The living room and, specifically, television is Shazam's next growth target. That's something we've known for a while as the service aims to expand beyond its music recognition roots to become a wider discovery technology for all sorts of content. And today, the London-headquartered company has announced its latest television tie-in, partnering with Syfy for a series-long "TV tagging initiative" for the cable channel's new U.S. show Being Human.

A day in the life of a famous tech blogger (citation needed): I was pitched a story yesterday, an exclusive no less, on an ‘interesting announcement’ from Grapple Mobile, which provides technology and services for cross-platform mobile app development.

Sure, I said. Share away, I said.

Turns out the story, which was embargoed until ‘first thing tomorrow’ to confuse matters even further, concerns a financing round. Which didn’t occur.

In a press release, Grapple Mobile says it has rejected $10 million venture capital funding offers to bankroll its expansion. To be more specific, the startup says it has received 2 substantial term sheets from VC firms in the United States and the United Kingdom.

But turned them down because they didn’t need to raise money after all.

And no, they can’t send me the received terms sheets – those are confidential.

It’s a funny (and apparently efficient) way of getting attention, but I’m not so sure why there needs to be any ‘exclusives’, let alone embargoes, about this sort of non-news. Grapple Mobile adds that it has exceeded its revenue expectation by 550% from original company forecasts, which is equally meaningless, since we don’t learn what those original company forecasts were.

I mean, they could have projected to make $1 in 2010 for all I know.

Anyway, Grapple says it is looking to acquire technology and mobile operations that will allow it to extend its existing service, and says it’s already in advanced discussions to buy a technology centric recruitment agency. Unfortunately, they’re not sharing which one, for how much and how such an acquisition would fit into their strategy.

Bizarre stuff, I say, further amplified by Grapple Mobile founder Jamie True’s quoted statement on his company not raising funding from any VC firms whatsoever:

"Grapple has a unique energy and excess funds are flattering but not what we are looking for right now."

Duly noted, Jamie. Thanks for sharing!

Any other companies who haven’t raised VC funding and would like to tell the world?

TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki has closed its $8 million series A financing, which I first reported a couple weeks ago when it was midway through the round. Now we know the investors, and it is a very interesting group. The largest investor who led the round turns out to be Eduardo Saverin, the early Facebook co-founder who was pushed out of the company but walked away with enough shares to make him a billionaire. Saverin watched Qwiki’s demo at Disrupt streamed over the Internet from Singapore, where he now lives.

Saverin reached out and met with the founders, and they clicked.

Joining Saverin in the round is Jawed Karim (the third co-founder of YouTube and an investor in Qwiki’s previous $1.5 million seed round), Pradeep Sindhu (the co-founder of Juniper Networks), the Greylock Discovery Fund (which is run by Reid Hoffman), Lerer Ventures, Tugboat Ventures, and Contour Ventures. (Felix Venture Partners, which was mentioned in a related SEC filing, is creating a pooled fund for some of the individual investors).

It is telling that a hot startup like Qwiki went with a wealthy individual as a lead investor instead of a venture capital firm. The funding is extremely founder-friendly, with Qwiki management retaining full control over the company. No voting board seats were given to any of the investors. However, Saverin will get an observer seat on the board. (The voting members of the board are co-founders Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier, along with the primary seed investor Bobby Yazdani).

A lot of the excitement around Qwiki is because of its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. The company is still in private alpha. Now that it has closed its round, the next steps are to open up the service beyond the alpha and launch an iPad app, which is in the works. “The iPad app is better than sex,” boasts Imbruce. Qwiki’s highly visual presentation of information lends itself to big, touch screens. He also wants to make it easy for developers to incorporate the Qwiki format into their apps.

Below is the Disrupt demo that convinced Saverin to invest:

Market Leader, a NASDAQ-listed provider of online marketing and technology solutions for real estate professionals, has acquired kwkly, which operates a mobile software-as-a-service lead generation platform.

It seems like a good match – kwkly is used by some of the real estate industry’s largest and most prominent brokerage companies to engage tech-savvy home buyers and sellers.

The company provides a service that lets home buyers access detailed property information straight from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), on their mobile phone, in real time.

Market Leader’s acquisition of kwkly expands the offerings that the company can make available through its business and marketing platform for real estate professionals.

2010 was a big year for Opera’s mobile browser, Opera Mini. The browser’s iPhone app was approved, saw one million downloads in the first day and since the mobile browser has been growing like gangbusters. Today, Opera released its state of the mobile report showing that Opera finished the year off with additional growth.

In December 2010, Opera Mini had over 85.5 million users, a 6.8% increase from November 2010 and an 84.7% increase in unique users since December 2009. Opera Mini users viewed over 46.7 billion pages in December 2010, which is a 4.6% percent increase since November, and a 125.5% increase in page views since December 2009.

In December 2010, Opera Mini users generated over 706 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since November, the data consumed went up by 4.3%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 6.5 petabytes of data in December.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing in December, Opera took a look at traffic to e-commerce giant Amazon, with percentage of Opera Mini users who accessed Amazon (per month) went from 3.8% in January 2010 to 7.4% in December.

Shoppers in the U.S. and Germany doubled their number of page views to Amazon towards the end of the year, as compared to the start of 2010, as mobile shopping heated up.

Opera also delved into usage in ten countries in Africa (South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Namibia), with page views in these countries increasing by 365%, unique users up 176% and data transferred up by 331%. Sudan and Zimbabwe lead the top 10 countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (4908.2 % and 2321.6 %, respectively).

And in the top 10 African countries, Facebook and Google vied for the website with the most visits. In 6 out of the top 10 countries, Facebook was number one. In the remaining 4 countries, Google was number one. YouTube, Yahoo, and Wikipedia were also highly visited in these countries.

Last month we wrote about The Gifts Project’s closing of a $1 million funding round. Today the company is finally able to lift the veil on a major accomplishment … turn out it is its gifting platform powering eBay Group Gifts.

The upstart also managed to have Index Ventures join the round, with Saul Klein actively advising. The actual amount is undisclosed.

As we noted in the original post:

With The Gifts Project, online retailers will be able to offer groups of people the ability to chip-in and buy a gift together for a mutual friend, colleague, or family member. A pretty simple idea with a promising potential considering social commerce is going gangbusters.

What makes The Gifts Project compelling in my opinion is not only the size of opportunity in social commerce, but that it's designed to sit rather cozily within the online purchase flow.

The eBay deal is a tier-1 endorsement for social commerce by an ecommerce giant. But also, it’s a major vote of confidence in The Gifts Project’s ability to support major online retailers as a technology provider, because surprisingly, eBay Group Gifts was hosted on by The Gift Project, rather than on eBay’s infrastructure.

The company has two other products up its sleeve. The first, a full-blown, white-labeled group gifting solution. The second, a soon to be released group gifting widget for smaller retailers, or ones that don’t have the resources to customize the white-labeled solution.

With both products, The Gifts Project provides a full-fledged solution for group gifting that taps consumers’ social graphs, allowing friends, family members and colleagues to individually chip in and buy gifts together.

Consumers are led through a flow where the group buy is initiated, friends are selected, contributions are tracked, and finally the gift is provided.

Early testing and data from eBay Group Gifts has shown a significant increase in average ticket price. That is, the average sale price of an item.

With social commerce exploding, timing couldn’t be better for The Gifts Project. The obvious question is will they be able to scale their business? Time will tell of course, but it certainly feels the stars are beginning to align for them. Now there’s only that pesky little thing called ‘execution’.





Part of Twitter‘s appeal is that people can ‘connect’ and engage with celebrities online, even if most of them consider it to be, and treat it like, just another push marketing channel rather than a multi-dimensional communication system.

Be that as it may, but Twitter owes a lot of its popularity to notable celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry, P Diddy, Ellen Degeneres, 50 Cent and plenty of others using and promoting the service.

Now, some company called VS Technologies is suing Twitter, alleging that it infringes on a patent of theirs, entitled “Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people”. For real? For real.

In the complaint, filed earlier this week (and embedded below), VS Technologies alleges that Twitter has purposefully infringed the above-mentioned patent, US patent no. 6,408,309.

Straight from the documents:

As it pertains to this lawsuit, very generally speaking, the ’309 Patent discloses methods and systems for creating interactive, virtual communities of people in various fields of endeavor wherein each community member has an interactive, personal profile containing information about that member.

For reasons unknown, the company was awarded the patent back in 2002. Since I can’t find any information or website about the company, it appears like they did absolutely nothing productive with their ‘invention’, and thus I’m declaring it a YAPT (Yet Another Patent Troll).

VS Technologies is asking for damages to be paid, which, and I quote, should adequately compensate the company “for Defendant’s infringement, which by law cannot be less than would constitute a reasonable royalty for the use of the patented technology, together with interest and costs as fixed by this Court”.

Yeah, good luck with that.

I’ve contacted Twitter PR for a response, but haven’t heard back yet.

(Top image via Ad Age)

Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps anyone develop and create iPhone and Android apps, has landed a major partner—Sony Music Entertainment.

The startup is now helping Sony develop interactive mobile apps for the music label’s network of artists. Using Mobile Roadie’s recently launched self-serve platform, Sony will be creating both iPhone and Android apps for a musician or band that feature their latest news, streaming music and videos, photo galleries, tour schedules, ticketing options, chat and more.

Sony Music artists also will have the ability to offer premium content and special premium exclusives directly through the apps, including karaoke features, games, and remixes. At launch, Sony Music is suing Mobile Roadie’s platform to develop and power mobile apps for over a dozen of the record label’s artists, including David Archuleta, Marc Anthony, Camila, Chayanne, Daughtry, Jerrod Neimann, Gerardo Ortiz, Brad Paisley, Passion Pit, P!nk, Mike Posner and Thalia.

Mobile Roadie has become a defacto mobile app development platform for a number of high profile brands and celebrities using its platform, including Taylor Swift, Madonna, Live Nation, Levi's, Twilight, and Vera Wang. In 2009, Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, and struck a deal with Random House to power iPhone apps for authors.

Kabam, a Californian developer of massively multiplayer social games formerly known as Watercooler, has raised $30 million in Series C funding in a round led by Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital, with participation from original investor Canaan Partners (which incubated Kabam in its offices at the seed stage).

The company, which was founded in 2006, says the additional capital will be used to expand its game studios.

In addition, Kabam aims to produce a greater assortment of original and branded social games and explore targeted acquisitions similar to its purchase of WonderHill in October 2010.

Maha Ibrahim, general partner at early backer Canaan Partners, says the Series C round was “heavily oversubscribed”.

Kabam tries to differentiate from other social game developers by shying away from so-called casual games, putting more focus on games that appeal to a core gamer demographic, says Kevin Chou, CEO of the company.

It attempts to do that by combining the immersive gameplay found in massively multiplayer online strategy and role-playing games with the social interaction capabilities provided by social platforms (as far as I can tell, its games are Facebook only).

The company says it has several new games scheduled for launch in early 2011, with more titles and “strategic initiatives” slated to follow later in the year.

Kabam says it has grown from 20 employees to over 200 in the course of a year, recently opening up studios in San Francisco and China.

The company has raised a total of $39.5 million to date.

(Press release)

CloudTalk has raised $5.2 million in Series A funding in a combination of debt and equity financing, two separate SEC filings reveal. The company says it expects to close the round by the end of this month.

Perhaps the startup can spend some cash to buy cloudtalk.com – its website is currently located at pana.ma (its former name).

CloudTalk is billed as a social messaging service that “goes beyond texting and voicemail”, in the sense that it aims to enable voice communication between individuals and groups via the Web and a range for smartphones, free of charge.

To be honest, the service doesn’t look all that exciting, so it was quite a surprise to see the experience of the team behind the company.

Chief executive of the fledgling company is David Hayden, a serial entrepreneur who was co-founder of the Magellan Search Engine in 1993 (!), which was sold to Excite back in 1996.

He was also founding chairman and CEO of Critical Path (which went public in 1999), created social networking company JetEye in 2004 and served on the boards of companies like E*Trade Financial, Riya, and eHatchery.

Hayden co-founded CloudTalk in February 2009 – you can find bios on the rest of the team here. I’ve reached out to CloudTalk to learn more about their plans.

With Amazon’s purchase of the remaining shares of European video streaming and rental business Lovefilm, comes a welcome exit for the latter’s long-suffering investors, many of whom have been invested in the company since it started way back in the early 2000s. Terms were not disclosed, but we have it on good authority that Lovefilm was valued at around $312 million (here in London we also heard a £200 million figure) for the purposes of the acquisition. Which means that as well as the VC institutions that invested in Lovefilm (Balderton Capital, DFJ Esprit, and Index Ventures), a few individuals will have benefitted as well. Some will have had their liquidity event in 2008 when Amazon bought into Lovefilm originally, some earlier when it merged with Video Island. Some will even wince at this post, wishing they’d not exited long ago. And some will be buying the round of drinks tonight. We’ll let you speculate in the comments as to whom…

BREAKING: Amazon will acquire the remaining shares in the pan-European movie rental and streaming service LoveFilm. Terms have not been disclosed but we believe the valuation was around $312 million. Amazon already owned 42 percent of LoveFilm which acquired Amazon's DVD rental business in 2008.

Amazon has had a large minority shareholding in LoveFilm for some time and this deal has been in the offing for what seems like forever. The talks have been going on since at least September last year, and Lovefilm investors has been looking for an exit since, oh, 2009? Assuming regulatory approvals are all fine the deal should close in the first quarter of 2011.

Many of you have asked for a post revealing the story behind this post. (Warning: Don’t click if you’re easily angered. And please don’t read any further if you hate inside baseball stories).

This morning Mike wrote something called “Obligations To Dead Sources” in which he refers to a tweet from New York Times correspondent Micheline Maynard. Maynard’s tweet about not breaking a promise to protect a source actually broke her promise to protect a source. It’s mind blowing, I know.

While Maynard’s tweet is more of a paradox (two mutually exclusive assertions in one concept) than recursive (the application of a definition repeatedly) it reminded me of another tweet that pushed the logical boundaries of 140 characters.

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera (who also happens to be my boyfriend) tweeted out this ouroboros-inspired tweet back in 2009 and it resonated with people who love recursive humor. But what Rivera was riffing on then and what we were playing with today is anything but original, from Fibonacci to Comp Sci 101, from Stephen Hawking to Yo Dawg, meta-references are everywhere.

The idea of an infinite loop is so integral to the way we conceive of the world that linguist Noam Chomsky at some point thought that understanding and being able to proliferate recursive concepts was what separated us from the animals. Just Google “recursion” if you want more proof (and to be delighted).

News writing, because of the nature of  aggregation and content farming, is trending toward blog posts with provactive headlines, little actual content and endless arguments in the comments section. Business Insider has even made whole posts out of MG’s tweets.

So when Mike suggested we try to figure out how to make a post that linked to itself, not only did I see a chance to be meta, but also an opportunity for a subtle critique of the news cycle and business. And yes, I went into this knowing exactly how many people it would piss off. And no, I don’t take my readers for granted, but I often hope that they have a sense of humor. Or patience.

Granted I wasn’t necessarily planning on doing a followup post, and some of you seemed to get it (“This article really was a transcendent experience. Astounding, the subject didn’t lie.”) but comments like this one “I clicked the link 3 times, then I realised and then I was sad. :’(“ made me feel like I owed it to my readers to drop some science on this. After all, you guys do pay my bills and no one likes to be made to feel stupid. Trust me.

So here are the final analytics numbers: At the end of the today, “This Other Article Is A Must Read” garnered 38,888 onsite pageviews, 30,467 RSS reader views, 204 comments, 566 tweets, 92 Facebook Likes and 17 Diggs (don’t know if anyone pays attention to the Buzz button anymore). It was the top trafficking post on TechCrunch in this 24 hour time period, though I think there were many others deserving of that title (but especially “The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers Of 2010“).

It also made our “Most Commented” section with one comment hitting every 30 seconds at some point, even though the topic of discussion was just a link to itself. What the hell guys?

While the post’s title definitely being click bait on purpose might explain the high traffic, it’s hard to wrap my head around the 204 comments (I half-expected an iPhone vs. Android fight to break out down there).

Maybe this ultimately proves that TechCrunch is more about the commentary (and community) than the content? After all this similar post and this similar post both received similar levels of discussion.

If that is indeed the case, thank you.

Obligatory Quora reference.

So Facebook has been a bit aggressive with their trademarks in the past, most recently filing to trademark the word “Face.” The social network has also gone after companies that have “book” in their name. But the tables may have turned on Facebook, if long-distance calling company Talkbook has its way. As All Facebook reported last week, Talkbook filed a "petition for cancellation" to the USPTO claiming that the social network’s trademark on "The Facebook," was fraudulent because it dropped the “the” from the trademark. You can read all the gory details in the filing here (courtesy of DomainNameWire).

And according to the USPTO, the current status of Facebook’s trademark for “Facebook,” now states that “a cancellation proceeding is pending at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.”

What does that mean? According to the USPTO, a “cancellation is a proceeding in which a party seeks to cancel an existing registration of a mark. Under the law, a person who believes he will be damaged by the registration may file a petition to cancel.” Once a party files for a cancellation of a trademark, the party who owns the trademark (i.e. Facebook) is then required to respond to the allegations. The USPTO will then decide whether the allegations are true.

If I were a betting woman, I’d say that Facebook is going to win this one. And it’s probable that the social network will go after Talkbook simply for having “book” in its name. But it is kind of humorous to see a small company preemptively take on the big guy at his own game.

A spokesman for Facebook issued this comment on behalf of the company, “We believe this complaint is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously.”

There’s no doubt that the success of startups like Quora have propelled the Q&A space into the spotlight. And there seems to be room for other niche Quora-like sites, such as enterprise-focsued Opzi and recently launched LawPivot, which provides crowdsourced legal advice to technology companies. Today LawPivot is announcing that it has secured $600,000 in new funding from Google Ventures and a number of angel investors, including Richard Chen, David Tisch, David Li, Nick Mehta and Don Hutchison. This brings LawPivot’s total funding to $1 million (the startup previously raised $400,000 in angel funding).

LawPivot is essentially a "Quora for legal advice" that allows technology companies to confidentially ask legal questions to expert attorneys. Questions are completely confidential, so companies still have privacy within the platform. The startup was co-founded by a team of lawyers and tech execs, including Jay Mandal, a lead mergers and acquisitions attorney at Apple; Nitin Gupta; an intellectual property litigation lawyer; and Steven Kam, a software engineer and architect with experience as an intellectual property litigation lawyer. Clearly, these guys have experience in advising tech companies on how to navigate the law.

The company also unveiled its new product, LawPivot Recommendations, a personalized recommendation algorithm that connects a company to the best lawyers to answer its legal questions. As companies interact with LawPivot over time, the site’s technology will uses past and present data on users and trends to provide a company the best lawyers to answer its question based on the company's specific needs.

The incentive for lawyers, says Gupta, is that LawPivot is a way for lawyers to create new business and market themselves to potential clients. In the future, LawPivot also plans to offer companies business development advice in a Q&A format.

LawPivot is currently offering a free trial to California companies, and LawPivot is free for
California lawyers but eventually companies will be charged for advices, and lawyers will be charged for leads.

Aswe wrote in our initial review, the site seems like it could be a very useful tool for startups and mid-sized companies that many not be able to afford high-priced legal advice. And LawPivot can also be used as a way for any-sized companies to find lawyers with particular expertise in certain fields of law.

Over the past few years, I’ve been pretty vocal with my distaste for AT&T. Their complete and total incompetence when it comes to handling the iPhone in major metropolitan areas (or really any mildly crowded area) was only matched by a few of the colossal fuck-ups they’ve had with regard to some of my bills over the years. Tonight was the last straw. And it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. Thanks to the new awesome number porting feature that Google Voice is now testing, I was able to cancel my AT&T service tonight — without having to talk to a soul at AT&T.

I just completed the process which took less than five minutes. You see, when you port an existing number over to Google Voice, it will proceed to cancel the carrier contract that is tied to that number. Google is very good about warning you that this will happen — they make you check something like six checkboxes just to make sure you really, really want to do this. And then they make you enter your current carrier account number and the like so they can complete the process. But again, it’s all super-simple. And awesome. I’m no longer an AT&T customer thanks to Google.

Of course, I had been planning on dumping AT&T just as soon as the Verizon iPhone was available. But for now, I’ll make do with a back-up phone we have laying around the office. I’ll simply forward my old number (now run by Google Voice) to whatever random number is assigned to whatever phone I use. It’s a brilliant system that Google has devised.

And it must both piss off and scare the hell out of the carriers. Which I love even more.

Obviously, this move isn’t for everyone. First of all, if your contract isn’t up, your carrier is going to charge you an early termination fee (ETF) on top of the $20 Google charges you for the porting. And if you already have a Google Voice number that you regularly use, this newly ported number will wipe that out (though you’ll have access to both for 90 days as you transition). And yes, you will still need another service plan from another carrier that you can then forward your old number to — Google is still not a carrier (at least not yet). So be careful.

But if those things above don’t apply to you. Or, like me, you just don’t care anymore, you’ve had enough — Google couldn’t make this any simpler.

I’m a bit concerned about how exactly I’m going to call AT&T tomorrow to explain that while I no longer have an account, I need them to remove the $350 roaming charge they incorrectly charged to my account for the second month in a row. But that’s another worry for another day. Tonight, I’m going to bask in the glow that is Google Voice number porting. And Im going to savor the feeling of no longer being an AT&T customer. Not only did I just quit. I was able to kick them in the groin on my way out the door by canceling their service via another service that is sure to piss them off.

Glorious.

We’ve been huge fans of Google Voice for quite a while now — it makes screening calls and managing multiple phones a breeze — but there’s always been a huge thorn in its side: it didn’t allow people to port their existing phone numbers over. In other words, in order to take advantage of all of Google Voice’s benefits, you’d have to get a new phone number. Now, after years of waiting, that’s finally changing: Google has quietly enabled number porting for Google Voice.

Update: Google tells us that this is currently just a test available to some users and is not rolling out to everyone yet. However, it seems likely that a wide scale launch is coming soon.

Here’s a statement from Google:

“We’re continually testing new features to enhance the user experience. For a limited amount of time, we’re making the Google Voice number porting process available to users. We don’t have any additional details to share at this time, but plan to offer this feature to all users in the near future.”

The feature was first noticed by Engadget, and I’m seeing it in my Google Voice account as well. The process appears to be fairly straightforward (and yet terrifying at the same time): tell Google your existing cell phone number, agree to some strongly worded warnings, pay $20, and you should be in business.

You can see screenshots of the process below.

Oh, about those warnings. Transferring your number to Google Voice isn’t exactly painless — depending on your current carrier agreement you may have to deal with some steep early termination fees (ETFs) that can run hundreds of dollars. That means you should think twice about doing this (as the warnings make clear). And all of you who are about to buy shiny new Verizon iPhones may want to consider doing so under a new phone number, so that you can transfer your existing number to Google Voice.

This could be a turning point for the service. Up until now many people have only been able to take advantage of a limited set of Google Voice’s features (namely, voicemail) because they didn’t have a way to port their ‘real’ phone numbers over. Google Voice supports deep integration with Android, and comes pre-installed on stock Android builds, so plenty of people are going to be exposed to it, too.

I’ve been using Google Voice with my primary phone for over a year now, after the team offered to port my phone number over to the service (I was under the impression that it would be released for ‘everyone else’ much sooner than this). My experience has generally been quite positive, save for a series of downtime issues a couple months ago.

Yes, Google Voice will probably be a bit confusing to some people — it takes some getting used to the idea that one number can ring multiple phones. But think about where this is heading. Right now, you can make and receive phone calls using your Google Voice number directly from Gmail (which is awesome). Now imagine being able to do the same from your Google TV (which sports Android), your tablet computer, or any other Internet-connected device. It’s not there yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

More: Payback: I Just Canceled AT&T By Way Of Google Voice

Last night, we pointed out that as a part of their countdown to 10 billion app downloads, Apple actually revealed the top all-time app downloads for paid iPhone apps, free iPhone apps, paid iPad apps, and free iPad apps. The top results seemed pretty straightforward, with a few oddities here or there. And there may be a good reason for such oddities. The system appears pretty easy to game.

Well, technically, it’s probably not really “gaming” the system. At least not yet. It just appears that Apple is being a little sloppy in populating their lists. After speaking to a few top app developers, it seems that Apple is counting total download numbers in aggregate, regardless of if an app switched between being free and paid.

In other words, to boost yourself on the top paid app lists, all you would have to do is go free for all but one of the days, then switch to paid, and all those downloads would be counted towards your total as a paid app, it seems.

Obviously, free apps tend to be downloaded more than paid ones. So if you had a popular app and went free, then went back to paid, this could be a great way to jack your stats.

And several apps have done this switch from time to time (though we’re not saying they did it to jack their stats — they probably didn’t know that Apple would rank this way — instead it was just a nice offer to customers). Top apps like Traffic Rush and a few of the Tap Tap Revenge games are good examples of this.

One developer we spoke to, John Casasanta of TapTapTap, said that he found the numbers fishy because they’ve done multiple apps and Apple’s rankings don’t line up with their actual separated numbers. But if you take into account free and paid downloads for one app, things begin to align.

We’ve reached out to Apple about the issue, and will update if we hear back. In the meantime, be a bit wary of some of the top paid apps on that list — they may not be making as much money as it may seem given their position.

YouTube started experimenting with a new homepage last month, amping up its recommendation features so it would suggest new content you’re interested in. Today it has rolled out that experiemental homepage to all users. YouTube product manager Brian Glick tells us that the decision was made primarily because of positive user feedback, “Over 100,000 people filled out a survey, and most thought that the homepage is better now. Millions of people opted in, now we’re just putting it out to all the rest.”

The whole thrust here seems to be increasing the recommendation aspect of the site for users who are logged in Their solution is bringing more of the videos you interact with to the fore. Says Glick, “What we’re trying to turn the homepage into a destination to go to when you don’t know what you want to watch.  Now you personalized list of content that’s waiting for you.”

YouTube includes a list of the new features on the previous experiment page, I’ve broken them down below.

Combined list

Don’t miss a video

Delete anything and “grey out”

Help me re-find stuff I just watched

Easy inbox

YouTube has removed some of the less popular impersonal features like “Videos Being Watched Now” and moved the “Spotlight” and “Featured Videos” sections over to the right side. This is part of an effort to make the left side of the homepage more personal to the users.

Glick says that the new features are meant to hit three different dimensions of personalization: “Things you’ve told YouTube you like,”"Videos your friends have shared,” and “Videos YouTube thinks you like.” The new homepage focuses on serving up videos your friends have liked, channels you’re subscribed to and other things YouTube recommends based on your taste. The operative term here is YOU.

“It’s part of our broader focus on how we can bridge the gap from 15 minutes a day to 5 hours a day” Glick explains, referring to how people usually spend 5 hours on television versus 15 minutes on YouTube. “We want to make this personalized experience follow you anywhere where there is a screen.”

Another day, another iOS beta. This time, 9to5mac has dug into the latest iOS 4.3 beta and found something rather interesting: hints of a would-be new feature to be called “Media Stream”. While the details are obviously pretty scant at this point, early speculation points to a more social version of iOS.

9to5mac notes that inside the code for Media Stream is also a reference to something called “Photo Streams”, which is something other users may be able to subscribe to. What other users? Well, presumably your friends. 9to5mac is putting two-and-two together, tying these hints to the recently found “Find My Friends” feature in the first iOS 4.3 beta.

Each of these new features appear to be also tied to MobileMe, which also suggests that Apple could begin using the cloud for this new social stuff (if it is, in fact, social stuff). While there was no word about it during their latest earnings call yesterday, Apple had previously said that their massive North Carolina-based datacenter was set to come online at the end of 2010. Assuming that happened, new cloud-based services could be on the way shortly.

Much of the speculation that has been around an “iTunes in the cloud“, but it’s possible that Apple could do a smaller-scale, more personal cloud experience first. If that’s the case, something like a picture streaming/sharing service could make sense. But the name “Media Stream” also implies other media beyond pictures. Might music and videos be shared in the same way as well? Could Apple take a page from Microsoft and create a Kin Studio-like experience for iOS devices?

Apple took a pretty half-hearted step towards social with Ping last year. Have they learned from their mistakes there? And can they afford to go it alone in social, or would they try to partner with Facebook and/or Twitter on it?

Or maybe Media Stream will actually be meant to directly compete with the streaming media service Google has stated they will build into upcoming versions of Android?

At this point, who knows what Apple is cooking up here. 9to5mac seems to think all of this stuff won’t see the light of day until iOS 5. This goes along with earlier news that the new multi-touch gestures in the iOS betas weren’t meant for iOS 4.3 at all, but a later version (likely iOS 5).

iOS 5 hasn’t been announced or acknowledged by Apple, but assuming they keep on their same yearly timetable, a roadmap for it should be unveiled sometime before their WWDC event in June.

Today, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao revealed, at a press conference in Washington D.C., conclusions from their latest round of meetings that have taken place this week at the White House. The two world leaders have met eight times since Obama took office.

Excerpts from their speeches relating to environmental issues follow below. A full transcript of today’s press conference is available at Whitehouse.gov.

In their respective speeches, President Obama addressed the environment many times, while President Hu barely touched upon these issues directly. Instead, Hu highlighted his country’s willingness to be more collaborative and open in its handling of environmental and related trade issues.

Aside from other humanitarian, economic and geo-political security goals, the presidents said their countries’ wished and plan to: spur innovation and production of clean tech and energy; reduce pollution and curb climate change; and generally keep the flow of exports, including clean-tech related products, between the two nations robust and fair.

President Obama noted:

The U.S. is now exporting “more than $100 billion a year in goods and services to China, which supports more than half a million American jobs.”

This week, the U.S. and China “completed dozens of deals that will increase U.S. exports by more than $45 billion”

China's investment in the U.S. increased by several billion dollars through deals announced this week that deal with: machinery, software, aviation and agriculture.

China’s new U.S. deals will support an estimated 235,000 American jobs, many in manufacturing.

As China proposed at the Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, with U.S. blessings, the country will establish a nuclear “center of excellence,” to help “secure the world's vulnerable nuclear materials.”

The U.S. will cooperate with China on science and technology initiatives to advance agriculture and industry, including: a U.S.-China clean energy research center; joint ventures in wind power, smart grids and cleaner coal.

The U.S. wants to ensure that the “government procurement process in China is open and fair to American businesses,” especially vis a vis intellectual property protection.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft pointed out to Obama and Hu, this week, that an estimated one customer of every 10 in China is actually paying for Microsoft products.

The U.S. and China are the two largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouses gases, in the world.

Both Obama and Hu agree their countries have the “responsibility to combat climate change by building on the progress at Copenhagen and Cancun, and showing the way to a clean energy future.”

President Hu noted:

The U.S. and China “agree[d] to strengthen consultation and coordination on major issues that concern peace and development in the Asia-Pacific region and in the world,” including: the Korean Peninsula, the Iranian nuclear issue, climate change and others.

China and the United States will…promote denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in Northeast Asia.

Each year China and the U.S. have about 3 million people traveling between the two countries. (Each day, about 7,000 to 8,000 will be traveling between China and the United States.)

China plans to “work with the United States and other countries to effectively address global challenges, such as meeting the climate challenge, energy and resource security, food security, public health security and serious natural disasters.”

LivingSocial has been offering $10 off any $20 Amazon purchase since 5 am this morning and it’s been a boon huge for the daily deals company, which Amazon has astutely invested $175 million in. Now the extremely popular deal has just crossed over the one million mark, with 12 hours to go. LivingSocial tells us that there are currently 99.4K vouchers being sold each hour, 2k vouchers being sold each minute and 85 vouchers being sold each second.

Already this has beat the Groupon/Gap deal which ended in $11 million worth of Groupons sold, and it’s still got a half a day left.

CenterNetworks is keeping an impressively vigilant track of the deal’s milestones, here.

Last week, we noted that mobile photo-sharing app PicPlz rolled out a bunch of improvements to their app in an effort to better compete with rival Instagram. Sadly, that new polish was only for their iPhone app at the time. But today brings good news for Android fans: the same features! And there’s a bonus too: PicPlz is now accepting applications for access to their API.

PicPlz has more about the new features for Android users here. Here’s the main gist of the update:

• Live thumbnail preview of your picture with different filters applied.
• Fixed rare crash on sign up
• Fixed issue with notifications not clearing from status bar
• Camera view no longer turns screen brightness to 100%
• Fixed issue with camera not properly detecting the flash state on start-up
• Other misc bug fixes

They also promise more speed improvements in the next iteration. The Android version is key for them because it is one way they definitely distinguish themselves from Instagram — which is still iPhone-only.

The API, meanwhile, is another way they can potentially distinguish themselves — at least for a bit. Those interested are asked to sign up for the PicPlz API beta here.

Instagram caused a bit of a stink when they pulled third-party access to their data a couple weeks ago. This wasn’t meant to be a hostile act, they simply want developers to wait to use their data until they have a proper API that can scale. ”We’re testing it internally and with selected partners at this time,” they tells us.

The race is on.

John MacFarlane had a dream: to send music from one box to every room in the house. In 2002, the only way to do this – sanely – was to run speaker wire from room to room, creating an install headache or a rats nest of wires. Instead, his company, Sonos, succeeded at sending the audio wirelessly, a feat that has been replicated many times but has never resulted in a product as successful and popular as the Sonos Multi-Room Music System.

There’s a dirty secret in gadget start-ups: they fail. Constantly and catastrophically. Unlike web or web service start-ups, gadget start-ups require R&D, manufacturing, and distribution. The Gizmondo, the most famous of all flame-outs, involved unkept promises, horrible hardware, and an exec with organized crime ties wrapping a Ferrari Enzo around a light pole.

Making hardware is hard. It takes time, and MacFarlane and his team took three years to finally launch the ZonePlayer 100 and remote control. During this time multiple vendors tried and failed to ship similar products. However, thanks to a unique design aesthetic, some nice software, and a lot of luck, Sonos survived and is now thriving.

Read more…

Last October, finance-tracking startup 60mo sent a tweet to Lightbank that read: “Hey @lightbank, we should chat sometime. Mid-westerners gotta stick together, yo.“

Three months later, Lightbank has its response: “fo sho”.

Today, 60mo is announcing that it’s closed a Series A funding round led by Lightbank. Exact details of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but we’re told it’s “in the range of a million dollars”. And yes, that tweet was actually the first time the two organizations communicated with each other.

60mo, which we’ve covered before, is an online service that helps businesses manage their finances by importing data from QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and a variety of financial institutions like Bank of America, Chase, and American Express. Once the data is in the system, you can use 60mo to create financial projections, manage your business’s budget and share the data with your accountant or investors — it’s sort of like a Mint for businesses.

Since we last wrote about them, 60mo has launched a new design, and they’ve also adjusted their pricing. The service initially started at $19 a month — that’s now jumped to $29 a month, but 60mo has introduced a new free option, albeit with limited functionality (you can only connect with one bank account or credit card). There’s also a new 30 day trial available.

Lightbank is an investment firm founded by Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell — both of whom also cofounded Groupon, among other companies.

Another competitor in this space is inDinero.