iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day.

As of mid-October, Apple has sold around 250,000 new Apple TVs, which were released to the public in late September. During Apple’s third quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented on the new version of Apple TV, "It's a great product and its $99 price point is very enticing."

We’d heard reports that new Apple TVs were selling like hotcakes, thanks to a lower price point and a host of new features. Notably, with the new Apple TV, the company moved the product over to the streaming model, allowing users to stream movies and TV shows from the iTunes store or from a computer in your house.

Earlier this year, 500 Startups, the seed fund run by Dave McClure, announced that it was creating a $250,000 micro-fund dedicated to companies that were based on Twilio’s telephony platform (Twilio is one of 500 Startup’s portfolio companies). Today it’s announcing the first three winners, each of whom will receive $10,000 in return for a 1% stake in the company.

The three companies are Textaurant, OrderMapper, and Voicendo. Textaurant is a service that lets restaurant customers ‘put their names down’ for a table without having to sit around on a restaurant bench for 20 minutes. Instead, they receive a text or voice message (via Twilio) when it’s their turn (this sounds like an alternative to those vibrating gizmos that some establishments hand out). The company says that there’s been a 5-15% decrease in no-shows for restaurants on busy nights that use the service, and that most customers are happy to give the restaurant their phone number to take advantage of it. Come to think of it, I’m surprised this kind of SMS-service hasn’t taken off sooner.

OrderMapper helps restaurants create mobile applications that customers can use to order food, including the completion of credit card transactions. Orders are delivered to restaurants via fax, email, Point of Service, or phone numbers (again, Twilio) and OrderMapper already powers Round Table’s mobile app. The company is planning to launch an API called OrderWiki, which will let other developers hook into the service.

Finally, Voicendo offers a dashboard that lets businesses route their incoming calls and text messages using a variety of rules (which can be quite complex). Rules can be set up using a drag-and-drop interface, and businesses can incorporate options like Text-to-speech instructions and menus.

In addition to the winners, Twilio is also announcing the full set of advisors for the Twilio fund, who include:

• Joshua Schachter
• Jay Weintraub
• Lane Becker
• Dave Schappell
• Manu Kumar
• John Musser

For interested startups, the program is actually still accepting submissions through December 31.


CrunchBase Information
Twilio
Information provided by CrunchBase

6Wunderkinder, a Berlin-based startup, has raised 500,000 euros (or roughly $660,000 at current conversion rates) in its second round of funding. Germany's High-Tech Gründerfonds made the investment and will also help the fledgling company by providing know-how and consulting for their upcoming project. Said project is dubbed wunderkit, which is referred to as a "modern working and productivity platform".

Social business services company Dachis Group has made its third acquisition in less than 2 months, and this deal marks the biggest purchase for the company to date. Dachis has picked up social marketing agency Powered along with its operating subsidiaries StepChange Group, Drillteam, and crayon.

The agreement, terms of which were not disclosed, makes Dachis Group the largest Facebook Preferred Developer on the planet, and also expands its presence to New York.

The agency primarily focuses on social marketing campaign, from lining out strategies to planning, program development, content marketing, blogger outreach to branded events.

Powered's clients include companies like HP, Nike, Ernst and Young, Toys "R" Us, T-Mobile, Toyota, Gillette and Target.

The acquisition of Powered increases Dachis Group’s size to over 220 employees across ten cities, in five countries worldwide. The company recently bought youth marketing consultancy agency Archrival and social marketing applications developer Stuzo.

Dachis Group was founded in 2008, by CEO and chairman Jeffrey Dachis (cofounder and former CEO of Razorfish).

Its growth strategy, which consists of rolling up smaller companies in the social business services space as well as growing organically, is backed by a financial commitment of up to $50 million from Austin Ventures (Dachis Group is headquartered in Austin, Texas).

Google wants to be in the online group buying space, badly, and with good reason. The company may have not succeeded in purchasing the current leader in the space, Groupon, which has spurned a $6 billion buy-out offer in a bid to stay independent and shoot for the stars, but it seems determined to get in on the action – through acquisition – regardless.

According a report from the New York Post, citing a source familiar with the matter, Google is talking to smaller Groupon rivals about a potential acquisition.

Companies like LivingSocial and BuyWithMe, both privately-held and backed by tens of millions in venture capital, are some of the names that are dropped in various reports, but there are of course plenty of smaller Groupon competitors to go around.

LivingSocial, for one, seems an unlikely target – it has just raised $175 million from Amazon.

BuyWithMe has raised $21.5 million to date, and interim President David Wolfe told the New York Post that he wouldn’t comment on whether he was speaking to Google, saying only that he believes Google definitely needs to enter the coupon advertising market (we agree).

Another potential bet in our opinion could be Whaleshark Media, which operates a marketplace for coupons and deals and owns Deals.com, CouponShare and Deals2Buy, among other sites.

The company just raised roughly $90 million to pursue its roll-up strategy, and Whaleshark Media also just acquired coupon search engine company RetailMeNot.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Needless to say, we’re all over this.

The9, a Chinese online game operator and developer, this morning announced that it has entered into a memorandum of understanding with three investors – Chengwei Ventures, ChinaRock Capital Management and China Renaissance K2 Ventures – for the establishment of an investment fund with a total size of $100 million.

The fund, dubbed Fund9, will focus on investments in both Chinese and overseas mobile Internet application and platform developers. The company says proposals can be submitted directly online to the fund investment committee, composed of members appointed by the four fund investors mentioned above, for evaluation.

The only thing that was missing in the press release announcing the formation of the fund is the website address.

In a separate news release, The9 has announced that it has entered into an agreement with Aurora Feint for a five-year license to use its OpenFeint mobile social gaming network software, which works with both the iOS and Android platform, in China.

MeLLmo, the developer of business data visualization platform Roambi, has raised $10 million in new funding. The startup declined to name its investors in the round but revealed that to date, MeLLmo has raised a total of $20 million in funding.

Roambi is meant to allow business professionals to access visualized data from anywhere. Roambi’s website and iPhone and iPad apps allows for data in spreadsheets and documents to be easily viewed on both the web and mobile platforms in customizable charts and graphs.

Roambi users simply upload their data from Excel spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets, HTML table data, CSV files, and Salesforce CRM reports to the online Roambi Pro Publisher. Roambi also support uploads of data from business applications including those from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. After the data is downloaded, you can select a pre-designed template to deliver the data (i.e. pie chart, graphs etc.). Once published, the data transforms into interactive visualizations for the iPhone and iPad.

Roambi Trends identifies and visualizes trends in data and offers data comparisons across whatever period a user chooses – years, months, even minutes; users can easily focus on specific time periods by sliding the dateline at the bottom of the graph. CataList view organizes data into hierarchical, categorized lists with the ability to drill down to into detailed summaries, as well as simultaneously compare or analyze different sets of data.

For enterprise users, Roambi offers both a Pro version, which is a secure, hosted service that connects mobile; and Roambi ES, a secure, on-premise server solution. As we've written in the past, the view of the data within Roambi's app is impressive as data-filled spreadsheets are automatically turned into interactive graphs and charts which allow you to easily understand the information that's being delivered.

Within graphs, you can also delve deeper into certain data points by simply touching the screen. And the app itself intuitively stores various charts according to subject matter and category, making it easy to access various visualizations quickly and efficiently.

Looks like an unofficial iPhone and iPad app that let you view WikiLeaks site content and follow the WikiLeaks Twitter account on the go has been removed from the App app store earlier today. The app used to be available here (here’s the Google cache).

From the WikiLeaks App’s description:

“The Wikileaks app gives instant access to the world's most documented leakage of top secret memos and other confidential government documents.”

Basically the paid app was selling WikiLeaks content (available for free) for $1.99. Its entry into the app store on December 17th was actually surprising, as Apple is usually quite strict and somewhat vague about its app approval standards. WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange are quite controversial, to put it lightly but I’m not sure if the app directly violated anything in Apple’s TOS.

In the past couple of weeks corporate biggies Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa and Bank of America have all tried to disassociate themselves in one way or another from WikiLeaks. If this isn’t some kind of glitch, Apple has plenty company.

I’ve contacted both Apple and and the developer for more information and will update this post when they respond.

Thanks: Appsfire

Update: Developer Igor Barinov responds with the following official status update, showing that the app was indeed removed from sale.

So it’s been raining for almost two years here on the West Coast and it, for lack of a better term, sucks. But you know what’s making Noah’s Ark part deux just a teensy, eensy bit better? Wthr.in, a newly launched minimalist site that uses geo-location to serve up information about the weather around you.

Built by Artur Kisiolek, the site automatically gives you information for your location coordinates, allows you to search by location name as well plugging your zip code into the URL and also includes a list of top international cities you can immediately drag into your browser bookmarks or iPhone homescreen.

I’ve spent all day refreshing it every five minutes hoping that the incredibly annoying “Weather condition: Showers” in SF will change to something more outdoor exercise friendly like “Weather condition: Scattered clouds” so I can finally go jogging.

Apparently I’m going to have to wait until Thursday. Or move.

Sorry, we like toys around here and we don’t care what you think. Tonka trucks, robotic spiders and portable gaming systems should make everyone smile. These things are just for young kids anymore. Just think about the rage you can unleash on your office with a motorized Nerf gun.

CrunchGear saw plenty of new toys in 2010 but the following video reviews were our favorite. Join us on a look back at the year’s best toy videos.

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Last night around 11PM, Tapulous released the latest version of what is one of the App Store’s most popular franchises of all time: Tap Tap Revenge 4. 18 hours later, it became the top application in the App Store, marking the sixth time Tapulous has held the #1 spot since the App Store launched in summer 2008 (TTR1, TTR2, TTR3 as a paid app, then again as a free app, TTR3 Boost , and TTR 4). Tapulous founder Bart Decrem says that this game launch has been “twice as fast, and twice as big” as TTR 3 was in the same time span.

The launch of Tap Tap Revenge 4 comes around six months after the company was acquired by Disney for an undisclosed sum.

Decrem, who now serves as SVP and General Manager for Disney Mobile, says that the game is seeing around 25,000 downloads per hour right now, which is on par with what it saw on Christmas day last year (app downloads see a major spike on Christmas as people try out their new iPhones and iPod touches, so expect this number to surge even higher this year). Decrem says this is the fastest any of Tapulous’s games have ever hit #1, and it may be the fastest growing game ever (though he doesn’t know that definitively).

Given that the company has such a large existing install base — Decrem says Tapulous is coming up on 50 million total downloads between all of its applications — Tapulous can more easily gain traction with a new game than a small-time developer could, because it can send promotions to existing users. But Decrem says that Tapulous is only tapping into around a third of its viral channels so far (namely, interstitials in TTR3), and that it will save its other big guns like emails and push notifications for once the initial buzz for the game dies down.

Among the new features introduced with TTR4 are support for Apple’s Game Center, higher resolution graphics for the iPhone’s Retina Display, a stronger social component where you can ‘Like’ songs and challenge users with similar tastes, and a wider selection of both free and premium music downloads.

Decrem says that Tapulous has some other big news coming up: in January it will be announcing its lineup for the leadership team of Disney Mobile based out of Palo Alto. Decrem also says that both Tapulous and other Disney applications are going to begin incorporating a standard set of analytics and advertising libraries, as it looks to become the App Store’s largest freemium gaming network.

Earlier today Google User Experience Lead Paul Adams, whose much discussed slideshow revealed the gaps in the way Facebook’s social graph represented human relationships, announced he will be heading to Facebook in January. Adams had worked on the Google UX team for over four years.

Adams’ impressive “Real Life Social Network” slideshow, which got over 400K views, 1799 Facebook shares and was the subject of ample press coverage, hinted at how Google could successfully foray into the social market by taking advantage of the fact that humans are a part of multiple social groups.

Aside from foreshadowing Facebook’s own reconceptualization of its own group product three months later, the presentation gave many the impression that Google was finally serious about social. This move comes at an interesting and perhaps innopportune time as Google continues to ramp up these efforts.

According to his tweet, Adams will be joining Facebook in the New Year. I’ve contacted both Adams and Facebook for more information and have no word yet on what his official Facebook title will be. His LinkedIn profile still reads “Senior User Experience Researcher at Google.”

Brazilian startup DeskMetrics, which offers tools and analytics services to help developers track how their customers are using native desktop applications, has closed a $200,000 seed round from a group of regional angel investors (the startup isn’t disclosing the names of the investors involved).

DeskMetrics launched in October, offering developers a set of native components they could integrate into their desktop software to perform advanced analytics tracking. It’s a lot like a web analytics service for the desktop — with these components integrated, developers can tell when users have installed or uninstalled an app, and even which buttons they’re clicking within an application.

Obviously there’s a bit of a creepiness factor (comments in our original article note that this sounds suspiciously like spyware), but DeskMetrics points out that Microsoft has used similar technology in its own software through its Customer Experience Improvement Program. And responsible developers can (and should) always prompt for the user’s consent before recording this data.

Another competitor in this space is Eqatec.

You probably remember the Kno, either from the original announcement or the demo at TechCrunch Disrupt. The monster 14.1″ screens set it apart from every other tablet on the market, and the customized Ubuntu OS makes it potentially more versatile as well. The impressive technical specs had me doubting whether this device would ever actually see the light of day, or just languish in development hell until the funding ran out.

They’ve defied my expectations, however, and are actually beginning to ship to their first pre-order customers (though many are having to wait until mid-January, and are canceling their orders). The version I got to play with was pretty much final, though I haven’t had the pleasure of hefting the (in)famous dual-display version, which I expect will turn out to be an albatross around the company’s neck.

Continue reading…

A new SEC filing revealed that LS9 — a biotechnology startup turning plant-based materials into fuel and chemicals for use within traditional petroleum-based systems — has raised a series D investment of $30 million.

The round was led by BlackRock and joined by all of LS9′s previous investors: Flagship Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and CTTV Investments LLC, the venture capital arm of Chevron Technology Ventures LLC, according to a company spokesperson.

LS9 uses synthetic biology, or what it calls “designer microbes,” and a “single-step fermentation process,” to make proprietary biofuels. The company’s pilot plant in South San Francisco has been in operation for over two years. It acquired a larger-scale production facility in Okeechobee, Florida in early 2010. This spring, LS9 won the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) highest environmental honor.

In total, the company has raised $75 million in venture funding since 2006. LS9 plans to use the $30 million to move into commercial-scale production, and to support additional development and growth programs. TechCrunch has reached out to the company and its investors for further details.

“Well dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

Cobb’s quote from Inception reminds me of something. Something going on right now, seemingly all around us. It doesn’t feel like a dream, but increasingly, I’m not so sure. Something just isn’t right. And I believe it’s Google that is doing the dreaming.

Yesterday brought news that Google was asking partners to delay large-scale unveilings of Google TV products at the upcoming CES due to concerns about the overall reaction to the current products already on the market. Obviously, despite some Sony spin, that’s not good news.

And some of us could see this coming. Not just because of odd product design choices, but also because of the history of problems in the web/TV space. Google seemed to think they could solve these issues because, well, they’re Google. They have some of the smartest people in the world working there. But the reality is that this seems to be the continuation of a trend in which Google is living in a dream world. And doesn’t realize it.

The other big example of this is with Android. Sure, the platform is a huge success now — but at what cost? Originally, Google had a grand plan to reshape not just the mobile OS market, but the entire mobile industry. They were talking about a future in which phones were given away for free, subsidized by search. That quickly changed to cheap phones subsidized by search. And that quickly changed to $199 phones subsidized by carriers. In other words, nothing changed. Why? The carriers.

Google seemed to think they could go around them and sell phones on the web directly to consumers. The carriers didn’t like that idea too much. They pulled their backing of that plan. And Google had to pull the plug.

When apps and smartphones started exploding, Google envisioned an open environment where consumers dictated to the carriers and hardware manufacturers what they wanted on their devices. That was until Google realized they needed Verizon’s help in pushing Android devices and sold their soul for bundled Blockbuster apps. Ones you couldn’t delete.

Soon, the vast majority of Android owners will have VCAST apps shoved in their faces — whether they want them or not. The open ecosystem is so open that the carriers are open to give consumers absolutely no choice. It’s more like their dream.

And what’s most disturbing about this is Google’s rhetoric. It has morphed from “wait and see” to “we think the carriers will get the message” to “we hope the carriers will get the message”. Newsflash: the carriers are not going to get the message as long as they have any shred of leverage. You know, leverage like Android’s “openness”.

In other words, the carriers are going to continue to do what they want. They’re going to continue to puke up bullshit like this.

Again, dream world. Google set out with the idea that they could change everything on their terms. Instead, they’ve changed things in the image of those actually in control.

Let’s move on to Google Music. Remember, it was supposed to launch this year. Google was just finalizing deals with the labels. It was going to be all in the cloud. It was going to be magical.

It’s so magical that it has vanished in front of our eyes.

So where is it? Again, this looks to be Google living in a bit of a dream world. They seemed to think that the labels were so eager to break Apple’s dominance in the space that they would just hand over their rights to all their music. What they didn’t consider is that even wounded dogs are hungry. Actually, wounded dogs may be especially hungry. If they smell meat, they might just rip your head off.

Google was so confident in their ability to get this service going soon that they even talked about it on stage at their biggest event of the year, Google I/O — that was exactly 7 months ago. A few months later, when negotiations presumably weren’t going too hot, they brought in some big guns with experience to help. We have 11 days left in the year. It ain’t coming.

What about Chrome OS? I, for one, love the idea. But the current execution is pretty bad. Bad to the point where I’m wondering how long it will be until it gets better? Remember last year when we were promised Chrome OS netbooks by this holiday season? The Cr-48 is essentially a lump of coal that only a few unlucky kids got.

Further, there are no shortage of critics out there who believe Chrome OS will never amount to anything. That includes people with prominent Google pedigrees. Google was supposed to shake up and dominate the netbook industry with Chrome OS. Then the netbook industry fizzled out. So now it’s the notebook industry. And some assertions are that it will eventually end Windows dominance in the workplace.

You could certainly argue that is the most outrageous dream yet. That may be a dream within a dream. Maybe even two levels deep. Maybe close to “limbo”.

Still, it’s great to dream big. And Google has the ability to do that thanks to a huge amount of revenue coming in as a result of the original times when they had big dreams. But the world was different then. Well, actually, it was just a different world. Search engines were just starting to pop up. Google came along and did it right. Search monetization was basically nothing. Google came along and did it right.

With Google TV, Android, Google Music, Chrome OS, and a range of other products, Google is trying to change established industries. And they seem to think they can just because they’re Google. But as we’re seeing again and again, they’re having a lot of issues.

And again, just to be perfectly clear, I’m not saying Google shouldn’t try to change these industries. All of them need to be disrupted — in some cases very badly. I’m just not sure about Google’s execution on any of them.

In some cases, they set out with the right idea (Android), then have to make concessions to the point of bolstering the status quo. In other cases, they walk into an industry (Google TV) and arrogantly expect everyone to love them, only to watch all the major players quickly leave them hanging out to dry.

I’m really starting to worry that we’re nearing “limbo” in this Google dream. And we’ll never wake up.

[images: Warner Bros.]

We’re part of the AOL family here at TechCrunch, but they don’t trust us with much actual information. We don’t get the emails sent out to all employees, for example. So when I get my hands on one I certainly don’t feel bad about posting it here.

Here’s the email to all AOL staff (except us) from executive Brad Garlinghouse announcing the About.Me acquisition from earlier today.

I love that they link to my about.me profile at the very end, but don’t trust us with the email. Probably a good call, actually.

AOLers –

Facebook, Twitter and others have demonstrated how profound the ability to express and manage your identity is on the internet. As we continue to evolve our consumer experiences, we want to deliver a ground breaking approach to managing your identity – within AOL and beyond. It's about more than just your Facebook or Twitter profiles, it's about your entire online identity and providing consumers with the ability to express themselves and their individuality. If done well, this can have a tremendously positive impact on our advertising and content strategy, marrying your social graph with your "interest graph" to create a dramatically more relevant experience for consumers.

I'll be sharing more about our vision in this area in the months ahead, but as a critical step in this journey, I'm incredibly excited to announce that Tony Conrad and the about.me team are joining the AOL family!

Just recently launched to the public, about.me is a site that ties users social networking profiles including Linkedin, Twitter, Email, personal blogs and more, all together in one place. In addition, it provides analytics allowing users to track how many people viewed their profile pages and which social networks they went on to view from there – appealing to the increasingly vain online audience! C'mon…who doesn't want to know how many people have viewed their profile pages, status updates, photos and more?!

I encourage you all to check out about.me, the tremendous roster of notable early adopters already using about.me and build your profile! Here's mine: about.me/bradgarlinghouse. It's an incredibly well executed consumer experience and the future direction of the social web. While last week we saw competitors closing down innovative products, we're playing offense and building next generation web experiences for consumers.

Tony Conrad is not only one of the most innovative, inspiring and influential people in Silicon Valley, he's also a former AOLer and we're lucky to have him back at the company. He and the team will be based in Palo Alto and Tony will report directly to me.

Please join me in welcoming them to the AOL family.

All the best,
Brad

PS – here are some other AOL'ers pages to check out:

http://about.me/timarmstrong
http://about.me/fletcherjones
http://about.me/scheinker
http://about.me/mike

Software maker Adobe has once again posted record revenue results this quarter, surpassing the $1 billion milestone for the first time. Adobe revenue for the fourth quarter of 2010 was $1.008 billion versus $757.3 million reported for the fourth quarter of 2009 and $990.3 million reported in the third quarter of 2010. This signifies a 33% growth from last year.

The company has also had a banner 2010 as a whole, with record revenue of $3.8 billion compared to $2.946 billion in 2009, 29% year over year growth. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen reinforced this, "We posted our first billion dollar quarter and record annual revenue in 2010, driven by outstanding performance across all of our major businesses, and we are entering 2011 with strong momentum.”

Adobe's non-GAAP diluted earnings per share for the fourth quarter were $0.56, versus $0.39 reported in the previous year. Non-GAAP net income was $384 million, versus $265.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Adobe's GAAP diluted earnings per share for the fourth quarter of 2010 were $0.53 versus a loss per share of $0.06 reported in the fourth quarter of 2009. GAAP net income was $286.9 million for the quarter, versus $153.6 million reported in 2009.

Adobe  has had a year filled with ups and downs as scuffles with Apple over Flash eventually turned into noble attempts at product evolution. Adobe shares are up 5% after hours today as the company beat Wall Street analyst earnings expectations.