We just got an anonymous tip that Google’s been ‘hacked’ – sure enough, visitors of the company’s Bangladesh search site (Google.com.bd) see a defaced landing page rather than the usual search site. As far as I can tell, www.google.com.bd functions properly, so whether this really constitutes a ‘hack’ is up for debate.

Local Bangladesh media, including online newspaper bdnews24.com, reported on the news as well, quoting a CTO of a local ISP, who confirmed the hack.

Nevertheless, it seems like only a subset of users see the defaced landing page, while others report that they can visit and use the search engine without any hiccups.

According to Zone-h, Bangladeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE has been quite active with defacements lately, and has targeted some high-profile sites in the past, including the local website for American Express and Airtel (video).

As we hinted predicted four days ago, SoundCloud was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It’s confirmed today on their blog that both firms have made undisclosed investments.

SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on bigger offices and more staff.

Everyone in the tech world talks about business models. But I'll bet that if you quizzed a random sample of these people, you'd find that they really don't know what a business model is. I did just that with my students at UC-Berkeley. Most raised their hands, and MBA student Blake Brundidge’s attempt to answer the question was a valiant one—but none of them really had a clue.  The only one who got the answer right was Lionel Vital, a Stanford student gatecrashing my iSchool class.

The reality is that a business model is like the old saying about teenage sex: everyone talks about it all the time; everyone boasts about how well he or she is doing it; everyone thinks everyone else is doing it; almost no one really is; and the few who are are fumbling their way through it incompetently. (Yes, I know things have changed.)

I'll tell you what a business model is, in case you are quizzed by your investors.

But first, let me answer the big question that is surely on your mind: what is a Stanford student doing at Berkeley? It may be that our classes at Berkeley are much better than those at Stanford. That is probably why Lionel approached me at the beginning of the semester and begged to be allowed to audit my class. To Lionel's credit, he scored better than any of the Berkeley students. So perhaps some Stanford kids are a little smarter, but Berkeley students get better education? I know that our students certainly have a lot more fun. You just have to visit the campuses to note the stark difference.

Now let's discuss business models. Sorry, the teenagers reading this will need to get their sex education somewhere else. I teach only entrepreneurship and globalization.

Step one in building a successful business is to learn what products or technologies your customers really need and are willing to buy. This is an iterative process that I explained in this piece. The vast majority of technology startups fail because too few customers buy or use their products. So don't underestimate the importance of validating and testing your ideas.

Developing the right product is hard. But what is harder is building a good business model. Fortunately, there’s nothing magical about a business model. It’s simply the nuts and bolts of how a business plans to generate revenue and profits. It details your long-term strategy and day-to-day operations.

Entrepreneurs put together elaborate business plans showing optimistic market-share projections. Even 1% of a billion-dollar market seems lucrative, right? Wishful thinking is great, but when it comes time to create your business model, you need to be realistic. The challenges differ from industry to industry, but here are seven basic components of a business model:

1. Reaching customers. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” The reality is that even if you did, no one would find you. Even when you know who your prospects are, it’s usually difficult and costly to reach them. You have to find them via the Internet and e-mail, or the old-fashioned way—through broadcast media, print ads, direct mail, telemarketing, or references or by cold-calling. And these potential customers are not likely to be waiting to hear from you and may not respond to you. So be sure you know how you are going to find and reach them.

2. Differentiating your product. You think you’ve got the very best solution, but so does the other gal (or guy). There’s always competition, whether you realize it or not. Smart marketing executives know how to develop unique product-positioning strategies that highlight a product’s true value. You need to thoroughly understand the competition and effectively communicate the unique advantages of your product.

3. Pricing. One of the most basic decisions you have to make is how much you’re going to charge for your product or service. Giving your stuff away is the way to go on the web, but remember that you still need to figure out how you are eventually going to make money—you can't make it up on volume. Start by understanding how much customers value what they’re gaining from you. Then you need to estimate your total costs, analyze the competitive landscape, and map out your long-term strategy. For your company to survive, your product’s price must be greater than its overall cost.

4. Selling. Persuading customers to buy a product that they need is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur must learn (read It’s All About Selling for Survival). You’re going to be selling at every juncture. So you have to understand what it takes to close a deal and put together the necessary sales process. And this process has to be perfectly conceived. Be sure you test your selling strategy as you would your product.

5. Delivery/distribution. This is easy on the Internet. But for big-ticket items, you usually require a direct sales force; for mid-range products, distributors or value-added resellers; and, for low-priced items, retail outlets or the Internet. It’s different in every industry and for every type of product, but you have to get this right. Your products need to be designed and packaged for the channel through which they will be distributed to customers.

6. Supporting Customers. In addition to teaching customers how to use your product, you need to ensure that you can deal with defects and returns, answer product questions, and listen to and incorporate valuable suggestions for improvement. You may need to provide consulting services to help customers integrate and implement your products. If your product is a critical component of a business, you may also need to provide 24/7 onsite or web support.

7. Achieving customer satisfaction. The ultimate success or failure of a business depends on how much it helps customers achieve their objectives. Happy customers will become your best sales people and buy more from you. Unhappy customers will become your biggest liability.

All the pieces have to come together like a jigsaw puzzle in your business model. The good news is that you don’t have to start from scratch when formulating it. You can give yourself a head start by learning from competitors and other markets. It is not only the successes that provide valuable lessons; it is also the failures.

You can innovate as much in your business model as you do in your products. Be prepared to evolve your innovation strategy as you gain experience and as your market changes. Like your products, it will probably take several versions to get your business model right; you get better with practice.

Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Editor's note: Guest writer Rory O’Driscoll is an entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist. He is a Managing Director at Scale Venture Partners. You can follow him on Twitter at @rodriscoll and blogs at VCMatters.

I simply love Goldman Sachs. The Facebook deal is a brilliant poke in the eye for just about everybody, and proof, yet again, that money, like water, finds its own level. If there are buyers and sellers to be matched, and a fee to be made in the process, the fine folks at Goldman Sachs will figure out how to bridge that gap. So much the better if there is regulatory friction to arbitrage against, it simply raises the fee.

For the last seven years, the venture capital industry has been saying that the IPO process is broken and startups are the losers. In a fine display of Wall Street's can do attitude, Goldman has gone and produced an alternative to an IPO; one where the clear winner is the startup.   Make no mistake; this is a great result for Facebook.  Consider the alternative. Going public is hard, and being public is harder. This is true for a company like Facebook, not because of the cost of Sarbanes Oxley compliance, which would be more than manageable, but because of the insidious nature of being public and having a focus on quarterly earnings, governance and the stock price. No matter how hard you try to avoid becoming short-term focused, the constant drip of analyst meetings, quarterly updates and daily stock price tickers takes its toll. Your earliest and best employees, fully vested and now fully liquid, leave, and instead of building a company, the CEO is getting on quarterly analyst calls.

The best reason to go public was to get the money. Conventional wisdom used to say that the only way to raise $1 billion-plus, at an attractive valuation, was to provide investors in return the transparency and the liquidity that being a publicly traded stock entails. The company puts up with the analysts, the information requests and the quarterly filings in return for getting the cash. Goldman has given Facebook all of the benefits  and none of the negatives of a public offering. They should have a happy client.

It is of course axiomatic that the other clear winner here at least in the short term, is Goldman Sachs. They have made a bet with their money that will either work or not in the next two years, but along the way they will make many hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. From all accounts, their retail client base is happy to be offered the chance to invest in Facebook, and Goldman will make a 4% fee and a 5% carried interest on the deal. If they sell enough, and can sell down some of their own piece, they can be money-good on Day One. The demand sounds like it is there.

The clear losers here are the stakeholders in the IPO process, namely the exchanges (NYSE, Nasdaq), the SEC, and arguably the large institutional investors who are restricted to investing in public securities. The dearth of venture backed IPO's in the last ten years can be looked at in reverse as a loss of market share for the "IPO and beyond" team.  There are numerous privately held companies that would, in an earlier time, be public and want to be public (because the Goldman Facebook option is not available to them) and are instead still private, because the IPO process is hard and the public market investors have been gun shy. Although this has been presented as a negative for the private investors, the reality is that it is arguably a bigger negative for the exchanges and investors. The exchanges have left trading fees on the table, and the public investors have not participated in the creation of value, that has instead taken place on the private side. Anyone with a 401k should be wishing that Facebook had gone public at a $5 billion valuation three years ago. The subsequent $45 billion of value creation would be dispersed across thousands of 401k's and not concentrated here in Silicon Valley.

What about the new investors here, are they winners? The honest answer is who knows and who can know? Would Facebook trade today at $50 billion in an IPO? I don't know. Could it be worth $100 billion in the future? Quite possibly.  All you can know for sure is that, because this investment is illiquid and the company will not be filing quarterly financial updates, the investors will not suffer the torture of knowing their investment is "under water",  if such should happen, along the way. No news means no bad news.  Not, it would seem, that some of the investors care. In a wonderful quote from the Wall Street Journal a Goldman client said;  ”It’s hard to imagine how this thing is going to make money, still the deal is an attractive opportunity". All the SEC regulation in the world cannot save people like that if they don't want to be saved. Maybe it is best that instead, they just enjoy the privilege of being a special Goldman client.

The reality is that this is not a trend, it is a singular event. There are not ten Facebooks out there, instead there is, roughly one Facebook every ten years. As a small part of the fun of being an utterly dominant company, each decade's winner gets to slap around the IPO process. Microsoft made the underwriters cut their commission, Google ran a Dutch Auction, Facebook for now has contracted out of the process entirely. None of this represented a trend that others could follow. For almost every other deal out there, this kind of financing is not an option and the IPO process will continue broadly as before.  For those of us in the investing business who did not invest in Facebook, the only good news from this could be if the competition does sharpen the "IPO and beyond" team up a bit. The only bad news could be if the SEC, in an understandable effort to amend the rules to prevent this from happening again, changes them in such a way as to impact venture firms with more typical LP/GP structures. It shouldn't happen, this really is a one off, but the SEC has got to be thinking dark thoughts about expanding the rule book.

Failing either of these outcomes, I am left saying “bravo” to the great vampire squid and the unstoppable chutzpah they have shown.

Image credit: Goldman Sachs "Vampire Squid" Moniker Courtesy of Matt Taibbi in RollingStone

photo © 2008 walknboston | more info (via: Wylio)The US Department of Justice  has served Twitter with a 2703(d) court order to reveal information about accounts related to people associated with WikiLeaks.

The order is a request for account data including the ominous “correspondence and notes of record related to the account” for users Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Rop Gongrijp (@rop_g), Birgitta Jonsittir (@birgittaj); Julian Assange and Bradley Manning from November 1, 2009 to present.

Salon is reporting that the original (sealed) order was signed on December 14th by Judge Theresa Buchanan in Alexandria, Va. It gave Twitter 3 days to comply with the DOJ without notifying anyone involved. Then mysteriously, and possibly because a gag order on a 2703 (d) might be unconstitutional, Buchanan decided this Wednesday to unseal the document at Twitter’s request.

Cnet political corespondent Declan McCullagh tells TechCrunch that this is highly unusual, “So the judge — remember, a magistrate judge, not a district judge — got nervous and backed down and coughed up this week’s order. You rarely see judges reverse themselves so thoroughly.”

After Twitter successfully balked, those targeted were then given 10 days to take legal action. User @rop_g received the following email.

Kessel, Jan-07 11:20 am (PST):
Dear Twitter User:

We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account, @rop_g. A copy of the legal process is attached. The legal process requires Twitter to produce documents related to your account.

Please be advised that Twitter will respond to this request in 10 days from the date of this notice unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the legal process has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.

To respond to this notice, please e-mail us at <removed>.

This notice is not legal advice. You may wish to consult legal counsel about this matter. If you need assistance seeking counsel, you may consider contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation <contact info removed> or the ACLU <contact info removed>.

Sincerely,

Twitter Legal

According to the documents, if Twitter legal had not taken action to unseal the order, it would have had to turn over user information without giving a heads up to users, or anyone really, that it was doing such. When asked why it made the decision to challenge the court order and inform the targets, Twitter representative Sean Garrett gave us the following statement on Twitter’s behalf.

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

Requesting the order to be unsealed is an interesting move by Twitter in the for all intents and purposes legally unprecedented case of the stateless WikiLeaks. Twitter has heretofore been subpoenaed for information by Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett, a subpoena that was subsequently withdrawn.

The WikiLeaks Twitter account has also mentioned Google and Facebook as other possible recipients of data requests. I have contacted both companies for more information and have yet to hear back.

Court order and unsealing notice, below.

Last week we reported that Groupon was closing a massive $950 million funding round at an impressive $4.75 billion valuation in the wake of walking away from an acquisition offer from Google.

Groupon already closed half of that — around $500 million — from Russian firm DST, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley. Now we’ve heard from multiple sources that distinguished Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins is on the verge of participating in the round as well. It’s unclear when the remainder of the round will close or who the other other participants aside from Kleiner will be.

Kleiner has recently been making aggressive moves in Silicon Valley, including a $150 million slice of Twitter’s recent $200 million funding round, doubling down on its iFund earlier this year, and its $250 million bet on social, the sFund.

Another year, another set of Kevin Rose predictions, this time about the iPad 2. Apparently Rose has revealed to the subscribers of his foundat.io/n newsletter (and everyone else) that the iPad 2 announcement will be coming in 3-4 weeks, giving the exact date of February 1st as a possibilty. So basically last year’s iPad announcement date, plus a year and five days.

From the Blogg:

From: Kevin Rose (Foundation Newsletter)

I have it on good authority that Apple will be announcing the iPad 2 in the next “3-4 weeks”, possibly Tuesday February 1st. The iPad 2 will feature a retina display and front/back cameras.

If you’re thinking of buying an iPad, hold off for now.

Kevin

UPDATE: Spoke w/another source, the display has a “higher dpi”, but not technically a retina display. This seems odd to me, we’ll have to wait and see..

Briefly mentioned is a retina display and front/back cameras which is something that has been covered before quite a bit. The retina display tip seems to be the most controversial (Rose has amended it with a second update suggesting a higher dpi but not retina) and many are saying it’s impossible on a tablet platform. From the comments:

“No. No Retina. It’s just not feasible. Let’s look at the math.

iPhone 2G/3G/3GS is a 3,5″ screen with a 320×480 resolution. You get 164.83 PPI out of this screen.
iPhone 4 is a 3,5″ screen with a 640×960 resolution. You get 329.65 PPI out of this screen.
> iPhone 4 has a PPI over 300, which Steve Jobs himself said to be more pixels per inch than the human eye can pick out, thus it’s a Retina Display. Now to the iPad(s).

iPad has a 9,7″ screen with a 1024×768 resolution. You get 131.96 PPI out of this screen.
What about if the mythical Retina iPad was released? What if it had the same screensize as the iPad and the same PPI as iPhone 4? It would need to have a 2560×1920 resolution to be able to reach 329.9 PPI, about the same as iPhone 4. Feasible? No.”

Kevin Rose occasionally predicts things, like this and this and this, and is occasionally right and occasionally wrong (remember the slide-out keyboard on the iPhone?). Clock is ticking on this one, in the meantime sign up for his newsletter!

Image: revision3

Many successful startups have followed a simple pattern in recent years. They gain the users then demand for an ecosystem begins. We saw this with Facebook, with Twitter, with Foursquare, etc. Quora is currently in the process of gaining those users. And now the demand for an ecosystem is kicking in. So they’re releasing an early API to meet that demand.

Specifically, Quora has launched an “Extension API”. Engineer Edmond Lau has detailed it here, but essentially, it’s a simple API that allows users who are building browser extensions based on Quora’s data to access better data from users who are logged into Quora.

This API comes as a direct result of the Google Chrome Quora extension created by Andrew Brown, which we covered a couple weeks ago. Lau notes that another developer, Jason Wiener, quickly followed this up with a similar Firefox extension for the service.

But Lau warns, “The API is still in its alpha phases, and there’s no guarantee that as we evolve the site that we’ll be able to maintain the same interface, as certain fields may no longer be relevant or have the same semantics.  We’ll try our best to work with developers to ease any necessary migrations.“

Again, this is just the first step for Quora APIs. As co-founder Charlie Cheever noted back in December 2009, “When there are enough users and content on Quora that an API would be really useful, we’ll almost certainly add one.” Sounds like the timing is right.

If you’ve been on Twitter at all lately you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with #LessAmbitiousMovies, which is a hashtag that exploded on Twitter on Monday night in what we thought was record time, judging by the fact that it seemed like our entire Twitter stream was at some point saturated with not so ambitious film titles.

Now the folks at Backtype (who track Twitter data) have provided us with more concrete stats on the meme, combing the hashtags #lessambitiousmovies, #lessambitiousmovie, #lessambitiousfilms or #lessambitiouscinema to come up with some pretty awesome data including the agent zero of the tweet, artist @Rob_McCallum and the tweet that started it all.

According to Backtype, McCallum sent this tweet out at 10pm PST on January 3rd and it then took approximately 15 hours for things to take off.  Some of the credit for the virality goes to Greg Hemphill whose 3000 followers triggered increased participation.

Backtype defines the reach of a piece of content (a tweet, hashtag etc) on Twitter as “the maximum number of unique Twitter users’ timelines the tweets appeared in.” Total damage by the tail end of #lessambitiousmovies? 364K tweets using a related hashtag, from 81K Twitter users tweeting out an average of 4.5 less ambitious movies per user.

While not all Twitter accounts are necessarily active and many users may not have been logged in at the time, it’s still pretty crazy spread for something so random. When asked if this was the most popular Twitter hashtag ever, Backtype CEO Christopher Golda said that usually a hashtagasm like this one is centered around an event like the World Cup and wouldn’t be organic, “300,000,000+ impressions on Twitter is an impressive feat.”

The most popular tweet earned that distinction primary because it was retweeted by Katy Perry and reached her 5.2 million followers.

And the runners up were:

One thing people mentioned was the prevalence of repeat tweets (I think I even tweeted out #5 “Apocalypse Whenever,” thinking I was being totally original. Perhaps if anything we learned that we are less creative (and less funny) then we think we are.

At the post’s peak at 8pm PST, which TechCrunch contributed to (see above), 17 less ambitious movies were being sent out per second. It took 27 hours for the meme to die out after that, even though it’s still alive in our hearts.

In fact I think I’ll tweet one out right now, for old meme’s sake.

Editor’s Note: Jim Dalrymple has been writing about Apple for more than 15 years. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple and on his Web site at The Loop.

Earlier today, Verizon announced a special event to be held next week and while the company gave no details, everyone is speculating that this is the long-awaited, much-anticipated Verizon iPhone.

If that’s the case, one question immediately leaps to mind — would Apple really let another company announce an iPhone for them? We all know how secretive Apple is and how much they love doing their own events.

I believe the answer to that question is, yes. Apple would let Verizon announce the iPhone. The iPhone 4, that is.

The most important reason Apple would let Verizon make this announcement is that Apple is managing expectations.

If Apple sent out its typical invitation to join them in California for an event, the speculation would be that Apple was going to release the iPhone 5 or perhaps the iPad 2. I believe when the Verizon-compatible iPhone does come, it will simply be a CDMA version of the iPhone 4.

While Apple will go through the development of making a phone that is compatible with Verizon’s network, I doubt that they would completely change the development cycle to release the iPhone 5 early.

If Apple’s iPhone development cycle remains the same, we should see a new iPhone in June or July 2011.

Of course, there is another reason. Apple has the iPhone available on multiple carriers in many countries and they don’t make a big deal about it. Looking at this from a business perspective, Verizon is just another carrier for Apple.

This is a bigger deal to most of us because many want to use the iPhone on Verizon. But to Apple, it’s just a modified version of an already released product.

We ran into iTwin co-founder Kal Takru at last night’s press event, Showstoppers, and he had some good news for us. You may recall them as a finalist from 2009′s TechCrunch 50 — and now they’re shipping. That’s a stage many startups don’t reach.

In case you’ve forgotten, the iTwin is a simple device for connecting two computers wirelessly. You plug one half into one computer, and one into another, and if all goes well, an encrypted connection is created between them (via the internet, not directly), letting you share files securely.

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If you’ve ever searched online for guitar tablature (a popular music notation format used for guitars), you know that it’s a generally miserable experience. First there’s the problem of quality — there’s myriad versions of popular songs out there, and many of them are wrong. But even once you’ve found the tab you’re looking for, actually using it is a pain.

The most basic tabs are just text documents, with notes presented using a combination of ASCII characters. That works, but it’s no better than looking at the tab on a piece of paper — you can do much better by taking advantage of the fact that you’re viewing the tab from a computer. Now an experiment on Mozilla’s Hacks portal, which showcases neat things that are being done with Firefox, gives a glimpse of what tabs could look like in the future with the help of HTML5. You can try out the demo here, though you’ll need to be using a recent version of Firefox.

Now, seasoned guitar players already know that there are applications like Guitar Pro and Power Tab that are much richer than standard ASCII tabs — these can actually play the song back to you while simultaneously showing which note is being played. These apps also generally support looping, slower playback and other features that make learning a song easier.

There’s just a few problems: some of these applications aren’t free, there are multiple competing file formats, and having to actually fire up a separate application to open a tab is annoying, especially when you’re not sure if the tab is accurate in the first place.

The experiment showcased on Mozilla’s blog appears to solve at least a couple of these problems. In his post, Illinois State grad student Greg Jopa writes that he used a combination of tools to build it: the Firefox 4 Audio Data API, MusicXML, and an opensource project called Vexflow to present the tabs in the browser, no download required.

Obviously there’s still a long way to go — this will only work in Firefox, and the music being played back sounds more like a cell phone ringtone circa 1998 than a guitar. But hopefully it’s sign of things to come.

For the time being there’s another solution for playing your guitar tabs in the browser: a startup called Songsterr features a pretty slick Flash-based player.

We're here at CES in Las Vegas live streaming the show floor; getting our hands on all the super-modern and futuristic cool stuff. Today, GM asked us to come by and check out what they think the future will be like for some people. This future has many types of vehicles that fit entirely different lifestyles. That future is of course more than 10 years away, but we’ll get there with working concepts like the GM EN-V. And they gave us the keys.

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The Finalists for the 2010 Crunchies Awards have been announced and voting has already started.

So why not give away some free tickets to a few lucky readers?

People say the Crunchies are to technology what the Oscars are to Hollywood. You can read the full list of winners for 2009 here, 2008 here, and 2007 here.

Some fun things to note: these tickets include access to the awards ceremony, as well as access to our exciting after party. The awards will be held at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco on January 21, 2011 at 7:30pm PST, with the after party following at the Exploratorium until 11:30 pm PST. There will be a fully-hosted bar, hors d’oeuvres, a gaming room, and other fun surprises.

If you want to join TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat for a night of fun and exciting surprises, all you have to do is the following. Just fan the TechCrunch Facebook page and then do one of these two things: retweet this post (making sure to include the #Crunchies hashtag), or leave a comment below telling us why you think these tickets should be yours. The contest will end tomorrow, January 8th at 5pm 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 can enter, but please note this is a giveaway for tickets only, and does not include airfare.

Come join us for a night you will never forget. We will pick two winners tomorrow after 5pm PST. Good luck!

Qwiki, the visual search startup that won the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt last September is in the middle of raising as much as $8 million in a series A financing. According to an SEC filing, it has already sold $5 million worth of the round. Both venture capital firms and individuals are investing. It appears that a large part of the round ($4 million so far) is being taken up by a pooled investment fund from Felix Venture Partners, at least according to this separate SEC filing. The company is still raising money to complete the round.

Qwiki has already raised $1.5 million in seed capital from angel investors including Keith Rabois (from PayPal, Slide, and now Sqaure), Shervin Pishevar (SGN), an Jawed Karim (the third YouTube founder), and Elad Gil (Google, now Twitter). The company was founded by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier (who founded AltaVista).

The service is still technically in alpha, although it’s been opening up. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics. Following its debut at Disrupt, the company fielded acquisition offers, but is now raising its series A to more fully develop the product. I still can’t wait for Qwiki to officially come to the iPad. Below is a video of Qwiki’s first demo at Disrupt.

Showstoppers, like Unveiled and Digital Experience, is a peripheral show to CES but it offers close hands-ons with lots of great gear. Here is the huge mass of videos we’ve collected and we’ll pop out items that made us smile.

I just wrapped up a short interview with Ted Schilowitz from RED, in which he told us (and all our live stream viewers) all about the new RED Scarlet (AKA Epic Light) digital cinema camera. I got to hold the thing and revel in its 3K glory; and while RED devices are notoriously never “final,” this felt about as final as it gets.

I don’t want to repeat what’s already out there regarding the resolution, accessories, dates, and so on, which are all googleable (and some not final), so I’ll stick to general impressions and you can watch the video for specifics. A few beauty shots are included for you to covet.

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A new SEC filing revealed that the Cambridge, Mass. consultancy Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. (SR Inc.) raised about $1.2 million to help corporations green their facilities and operations, and learn how to run their businesses in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.

With a special focus on energy efficiency and real estate, SR Inc. bills itself as a provider of “shared cost” research and consulting services to its members. According to the company’s LinkedIn page, their client-members include several private sector corporate real estate, tech and green building businesses including: Adobe Systems, Akamai, Autodesk, Gensler, Harvard University, IBM and Siemens Industry.

Notably, the United States General Services Administration (or GSA) is also one of SR Inc.’s Sustainable Corporate Real Estate Roundtable “members.” The GSA is the largest landlord in the U.S., according to a report from SR Inc., owning and leasing some 350 million square feet in 8,600 buildings through an estimated 2,200 communities nationwide, and giving it plenty of opportunities to move federal real estate toward greater efficiency either through retrofits or new technology.

Navitas Capital led the round, with participation from the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund (MGEF). According to a company statement, the funding will allow SR Inc. to scale its product portfolio in response to the growing market demand for its research and services and expand its business development. James Pettit, Managing Partner of Navitas Capital, will join SR Inc's board of directors.

We saw the Surface V2 (as they’re calling it) soft-launched at the press day before CES, then demonstrated briefly by Ballmer in his keynote, and at last given official status with pictures and all the next morning. And then we got the the chance to try it out in person at the Microsoft booth. We’ve got video, some hands-on pictures, and our first impressions of the device.

One thing I should make clear right away, which is of course slightly disappointing, is that this is definitely not a consumer device. It’s too expensive and development is very much aimed at commercial deployment. That said, they hope to make the devices ubiquitous enough that having one at home would be redundant. You may form your own opinion of that strategy.

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Who cares about enterprise software? Apparently you do. Even though I posted this solicitation for Ask a VC questions late on a Thursday, I woke up this morning to one of the better inboxes of questions since the show began.

Our guest in your virtual hot seat was Jason Green of Emergence Capital. Like a lot of things in tech, Green is a believer that the hype in software-as-a-service may have over-promised in the short term, but has underestimated how big this trend will get over time– and how big companies can get. His LPs certainly hope so. There are few firms who have bet so heavily on this single trend.

Readers asked most of the hard questions like, “If cloud is the future why are companies like Oracle, SAP and IBM doing so well?” and when– if ever– a billion dollar revenue enterprises would be confident enough in SaaS providers to have absolutely no servers in the back room.

We talk about Yammer– Green’s investment– and Salesforce– the investment that started Emergence– and which of them will win the social enterprise, and whether Jive could be a spoiler. We also discuss how the trend plays globally, both with startups and customers.

Video below.

Hmmm.

Earlier today, BGR published a story that Apple is looking to launch the iPhone on Verizon’s network as soon as February 3. That’s in line with an earlier report about no-vacation windows for Apple retail employees. And now something curious has just appeared in my inbox. An invite to a Verizon event, taking place in New York City on this coming Tuesday, January 11. Could it be?

Well, for one thing, I don’t typically get invites directly from Verizon to anything. At least not that I can recall. They usually send those directly to the MobileCrunch and CrunchGear guys. But this invite appears to very specifically be for me — it’s non-transferable. Would Verizon send me such an invite unless it was specially about Apple?

But that’s the other thing. Would it be Verizon and not Apple running such a high-profile show? And would they do it in New York City instead of near Apple’s home base in Silicon Valley? Certainly someone from Apple would have to be there — and you’d think it would be Steve Jobs. But there’s no mention of Apple at all on the invite.

So what is Verizon inviting me to exactly? Is it some silly USB card or the iPhone 4 on Verizon? I don’t know. But color me intrigued.

Update: Jim Dalrymple of The Loop (which exclusively covers Apple) confirms that he got the same invite. Something is definitely up.

Update 2: Another sign: Gizmodo (of iPhone 4 prototype fame) was not invited. And they note that they’re normally very friendly with Verizon.

Update 3: This probably has nothing to do with anything but is just kind of cool: the event is on 1/11/11 at 11 AM.

The finalists for the 2010 Crunchies Awards have been chosen. Over 243,000 votes were made across all categories and many outstanding achievements were discussed. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce this year’s finalists for the best in technology for 2010.

Categories range from Best Social App and Best Mobile App to Best Angel of the year and Best New Startup or Product. Even Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange made the list, as well as first time nominees Quora and Instagram. Mobile apps dominate throughout and last year's overall winner Mark Zuckerberg is up for CEO of the Year.

Voting begins now. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote. You may vote once per day, per award category, until voting closes on January 19, 2011 at 11:30pm PST. There are 20 award categories open for voting, recognizing the top accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. If you are a finalist, create a badge and get your community excited about this honor and to vote for you as a winner.

To commemorate today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are excited to release our next set of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins at 1pm PST so please act fast and get them while you can.

Here are your Finalists:

Best Internet Application
Chartbeat
Greplin
Pandora
Rdio
Ujam

Best Social App
Cityville
Dailybooth
Foursquare
GroupMe
Twitter

Best Social Commerce App
Blippy
Groupon
Jetsetter
LivingSocial
One King’s Lane
ShopKick

Best Mobile App
Bump
Chomp
Google Mobile Maps for Android
Hashable
Instagram

Best Location Based Service
Facebook Places
Foursquare
Gowalla
SimpleGeo
Uber

Best New Device
Boxee Box
Google Chrome Notebook
iPad
iPhone 4
Kno
Xbox Kinect

Best Technology Achievement
Blekko
Google Self-driving Cars
Hunch
Palantir
Qwiki
Word Lens

Best Design
1000memories
about.me
Airbnb
Flipboard
Gogobot
Qwiki

Best Touch Interface
Flipboard
Fotopedia Heritage iPad app
Osmos
Pulse News Reader
Sencha Touch
Swype

Best Bootstrapped Startup
Addmired (iMob)
Beluga
Easel
Fast Society
Instapaper
Techmeme

Best Enterprise
37 Signals
Buddy Media
CloudApp
Indinero
Millennial Media
Salesforce

Best International
Crivo
PCH International
Soluto
Viki
VNL
Wonga

Best Clean Tech
Coolerado
Kopernik
MicroGreen
Puralytics
Smith Electric Vehicles
Solar City

Best Time Sink Application
Angry Birds
Cityville
Netflix streaming
Quora
StumbleUpon

Angel of the Year
Jeff Clavier, Softech VC
Ron Conway, SV Angel
Michael Dearing, Harrison Metal Capital
Chris Dixon, Founder Collective
Mike Maples, FLOODGATE
Paul Graham, Y Combinator

VC of the Year (individual)
Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz
Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital
Jim Breyer, Accel Partners
John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins
Yuri Milner, DST
Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

Founder of the Year
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
Dennis Crowley, Foursquare
Jack Dorsey, Square
Kevin and Julia Hartz, Eventbrite
David Karp, Tumblr
Mark Pincus, Zynga

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo, Twitter
Reed Hastings, Netflix
Drew Houston, Dropbox
Andrew Mason, Groupon
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

Best New StartUp or Product of 2010
Flipboard
GroupMe
Instagram
Quora
Square
Uber

Best Overall Startup or Product of 2010
Facebook
Groupon
Quora
Twitter
Zynga

The awards will be held at the Palace Of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco on January 21, 2011 at 7:30pm PST, with the after party following at the Exploratorium. As always, the tickets include access to the amazing after party until 11:30pm PST. We will have a fully-hosted bar, unlimited hors d’oeuvres, a fun gaming room, and many other exciting surprises.

If you would like to sponsor or support our events, please contact Jeanne Logozzo regarding sponsorship opportunities.

Good luck to all the Finalists. Let the voting begin!

As we’re all well aware by now, the Q&A service Quora is exploding with growth. And while that may seem like a good thing, there are two distinct downsides. First, Quora is a pretty complex site and so scaling to accomodate huge user growth is difficult. And second, there has been a belief since the site launched to the public that as it grew more popular, the less useful it would become. Put another way, there’s a fear that it will turn into Yahoo Answers. Quora addressed the first issue a couple days ago. The second, co-founder Charlie Cheever addresses today on the service.

In a post entitled, “Commitment to Keeping Quora High Quality“, Cheever outlines the steps Quora is taking to ensure that the community remains the same great place for knowledge as it grows in size. So what are the steps? The biggest and most immediate one Cheever highlights is a better on-boarding process. Cheever notes that it can be difficult for new users to understand how to properly ask questions on the site. So they’ve created a tutorial quiz that walks them through the process before they submit the first question.

“So far, we’ve found that the quiz has helped make more of the questions that new users post conform to the site guidelines and require less editing from experienced users,” Cheever writes. He also notes that changes were made to both the homepage feed and the notification system yesterday to make both more manageable for new years (though he doesn’t detail what those changes are exactly).

In terms of the next few months, Cheever writes that resources are being put into:

• Educating new users about site policies and guidelines
• Improving the feed and voting ranking mechanisms
• Changing the core product to accomodate a Quora with many more users and many more questions and answers and topics
• Building special tools to support the efforts of reviewers and admins to improve the site and maintain civility and generally make it more fun to make Quora better

He also says that they’ll be working with site admins to help them deal with the growth as well.

All of that sounds good and addresses some of the issues that Mathew Ingram at GigaOM laid out yesterday in a post. Of course, Quora still has to execute. And fast. My new follower notifications don’t appear to be slowing down.

We’ve become used to the idea of sharing photos on Twitter (from Twitpic to Instagr.am), video (YouTube to Qik) and audio (Cinch to Soundcloud). But have we done much file-sharing via Twitter? Not to date.

There’s Tweetshare, Filesocial and Tweetcube but they are not something you will see in the average user’s stream – or at least not mine, and I follow nearly 4,000 accounts.

Twileshare is still in beta and launched just before Christmas but already it’s seen a lot of viral traffic from what I can see. There are now 24,000 mentions of it on Google.

Increasingly, you hear about huge download numbers of popular mobile applications. But few give out actual revenue numbers that are equally impressive. The reason for this is obvious: most simply don’t have impressive revenues. And part of the reason for that is that many of the biggest apps are free. But TapTapTap long ago decided that model wasn’t for them when it comes to their app Camera+. And that decision is paying off — literally.

As they’ve announced on their blog today, TapTapTap has hit both one million downloads of Camera+ and one million dollars in revenues from the app, the rare double-double in the app world. Revenues include both sales of the app itself (which currently sells for $0.99) and in-app purchases, co-founder John Casasanta writes. And what’s perhaps most impressive about the two milestones is that TapTapTap hit them despite being pulled from the App Store for a four-month stretch last year (something they illustrate humorously in the graph above).

But since Camera+ came back a few weeks ago with version 2, revenue has been up 2.7x when compared to the first version, Casasanta says. And it has only been a couple weeks since they announced their 500,000 total sale.

Casasanta then uses the rest of his post to go off about a few things on his mind — namely: VCs, business models, competition, and Android vs. iPhone. While he notes they’re actively being courted by VCs, Casasanta makes his overall disdain for many of them prettty clear. He simply thinks they’re too focused on pushing for a free, ad-driven model — something which TapTapTap doesn’t want to explore.

He also takes a swipe at some of Camera+’s competitors, namely Instagram, downplaying their 1 million download milestone. “Numbers for free apps aren't nearly as impressive as the press is making it sound. The recent darling of Silicon Valley and one of our competitors, Instagram, has been lauded for getting one million downloads of the app in 10 weeks. But in reality, this number is pretty tiny compared to what high-ranking free apps are doing on a daily basis,” he writes. ”The Facebook app, which usually isn't even in the top 10, will typically get a million new users every week or so, and these are active users, not just downloads,” he continues.

As for Google vs. Android, Casasanta cites Google’s lack of an effective equivalent for Apple’s payment structure as the reason why the platform doesn’t interest him. And he thinks Google doesn’t have that in place simply because they don’t care too much about it. Instead, they’re all about selling ads. He does conceded that both the Apple and Android models will probably thrive, they’re for “two different kinds of users… and two different kinds of developers.”

“Basically, we're sticking with exactly what we've done so far… we'll continue to create high-quality paid apps with no ads, exclusively for iOS,” he says in conclusion.

You can find Camera+ in the App Store here.

Update: Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom has responded:

“We like Camera+ and would love to support their growth as a paid app – internally we don’t see them as a competitor. Many of our users use Camera+ on a daily basis to post over to Instagram, just like they use Hipstamatic, Camerabag, etc. Our goal is to create a platform for sharing these images, not to supplant the myriad of apps out there that let you take and transform photos.”

“He’s right that it’s wrong to quote the number of downloads as a success metric. We don’t do that — our announcement was that we had hit 1 million registered users, not the number of people that have downloaded it.”