We’ve seen this one coming all year. Facebook is now the third largest website in the world, taking the No. 3 spot from Yahoo, according to comScore. Facebook drew an estimated 648 million unique visitors from across the globe in November, 2010, compared to 630 million for Yahoo. In October the two sites were dead even with 633 million worldwide unique visitors each (actually Facebook had already passed Yahoo by a smidgeon in October with about half a million more visitors). The only two Web properties left which are bigger than Facebook are Microsoft (869 million worldwide visitors) and Google (970 million) when you look at all of their sites collectively.

The evidence leading up to this overthrow has been building up for a long time. Facebook became the fourth largest Website in the world nearly 18 months ago, and quickly passed Yahoo in pageviews. Today, Facebook accounts for nearly a quarter of all display ads in the U.S., which is more than twice as much as Yahoo.

Facebook also recently passed Yahoo to become the second largest video site in the U.S., and is also the ssecond largest source of traffic (after Google) to other video sites on the Web. No wonder Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz sees Facebook as her biggest competitor, not Google.

In the U.S., however, Facebook is still No. 4 in terms of total monthly visitors (with 152 million), and Yahoo is No. 1 (with 181 million). So not all is lost. Note also that these comScore visitor estimates are different than Facebook’s official user numbers which are somewhere north of 500 million worldwide, but they are better for making apples-to-apples comparisons between sites.

We have a Christmas surprise for all of you.

As you have seen us do in the past, we feel it’s only fair to give away some of the new, fancy, amazing items we so often write about, and this time we are giving away a Google Nexus S to one lucky reader.

You can read our full review on it here or watch Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs review it on Fly or Die (also embedded below). It is really simple to set up, includes all of Google’s various apps (like 3D Maps and Google Voice), and is incredibly fast.

Simply put, this is the best Android phone on the market right now. You want it? To enter is simple. Just fan the TechCrunch Facebook page and then do one of these two things: retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag), or leave a comment below telling us why you think this phone needs to be yours. The contest will end tomorrow, December 25th at 12pm PST. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will go through the comments and tweets, make sure you have become a fan of our Facebook page, and contact you this weekend with details if you are chosen. Anyone in the world is eligible to enter, as long as you can receive delivered packages.

Just for fun, check out our very own Jason Kincaid playing with the world’s largest Nexus S and watch Schonfeld and Biggs debate the merits of the Nexus S below.

Good luck everyone and Merry Christmas!

Editor’s note: Contributor Jon Evans is an author and software engineer. He hails from the Great White North, but we let him write here anyway.

Report from the app-development trenches: it’s gettin’ kinda crazy out there. I’ve lost track of how many NDAs I’ve signed this year from people with app ideas. Old coworkers and previous clients have deluged me with so many offers of new work I can’t possibly take it all. Friends of friends want my opinion on whether their app notion might fly, and if I might want to partner with them.

The VP at my client Xtreme Labs has as his Gmail status, "I’m hiring 50 Agile Engineers."  That doesn’t include their startup incubator Xtreme University. And this isn’t frenetic Silicon Valley, this is once-sleepy Toronto. My clients HappyFunCorp, an incubator/development consultancy in Brooklyn, proclaim on their web site, "We can only take on so much work, and because of that, there’s no contact information on our page." None of my developer friends are underemployed. Supply is low, demand is insane. I realize the plural of anecdote is not data, but I can’t help thinking: this feels a lot like 1999.

Everyone is asking, "Are we in a bubble?" except for the people shouting, "Yes!" Bubble satirists have already arisen:

Headlines proclaim: “Startup Accelerator Founder Says We’re In A Startup Accelerator Bubble.” But as Paul Kedrosky notes:

True, people are throwing a lot of money at a lot of dubious ideas, but it has ever been thus, and we haven’t yet sunk to the nadir of Pets.com. Remember them? Remember the dot-com bubble? Sure, it burst spectacularly, but as Alan Greenspan once pointed out, it was not a market failure, it was a resounding success. Technology created a whole new economic sector, the market drenched in ridiculous amounts of money, and in the end the great companies—Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo (for a while there)—thrived. Remember when Yahoo was a great company? Those were the days.

During the dot-com boom I worked for clients who spent a million dollars to sell chickens online. (They subsequently expanded into eggs, too, thus answering the ancient question.) That sounds ridiculous, but it actually wasn’t. I think Instagram is dumb, but maybe I’m wrong. As William Goldman once said of Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything." The app space is so new that only trial and error tells us what works. I mean, Angry Birds?  I Am T-Pain? Are you kidding?

But let’s face it: we’re in a bit of a bubble. Henry Ford famously said, "If the elevator operator recommends buying, you should have sold long ago." Today the elevator operators have begun to seed lean app startups. And yet I remain resolutely unconcerned, and relentlessly optimistic.

Why? Because I look beyond the rich world and I see five and a half billion people only a few years away from their first smartphone, which in most cases will also be their first computer, and their first Internet device. Those three revolutions will hit the developing world all at once—and the repercussions will be epic. Today’s bubble is nothing compared to tomorrow’s boom.

Meanwhile, some undeserving people will make zillions, and a lot of deserving folks will sweat 80 hours a week to break even. So it goes. But you know what? I apologize in advance for getting earnest and histrionic, but what the hell, it’s Christmas, and I genuinely mean this: the tech industry is about more than money. I’m new around here, so I’m loath to try to speak for my fellow writers, but I suspect they’d all agree.

Don’t get me wrong, money’s great, and fun to talk about. But the tech business is really ultimately about building the future and changing the world. That’s what everyone in it does, each in his or her own small way, and more power to you all for it. Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to short Yahoo before the tax year ends.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jeff Kubina

Reading and books: probably the most fantastic gifts possible. That said, the Nook Color can do books, magazines, simple games, and browse the web all on an Android system. It’s been called an iPad light and that’s a great description, really. Normally these run $249.99 in Barnes & Nobel stores, but as the last item in our 12 Days of Christmas giveaway extravaganza, it’s going to one of our lucky reader for nothing more than the cost of a comment. Of course B&N stores are still open today and the Nook Color along with its e-ink counterparts are likely still available if last minute shopping is on your to-do list. They are great devices.

Also, consider this last call for our big ticket giveaway: one stunning gaming system from Digital Storm worth nearly $2,300. Both the computer and Nook Color giveaway end tonight at 11:59pm PST. Click through for the instructions and rules.

Read More

E-commerce giant eBay sees a massive amount of searches every day—the company just announced that it handled more than 2 billion U.S. product searches in the third quarter alone. For the same time period, comScore reports that Amazon saw 847 million searches, while Google handled only 226 million product searches. Similar to the fact that top Google searches can show what’s trending during a specific time, eBay’s searches can show us what is popular in terms of e-commerce at a given time.

The company has releases data on the top product searches on the marketplace during the holiday shopping season (Dec. 1 through Dec. 22). During the time period, the top three products that saw the largest spike in searches (in order) are the Nintendo Wii Console, Xbox Kinect, and “Ugly Christmas Sweater.”

These were followed by Skullcandy Headphones, American Girl Dolls, Sons of Anarchy (TV show), North Face Jacket, Sony Cybershot, Nintendo DSi and Laptop computers.

The fact that the Kinect and Wii are at the top of the list isn’t particularly surprising. comScore just reported that online spending for consumer electronics is currently up 22 percent this holiday season. I think it’s safe to assume that searches for Ugly Christmas Sweaters are likely to go down in the next few days.

Photo Credit/eBay

After selling his latest company, Jajah, to Telefonica for $207 million a year ago, co-founder Daniel Mattes has set his sights on the electronic payments market.

Mattes, who has apparently been baptized the “Bill Gates of the Alps”, has started a new company called Jumio.

Not much is known about the company to date, and this is its vague pitch on the website:

“You buy. You sell. And Jumio is making everything in between a lot easier.”

Tom Foremski met with Mattes earlier this year and believes Jumio will become one of the hottest startups of 2011.

According to Foremski, Mattes has figured out a way to make secure digital payments that cannot be hacked. Mattes said he discovered a patent filed by two engineers based in Israel and acquired it for several hundred thousand dollars:

This technology will make it possible to provide payments services at a far lower rate than the credit card companies because the risk of fraud has been removed. Jumio is currently working on the infrastructure for the payments system but it will also license its technology to large retailers such as Amazon to run on their platform.

He won't yet say how he can guarantee that his payments systems cannot be defrauded — but I'm looking forward to finding out.

And now Mattes has tapped a friend of his, Bosnian opera singer Jasmin Bašić, to tease us a little more by having the tenor sing the Christmas classic ‘Silent Night’ with custom lyrics.

Enjoy and happy holidays.

Once a company focused on building a slideshow creation tool, FlipTrack in May 2008 decided to change its name to Moblyng and shift its core reason for being to bringing Flash objects to mobile phones.

Today, the company seems to have pivoted a third time, now developing cross-platform HTML5 games for mobiles devices.

And according to this SEC filing, the company is currently raising nearly $10.9 million, having already secured about $7.5 million for the round.

FlipTrack / Moblyng announced a partnership with Playdom in May of this year to publish Playdom games on major mobile platforms, and raised $2.65 million in funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Deep Fork Capital.

Stewart Putney, the company’s chief executive, recently proclaimed in a guest post on Inside Social Games that HTML5 is the future of social game development.

Zumbox, a privately held company that offers a digital mailbox and filing system based on your street address, has raised a little over $9.7 million in venture capital, according to this SEC filing.

In August 2009, Zumbox announced that it had raised $8 million from a number high-profile investors, including Michael Eisner, the former CEO of Walt Disney and Rick Braddock, the former CEO of Priceline.com.

This round brings the company’s total amount of funding raised to $17.7 million.

Zumbox is a free service that provides you with a combination digital mailbox / filing system based on your street address. The company works directly with mailers to automatically deliver a digital version of the mail they already send to people. As soon as you verify your identity and address with Zumbox, you can opt to have mail delivered digitally.

Once in your ‘Zumbox’, you can view your mail from your computer or mobile device, set reminders, follow links to pay bills or access your account, print specific pages and organize an archive that will be available whenever you need it.

The service has been available in beta since December 2008.

Zumbox has also established a subsidiary (Zumbox Software) to license its platform to postal authorities and commercial entities worldwide.

Callidus Software, which markets Sales Performance Management (SPM) software solutions, has announced its intent to acquire all of the assets of its technology partner ForceLogix. Through the acquisition, Callidus says it gains a solid sales coaching and talent development technology platform, and the ability to extend its footprint to provide the most comprehensive offering of on-demand sales talent lifecycle management solutions.

Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, has acquired WebVisor, a Russian startup, after holding an "open day for startups" to pitch the search company. WebVisor provides visitor behavior analysis (mouse movement, clicks, text copying etc.) and will be integrated with the company's own visitor statistics tool, Yandex.Metrica. Terms were not disclosed. Yandex says the WebVisor team has joined the company to work on merging their technology into its own framework. WebVisor will keep servicing existing clients, but the service will not accept new customers going forward.

As we reported yesterday, Facebook for a while blocked all j.mp short URLs provided by parent company bit.ly in status and page updates.

Asked for more information, Facebook said it was working with bit.ly to resolve the issue, and that more than 70% of j.mp links pointed to spam or “other security issues” at the time the block was imposed.

Thanks to our original tipster on the story, William Albano, we’ve now learned that j.mp links can now again be posted to Facebook walls worldwide.

For what it’s worth, bit.ly hasn’t said much about the blocking on its blog or Twitter account, but since they’re not disputing the 70% spam and malware claim from Facebook, we’re assuming that this was actually the case.

Shows you still need to be careful of which short URL you click – consider the source, primarily, and look for a browser extension that automatically shows destinations for short URLs, or take other precautions.

Back in October, after the official launch of Windows Phone 7, I wrote up some initial thoughts after having played with a few prototype devices in the months leading up to the launch. Many seemed surprised by my mostly positive reactions. It seemed to me at the time that Microsoft may have actually brought a gun to a gun fight with Windows Phone — as opposed to a sword, or a knife, or a mop.

At the same time, I noted, “Now they just have to run a marathon. Up a mountain. Against competitors that they gave a 20 mile head-start to.” And the early indications point to that race not going so well for Microsoft early on. But still, I think there might be some hope for the platform, for two reasons. First, I’ve actually had the chance to use a finished device for a while now — and I like it. Second, Microsoft has a seemingly endless supply of money.

As I’ve done with a number of other smartphones, the following is my take on Windows Phone from the perspective of an iPhone lover. In my mind, the latest iPhone (currently, the iPhone 4) is still the device to beat out there in the smartphone market, and so I look at all these new devices from that perspective. Is Windows Phone good enough to make me consider switching? Is there anything about it that’s better? Worse? Etc.

Different Is Good

Right off the bat, let me just say the thing that is sure to piss off every fandroid reading this. From an OS perspective, I find Windows Phone more appealing than Android. As I’ve stated previously, I like that Microsoft is doing something different to move the concept mobile OSes forward. The main problem I’ve always had with Android is that it feels too much like a less-polished version of iOS. Google has done a good job iterating and getting it closer to iOS, but it still lacks the refinement. And the fact that they made it have the same basic look and feel makes comparisons impossible to get around.

Windows Phone is completely different. From the homescreen tiles to the UI (codenamed Metro), when I’m using it, I don’t feel like I’m using a poor-man’s iPhone. I feel like I’m using something new. That’s jarring for some people considering the apps-on-the-screen model has been so dominant in the smartphone market up until now. But if Microsoft is able to scale Windows Phone into an actually successful product, they’ll have a lot of competitors copying a lot of what they’re doing.

Tiles

First and foremost, the live-updating tile idea of Windows Phone is great. I’ve never been a big fan of the little red dot badging system that iOS uses to indicate if there’s some update to an app. Windows Phone’s tile system uses a straightforward number system within the tile to show how many new text messages (or emails, or calls, etc) you have.

I also love the simple design of the tiles. They’re big and clickable. And unlike iOS or Android where developers often create weird-looking, ugly icons, Windows Phone tiles are all standard squares. The ones made by Microsoft can be customized with different colors, which changes the look of the homescreen. And tiles can also update with live information such as new pictures.

Clicking on a tile produces a neat little effect where all the other tiles zoom away and the app you clicked on opens. It’s little elements of polish like this that shows Microsoft actually put some work and thought into this OS.

Apps

In the apps themselves, the Metro design work is also very apparent. Microsoft uses this carousel-style system where you cycle through the different main parts of apps. This is a little odd because the way they indicate that there is something to scroll to is often with the word of the next area being partially obstructed. Again, different.

The best third-party apps follow this style as well. A bunch of the apps I’ve been using regularly, such as Twitter and IMDb, were created by IdentityMine, a firm which often works with Microsoft on a number of products. Because they adhere to this Metro style, the apps look really nice. Most importantly for Microsoft, you come away with the feeling that they seem like Windows Phone apps, rather than just regular old apps developed to be cross-platform.

Of course, that styling has probably slowed down the app development process for some third party teams. Kurt Brockett, the Director of UX Evangelism for IdentityMine, tells us that the dev tools are pretty great for Windows Phone and credits Microsoft for doing a good job on a v1 product. But at the same time, to look like the best Windows Phone apps, you’re likely going to have to either outsource your work to companies like IdentityMine or hire dedicated people.

Another brilliant app for the platform is the one made by Netflix. In fact, I’d say it’s noticeably better than the app Netflix makes for the iPhone. It’s just more polished. And they still don’t have any app available for Android. Of course, it may help that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on Microsoft’s Board of Directors.

Most developers I’ve spoken with over the past several weeks have said they are not focusing on the Windows Phone platform just yet. The main reason, obviously, is because they’re just not sure what the public interest will be yet. This is similar to developer reactions after Android launched. And it’s only just now getting to the point where teams are focusing on both iPhone and Android at the same time. So third-party apps may be a slow road for Windows Phone for some time.

Games

But while apps may be coming along slowly, one segment, games, already seem fairly strong. Microsoft has an advantage here given their experience with Xbox Live. And wisely, they’re tying that directly into games on Windows Phone. When games launched on Android, they were pretty awful. On the iPhone, they were decent, but I think it’s fair to say that Apple underestimated how important that market would be. Microsoft doesn’t seem to be underestimating that.

I haven’t played a huge number of them, but the ones I have played seem to run smoothly for the most part and look great. Ones also available on the iPhone (in other words, ported), like Fruit Ninja, don’t seem to run quite as well, but the experience is close.

Windows Phone ties in your Xbox Live avatar to the gaming area so you can keep track of achievements and connections. I suspect the company will continue to beef this up in the coming months as this could potentially be a huge hook for them to get people onto the platform.

Hardware

The Windows Phone I’ve been using is the Samsung Focus. It has a 1Ghz processor, a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, a 5 megapixel camera, and 8 gigabytes of internal storage (which can be beefed up via the microSD slot). The device runs on AT&T’s network — which, as we’re all probably well aware by now, is pretty awful in the Bay Area.

Call quality when AT&T is playing nice (meaning, it’s not raining, I’m not in SoMa, etc…) seems quite good. I love text messaging on the device because I prefer the Metro style Windows Phone uses versus the cutesy bubble style iOS uses.

Simply put: the hardware is overall good, but not great. The screen is great, but the device itself feels a little too plastic-y. Compared to the iPhone 4, it’s shockingly light — which is great when it’s in your pocket, but feels a little odd when it’s in your hand. It’s so light that it feels almost as if it’s missing the battery (which, of course, it isn’t).

Like most Android phones, taking the back off of this device is just about the least elegant thing in the world.

Microsoft is doing a smart thing with their OEM partners in giving them a fairly strict set of specs to adhere to for Windows Phone devices. This means that each phone will have many of the same basic elements, and all should be fairly similar from a user experience perspective. Like Android phones, the Windows Phones have virtual buttons that reside just below the screen. But instead of the four you find on most Android phones, there are three: Search, Home, and Back.

The Focus also has a physical camera button which allows you to quickly jump into camera mode no matter what app you’re in on the device. I’ve heard that a big focus of Windows Phone was to make the picture-taking process as quick as possible. And it is very quick. The problem with the physical button (as opposed to the virtual ones found on the iPhone and Android phones) is that it can lead to small jitters in your pictures, I’ve found.

But if you have steady hands, the picture quality is good. And the device can take 720p video, which looks great.

Overall, the system runs quickly and smoothly. Windows Phone could definitely benefit from the type of background pausing and resuming that iOS employs (apps currently fully quit when you exit them), but that’s a software issue, not a hardware one, and one that will undoubtedly be implemented.

Miscellaneous

In my few weeks with the Windows Phone device, I’ve found a few other things here and there to like about it. One huge thing is the deep Facebook integration. Your Facebook contacts are tied directly into the People tile on the phone, and all of the contact information from their profiles comes over to your device. A few Android phones offer similar things, but it feels more integral to the system on Windows Phone and less tacked-on.

Bing search, with its huge pictures tailored for the phone’s screen looks amazing. And the results pages that take on the Metro design look far better than anything Bing has done on the web proper.

That said, the web browser on Windows Phone is an abomination. It’s hard to describe how bad it is. It’s sort of like IE6, but worse. Nearly every page I’ve visited over the past several weeks has been broken in the browser in some way. It’s usually just small style issues, but still — Microsoft should be ashamed of this. The browser is arguably the most important feature of any smartphone. And on Windows Phone, quite frankly, it sucks.

The software keyboard in Windows Phone is somewhere between the iPhone keyboard and Android’s virtual keyboards in terms of usability, but it’s much closer to the iPhone’s. Again, for a v1 take on this, that’s impressive.

In fact, the overall responsiveness of the touchscreen elements is impressive on v1 of Windows Phone. Android has had a long time to nail this, and with many of their phones, they have not.

Conclusion

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how much I’ve liked Windows Phone. Would I recommend buying one? Certainly not on AT&T, but if and when it came to Verizon, I certainly think it’s worthy of consideration. Would I replace my iPhone with it? Well, no. But I do think it’s important to remember that this is Microsoft’s first stab at this. If you were to compare this to the original iPhone, just from a software perspective, clearly this would be right there, if not slightly better (and much better if you consider that this has third-party apps and the original iPhone didn’t at first).

Of course, we’d probably be having a whole different discussion if Microsoft had released this in 2007 instead of continuing to give mouth-to-mouth to the decaying Windows Mobile brand. Now, they’re coming two to three years late to the party. That means they’re going to have to iterate at an extremely rapid pace — and that could be a good or bad thing.

But the good news is that they’re Microsoft. They have a ton of money that they clearly don’t mind burning if they feel it’s worth it. And mobile is clearly worth it. And that’s why Windows Phone is going to be around a while even if it never fully takes off.

But at least Microsoft has given it the chance to take off with the initial release of Windows Phone. They could have just as easily released a total dud into the market. They could have brought the mop to the gun fight.

More:

• An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus One
• An iPhone Lover's Take On The HTC EVO 4G
• An iPhone Lover's Take On The iPhone 4

Pummelvision does more than turn photos into video. Created by Vimeo co-founder Jake Lodwick, the service literally flashes your life before your eyes by pulling all your photos from Facebook, Flickr, or Tumblr and exporting them to either YouTube or Vimeo. You also have the option of pulling from a single set if you’re using Flickr.

Lodwick explains the motivation behind the tool, which he says was inspired by a mushroom trip, “I retired from blogging on Tumblr and ran their backup tool. A few days later it occurred to me that I had every image I ever posted sitting on my computer, and it would be interesting to see them as a video. I went into Final Cut Pro and produced this. I found it so entertaining, I thought, I should make a tool that does this for everyone. So I spent a few weeks making Pummelvision”

I have not seen anything else like Pummelvision on the Internet. Lodwick says that he’s seen slideshow tools that focus on “goofy” transitions but nothing that combines speed and sound with a massive quantity of photos.

Lodwick wants to eventually be able to grab photos from anywhere and have the videos export anywhere, and plans on adding support for Picasa, Twitpic, Twitvid and Dropbox. He also is working on customization features in order to be able to change features like speed and music, which was the first thing on my wishlist (you can see the fruits of my Pummelvision efforts here).

The last time we wrote about Lodwick it was because he had a bong in his hands. Nowadays he says he has quit smoking pot and is focusing on “Making cool shit at the intersection between art, business, and technology.” Lodwick is also an investor in MakerBot, Bleacher Report, and Tumblr which are indeed very cool.

Here’s a sample Pummelvision courtesy of WSJ New Products Manager Maya Bartz.

Needed any more sign that Christmas is upon us? The annual Google and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) partnership to track Jolly Saint Nick is back in action, starting tomorrow at 2:00 am EST despite the fact that it is already Christmas Eve in some parts of the world.

From the Google Blog:

“There's one timeless question that we're proud to say we can help answer: Where in the world is Santa at this very moment? Thanks in part to recent advances in warp-speed GPS technology and some very clever elves (elveneering?) NORAD Tracks Santa is once again prepped and ready to go.”

The kids love it (Okay who am I kidding? This is really cool). As of tomorrow young and old alike can visit www.noradsanta.org to stalk Santa as he crosses the names of over 6 billion people off of his list. And because it’s the all-seeing GOOG you have multiple “Santa stalking” options. Yes really.

Google Map — Open Google Maps and search for “Santa NORAD” or just visit NoradSanta.org and get past the language screen. You can also watch a Santa cam here.

Google Earth Plugin – If you’ve got the Google Earth plugin, you can visit Noradsanta.org and click on Track Santa In Google Earth.

Santa Mobile — Visit m.noradsanta.org or complete the “Santa NORAD” search on Google Maps for mobile.

YouTube –  Of course, Santa has a YouTube channel.

Realtime Search — You can follow Santa on Twitter at @noradsanta, find him on Facebook here and use Google’s realtime search for updates.

Apparently NORAD has been tracking Santa since 1955, hilariously because a telephone misprint in a Sears catalogue misdirected Santa hotline callers to a NORAD higher ups phone line. Google got in on the Santa tracking game in 2004 and partnered up with NORAD in 2007, bringing Google services like Maps, Earth and YouTube into the mix.

Okay seriously, does ANY tech company have more Christmas spirit than Google?

Update: For those in need of an even bigger Santa fix, here’s his privacy policy.

Image: Google

Back in October we wrote about JewelMint, a new subscription jewelry site endorsed by Kate Bosworth and her stylist Cher Coulter. The site represents the first vertical for Santa Monica-based startup BeachMint, and it’s apparently doing well — less than three months after launching, BeachMint just landed a new $10 million round, which comes in addition to the $5 million it raised last summer. The round is being led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from Stanford University and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Anthem Ventures.

That was fast. BeachMint was only founded in June by Diego Berdakin and MySpace cofounder Josh Berman, both of whom previously headed News Corp’s incubator Slingshot Labs. But the two founders claim they’ve seen “astonishing growth”, and they’re eager to use this money to expand to new verticals.

JewelMint is a lot like ShoeDazzle, the shoe site endorsed by Kim Kardashian. Upon signing up, JewelMint will present you with a brief quiz, which it uses to recommend a few pieces of jewelry based on your taste. Each piece of jewelry is designed by Bosworth and Coulter, and they’re available exclusively through JewelMint.

Buy something and you’ll be signed up for a subscription, which costs $30 a month. Each month you’re given a credit to use toward a single piece of jewelry, and if you don’t like any of the pieces recommended to you, you can skip and wait until the following month (you’re only charged when you order something). If you want to try it out, JewelMint is extending a special offer to TechCrunch readers — use the gift code Nerd15 and you’ll get 50% off.

Berdakin says that since launching JewelMint, BeachMint has increasingly found itself focusing on the technical side of things as it looks to hone its recommendations. “We’re sort of like a Pandora for shopping”, he explains, because the site tries to match customers with items they’ll like. This also boosts switching costs, because customers won’t want to leave their taste profiles behind.

Berdakin and Berman won’t talk revenue numbers or specify which verticals they’re targeting next, but they say we should expect more news in January. They also say that the company is going to continue to match celebrities with each new vertical because it’s proven so effective (they point out that Kate Bosworth and JewelMint have already been featured in numerous glossy magazines).

The company currently has a headcount of twenty, which it plans on doubling over the next couple months.

Group messaging has been something that has been pretty hot for a while now. In fact, it’s gotten so hot that products from other hot spaces are starting to pivot towards it — see: Brightkite. But despite the hotness, I’ve yet to find one of these apps that really hooks me. But a new entry in the space, Beluga, may just be my elusive white whale.

As first covered yesterday by blogger Louis Gray, Beluga is a service with a good pedigree. The three people behind it, Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport, and Jon Perlow, are all Xooglers (ex-Googlers). What they’ve built is a simple, elegant, and fast group messaging service.

The key may be that it works across several different platforms: iPhone, Android, mobile web, regular web, and text message. But whereas most group messaging apps seem to focus on the lowest common denominator, SMS, Beluga puts the focus on the native iPhone and Android apps. The rest are simply fallback options. And across all the platforms, they’ve able to keep the experience consistent.

“Our initial motivation was wanting to eliminate the pain of coordinating plans among groups of people on the move. We wanted to communicate with groups of our actual friends in real-time (and in private) from our phones,” Davenport tells us. “We didn’t feel any existing solution really gave us what we wanted, and when we got positive feedback on our idea from talking to friends, we set out to create the best possible app for small private group communication,” he continues.

And based on my usage of the app over the past couple of days, I think they’ve come pretty close to nailing it. What strikes me is how Beluga seems to fullfil the promise of what Facebook Messages is supposed to be. Again, quick messages in real-time across platforms. I really like Facebook Messages so far on the web (so much so that I hope Gmail copies it), but the mobile experience leaves much to be desired so far. Beluga nails the mobile execution.

It’s almost as if Beluga is like Facebook Messages plus Groups. Groups on Facebook’s iPhone app almost accomplishes this. But it’s too heavy. There are too many layers. You can post messages and comments and you can like things. Beluga is just messages. And Facebook’s mobile clients don’t have a good notification system for Groups. Beluga is all about notifications.

The other popular group messaging services are either too text-reliant or too complicated for my tastes. TextPlus is probably the best-known of this group. But when I load it up I see 30 things I could do, some of which are free and some of which cost additional money. I never know what to click so I end up clicking one button: the iPhone home button to exit the app.

GroupMe is much more simple and comes very close to what I want. But in my opinion, the service (which actually launched out of our first hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City earlier this year) is too reliant on text messaging. That can work really well, but I fundamentally hate text messaging. It’s ugly and it’s a giant rip-off. Also, if you want to send pictures, you have to use their app. I used it recently with a group of friends on a Vegas trip, and no one sent any pictures because of that requirement. (I also would have been screwed had I not turned on unlimited text messages.)

But Beluga offers up a few others things as well that the others don’t that I love. First, you have the option to tag each message with your location. Each “Pod” (the groups Beluga creates for your different conversations) has a “Map” view which allows you to see where everyone in the group is sending their messages from. This can be helpful if you’re trying to find one another — or just cool if you’re chatting from different parts of the world.

You can also set a time and location for each Pod. This can be changed on the fly by anyone in the Pod so you can keep using the Pod to coordinate different events.

To invite friends to chat in Pods, you can either use an email address or phone number (or name if they already have an account). ”We want creating a group conversation to be as easy as sending an email or a text message, but to be a better experience than either. Immediacy and performance are key, so we are primarily focused on native mobile apps (using push notifications),” Davenport says.

He notes that initially it was just himself and Zhang working on the app in New York City this past July. That’s when they first tested a prototype on a 12-person group trip. A further 45-person test followed in September. After that, they brought on Perlow as a third co-founder and CTO. By November, they relocated the operation to Palo Alto, and started sharing space with Quora.

Davenport says that they’re currently actively working on the iPhone, Android, and mobile web versions of the app, but they’re considering BlackBerry and the other mobile OSes as well. They’ve also recently launched their SMS integration through Twilio.

Beluga tapped Braden Kowitz at Google Ventures to do a UX refresh recently, Davenport says. And the work shows. But they’re still just a team of three for now, though they plan to hire shortly as they look into taking on some funding (the operation is currently self-funded).

[photo: flickr/Steve Snodgrass]

Video advertising service PixelFish has just raised $2.1 million in Series B funding according to a SEC Form D filed today. Combined with a $1.4 million Series A round raised back in February this cash brings the company’s total funding to $3.5 million.

Founder John McIntyre won’t give us specific details on the investors in the round other than to say they include himself, co-founder John Zdanowski and executives from AT&T and Microsoft. Floodgate will also be investing and VC Mike Maples (listed on the Form D) will be joining the PixelFish board.

In the same space as Spotrunner and Turnhere,  PixelFish helps businesses leverage video as a customer acquisition and conversion tool. CEO McIntyre says he plans on using the money to expand product development and and fund growth, “We see local marketing and particularly video exploding in 2011.”

HoverMe, a new browser add-on, is launching to add contextual social information about who you follow on the new version of Twitter. After you install the add-on, which works with Firefox, Chrome, and IE, when you hold your mouse or cursor over someone's name on Twitter.com, it brings up a window that shows links to that person's profiles on other social networks and media sites.

For example, If I hover over my colleague Alexia Tsotsis' name in my Twitter stream, I’ll be able togo straight to her Facebook, Foursquare, PlanCast, and FriendFeed accounts via the hovercard. HoverMe pulls in all this information via an API from Qwerly which pulls any profiles that can be found publicly in a Google or Bing search, including LinkedIn, Flickr and more.

It’s actually incredibly useful to quickly find contextual social information about Twitter users. Unfortunately, it only works in Twitter and exclusively in the new web application that Twitter rolled out a few months ago. But Hoverme’s developer Aculis, says that they are hoping to add a similar functionality to Facebook.com

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Travis Kiefer, a kid who worked brutally hard to get into Stanford, took time off to build a non-profit called Gumball Capital, and decided to raise money by running a marathon on every continent. It was one of the more passed around posts I’ve ever written with more than 1,200 Facebook “likes,” 800 retweets and RTing this actually made my username a national trending topic on Twitter for a brief period.

More important, TechCrunch readers donated more than $10,000 to Kiefer’s nonprofit. The deal was Kiefer would do something crazy for each $27 donation. Since he was going to be in Antarctica for a week, he figured he’d have plenty of time. And then he got stuck in Chile for three days. Oops.

I caught up with Kiefer from my parents house in Memphis and his parents house in South Dakota to hear how it all went. If for no other reason, watch this to see how much he looks like Kenneth from 30 Rock.

Editor’s note: Guest author Tim Wu is a profesor at Columbia Law School and author of The Master Switch: The Rise And Fall Of Information Empires. He is also credited with coining the term “network neutrality.” Earlier this week, the FCC approved weakened net neutrality rules which were highly debated and nobody seems to be happy with. In this guest post, Wu tries to sort out who benefits and who loses as result of the new rules.

The new Net Neutrality rules put off most of the hard questions—but who does that help and hurt?

When government faces a tough decision, it has three options: "Aye," "Nay," or "Kay"—"Kick the Can." Postponement is attractive, and the Obama administration's 2010 Net Neutrality rule has transformed can-kicking, the traditional domain of small children, into an art form. In its rule the FCC has successfully put off almost all of the hard Net Neutrality questions that have been buzzing around since 2000 or so. It is a remarkable feat to write a rule that actually creates more uncertainty than no rule, but by golly, the agency has done it.

If you're the type that prizes certainty and clarity (i.e., most engineers, business people and investors), then manufacturing confusion may sound like insanity. But welcome to law school: good lawyers know that uncertainty has a power all of its own. So to really understand the Net Neutrality rule is not to bother understanding the rule itself, but rather the effects the uncertainty will create over the next 5 years or so.

In simple win/lose terms, the effects are good news for the wireless (Verizon / AT&T) and Internet app (Google / Skype) companies, and, as we'll see, something of a defeat for the cable industry. For users, the consequences are mixed. What you'll probably notice most clearly is a sense of a growing gap between the wireline and wireless internet. The reason is that the whatever the wireless rules do (which is, of course, uncertain), they'll have only a marginal effect on the practices in that industry.

Let's look at how, exactly, the rule creates uncertainty. For years everyone has been wondering whether the FCC might bless or damn an Internet “fast lane”—that is, allow a firm like Comcast to speed up Hulu in exchange for cash. The FCC gives us, well, no clear answer. Instead, it tells cable and DSL providers that "unreasonable discrimination" is banned, and then hints strongly that some prioritization might be okay, but paid prioritization might be trouble. Got that?

Another big question is whether the FCC has authority to make the rules at all. After this rulemaking, that question will remain unclear for a good four to six years. We'll get an initial indication in about two years (the length of time it will take for the initial legal challenge), but a final answer may require the Supreme Court to get involved. Meanwhile, if the new rule is struck down by a federal court, the FCC retains the power to reenact it using a different basis of authority (its backup power, so to speak). That will effectively reset the authority question for another two years. Isn't law fun?

The rule is also, finally, deliberately unclear as to exactly who the law applies to, a question the FCC will decide when the time comes. Nor, importantly, do we know exactly what the Net Neutrality rule means for the wireless internet, other than it might be more lenient. Then again, the FCC makes pains to say (on the urging of Commissioner Copps), it might not be more lenient.

Believe it or not, there is a meaning to this madness, for we can predict the effects of the uncertainty. I suggest it will confirm present trends. The uncertainty supports a continued openness on the wired internet, while also sanctioning a wireless internet that is semi-closed and dominated by commercial content. In the language of my book, The Master Switch, the rules may slow the cycle of consolidation on the wireline Internet, while simultaneously speeding it up in wireless. At a deeper level it suggests a coming age of Two Kingdoms: an Internet experience ever more divided by whether you pick up your laptop or your phone.

Let's see how this will work. First, the rule's uncertain application to any would-be fast-lane is as good as a ban. The uncertainty makes major investments needed to create a complex prioritization system a dicey proposition. That's particularly unhappy news for the cable industry, which has more of a fast lane to sell. On the other hand, as is so often the case, what is bad news for cable is good news for consumers. The rule may finally force cable to offer higher speeds instead of trying to squeeze money out of app providers.

Also unhappily for cable, but good for users, the tenor of the rule suggests that the FCC will be suspect of efforts to kill Netflix or other over-the-top video sites. There is, of course, no clear rule saying so, but rather a sense that this is what "unreasonable" discrimination is all about. It's in the air.

In the wireless world, matters are much the opposite. To change current trends would have required a very clear and aggressive ban on multiple forms of discrimination. Instead, the uncertainty confirms a world where favoritism operates not at the network level, but at the level of the physical device, operating system, and arcane areas like app store placement. This is a game that Google, a staunch advocate of wireline Net Neutrality, plays pretty well. But it is Apple who is, of course, the master here. Notice that when Apple decided to block WikiLeaks, it didn't block the website, but rather declared that the App didn't meet developer guidelines. If, instead, partner AT&T had blocked wikileaks.ch, all hell would have broken lose.

The difference between wireless and wireline doesn't necessarily make technical sense, but it is more about which Internet is a happier home for various business models. Discriminatory platforms favor old-school commercial content, which suggest that the Net Neutrality rule will probably foster a continued migration of commercial services to wireless. Meanwhile, the Internet that arrives on your computer will remain a happier home for social, advertising-based, amateur, and non-profit projects, like Wikipedia or, frankly, Facebook. Whether that was the intent of the rule is, of course, impossible to say. But seen through the mists of uncertainty and vagueness, the message is nonetheless clear: so much for "One Web."

Photo credit: Flickr/Serban Constantin

Tremor Media, a New York-based online video monetization and advertising company, recently acquired streaming ad placement service provider ScanScout for an undisclosed sum. Now, thanks to this SEC filing, we know they spent at least $65 million on the merger.

If the transaction was all stock, that’s the purchase price. If the agreement also included partial payment in cash, that means the purchase price was actually higher that that.

Either way, it’s quite a big bet on Tremor Media’s part – the company’s raised just south of $80 million to date (half of which was secured in April of this year).

According to the filing, nearly $1.9 million of the proceeds was paid to one or more executives or directors of the merged entity.

Update: a spokesperson tells us the filing was actually slightly incorrect. According to him, none of the cash proceeds were actually kept by the directors or executive, but completely reinvested in the company. He also noted that the merger was “by far mostly in stock”.

Digital measurement company comScore recently released online video numbers for November, 2010. The company found that Americans viewed more than 5.4 billion online video ads that month alone. Hulu took the top spot, serving more than 1.1 billion ads.

Second to Hulu was Tremor Media, ahead of Microsoft Sites, Brightroll and AOL.com but a far cry from the leading ad network – the company served 477 million online video ads, and its viewers averaged 7.1 ads per person.

The top video ad network in terms of potential reach of the total U.S. population was … ScanScout, at 44.3 percent.

Around twenty miles south of San Francisco is a small city called San Carlos. Despite living in the Bay Area for two decades I know almost nothing about it (Wikipedia says it’s an affluent small residential suburb) but starting today, it’s special for at least one big reason: it’s home to the largest Nexus S in existence.

Last night, Google employees installed a giant Nexus S in the San Carlos Best Buy, sporting a 42 inch touchscreen, a working camera, and internet connectivity. Yes, unlike the giant Nexus Ones that Google produced last year, which just played a looping video of the UI, this giant Nexus S actually works. And it’s actually being powered by a real (smaller) Nexus S that’s been equipped with special video-out capabilities.

So this morning I woke up at the crack of dawn, rolled out of bed, sat in traffic, and made my way to the San Carlos Best Buy to get a hands-on with the giant phone. Watch the video above for my first impressions. Update: Uploaded a new video that is less shaky than the first.

The phone is obviously meant to attract customer attention, and from what I saw (despite the early hour) it was working. Like moths to a flame, I watched a handful of customers walk up to the phone and start playing with it, and even the employees seemed intrigued. It probably helped that the display was right at the front of the store.

Google says this is a test for now — depending on how well the unit fares in the wild (i.e., if people don’t break the screen) it may roll these things out to many more Best Buys, which is currently the only retailer to carry the Nexus S.

Update 2: I was wrong about the new Android Market — it has rolled out to some people, though not everyone has it. And to the people saying I should have controlled this with my palms… no. That’s not how any ‘normal’ consumer is going to use this unless they’re instructed to. And I’m pretty sure that in the future, as big touchscreens become increasingly ubiquitous, we’re not going to be controlling them by rubbing proportionally larger parts of our bodies against the glass.

Smith Electric Vehicles U.S. (SEV) and the Tanfield Group announced today that the American maker of all-electric trucks will purchase its United Kingdom-based parent company, Smith Electric Vehicles U.K. for $15 million in January.

The company began its U.S. operations in Kansas City, Mo. in 2009. Led by chief executive Bryan Hansel, SEV is buying all of the assets and operating business of Smith Electric Vehicles U.K. and renaming its business there Smith Electric Vehicles Europe to reflect an imminent expansion.

The company is eyeing Germany and France, countries whose governments have embraced renewable energy and electric vehicles, Hansel told TechCrunch on Thursday. He also explained that unifying SEV’s divisions could help the company create, operational efficiencies and market synergies that will make it more financially sound and productive:

“First, we'll have global purchasing power for a combined volume of key components like batteries. We had technical alliances before, but negotiated separately on these things. With this deal, we can leverage global buying power. That means something today, and will help reduce and drive out costs.

Efficiencies at scale will apply for our customers, too. We can offer them contract negotiations, pricing, terms and conditions, and global warranties [that are uniform across different regional divisions] thanks to the new structure.”

The $15-million sale will be effective Jan. 1, 2011. Smith U.K.'s current owner, the Tanfield Group, will retain 49 percent equity in SEV. This percentage is subject to dilution as SEV raises additional equity capital. Geoff Allison, the current managing director at Smith U.K. will retain his leadership role there. The company plans to retain the (approximate) 180-person workforce in Europe, and to expand it in 2011, Hansel confirmed.

Recently, SEV announced that the United States Marine Corps signed as a customer, adding a couple of Smith Newton all-electric, commercial trucks to its fleet at a West Coast training facility, Camp Pendleton, Calif to start. The Newton is the only medium duty (class 4-7) all-electric commercial truck on the federal government’s general services administration (GSA) schedule the company confirmed.

A Marine Corps website said:

“The consumption of energy to operate our facilities in support of our mission is a large and recurring cost in terms of both taxpayer dollars and drain on non-renewable resources. Dependence on fossil fuels in a volatile market and from unstable regions of the world is both a financial and security vulnerability. In recognition of these facts, the Commandant of the Marine Corps has set a goal for a 30% reduction in energy consumption by 2015.”

The trucks are currently being built at SEV’s Kansas City, Mo. plant and are scheduled for delivery to Camp Pendleton in February 2011. SEV plans to build additional manufacturing, sales and service facilities around the world in 2011.

The company’s U.S. customers now include fleets run by: Frito-Lay, Staples, Coke, AT&T and PG&E. All have replaced some of their diesel trucks with Smith Newtons, and use them on urban delivery routes. In Europe, Smith Electric’s customers include: the grocery business Sainsbury’s, and the shipping company TNT and several government customers through the U.K. Low Carbon Vehicle Procurement Programme.

Skype is still recovering from its massive outage yesterday, but it is getting back to normal. Instant messages still seem to have a delay (anecdotally, I am noticing that I hear the IM ping, but then it is hit or miss whether any message comes through), but voice calls are working fine. I know because I just spoke with CEO Tony Bates over Skype. He estimates that between 16 million and 17 million Skype users, or about 80 percent of the people who would be on the service right now, can use it. “We are bringing folks back on in a controlled manner,” he says.

Bates priority is to get the service back up and running and to make sure Skype does not lose the trust of its users. To rectify that, he is publicly apologizing to them for the downtime and will offer users some sort of credits, with more details on that coming out later today. (Yes, free calls!) This is the right approach, and reminds me of what Netflix does when its streaming movie service goes down (free movies). Although credits may only go to paying customers wh already have SkypeOut accounts.

The ultimate cause of the outage is still unclear (or at least Skype isn’t ready to talk about it yet). When I asked if Skype has ruled out a malicious attack, Bates responded: “We haven't ruled anything out.” Here is what we do know. Many Skype clients on the open Internet act as “supernodes.” These are directories which act like a big peer-to-peer telephone book helping one Skype client find another. These supernodes somehow were overloaded and went down.

Skype had to put up new supernodes to make up for the outage, and did so by redeploying the servers normally used for group video and offline IM features. Those features are down right now. Pulling the servers from other Skype services seems like a short-term solution until Skype can figure out something longer term.

Whatever the ultimate cause, the incident shows up the weak spot in Skype’s network. Take down the supernodes and the whole service goes with them.

Update: Below is a video message from CEO Bates to users about the outage and what Skype is doing about it:

Update 2: Skype has another update. Now they say the cause wasn’t malicious attack, and they are going to give 30 free minutes of calls to landline phones to paying customers. From their latest blog post:

We now understand the cause of the problem and we believe it was not caused by a malicious attack. But, we are still doing a full analysis and we will provide an in-depth post-mortem.

Nothing can make up for the missed experiences, but we’re going to be sending our Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users a Skype Credit voucher via email. The voucher can be used to give you approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world.*

For our active subscribers, we will credit you with a week’s extra subscription service