Mobile ad network Greystripe launched its workaround to bring Flash-like ads to iOS devices last year, with the hope that advertisers who still want to use Flash-based ads would choose the network’s format over Apple’s iAd format. It looks like Greystripe’s proprietary Lightning Technology could pay off for the network. The mobile ad network’s revenue in 2010 was boosted by 50 percent thanks to the Flash workaround.

Greystripe's Lightening technology transcodes Flash authored ads as HTML5 to mobile devices that do not support Flash Player (such as the iPhone and iPad); these ads will be supported in both applications and on the mobile web. There's no work for the advertisers or publishers; Greystripe says the transition from Flash to HTML5 is seamless. And Greystripe's technology for Apple's Safari web browser allows real-time transcoding of Flash authored creative work to HTML5.

In spite of Apple's lack of support for Flash Ads on iPhones and iPads, 30 million iOS users saw billions of ad impressions created using Adobe Flash from major brand advertisers that use Greystripe’s technology, says the network. Brands like Buick, Corona, Axe and Burger King, delivered over 300 Flash-based mobile advertising campaigns in 2010 and the company projects 1200 such campaigns in 2011 or 100 Flash-based campaigns per month.

The company is currently generating several million dollars a month already on just flash-converted mobile ads and expects 300 percent growth in this revenue in 2011. Based on our estimates, this could range between $35 million and $40 million in 2011 revenue for Greystripe.

While Greystripe doesn’t have the reach that networks like AdMob, iAd, or Millennial Media has, the mobile ad network been able to raise an impressive amount of VC funding and even got a $2 million infusion from NBC. It should be interesting to see what 2011 brings for the smaller network. Perhaps a possible acquisition?

23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin‘s spouse, has raised $9 million more in funding, adding to the company’s $22 million C round announced last November. This round of funding comes from MPM Capital and Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. MPM Capital Managing Director Ashley Ledbetter Dombkowski will be joining 23andMe’s Board of Directors. This brings the company’s total funding to nearly $54 million.

23andMe, which was founded in 2006, aims to help individuals understand their own genetic information through DNA analysis technologies and Web-based interactive tools. DNA analysis helps participants find information about their ancestry and their risks of getting certain diseases (Michael has tried the service).

Wojcicki said in a statement: With MPM Capital joining Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, Roche Venture Fund, Google Ventures and New Enterprise Associates as investors, 23andMe has aligned a powerful constellation of expertise in strategic healthcare, healthcare venture funding, consumer markets, information technology, and business strategy that will enable us to bring the vision of personalized medicine to consumers faster.

The company has had its hiccups along the way, but funding from healthcare and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is certainly a vote of confidence for the startup.

General Electric has been trotting out “home of the future” technologies at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show this week, from a backyard-installable wind turbine, the Skystream 600, to a home energy management device and system called the Nucleus (image below).

Today the company revealed a new — perhaps not surprising — “eco-home” focus for phase two of their Ecomagination Challenge, a competition through which GE and its venture capital partners committed to invest $200 million in clean, green technology startups.

The Ecomagination Challenge is now seeking green tech ideas to power the home. More specifically, the competition wants proposals in the following consumer-facing categories: household energy efficiency including management software, appliances and air conditioning; and renewable power, from solar, wind, hydro and biomass.

Applications will be accepted online through GE’s Ecomagination Challenge site from January 18 to March 1, 2011, then discussed and voted on by the user community there, with winners selected and announced in the early spring.

TechCrunch covered the phase one winners of the Ecomagination challenge in November, and the beginning of this initiative in July.

In an interview this week about the competition thus far, GE’s chief marketing offier and senior vice president, Beth Comstock said:

“The focus of the Powering Your Home phase of the challenge is innovation that consumers can touch and feel.

Phase one was great. We funded ideas from such a wide spectrum, especially to create and use [resources and energy sustainably]. But we felt we could get consumers more engaged at this point.

We got about 1,000 ideas in the home energy management space alone, out of about 4,000 total ideas in the last phase. They came from kids as young as ten and entrepreneurs over ninety. They came in from about 150 countries.

We evaluated those and are still evaluating some that may not have been appropriate for investments at the time, but may have something we want to license, for example. Many of the ideas we saw also could have become stronger and qualify for investment moving forward. We’ll encourage some of those applicants to submit new or stronger ideas to ecomagination.

Since we only announced our investments in November, it is too early to see returns. We continue to have very fruitful discussions with retailers about working together in licensing and distribution.

Though the challenge invested $55 million in the last phase, we haven’t set an amount we plan to invest in Powering Your Home. We’ll just have to see the ideas.”

General Electric’s chief executive officer Jeff Immelt is also set to speak about some of the company’s digital energy and other green initiatives on the Innovation Power Panel at CES 2011 today.

Apple this morning announced that over one million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store, which was launched just yesterday (with over 1,000 apps).

Our own MG Siegler thinks the Mac App Store will be huge indeed, even if many of the apps available through the desire leave much to be desired.

For (a lot) more coverage, check out this Techmeme thread.

CloudMade, which provides collaborative data and tools to developers and OEMs for mapping and navigation applications, has acquired navigation software company OneStepAhead. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

OneStepAhead’s software provides a number of technologies, but CloudMade CEO Juha Christensen says that he is particularly excited about the startup’s device map caching, which and will allows developers to combine geodata in the cloud with data that sits on a device. This technology, says Christensen, will allow Cloudmade developers to create navigation and location-enabled applications with maps that are always up-to-date.

CloudMade, which just raised $12.3 million in new funding, plans to integrate OneStepAhead’s technology into its own offerings to allows consumers to access map data, points of interest, routing, navigation and other data around their location even when not connected to the Internet.

CloudMade's platform allows third parties to create applications with stylized and customized map tiles, fully featured turn-by-turn navigation, in-app advertising, local search and data sets relevant to thousands of consumer activities. CloudMade distributes its collaborative mapping, package maps, geo services and advertising to developers and businesses; its main customers are mobile developers, OEMs and network operators. Some of the 12,000-plus developers using CloudMade’s API include Skobbler, OffMaps, Geocaching, Trails, Ride the City, GayCities, and Dopplr.

The startup uses data from partnership with OpenStreetMap (OSM), a wiki map of the world that has over 250,000 users worldwide (and is adding 3,500 new users per week), making over 7,000 edits per hour.

I’ve caught on to this SlideShare presentation fairly late, so there’s a chance you’ve already seen it (it’s garnered nearly 50,000 views so far), but it’s definitely worth sharing here. The presentation was made by Nick De Mey from Board of Innovation, which does a phenomenal job analyzing and visualizing business models in a wide range of industries.

For an example, check their recent look at Newsgrape, a startup I’m personally very curious about. The Board of Innovation blog is well worth subscribing to.

Featured in the presentation of the 10 business models that rocked 2010, at least according to De Mey, are Groupon, Flattr, Spotify and Airbnb, among others.

The presentation is best viewed in full screen.

Do you agree with this list? Any you would remove / add?

(And of course, don’t forget to check out our Seven Technologies That Will Rock 2011)

Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme is leaving the firm in a full time role to become the director of the Ohio Department of Development, where he will focus on driving Ohio’s economic growth. He was appointed by incoming governor John Kasich.

Kvamme joined Sequoia in 1999 and led early investments in LinkedIn, MarkLogic, Funny or Die, StrongMail and CastIron Systems (acquired by IBM). Prior to joining Sequoia he was CEO of advertising agency CKS Group.

Kvamme says he has big ideas about driving economic growth, noting that there aren’t a lot of people in government today with good business acumen. “Decisions are made with billions of dollars that lead to unsustainable solutions,” he said by phone yesterday. “I want to get Ohio back on track and drive people and businesses to the state.”

He says he has a specific blueprint for change that he’ll be sharing in the next few weeks. Sequoia is naming him their first “Special Limited Partner” and he will continue in a limited role with the firm.

Kvamme was also an early champion of UJAM, which placed second in the TechCrunch Disrupt: New York startup battlefield competition.

Should you be on Quora, one of the most hyped startups recently?

Cwora, created by tech comedian and speaker Tom Scott, says no, for the following reasons (thanks to @renate for the tip):

John Stewart took a bite out of Facebook tonight on “The Daily Show,” specifically Goldman Sachs’ recent $450 million investment at a $50 billion valuation and what it means with regards to a possible Facebook IPO in 2012.

Stewart wryly comments on the irony of Zuckerberg’s reluctance to go public, “Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be transparent? The guy whose immense success was founded on mining our personal data, the guy who shares my photos with the whole world unless I change my privacy settings every half an hour!?”

Stewart also goes on to call John Battelle’s Web 2.0 Summit “Nerdfest 2008″ and show hypothetical pictures of Facebook employees having a money fight and frolicking in a cash bonfire and well …

Just watch. Trust me, it’s good.

Back in August, I first got to try out the Twitter Streaming API via the User Streams feature which was being beta tested on a new version on popular third-party client TweetDeck. “Twitter User Streams Is Crack For Realtime Web Junkies,” was the title I went with. For this post, I sort of wanted to use the title “If User Streams Is Crack, Twitter For Mac Is A Crack Pipe.” Then I thought better of it. Actually, I didn’t. I’m simply mentioning it now instead of in the title because I thought the title I used was a bit more in line with what I actually wanted to say.

But the truth is that the newly launched Twitter for Mac is one of the most addicting, and more importantly, engaging, products I can recall seeing. Just watching it update in realtime is fascinating enough. But when you actually start to have a conversation with people and can see them responding to you in realtime, it becomes more like an IM service instead of the way we’ve typically viewed Twitter: with static one-off messages and maybe a reply here or there. And I’m wondering if now that Twitter has added the realtime User Streams to an official product, if it won’t fundamentally alter Twitter itself?

Shortly after it launched this morning, Erick gave Twitter for Mac a resounding “meh“. But Erick’s a TweetDeck guy. As much as I liked the idea of TweetDeck with User Streams turned on, I couldn’t get into it. There’s simply too much going on with a UI that sort of looks like a nightmare to me (complete with the black background). And while you can customize it, it’s designed in a way that’s all about cramming as much information in front of your face as possible. It’s just not my cup of tea. But Twitter for Mac is beautiful. It’s simple, speedy, and highly usable.

And during my first day of usage today, I’ve noticed my tweeting actions changing a bit — and from others I’ve talked to today, I’m not alone. Now when I tweet, I instantly see the replies come in thanks to User Streams. This is much faster than it is even on Twitter’s website, because they hold them back and make you hit a button to refresh. And with all these Tweets coming at me in realtime, I feel the urge to respond more quickly than I normally would. And this results in a realtime conversation taking place over Twitter — which is why I compare it to IM.

Granted, for those not in the conversation who follow the people I’m responding to, this has to be pretty annoying. But it’s also interesting. It’s like having a conversation in a crowded room where anyone at anytime can stop and listen to you if they want. Why would they want to? I don’t know. Why does anyone want to follow anyone else on Twitter?

And obviously that’s been an issue before, but never like this. The realtime-ness ups the conversation greatly judging by the few I’ve had today and others I’ve spoken with about it.

And again, it’s addicting. I sort of feel weird having a conversation in realtime with friends in a public forum, but what the hell, why not? It’s kind of fun. Maybe someone is actually interested in passively listening and joining in as they please. Maybe I’m crazy, and a weird edge case, but I do wonder if the realtime User Streams implementation could alter the way people use Twitter. What if it becomes more noisy (and I’m don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, just in a different way)? Does that ruin Twitter or make it even more addictive?

Obviously, the people using Twitter for Mac are going to be a smaller subset of the larger audience. But it’s still now an official product. What if Twitter rolls out the realtime feature to their website? That type of realtime system use to lead to huge engagement on FriendFeed, a service with tens of millions of fewer users than Twitter. The results could be quite scary (again, maybe in a good or a bad way).

Either way, I love this latest version of Tweetie reborn as Twitter for Mac. Back to the crack pipe.

Below: Old vs. New Tweetie (Twitter) for Mac:

Fast moving shopping rewards app and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CheckPoints has hit a couple of milestones this week, 2 1/2 months since its launch. Co-founder Mark Dipaola tells us that the app now boasts 1 million store check-ins and 600K barcode scans, or users scanning the barcodes of participating products in participating stores.

Dipaola also expects that the app will clock in about 1/2 a million users (not downloads but actually people who have registered for the service) on the iPhone and iOS platforms by the end of this week.

Says Dipaola, “We’re heading quickly to a million users, quickly adding on additional clients who want to reach consumers in the aisles where decisions are made.“

CheckPoints has partnerships with major brands like Belkin, Tyson, Energizer, Kmart and recently added Frito Lay. Over ten of their partners boast at least a billion dollars in market cap.

Self-funded, CheckPoints has recently had some funding interest due the mobile/social rewards space’s (which includes ShopKick and SCVNGR) rapid growth. Di Paola is currently exploring whether to continue as a bootstrapped startup or explore other investments.

After a Holiday hiatus, Ask a VC is back and we’re kicking off the new year with Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Emergence was started to fund the software-as-a-service craze of the early 2000s. That wave has had mixed results, but Emergence had several of the big hits including Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors. Green himself was also an investor in hits like DoubleClick, aQuantive and AskJeeves.

Enterprise software fell out of favor during the Web 2.0 consumer boom, but now, many investors believe a new wave of more disruptive, more sophisticated cloud-based services is bubbling up. Emergence already has one strong horse in that race with Yammer. Wonder how they view the upcoming Salesforce.com Chatter v. Yammer battle royale? I intend on asking Green.

What do you want to ask him? We’re taping early tomorrow morning so send in your questions now to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

At CES this week, Pandora made two announcements that get its popular Internet radio service into cars, one for Toyota and one for BMW. But while exciting, the reality is these are still hacks that use your smart phone to solve the big car Internet radio problem: Connectivity.

It’s a big problem but a crucial one for Pandora to solve if it wants to realize its mission of being wherever radio is. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad, 50% of all radio listening happens in the car– and frankly I’m surprised the number is that low.

I pulled Conrad away from the madness of CES to ask him when I’d be able to buy or rent a car and see AM, FM, CD, Satellite Radio and Pandora– all native. Hint: The only thing Pandora has ruled out in getting there is becoming an automaker.

If you’re as chained to Apple products as we are, you probably spent a couple hours this morning exploring the nascent Mac App Store or as I like to call it, the Productivity Toilet. And you are not alone, hours after launch some industrious (and foul mouthed) UI enthusiast has created “Read the fucking HIG,” a Tumblr compilation of terribly designed Mac Apps.

While we found it on Twitter of course, we hear this has been making the rounds at Apple all afternoon, “I can’t stop laughing. Every post is quotable” one employee told us. True.

These two in particular made me spit out my coffee.


Declaration for Mac by Clint Bagwell Consulting

“in the reviews:

"good lay out. this app does a perfect job presenting the Declaration in a simple but elagent way[sic]"

you cant make this shit up”

Vegas Pool Sharks by RESETgame

“ok just some sort of pool game i guess the custom buttons are abhorrent bOH GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR FACE”

And in case you’re curious what the bar is, here is Apple’s actual HIG (Human Interface Guide, basically developer UI recommendations). Enjoy.

The Mac App Store is going to be huge. Sure, you look at it now and see that it’s largely populated with a lot of apps you don’t want and will never want. But there are already quite a few gems (namely some key games) on day one. And the smooth execution of how it works makes it very clear that this is the future of software distribution for the Mac platform. And some of those apps themselves also speak to the future of the platform.

It’s no accident that Apple baked the Mac App Store directly into OS X rather than making it a stand-alone app. Apple clearly means for every Mac user to eventually have it. In a way, you could almost think of it as really the first feature of OS X Lion, we’re just getting it a few months early. And why not? If Apple realized they could make it work with OS X Snow Leopard, why force all users to upgrade to get access to it?

Apple will continue to sell software from their Apple stores, but the selection will dwindle over time. It will start with the Apple-made apps — the key pieces are in the Mac App Store on day one. The other big Mac app publishers will eventually get on board because they won’t be able to turn down this new built-in distribution channel.

But there’s something deeper going on here. Look at the two most popular apps right now: Twitter for Mac (free) and Angry Birds (paid). Twitter looks more like an iPad app than a Mac app. Gone is the dated “Aqua” user interface that most Mac apps still carry. It has been replaced by a sleek, black and gray UI. It’s something that seems to look a bit like what people originally thought a new “Marble” interface could look like.

Gone are the light blue scroll bars. Instead, Twitter has a light gray scroll bar that seems to blend into the side of the app. It looks a bit like the latest version of iPhoto and QuickTime. And that’s probably not an accident. This should be closer to what more OS X apps start looking like starting with Lion. At least I hope that’s the case — it looks great.

Angry Birds points to something a bit different. You open the app and you have no choice but to go full screen. This is another feature touted in OS X Lion, full-screen apps. And it’s something Apple has learned from apps on the iPad, and is borrowing. Windows are being shut — or rather, fully opened.

This full screen experience allows you to navigate the app more easily with touch. Yes, you can use your mouse to play the game, but it’s a much better and more seamless experience if you have a Magic Trackpad (or a MacBook trackpad). It’s just like a bigger version of the iPhone/iPad game.

You swipe your finger to pull back the bird and let go to fire. To bring up the menu, you swipe three fingers down. To zoom in or out, you pinch. To move the view to the right or left, you use two fingers. We’re seeing the shift to touch on the desktop happening before our eyes with apps like this. It’s no longer going to be point-and-click but flick-and-swipe.

And Angry Birds isn’t alone there. Other apps that were iOS-first, like Flight Control, also utilize the Magic Trackpad if you have one for a touch experience. Or if you have a MacBook, you’re set to go with the trackpad on those.

These are the new breed of apps that I suspected we might see in the Mac App Store. They’re apps that were iOS first, but now are moving to the Mac. They’re sort of micro-apps that are built around a touch experience and ported to the Mac with the help of the trackpad and a virtual cursor. Games are the first to come, but there will be others. And there will be many new hybrids.

Using the Mac App Store for the past few hours, my overall thought is: how did Apple not do this sooner? You click to download an app and it’s done. No tricky installation needed. And you hop on to a different machine and can re-download any app you’ve already bought. Updates are all centralized. And I’ve probably spent more today on apps than I have in the past year total.

Now just imagine when the apps get really good. And when some of these hybrid ones I’m talking about start hitting the store. Yeah, the Mac App Store is going to be huge.

Verizon is really looking to push the capabilities of its 4G network when it arrives on Android handsets later this year. Earlier today we wrote about a partnership the carrier had forged with streaming music service MOG to put that company’s apps on every 4G Verizon Android phone. Now Ustream has announced a similar partnership: every 4G Verizon Android phone will be shipping with Ustream installed as well.

The application will let you both broadcast and view live video streams, with integrated chat and social network integration for posting your videos to Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Obviously this is good news for Ustream in terms of getting exposure, and, as with MOG, this is the kind of application users are going to be eager to try to test out their new speedy connections.

This is the first time that Ustream will come bundled on a mobile phone. These partnership can be huge when it comes to boosting adoption, as evidenced by Qik’s jump from 600,000 to 5 million users in the last year, largely due to its partnerships (Qik was just acquired by Skype).

Depending on how you look at it, it's either a classic example of fiddling while Rome burns, or a masterstoke in brand positioning. In fact, come to think of it, maybe Tumblr's decision to hire a "fashion director" and to pay for twenty bloggers to attend New York fashion week is both of those things.

Certainly, you might think the company would have other priorities: like solving its persistent up-time problems – an issue that affects far more than the twenty lucky Tumblrs who will "receive complimentary flights, accommodation, and will be whisked off to lunches, dinners, and cocktails with a roster of to-be-confirmed brands and designers". At the same time, though, the Fashion Week junket addresses something that might cause even more of a challenge for Tumblr in future: the generation of original, re-bloggable content.

Most earlier blogging platforms – Livejournal, Blogger et al – built their user-bases on text: millions of diary entries and diatribes penned by angsty teenagers and frustrated Starbucks employees. Dirt-cheap content, in other words. Tumblr, on the other hand, is all about images: photos of food, fails and – yes – fashion uploaded by some users and then re-blogged by countless millions more. As such, the company's success (or lack thereof) is dependant on encouraging a flow of high quality, ultra-rebloggable images.

For that reason, sending bloggers to Fashion week is a brilliant move: injecting hundreds (thousands?) of sexy, copyright-safe images into the Tumblr ecosystem while simultaneously positioning Tumblr as the go-to platform for the cool kids. Sure, Blogger has better uptime, but will they send you to the Carlos Miele show? Nuh-uh!

Above all, though, Tumblr's attempts to influence and nurture the creative direction of its bloggers highlights something else: the fundamental difference between East and West coast social media companies.

West coast companies – Twitter, Facebook, Blogger et al – trust unfalteringly in the creativity of the crowds: leaving users to their own devices, confident that the vast sea of content they create will eventually issue forth some mermaids. Back East, though, the Manhattan media elites are a little more skeptical about citizen media and a little more bullish about the importance of editorial curation. Tumblr's hiring of a fashion director perfectly encapsulates that belief system: our users need to be directed into producing high quality content, otherwise they're just going to spend their days reblogging copyright-infringing porn. (Which maybe be a valid belief, affirmed by anyone who types “tumblr” into Google image search with SafeSearch turned off)

So, who is right? The West-coasters with their hands-off approach to creativity and editorial control, or the East-coasters whose views on citizen creativity are best summed up by this quote from Barry Diller…

"You have to distinguish between so-to-speak user-generated text or video, which will have a designed audience of four or forty, as against those things that will have a really wide dissemination."

…?

Boringly, the answer is probably both. Increasingly the West coast platforms are dabbling in curation: MySpace and YouTube have both shifted from purely user-driven platforms into organising their own live events and actively producing content. Even Twitter employs an official celebrity liaison – albeit more out of the necessity of keeping its highest profile users happy than a desire to shape the conversation. Meanwhile it's a rare East coast media company indeed which hasn't embraced the power of social: opening up its editorial pages to user comments or encouraging its viewers to share their own videos and photos.

The problem is that neither side seems to believe in the compromise: the East coasters' nod to social and community rarely avoids coming across as hugely patronising ("thanks, Wolf, now let's have a look what the Tweeters are saying!"), while one can't help to feel that YouTube's partnering with media brands is more about keeping their copyright-owner enemies closer than any fundamental belief in the value of professionally-produced conent.

Still, for those of us who are eying the curation vs crowd-sourcing future with vested interest, it will at least be telling to see whether Tumblr's experiment pays off. Whether their pet bloggers enjoy more page views and re-blogs for their costly, editorial-supported, Fashion Week coverage than they do for their regular snarky on-looking from behind the velvet ropes. Assuming, of course, that Tumblr stays up long enough for them to post anything at all.

Under the radar startup Personal has just announced a round of funding from a group of impressive backers. Personal has raised $7.6 million in a Series A round of investment from Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution LLC with participation from Allen & Company and Eric Semler of TCS Capital Management (although this SEC filing indicates the startup raised $7.3 million)

Founded by the same management team that built business mapping application The Map Network (which was acquired by NAVTEQ in 2006), Personal aims to give consumers control over their digital data. Details are still sparse on how Personal does this, but the company says that it helps users prevent companies tracking, compiling and selling digital information without the consumer’s consent.

In particular, Personal highlights the invasiveness of online tracking as a problem in the consumers web. Shane Green, president and CEO of Personal says, “We aim to fundamentally turn the tables to empower consumers to become gatekeepers of their information and, if they choose, be rewarded for granting access to it, even anonymously.”

Personal, which is in private beta, is certainly emerging at a time when online privacy is a heated issue. Whether it be via Facebook, or through online advertising tracking methods, consumers are more aware of the privacy issues surrounding their digital data. Personal could be away for consumers to regain power over their data on the web.

Salesforce is continuing its shopping spree into 2011. The company has announced that it has acquired DimDim, a web conferencing service for $31 million in cash.

DimDim, which has raised around $9 million in venture funding, provides a browser-based web conferencing platform that doesn't require the installation of any desktop software and is based on an open source platform. The platform provides real-time collaboration capabilities, the ability to share documents, record sessions, whiteboard and use video, voice and phone conferencing.

Salesforce.com says that it will use DimDim’s real-time communication technologies in its social collaboration platform, Chatter. Interestingly, while the CRM giant has previously backed away from facebook comparisons to Chatter, Salesforce said that the integration between Chatter and DimDim will mirror “the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.”

From the release, it really sounds like Salesforce wants to create the Facebook for the enterprise. From the release:

Today, Facebook has proven the value of integrated collaboration and communication, with services like presence and messaging, which helped fuel user adoption, making it the world’s most popular Internet site. Salesforce.com followed a similar path when it introduced the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform. Today, more than 60,000 customers have deployed Chatter since its release in June — making it the company’s most-popular product. Now with Dimdim, salesforce.com is following Facebook’s lead once again. By offering an integrated collaboration and communication platform, the company believes it will drive greater Chatter adoption, increase customer loyalty and differentiate its entire product portfolio.

So perhaps Salesforce will add the ability to hold web conferences and share screens to Chatter? It seems from the statement, that the company definitely wants to make Chatter a communication platform. Adding features like real-time chat, voice calling and more should help Chatter become more Facebook-like.

For Salesforce, this is the third public acquisition in the past month. The company bought email contact manager Etacts, and Heroku for $212 million in cash.

We’re Live at Verizon’s Press Conference in Las Vegas. The bandwidth is all kinds of shaky, but we’ll keep the updates coming as long as the bandwidth Gods allow it.

Read More

Here’s some big news for MOG, the premium music service that lets you pay $10 a month to stream an unlimited number of songs to your computer and your mobile devices (the mobile apps also let you download entire albums to your phone and save them locally, which is very handy).

Today the company has announced that it’s landed a deal with Verizon, and it’s a big one: MOG will come preinstalled on all 4G Verizon Android phones. MOG will also be featured in Verizon’s V CAST app store, and users will be able to sign up for MOG accounts using Verizon carrier billing.

This is a big win for MOG, which has the challenge of convincing people to pay for a subscription music service (no easy feat) and is up against some strong competitors like Rdio and Spotify (if it ever launches in the US). The exposure to millions of Verizon users will be nice, and I suspect that many people are going to be eager to ‘test’ their 4G connections as soon as they get their hands on a phone that supports it — mass downloading of albums sounds like a good place to start. And carrier billing is key too, as users won’t have to pull out their credit cards.

Verizon will almost certainly be taking a chunk of MOG’s revenues for users that sign up via the preinstalled app, but in the long term this may prove worth it. At this point we’re in a sort of landgrab for streaming music service customers — each service will eventually have very similar libraries (they already do in most cases), and users may well stick with the same provider for years.

Sorry international users, MOG is US only. But so is Verizon.

It’s time for this week’s episode of Fly or Die, the TCTV show where CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I look at three new products and debate their longterm chances of survival. In today’s show, we discuss Windows Phone 7, the just-announced Casio Tryx digital camera, and the popular Flipboard iPad app. At the end of the show, a special surprise guest appears from one of the companies involved to respond immediately to our criticisms of his product. That’s the best part of the show, so be sure to watch until the end to catch it.

Okay, I’ll tell you who is the guest. It is Flipboard co-founder Evan Doll, but John didn’t know who it would be when we were taping this yesterday. John actually gave Flipboard a “die” verdict because he thinks the New York Times or News Corp. will come in soon with their own social reading apps and cut Flipboard at the knees. I disagree. Flipboard, along with a few other iPad apps, is defining a new way to consume information on touchscreen tablets. Flipboard unpacks the underlying articles and images from your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a magazine-like format. It already has one million users, so those old media companies better move fast if they want to play the iPad game.

One challenge Flipboard does have is that it is still an aggregator of news and therefore is seen as a threat by some publishers, just like Google News or Digg. The bigger issue, in my opinion, is that it still presents news in chronological order, and doesn’t filter the news by importance or authority. Doll acknowledges that Flipboard needs to do better in that regard and suggests that the company is working on exactly those kinds of features. If you want to watch just the Flipboard segment, I’ve embedded it below.

The other two products we discuss are the Windows Phone 7 and Casio Tryx. We’ve already done a full review of Windows Phone 7 (twice). Just to be clear, Fly or Die is not so much a product review show as it is a product debate show. Both John and I are impressed with Windows Phone 7, but the big question is whether or not it can attract enough high-quality apps to make a dent in the smartphone market. The Casio Tryx is a digital camera with a funky form factor. It sports a handle that swings out and can double as a tripod, and it is making a big splash at the CES.

Since John is at CES this week, he had to join me by video Skype from the Venetian show floor in Las Vegas. And our guest Skyped in from Palo Alto. So apologies in advance for the imperfect audio, but the logistics were kind of crazy for this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Below are links to each segment from this episode, along with the Flipboard segment embedded. Be sure to also check out our previous episodes where we took on the Boxee Box, Instagram (Episode 1), and the Nexus S and Video Girl Barbie (Episode 2).

Fly or Die (Episode 3):Windows Phone 7

Fly or Die (Episode 3): Casio Tryx

Days after California passed a bill criminalizing certain online impersonations, the person behind the @ceoSteveJobs Twitter account tells us that someone from Apple has complained to Twitter about the @ceoSteveJobs Twitter account. The tipster (who wants us to call him Christof) tells TechCrunch that Twitter has received a “valid report” i.e. either from “the user being impersonated or someone legally authorized to act on behalf of that user/entity” that the account is in violation of the Twitter parody policy, which holds that usernames and profile names should not be the exact name of the subject among other things.

The @ceoSteveJobs Twitter account currently has 367,182 followers and is the most followed non-fictional (representing an actual person or entity, not a made up character like @Stewie) parody account as far as I can see. Currently the account is clearly in violation of the “Username” and “Account name” strictures of the Twitter guidelines which Twitter says haven’t been changed since the criminalization bill went into effect.

Christof has already changed his bio to include the word “parody” and will have to add something like “Fake” or “Not” to his username to be in accordance with policy. He says that all the good ones like ”fakestevejobs” “fakesteve” and”fakejobs” are already taken and also thinks that a name change will affect the account’s humor. “Most parody doesn’t blatantly label itself. That takes away the fun and the magic of it. If @bpglobalpr had been @fakebp, it wouldn’t have caught on nearly as fast and might never have been as funny. Once you got the joke, the fact that it felt like it was really coming from BP made it all the funnier.”

Last time the @ceoSteveJobs account made headlines it was because it had confused the UK’s Daily Mail enough to publish a post quoting it as the real Steve Jobs account. So perhaps Apple’s concerns are valid. When contacted about the account, representatives from Twitter said, “We don’t generally comment on alleged user violations. Our rules, guidelines and actions tend to speak for themselves.” Apple did not return my request for comment.

We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to talk with Ford CEO Alan Mulally about the current line-up of cars and the technology that goes into them.

Mr. Mulally has the unique honor of being CEO of Ford during the recession, and Ford was the only company that didn’t need a government loan. Perhaps this is due to Alan’s background as an engineer in Boeing in the 60′s. He went on to become the CEO of Boeing, and is in fact considered to be one of the major reasons that Boeing was able to compete with Airbus during that period. Mr. Mulally had quite a bit to say about the MyFord technology, the current car line up, and some hints about the future of Ford.

Read more…

It’s been a big week for Skype. The company launched video chat capability to its iPhone app last week and announced the acquisition of mobile video startup Qik today. The company has made another announcement, launching group calling functionality to its business offering for Windows PCs (the feature had previously been added to its consumer clients for Mac and Windows computers last year).

The new version of Skype for enterprise allows businesses to have video calls with up to 10 concurrent participants, adding to the client’s existing chat, screen sharing and conference call features. Group Video Calling for businesses is available from Skype for $8.99 per user per month.

Group Calling for Skype’s business offering is a big deal when put in the context of Skype’s enterprise ambitions. When the VoIP company filed to go public, Skype publicly stated that it plans on adding enterprise products to its suite to help build additional revenues. Group Video calling is no doubt an incredibly useful feature for businesses.

David Gurlé, General Manager and Vice President of Skype's Enterprise business unit said in a statement, The Business version of Skype is great for live meetings and it offers a compelling low-cost option compared to competing solutions that are often complicated, costly or difficult to deploy.

Approximately 37 percent of Skype users say they use Skype's product platform occasionally or often for business-related purposes and Skype is hoping to raise that number as the company looks for new forms of revenue. Gurlé told us last fall that Skype is ramping up production of its enterprise products so I’d expect 2011 to be a big year for Skype’s business strategy.