You may remember the Humble Indie Bundle from May, which was a sort of experiment in payment, trends, and distribution. It was extremely successful, raising quite a lot of money for the EFF, Child’s Play, and of course the developers themselves. Now, just in time for the holidays, a new bundle is being offered with similar terms, and it’s just as tempting.

One new wrinkle is that the sale is now being run by Humble Bundle, Inc., a Y Combinator startup. With downloadable games becoming an almost disturbingly large business, the company could have carved itself out quite a comfortable little niche. The independent games and apps scene is quite active and prolific, and projects like this one are an excellent way to reward developers who often create these things in their spare time.

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Have you ever lost an expensive phone? Hurts, doesn’t it?

I’ve experienced it, and it’s only when it happens when you realize you’ve not only lost a costly device that you’ll need to replace with another one soon, but that losing it also means someone might stand to gain access to your photos, emails, bank accounts and so forth.

Mobile security software maker TekTrak thinks it has a solid solution for that problem, and the startup has just raised a seed funding round from some notable angels to prove it can turn it into a profitable business, too.

Tektrak has developed an iPhone app dubbed TekTrak Pro ($2.99) that allows users to monitor the precise location of their device at all times and secure sensitive or private information stored on the phone. The TekTrak application uses 3 hardware components already built into most smartphones (cellular, GPS, and WiFi) to pinpoint the location of the phone, in the background of iOS.

Obviously, this only works when the phone is turned on, but users can always see where the phone was last located (which might help them retrieve it on the spot).

Location tracking and history aside, the TekTrak app also comes with a remote ringer feature that gives users the ability to locate their device once they’ve narrowed down its whereabouts and are located in close proximity of the phone. Evidently, this is only useful when sound is turned on.

Obviously, TekTrak has tough competition in Apple, which has just made its similar Find my iPhone/iPad application free of charge in the just-released iOS 4.2. TekTrak posits that it also allows users check the last known location and location history of phones, something Apple's MobileMe does not support.

The company also points out TekTrak provides support for the vast majority of iPhone users, including iPhone 3GS devices, and not only iPhone 4.

The fresh capital will also allow TekTrak to expand to more mobile operating systems and platforms, starting with Android, and to enhance its existing iPhone application with more features.

Investors in the seed round – the size of which remains undisclosed – include Cyan and Scott Banister, Kima Ventures, Sergey Grishin, Wasabi Ventures, BCITL Ventures, Barney Pell and Yoni Saban, among others.

As we wrote a month ago, Google Voice finally arrived for the iPhone after Apple waited 16 months to approve the application. And as expected, the app was a hit with Google Voice and iPhone users. Unfortunately, at the time of launch, Google Voice for the iPhone didn’t support the iPod Touch or the iPad. So today, Google is announcing a new version of Google Voice that will work on both iOS devices.

The new version of the app essentially allows you to use all the features of its iPhone cousin, including the ability to read your voicemail and send and receive text messages. Of course, you cannot make cell calls from the iPad and the iPod Touch. But you can use Google Voice’s Click2Call feature to initiate Google Voice calls with one of your phones.

When you click a “Call button” in the new app on an iPod or iPad, you can select which of your registered phones you want to use to connect the call. Google Voice will call your phone and then connect your call to the contact’s phone number.

Other features of the app include the ability to send callers straight to voicemail via a Do Not Disturb button. And Google has added a “Contacts” button to the Dialer tab to allow you to find your contacts in your address book more seamlessly. Also when you enable Push Notifications within the app, Google will disable Text forwarding for you.

The ability to actually initiate a call from the iPod or iPad is kind of cool, and surely something that could be useful for Google Voice users. Of course, you will have to put down your device and pick up your phone to actually participate in the call.

Like Uncle Eddie said, “Clark, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.” And so, kind readers, in that spirit today’s daily giveaway is a Roku XDS. Cut the cord, stream Netflix, and keep your hard earned money instead of paying for the power bill on Comcast’s massive 2100-foot HD wall. Or don’t cut the cord. We don’t care. We just want to give a reader this Roku XDS for the holidays so click through for the instructions and rules.

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Soladigm raised a $30 million series C investment the company announced this morning. Founded in 2007, the company makes smart glass for green buildings that can change from clear to tinted automatically, in response to changes in light or temperature. Windows using this “electro-chromic” technology help building owners and operators reduce their heat, cooling and lighting costs, and energy consumption.

The market for green buildings is growing rapidly. According to research by McGraw Hill Construction:

Today, a third of all new nonresidential construction is green— a $54 billion market opportunity. In five years, nonresidential green building activity is expected to triple, representing $120 billion to $145 billion in new construction (40 to 48 percent of the nonresidential market) and $14 billion to $18 billion in major retrofit and renovation projects.

DBL Investors and Nano Dimension led the series C round in Soladigm, joined by General Electric (GE) Energy Financial Services, as well as earlier investors Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners. Cynthia Ringo, Managing Partner at DBL Investors, joined Soladigm’s Board of Directors with the investment.

Last month, GE named Soladigm one of the first 12 winners of its Ecomagination Challenge, a $200 million innovation competition inviting entrepreneurs and students to share their best ideas on how to build the next-generation power grid.

In August 2010, the company announced plans to locate its primary manufacturing operations in Olive Branch, Mississippi, where it expects to create several hundred clean tech jobs. To facilitate the expensive factory build, the State of Mississippi provided the company a $40 million loan.

The series C round will help Soladigm build and launch its high-volume commercial operations and develop sales and marketing channels, according to a company statement.

Earlier this month, another maker of smart glass, Sage Electrochromics, drew an $80 million investment from Saint-Gobain, a construction materials manufacturer.

GNU creator Richard Stallman is back on the old “cloud computing is evil” kick again, and this time he’s speaking out against ChromeOS. His basic premise, that cloud computing is dangerous because it places your data in the hands of companies that neither care about you or your data, is sound. As is his threat that when the police come knocking on your cloud provider’s door asking for your data, Google is far more likely to give it up than you are. These are fine and good reactions to the slow erosion of privacy that comes from the rise of cloud computing.

“I think that marketers like cloud computing because it is devoid of substantive meaning. The term’s meaning is not substance, it’s an attitude: 'Let any Tom, Dick and Harry hold your data, let any Tom, Dick and Harry do your computing for you (and control it).’ Perhaps the term 'careless computing’ would suit it better.

To paraphrase Raymond Carver, Stallman is talking and Stallman invented GNU so sometimes that gives him the right. But I worry his FUD in regards to the cloud is misplaced. The obvious issues aside, given the current state of most people’s computer security and back-up practices, I’m will not disregard the cloud as a good alternative to those who can’t maintain their own PCs. Stallman comes from a culture where everything is in one place. The Linux architecture itself is, to an extent, monolithic (not in the computing sense but in the metaphorical sense), and every action you perform on data within it is self-contained on the disk. Copies of copies are propagated through the network, ensuring that important data is replicated and not linked.

You would be a fool to trust your entire video or photo collection to Google or Yahoo or Microsoft, yet millions do. You would be a fool to trust your email records to a bunch of privileged uber-nerds in Palo Alto, but I, myself, do just that. These are compromises we take to create a centralized information jukebox and I, as a responsible computing citizen, keep copies of my important stuff locally.

However, ChromeOS, like many mobile phone OSes, isn’t about being a responsible computing citizen. It’s about getting things done. You put music on your phone or start up Pandora – it’s essentially the same thing. You edit a document in Pages or in Google Docs on the iPad – it’s essentially the same thing. You drag a photo off of your Droid or upload it onto Flickr – it’s essentially the same thing. The primary examples are the movement of bits from and to your own realm while the secondary examples are the movement of bits from and to a password protected “alien” realm. Either way you’re doing the same thing with the same bits.

When it comes time for me to perform some sort of civil disobedience or when I get it into my head to do something illegal, I will keep that data off the cloud. But I do not consider sharing a photo on Posterous “careless computing.”

ChromeOS is Google’s way of showing us the desktop is dead. It’s also Google’s way of grabbing more eyeballs and insinuating itself into the fabric of our information age lives. None of this is done with any particular malice but it is definitely not done with our best interests at heart. However, for the vast majority of us, letting Google do the heavy lifting when it comes to data storage and maintenance is probably the best way to go.

The question is not whether I should trust Google or Microsoft or Apple with my data in the cloud. The question is, rather, whether it is worth my time, attention, and resources not to.

via Guardian

Google publicly unveiled the Chrome Web Store a week ago. Looking at the most popular apps in the U.S. by weekly install numbers, it looks like TweetDeck has fast risen to the most prominent spot on the list, as relayed by the startup’s founder Iain Dodsworth earlier today.

With about 102,500 weekly installs at the time of writing, TweetDeck thus beats NYTimes, whose app has seen approximately 87,700 weekly installs to date, roughly seven days in.

So where are the Google services? Right behind the TweetDeck and the NY Times, it appears.

The list of top 10 most popular apps on the Chrome Web Store includes Google Calendar, Google Books, Google Docs, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube.

Granted, most of Google’s ‘apps’ are mere links to the respective Web-based services, whereas ‘ChromeDeck’ is an actual app, but still.

Springpad rounds out the list of the ten most popular apps on the store as the third non-Google service to make the list after TweetDeck and NY Times, with about 35,000 weekly installs (almost a third of TweetDeck’s install numbers).

Obviously, it’s far too soon to draw any conclusions, but it’s certainly a testament to TweetDeck’s huge popularity to see it leading the most popular Chrome apps list, considering the company is primarily regarded as a desktop and mobile client software developer.

For your information, rivals HootSuite (16,000 weekly installs), eBuddy Web Messenger (13,9200 weekly installs) and Seesmic (5,442 weekly installs) are trailing far behind.

Infochimps, a marketplace for data sets, is announcing the acquisition of Y Combinator-incubated startup and competitor Data Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we understand it was an all-cash deal.

As we wrote in our initial review of Data Marketplace earlier this year, the startup served as a middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users could submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format.

Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a request, that users can search for.

Infochimps, which recently closed a $1.2 million financing round from DFJ Mercury, focused on providing smaller data sets for developers. Data ranges from content around academia, the enterprise, and more. The startup is also working on building a large-scale data stack capable of ingesting, analyzing and distributing TB scale databases.

Infochimps’ CEO Nick Ducoff tells us that the funding has been used for both the acquisition of Data Marketplace as well as for new hires, which include Kurt Bollacker, previously Chief Scientist at Metaweb (which was acquired by Google). Data Marketplace’s founders Steve DeWald and Matt Hodan will not be joining Infochimps as part of the acquisition but Data Marketplace will continue to operate as a standalone destination.

Giant retail electronic payments network operator Visa has released a free iPhone app in the United States, giving users access to over 50 merchant offers ranging from clothing and dining to entertainment, just in time for the holiday shopping season.

The app will allow retailers such as New York & Company, Planet Hollywood, Holiday Inn, Hard Rock Café and Zales to automatically deliver exclusive offers to Visa account holders.

Account holders with Visa Signature cards will receive special Visa Signature offers in addition to the standard offers.

Offers are stored in the application, can be tailored to users’ preferences, and can be redeemed either online or at physical retail locations.

Furthermore, the app boasts location-based technology that provides consumers with a map and directions to a nearby retailer where they can redeem offers, as well as the nearest ATM.

Visa says it is working closely with handset makers, carriers and technology providers worldwide to bring Visa payment facilities to the mobile channel. The Visa Mobile application for the iPhone was developed in partnership with Monitise, a UK-based mobile banking and payments platform company.

Visa signed a global alliance with Monitise in June 2009 to custom-develop mobile services for Visa across a variety of handsets.

In addition, Visa last week announced the commercial availability of mobile contactless payments enabled by DeviceFidelity’s In2Pay microSD solution (more about that here).

Visa has also developed an Android application, but participation in the program for the platform is currently limited to select U.S. Bank debit cardholders.

There’s no shortage of mobile ad networks; and unsurprisingly there’s been a lot of consolidation in the space marked by the acquisitions of AdMob by Google and Quattro Wireless by Apple. Today, Moolah Media is throwing its hat into the mobile advertising network ring.

Moolah Media, which has been in stealth for the past few months, is basing its network of mobile ads around a cost-per-action and cost-per-lead model. So the network’s ad formats allow advertisers to drive inbound calls directly to their call center, collect signups and registration leads, while also tracking conversions.

In a private beta period, Moolah claims that the platform generated 250,000 quality leads from 100 million impressions per month. The network also promises higher payouts and 100 percent fill rates for publishers. Ads can be placed within apps, on the mobile web or within text messages.

While advertisers pay more for CPA or CPL ad formats, Moolah Media will no doubt face competition from Google’s AdMob if the network turns on this type of advertising on mobile phones (which seems likely).

After a successful Box Office run and overwhelmingly positive reviews, The Social Network has garnered a number of Golden Globe nominations, including one for Aaron Sorkin for Best Screenplay.

The Golden Globes are known as an accurate reflection of what could come at the Oscars, so this is a big win for the movie, which was released by Sony Pictures.

The Social Network’s other nominations included Trent Reznor for Best Original Score, Jesse Eisenberg for Best Actor, David Fincher for Best Director, Andrew Garfield for Best Supporting Actor and Armie Hammer for Best Supporting Actor (the actor who played the ‘Winklevii’. And perhaps one of the most important nominations—a nod for best motion picture, in the drama category.

While nothing is definite, it certainly seems likely that The Social Network could get a number of Oscar nods come next year.

The Golden Globes will take place on January 16, 2011.

While there are some of us for whom even boiling water correctly is a challenge, there are also future Top Chefs just waiting to be given the chance. You probably have one among your family or friends. And while great cooks don’t necessarily need great tools (it’s-a all in the spirit, eh?), it can’t hurt to have a few high-quality items around the kitchen. A beautiful new knife and cutting board may be the excuse he or she needs to stay home and brew up something delicious instead of going out.

And remember, a high-quality knife or pot can last a lifetime! So don’t be afraid to lay out a little scratch. Consider some of the following items to set your foodie on the right path.

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There are only so many adjectives you can use to describe your achievments. LinkedIn has just released the most overused words and phrases in members' LinkedIn profiles in the U.S., and the results aren’t surprising.

Extensive experience took the top spot followed by Innovative and Motivated. Other popular keywords used in member profiles include Results-oriented, Dynamic, Proven track record, Team player, Fast-paced, Problem solver and Entrepreneurial. Results are similar for members outside the U.S. For example, France’s most-used word is Innovative while Spain’s most popular buzzword is Dynamic.

LinkedIn, which now has 85 million members, advises professionals who have used any of these words to replace these terms with actionable information and phrases.

If you’re an advertiser, you probably know full well that there are a lot of places for you to run your ads: billboards, radio, TV, print, and the web come to mind, each of which can be fine-tuned to hone in on certain verticals and demographics. And given the broad range of choices for advertisers, it isn’t surprising that running these multi-media campaigns can be a time-consuming and difficult task.

That is, unless you can turn to a platform that can handle all of them at once. That’s the promise offered by Integrate, a startup that launched in February of this year that allows advertisers to purchase placement on everything from billboards to the web from a single site. Today, the company is announcing that it’s closed a $4.25 million funding round led by the Foundry Group.

Integrate’s system allows advertisers to place their contextual ads into multiple ad networks without having to deal with each one individually; it can also place ads on TV, on billboards, and through other channels.

All of Integrate’s transactions are done on a performance basis — you pay based on how well your ad is converting. The system does this by assigning unique 800 numbers (or web URLs) to each ad campaign, allowing Integrate to determine how many potential customers have been acquired as a result of the ad (calls are all recorded to verify accuracy). Founder Jeremy Bloom says that since launch, the company has run over 1,000 campaigns.

Integrate also provides a platform where advertisers and publishers can discuss possible deals. For example, an advertiser could log into the platform, specify which regions they wanted their ads to appear in and to whom, and state that they’re willing to spend $10 per acquisition. A publisher can then say which of these requests they can fulfill, and can also say whether they’d like a price adjustment. Integrate takes a cut of each transaction, but it varies depending on the vertical and the size of the allocation.

All of these negotiations are done on Integrate’s platform, and while there’s a chance advertisers and publishers could scheme to finalize their deal elsewhere (so as to avoid giving Integrate its cut), Bloom says that these conversations are all reviewed by the company’s employees, and that everyone in the system is credible to begin with because of a vetting process.

Bloom says that some of the platform’s functionality is available through other systems, but that this is the only one that offers this flexibility on a performance basis, as opposed to CPM. Other players in this space include Right Media Exchange.

Also worth noting: Bloom has a pretty incredible resume. He’s a two-time Olympian, three-time World Champion, and eleven-time World Cup gold medalist snow skier. He also played NCAA football at the University of Colorado and was drafted into the NFL.

Right on the heels of raising $4 million, Java cloud computing startup CloudBees has announced that it has acquired Stax Networks, a pioneering Java Platform-as-a-Service solutions provider. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

It's December 14th. The holidays are getting closer...and closer...And with only 10 days until Christmas, I am sure there are tons of parents still frantically searching for something for their kids. Hoping to avoid crowded malls, many are perhaps buying gifts online. So what better time to announce a €2 million ($2.6 million) investment in an online store with over 150 of the hottest clothing, decoration, toy and furniture brands for kids than now ? Smallable, a Paris-based e-commerce startup founded in 2008, has just announced a 2 million euro investment from French VC firm Alven Capital. For anyone who doesn't know, Alven is the French VC behind up-and-coming French startup MyFab. This investment is in-line with the not-so-new e-commerce investment trend in France (EspaceMax, Showroomprivé, InstantLuxe...) but is perhaps one of the country's very first investments  that addresses e-commerce oriented towards the 0-12 year-old age range.

Former Googler, FriendFeed founder and Facebook-er turned investor Paul Buchheit just tweeted this zinger:

Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or “merged” with Android)

Considering his former employer just launched the Chrome OS pilot program last week, the comment may sting a little over at Mountain View, although it should be noted Buchheit is hardly the only one predicting that Google’s Linux-based operating system will go the way of the Wave soon enough.

Google to date has posited that Android and Chrome OS, its two operating systems, address different markets that will remain distinct despite the growing convergence of the devices they run on (netbooks, tablets, smartphones). Google co-founder Sergey Brin, however, has stated in the past that Google will likely “produce a single OS down the road”.

Ironically, the key architect of the Chrome OS project, Matthew Papakipos, left Google over the Summer — for a job at Facebook, Paul Buchheit’s most recent former employer.

If the man’s less-than-140-characters prediction is right on the money, Android will become the dominant operating system – and considering its current traction, that would hardly be a surprise – while Chrome OS will perish before 2011 is over.

Update: more from Buchheit in the FriendFeed thread:

ChromeOS has no purpose that isn’t better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).

I was thinking, “is this too obvious to even state?”, but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason.

Do you agree with his assertion, or do you think Chrome OS and Android can co-exist?

Mobile ad network Millennial Media is releasing its monthly data on mobile devices and OS marketshare for November today. Millennial’s ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web.

Similar to last month’s report, Android tied with iOS as the largest Smartphone OS on the network for November, with both mobile operating systems sharing 38 percent of ad impressions on the network. Both Android and iOS’s share increased by one percent from last month. RIM followed Android and iOS with a 19 percent impression share in November, down one percent from October.

One of the more interesting data points from the network’s report is that Android apps represented 54 percent of all apps on the Millennial network and are averaging 10 percent growth month-over-month over the past 4 months. Apple was second on the list with a 38 percent share. Additionally, Android was named the leading platform that publishers/developers intend to support in 2011, with the iPad and Windows Phone 7 tied for second on the list.

General smartphone impression share decreased by 3 percent month-over-month and accounted for 58 percent of the mobile phone impression share in November. Feature Phones and WiFi Connected Devices (i.e. the iPad) experienced a 1 percent and 2% increase in impression share month-over-month, respectively. Together, they represented 42% of impressions in November.

Millennial also reported that Apple continued its reign as the top manufacturer on the Millennial network (as it has been for the last 14 months), representing 25 percent of the network’s impression share by manufacturer in November. In terms of actual devices, the iPhone and iPod touch made up the top two individual mobile devices.

Samsung came in second in terms of manufacturers, followed by Motorola with a 15 percent impression share Motorola had three devices in Millennial’s network—Droid, Droid 2 and Droid X). RIM devices represented five of the Top 30 Mobile Devices on Millennial’s network, with a combined impression share of 11 percent in November.

While Android is eating away at the smartphone marketshare that Apple and RIM once commanded, there’s the possibility that Android’d rampant growth could be slowing down. The OS only posted a 1 percent increase in impressions share on Millennial’s network versus an 8 percent increase in October.

It will be interesting to see if Android can manage to surpass impression share in December. According to a new IDC report, Millennial is the third largest network behind Google AdMob and Apple’s iAd, so a shift in share on Millennial’s network would be significant.

I often have discussions with various people in the technology industry about location-based services. I also moderate and/or sit on a lot of panels about the topic. Naturally, I constantly read and write about it as well. So how often does Google Latitude come up in all of this? Basically never.

That’s why I was legitimately shocked today when in their blog post announcing Latitude for the iPhone, Google dropped a big number bomb: 9 million. As in Latitude has 9 million active users. That makes it nearly twice as large as the often talked-about Foursquare. So how is that possible?

Well, because Google wants it to be possible. You see, they now bake Latitude directly into every Android phone through the Maps application. And while it is opt-in, my suspicion (and I’m hardly alone here) is that many people turn it on then basically never do anything with it. But it’s still a part of Maps, so technically they are “actively” using it. They’re just passively actively using it, if that makes any sense.

Look, 9 million is impressive. There’s no way around it. It’s even more impressive when you consider that just seven months ago, they had 3 million active users. At the time, Foursquare had just signed up their one millionth user. So Foursquare has grown by 4 million, while Latitude has grown by 6 million during the same span.

But again, I’m just not sure that all those Latitude users are sure that they are active Latitude users. And even if they are, I’m not sure they’re actually doing anything. Because that’s kind of the point — with Latitude, you don’t have to do anything. It just runs in the background, updating your location. It’s actually pretty hard to be “active” on it.

As it stands right now, it’s a feature, not a service. And yet it exists as a service.

Last week at LeWeb, our own Mike Arrington asked Google’s Marissa Mayer about Latitude on stage. Given her new role in the company, Latitude is now under her watch. So naturally, Mike tried to get her to admit it sucked. While she wouldn’t do that, she wasn’t exactly jumping for joy and singing its praises. Instead, she agreed that it needed some work and that the model may need to change slightly.

That means check-ins. Latitude has long danced around this concept, sequestering it to the API. But the fact of the matter remains that most people simply still aren’t ready for the constant location tracking that services like Latitude offer. I would consider myself very open-minded about this kind of stuff, and I still sort of think Latitude’s concept is weird.

For example, since I downloaded the iPhone app, it has been running all day in the background letting those who are checking know where I am. If I want to turn that off, I have to go into the app and dig into the settings a bit. And it’s harder (and easier to forget) on Android. That’s annoying, and not that way it should be. Loopt, which also does some background location stuff, does a much nicer job with this on and off switch.

I know that Google sends you email reminders every once in a while that your Latitude location is turned on. But the fundamental problem remains: most people simply aren’t ready for background location updates all the time. That’s exactly why check-in services took off. They’re a stepping stone to that. And it’s going to be a while.

Google doesn’t seem to want to believe that. So they’re shoving it inside of Maps, creating iPhone apps, and giving users some nifty tools to show them that this type of data can be valuable. It’s a bit like passive force feeding.

But it won’t work. The timing just isn’t right.

Google can trot out the 9 million number as proof that their strategy is sound, but I believe those may be padded stats. Why? Because I’m most certainly one of the 9 million counted. And I wouldn’t consider myself to be an “active” Latitude user.

Or if I’m wrong, I’d love Google to give some more details about those 9 million users. Where exactly are they hiding? You’d think they’d be easier to find given their use of Latitude.

Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler has created the stunning map of international human relationships above, using a ten million friend pair sample size from Facebook social graph data. His methodology?

“I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.”

Hey Google HR people, Paul Butler. That’s P-A-U-L-B-U-T-L-E-R. Touch base with him on Facebook and/or on LinkedIn here. You’re welcome.

Since French artist Alexandre Oudin took advantage of the new Facebook design to express himself, we’ve been seeing some creative ways to mess with your (and your friends’) profile pictures. As we predicted, Oudin’s hack has inspired other users to play around with their profile to pretty interesting effect. And for those of you that don’t want to trial and error around with the 532 px by 180 px and 97 by 68 px image limitations, photographer Florian Stravock has made the above Photoshop tutorial to help you perfectly execute on your super profile pic. Abridged steps, below:

1) Take a screenshot of your current Facebook page.

2) Create a new Photoshop doc.

3) Grab the Slice tool (same family as the Crop tool) and select around the pictures.

4) With the Marquee tool, select around the sliced areas.

5) Bring the image that you want on Facebook into Photoshop and position it roughly the way you want it.

6) Drag the image layer under the Facebook layer and refine your positioning.

7) Go to “File,” select “Save for web and devices,” select all your document area, click “Jpeg, set the quality to 100% and save. Under slices select “All user slices.”

8) Upload your pictures to Facebook and tag them from last to first. When you get to the first picture click “Make this my profile picture.”

You can download Stravock’s Photoshop document here. Don’t have Photoshop or too lazy to sit through a tutorial? TechCrunch reader Trevor Farbo has created a profile picture generator that allows you to get the same effect in half the time.

Check out more reader customizations here and upload your own works of Internet art in the comments.

For the past 10 days, I’ve been in Paris. A few of us were there to cover the LeWeb conference, which was great, but I decided to stick around for a little while longer as I heard the city is amazing. Spoiler alert: it is. But I wasn’t on vacation, I was working. I had all my tech with me — including the best travel computer ever, the new MacBook Air, and even this thing. And, of course, my iPhone.

But there was something peculiar about my iPhone in Paris. It actually worked. Like it was supposed to. All the time. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why: there is no AT&T in Paris.

Since the initial launch of the iPhone in 2007, there have been no shortage of whispers implying that the iPhone itself is to blame for the coverage issues users are having with AT&T in the United States. There are even some compelling arguments as to why this could be at least somewhat true in certain circumstances. But all of those go out the window when you travel to a foreign country and the device just starts working as it should.

And this is hardly the first time I’ve experienced this. Back in April, I was in Japan for a little over three weeks. I was floored by how well the iPhone worked there. But I wasn’t sure that it was fair to compare it to the networks in the U.S. because I hardly saw any smartphones, let alone iPhones, anywhere in the entire country (apparently, that’s now changing).

But in Paris, the iPhone is everywhere. It seemed as if every other person I passed on the street had one. Those that didn’t, seemed to have BlackBerrys. And again, the coverage was beautiful.

The coverage was so good, in fact, that the iPhone worked on the subway in Paris. Yes, I could both place calls and surf the web while underground. Considering I haven’t been able to hold a call above ground in San Francisco for about 2 years now, this is truly amazing.

The only times I would hit dead zones in Paris seemed to be when the iPhone was switching me from one carrier to another. And it appeared to do this automatically based on signal strength. The result was a tight blanket of coverage. Again, as opposed to the blanket that AT&T provides in the Bay Area which often seems like it has more holes than cloth.

Earlier today, I arrived back in San Francisco. The first call I placed? Dropped. I then walked around my neighborhood for a bit using my favorite app: “Searching…” I was about ready to get back on the plane and go back. Well, if it didn’t cost me $1 per megabyte of data usage there (for the international rip-off, er, I mean, roaming plan compliments of yes, AT&T).

But there’s hope.

When the iPhone launched in 2007 in France it was also exclusive to one carrier: Orange. This exclusivity was eliminated in 2009 as Bouygues Telecom and SFR got to join the fun. The result was that sales of the device more than doubled. But even as the country saw this rapid expansion of the iPhone and its heavy data usage, the network didn’t cripple. Undoubtedly, because the load could be spread across all those different carriers’ spectrums. That’s what many of us are hoping will happen if and when the iPhone comes to Verizon and/or some of the other U.S. carriers early next year.

Of course, none of us will be able to hop from carrier to carrier as I was in Paris. The iPhone will undoubtedly still be locked down to whatever carrier you buy it on here. Plus, the fact that current GSM iPhones won’t work with Verizon’s current CDMA network means you will still have to choose.

Still, if AT&T is able to offload some of the iPhone weight in major metropolitan cities to Verizon (something which seems likely), there’s reason to hope the coverage will improve for the iPhone across the board.

It can work. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes and heard it with my own two ears. On a subway, no less.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an article pointing out how Google is increasingly favoring its own properties, in search results over natural results to outside sites which previously commanded the top spots. This practice is especially noticeable with Google Places and local results, but there are other examples as well from product and mortgage search to health search.

We’ve seen these spats before, particularly between Google and Yelp. Citysearch and Tripadvisor are also taking a traffic hit, it seems. Google responded yesterday with a post on its public policy blog titled “Local Search: It’s all about the best answers for users.”

Yeah, right. Don’t kid yourself. It’s all about what is best for Google. How else do you explain the preponderance of Google Places listings in local search results for queries such as “NY Chiropractor” (see screenshot) or “NYC spa”? In each case the top 7 links after the paid ads are businesses which just happen to have a Google Places page.

Is it just a coincidence that the top seven links in a row happen to be businesses with Google Places listings (which you can see by clicking on the Google Places links on the right). There is hardly any room on the all-important first page for any natural results below. What’s more, for the chiropractor search the first two Google Places results are ones with yellow “tags,” which are $25 local-search ad units targeted at small businesses. So even after the regular paid ads highlighted with a pink-shaded background, the next two results are also ads disguised as quasi-natural search results.

The Google Places results don’t always take up nearly the entire first page. Sometimes they come up in a single box with a smaller font, and just two lines each per listing. Try searching for “Columbus mechanic” or “NYC gym” and you will see what I mean.

Displaying local results this way is a little less in your face, but the end result is the same. In both cases, the main link still goes to the businesses’ own websites, but the Google Places links are also prominent. Either way, the message is clear to local businesses: list your profile in Google Places and you will have a better shot at appearing at the top of the first search results page.

Are these results better for users? It depends on how good are the Google Places listings. Some of them are very good, I will admit. But try any local search and I bet you will consistently get Google Places results, sometimes taking up most of page—not always at the very top, but always as a block. They can’t all be better than results for businesses which don’t happen to have a Google Places listing. Remember, Google Places is still fairly new and developing. Google is clearly using its main search page to push Google Places and make those listings more prominent. Over time, it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy and those listings will be the best because businesses will learn that is the most important place to be in order to be found by Google.

No wonder other SEO-friendly local listings and reviews sites such as Citysearch, TripAdvisor, and Yelp are up in arms about this favoritism. They are being muscled out of their previous cosy spots by the search engine which makes all the rules.

It should be pretty clear by now that Google is taking location very seriously. The original launch of Latitude in early 2009 was just a first step. Now they have robust APIs, Google Places, and key executive Marissa Mayer is now in charge of these and various related projects. And earlier today they finally rolled out a Latitude iPhone app. But if a fairly small tweak to Chrome is any indication, Google means to go deeper still.

More specifically, Chromium, the open source browser on which Chrome is based, just recently received a new experimental feature hidden behind a flag (meaning you have to explicitly enable it). In the latest builds of Chromium version 10, you’ll see an option called “Experimental location features”. Apparently, when switched on, this allows the browser to run “experimental extensions to the geolocation feature.”

The description clarifies it a bit more: “Includes using operating system location APIs (where available), and sending additional local network configuration data to the Google location service to provide higher accuracy positioning.” Obviously, that last bit is particularly interesting. Clearly, Google hopes to improve location accuracy within the browser — a problem since most of it is drawn from WiFi triangulation data rather than GPS (which most computers don’t have). But it would seem that they also mean to build out their own location database and services with the data they collect from this feature in Chrome.

There’s currently a war brewing underneath the location apps that consumers see. It involves location and place databases and services. It used to be that everyone, including the big boys, went to companies like Skyhook Wireless and Localeze for location data and functionality. But increasingly, the tech superpowers like Apple, Google, and Facebook are building out their own. Why? Because they all want to own the local space.

But Google has perhaps the most interesting positioning here. After all, their millions of Android phones come with location built into their Maps product. Apple has this too with the iPhone, but remember that it’s Google Maps that’s also included on the iPhone (though it is said that Apple builds the app on their own, simply using Google’s data). And now Google is starting to really push their location services like Latitude and the new Hot Pot. And just in case you don’t think anyone is actually using Latitude, Google made it clear today that it has 9 million active users — that’s nearly double Foursquare’s total user base.

Of course, there are still questions as to just how many people are actually using Latitude, versus how many enable it via Maps on Android devices and don’t even really realize it. But it almost doesn’t matter, Google is still getting that data. That’s why it’s so vital that they control all of these various entry points. And soon, it looks like Chrome will be another one. And that’s key just in case the Chrome notebooks take off. Location services will have successfully made the jump from smartphones to notebooks.

And all of this is key to what Mayer talked about on stage at LeWeb last week: the move towards “contextual discovery“. Getting results without searching.

Last week, Tim Wu challenged me to another, longer debate about the future of the Web. His new book, The Master Switch, argues that every time there is a major communications innovation, a handful of big companies find a way to close it off, keeping the future spoils for themselves. That hurts incremental innovation and ultimately hurts consumer choice in the name of convenience and low-prices. His book is about all the ways the Web is no different from, say, radio and the telegraph and old Hollywood studios.

I’ve argued the Web is different because of technological reasons, community reasons, and capitalization reasons. Because of the way startups are financed this time around, there is more money on the side of the Web staying open than there is in closing it.

My evidence is simply how things have gone so far: Most of the early Web giants like eBay, Yahoo and AOL have struggled at the hands of well-funded upstarts. The fact that in just a few years Facebook has racked up one of the largest valuations of a Web company in the world and even younger Groupon just turned down billions from Google proves the Web is nowhere close to being locked up by the incumbents.

In this longer debate on bloggingheads.tv, Wu raises a few good counter arguments that concern him about the industry’s future. And they hit home because they are two things I worry about too: Silicon Valley’s increasing reliance on acquisitions for exits and apps running on top of platforms like the iPhone and Facebook for distribution. We also talk about the distinction between the computer Web and the mobile Web when it comes to openness.

The whole debate is below.

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