Intel Labs is opening up its deep pockets once again today, announcing a $100 million cash investment in U.S. university research over the next 5 years. The company plans to develop and open several branded “Intel Science and Technology Centers” at a number of universities for sponsored research and innovation throughout 2011.

The first Center will be built at Stanford University and will focus on creating innovations around cloud-computing, says Intel. Researchers at Stanford will collaborate with a community of researchers from seven other universities and Intel’s Core processor with combined visual and 3-D graphics will “be a key R&D platform” for researchers. Other focus areas of Intel Research Centers will include visual computing, mobility, security and embedded solutions.

Intel Labs has previously run centers near research universities but this is the first collaborative effort for the company with university research facilities. Intel says that the new venture is expected to give researchers 5 times more funding compared to the previous approach.

A Cambridge, Mass. biosciences company that makes plastics, chemicals and energy from renewable crops rather than petroleum, Metabolix, Inc. (NASDAQ: MBLX) today announced that its subsidiary, Metabolix Oilseeds, obtained a $203,000 grant from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture (or USD $203,614.92) to test a crop called Camelina Sativa, or false flax, as a possible petroleum replacement.

Camelina contains oil, fiber and protein with potential uses in nutrition for people and animals, and industrial applications including in biofuels.

In 2009, Metabolix, Inc. won a $15 million grant from the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) to make bioplastics that could replace HDPE, a petroleum-based variety used in bottles and containers, made on commercial scale equipment and at rapid manufacturing speeds.

According to the company’s website, Mirel resin is biodegradable in soil and water, and in home and industrial composting facilities but not in a conventional landfill, and is used in lieu of traditional plastics to make consumer goods, compost bags, business equipment and packaging. It’s also FDA-approved for use in microwaveable, freez-able, and food, medical and cosmetic packaging.

While Metabolix is viewed as an industry leader, competition for a piece of the sustainable packaging market is growing with companies like Biopack Environmental Solutions, Crown Holdings, EnviroPAK, NatureWorks, Pactiv, and many other stalwarts strongly in the game, and startups like EcoSpan and MicroGreen growing quickly.

The global market for sustainable packaging (not just bioplastics) is projected to reach $142.42 billion by 2015, according to projections by Global Industry Analysts (GIA).

Metabolix is also developing technology to make plastics, chemicals and energy, from crops such as switchgrass, oilseeds and sugarcane on the same equipment, or in the same facilities.

How big a business are mobile apps? In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion last year to $15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to an astounding $58 billion by 2014. As with any forecast of a hypergrowth market, you can be sure this one will change in six months, and the further out you go the more guesswork involved. (Remember, less than a year ago nobody was even able to predict how many iPads would be sold this year). But here is one prediction you can count on: you will be hearing these numbers thrown around a lot all year long until a better forecast comes along.

Gartner breaks down the forecast into advertising revenues and paid downloads (including in-app purchases), as you can see from the chart above. Paid downloads and other direct purchases make up the majority of the expected revenues, but mobile advertising is expected to grow nicely over time into a multi-billion dollar market.

The forecast includes all mobile app stores, not just Apple’s (such as the Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Research In Motion’s App World, Microsoft Marketplace and Samsung Apps). However, Gartner estimates that Apple’s app store accounted for 90 percent of the 8.2 billion total estimated downloads last year (both free and paid), and will continue to dominate. In 2011, Gartner estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7 billion, with 81 percent of those being free. The revenue forecasts include the portion kept by Apple and the other app stores.

It looks like Yahoo has been looking for a home for Delicious for some time now. On his Diggnation web show this week, Digg founder Kevin Rose said that Yahoo contacted Digg to see if the company would be interested in taking over Delicious prior to when an internal slide leaked indicating Yahoo wanted to get rid if it and before the December layoffs (which would put the time period at early December/late November). In the video, Rose addresses this around the 36 minute mark.

Rose said that at first he thought that Yahoo was trying to sell Delicious off (which is what we assumed as well), but then realized that Yahoo was simply trying to find a home for the bookmarking service. Rose confirmed that Yahoo and Digg had preliminary talks simply about how much it would cost for the upkeep of Delicious.

Shortly after these early conversations, Rose said the news broke that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” Delicious and a number of other services in the Yahoo product family. Which is when he Tweeted that he would “really like to buy del.icio.us and make a seriously rad social bookmarking site, screenshot archives of bookmarks/audio annotations etc.”

Rose has a few compelling ideas to breathe new life into Delicious, including the ability to take static snapshots of a webpage at a given moment so users always have access to what a site looked like when they initially bookmarked it. Another possible feature, says Rose, could be an audio recording feature that would allow users to add audio annotations to bookmarks to add additional context to bookmark sharing. He’d also add pro accounts, and try to make a profit from the service.

Rose says he would definitely take over Delicious but didn’t offer any updates on whether this would actually happen. He added that he contacted Delicious’ original founder Joshua Schachter to see if he would want to back the project but as we know Schacter is pursuing other projects. Rose says that he’s hoping it finds a good home and he’d ‘love to do something cool with it’ but doesn’t know if Yahoo would give Delicious to him.

Thanks to @UniPaul for the tip.

The power of the crowd has proven to be particularly useful when it comes to fundraising online. Founder Institute startup CauseVox is launching a SaaS platform that allows non-profits to crowdsource fundraising.

A white-label platform, CauseVox allows organizations to launch a customized, charity-branded site on their own domain and begin accepting donations. Tools include a simple editor to create fundraising destinations, the ability to create fundraising pages for supporters, socialize fundraising efforts, and more.

While non-profits have a 30 day free trial to use the software, CauseVox will charge a small subscription fee and will take 7.5 percent of all donations. We have an exclusive offer for TC readers to use Causevox for free for six months. You can use the promo code “techcrunch” to get 6 more months free during billing.

In its beta period, CauseVox already helped non-profits, including Change For Kids and RestoreNYC, raise over $400,000 in donations.

CauseVox isn’t the first startup to launch a crowd-funding platform for organizations; the startup faces competition from Facebook app Causes, Nadanu, and GoFundMe.

Facebook is introducing two new measures to beef up security: expanding HTTPS connections as an all-the-time option and using social captchas to authenticate users who have lost passwords. Let’s take these one at a time.

HTTPS is a secure connection (more secure than plain-vanilla HTTP connections), and Facebook already uses HTTPS for when you log into an outside site through Facebook Connect and send your passwords back to Facebook. But now you will have the option to set HTTPs as the default connection for everything you do on Facebook itself. Pages will load slower over HTTPS, but you also won’t be vulnerable to people sniffing your password over WiFi using something like Firesheep. (Maybe Facebook should offer a “more secure” on/off button you could click every time you are not on a secure network at your home or office). Some app developers will need to use a new “Secure Canvas URL” so that their apps can also be accessed over HTTPS.

The social captcha feature is pretty clever. It will replace regular captchas (those slightly warped letters you are asked to re-enter to prove you are human) with a picture of one of your friends. You will need to identify the person to authenticate yourself when you are trying to retrieve a lost password or Facebook detects suspicious login activity on your account. You do know what all your “friends” look like, don’t you?

Well, so far the authoritarian regime in Egypt has taken steps to crack down on the uprising of its population by shutting down first Twitter and now Facebook, and thus useful parts of the movement’s ability to organise itself. No-one is suggesting that these this are essential to the people in the ground, but they certainly can’t hurt.

Now the government is taking steps to shut down web video services, and one of them is the live mobile video startup Bambuser. The company has now confirmed in a blog post that the service was shut down yesterday.

It looks like Mangrove Capital Partners believes in the business opportunity held in helping small businesses, do more, well, business. The Luxembourg-based venture capital firm has invested $1.75M in SohoOS to further propel the company’s small business management suite. Michael Jackson, previously COO of Skype, will take a board seat.

The concept behind SohoOS’s offering is to put business utilities that are common for medium to large businesses with resources, in the hands of both online and offline small and micro businesses. Think designers, programmers, plumbers, yoga instructors, small PR firms, consultants, the list can go on and on.

Since debuting on TechCrunch nearly a year ago, 20,000 businesses have become active accounts on SohoOS’s platform, making use of features such as invoicing and billing (without the need to open a merchant account), CRM, email and SMS broadcast, a sales flow manager, as well as document and project management.

The company has chosen to forgo early revenue for the sake of distribution. As such, the service is being offered completely free-of-charge. Certain premium services, however, such as bulk-SMS packages and VoiP services are offered at additional costs. These though are priced on a pay-as-you-go basis, and most companies can probably live without them and use SohoOS without spending a penny.

Ron Daniel, CEO, gave me a glimpse of a soon-to-be-realsed iPhone app for business management on the go. The app, along with a localized version of the service in several languages, will both be rolled out in the coming months. The investment from Mangrove will be used to scale the team as well to maintain the free version of the service. We’ll continue to keep tabs on the company and see whether Mangrove’s investment was money well spent.

In October, Amazon announced its “Kindle Singles,” product, which introduced short stories and digital pamphlets to the e-book reader’s store. In the company's words, Kindle Singles are "twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book" and generally 5,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages). Today, Amazon is debuting Kindle Singes, its collection of short works.

Kindle Singles are available to both Kindle device and app users, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99. Amazon says the first set of published Singles include original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction. While the company says that “the response to our announcement of Singles has been great,” it’s unclear how many Singles have been added to the Kindle bookstore.

Kindle Singles are important because the new format gives bloggers and writers out there who may not have the time to write a long-form book, the opportunity to publish a pamphlet or shorter work. And it seems fairly easy for writer to publish these works, especially since Amazon is looking to build up its collection of content in this genre.

For an example of a Kindle Single, checkout ZDNet editor Larry Dignan’s The Business Of Media: A Survival Guide.

It’s unclear how well this format will perform in terms of downloads, but Amazon has certainly been able to collect short works from a number of well-known authors, including Jodi Picoult, Evan Ratliff and Nic Marks (A TED book).

Cloud-based video monitoring platform Sensr.net has raised $1.5 million in funding led by Spark Capital with Charles River Ventures and other strategic angel investors participating.

Sensr.net essentially allows anyone to create a web-based video monitoring system. All you need is a web-cam and a computer set up to video monitor your home or office. Sensr.net will keep track of interesting images and alert you when something happens. The startup will send you an email or a text message if they detect something out of the ordinary.

For example, if you go away for the weekend, you can set up a web-cam to monitor any suspicious activity in your home. Sensr.net will alert if you if the video catches a trespasser or any other activities in your home.

Sensr.net also allows you to share your camera with other friends, on social networks or anyone on the web. The startup was founded by entrepreneur Adam Beguelin, who was also a co-founder of video search engine Truveo, which was acquired by AOL in 2006.

This is interesting. Verizon has just announced that it is bundling broadband with Google Apps for its small business customers.

Called Google Apps for Verizon, the package combines Google’s-cloud-based productivity suite with broadband internet access. The new offering includes 25 GB (gigabytes) of domain name e-mail storage per user; access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Sites, Docs, and Video.

Google Apps for Verizon is available to businesses that subscribe to a bundle consisting of Verizon Internet service and either Verizon voice or TV service, or both. Unfortunately, the package is available in 13 states, including Washington D.C. Verizon is actually offering 3 free users accounts and a free domain name if users bundle Apps with internet access.

Considering Verizon’s widespread popularity, this could be a big win for Google Apps.

Do you like fun? Do you like chess? Do you like being alone? Well, ThinkFun has the chess game for you. Called Solitaire Chess, the game is a cross between a puzzle and standard chess.

How it Works
• Each game begins with the pieces set on the board in specific positions. Challenges range from Easy to Expert levels.
• Pieces move as in regular Chess.
• Every move must be a capture.
• When there's only one piece left, YOU WIN!

Now, go ahead and click through to actually play the game and find out how you can win one of three iPhone/iPad apps or one of three actual board games.

Read more…

According to a number of tips we’ve received in the past few minutes, the chatter on Twitter and several local reports (mostly in Arabic), it appears Egyptian authorities have moved to block Facebook.

Inspired by the recent Tunisian demonstrations against corruption, protesters are filling the streets of Cairo to demonstrate against government corruption and policies.

Similar to the protests in Tunisia, the Egyptian demonstrations were partly organized on Facebook and Twitter. And yesterday, Twitter was blocked in Egypt.

If Facebook has in fact been blocked, this isn’t particularly surprising. Facebook itself has also been actively used to organize the demonstrations in Egypt. For instance, one Facebook Group called We Are All Khaled Said, features up-to-the-minute updates on the protests and photos from the scene. Khaled Said was “a young man brutally tortured and killed by police in Alexandria,” explains Blake Hounshell on the Foreign Policy blog, and his death has become a rallying point for the demonstrations which fall on “Police Day,” a national holiday in Egypt. And many of those who have been blocked on Twitter have now resorted to Facebook for activism.

We’ve contacted Facebook to confirm if the social network has been blocked and will update when we hear back.

Global information and measurement company The Nielsen Company this morning announced that it has priced its IPO of 71,428,572 shares of its common stock at $23 per share (precisely as The New York Times called it yesterday).

The company will receive net proceeds of approximately $1,560 million from the initial public offering of its common stock, and approximately $240 million from a bond offering after payment of commissions and estimated expenses. Total: $1.8 billion.

Nielsen says it intends to use the net proceeds to repay a portion of its outstanding debt and to pay a agreement termination fee to its current owners (Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, KKR & Co. and Thomas H. Lee Partners).

The Nielsen Company's shares of common stock are expected to begin trading today, January 26, on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “NLSN.”

The IPO's underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 10,714,286 of additional shares of common stock from The Nielsen Company at the IPO price less the underwriting discount.

In the bond offering, The Nielsen Company will sell an aggregate principal amount of $250 million of bonds, and the underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional $37.5 million in aggregate principal amount of bonds from The Nielsen Company.

J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Citi are serving as joint book-running managers for both offerings.

Social investment network operator eToro this morning announced that it has closed a funding round of $8.3 million from Spark Capital, Social Leverage and existing investors.

The money will be used to fuel international growth and further enhancement of eToro’s social trading platform. The platform basically enables investors to see, follow and copy the actions of other investors in real time.

Currently, eToro’s online investment network boasts 1.5 million users in over 130 countries.

I’ve been to a lot of tech and media conference in my day, but this week marked the first time I attended the annual Digital – Life – Design (DLD) Conference in Munich, Germany.

Not only was it a great opportunity to listen to, meet with, and hijack the Twitter and Facebook accounts of many a tech luminary, but it was also outright fun to be there.

I realize full well lip dubbing was probably last considered cool around the tail end of 2006, but that didn’t stop many of DLD’s attendees from participating in a well-organized lip-dub video recording, to the tunes of Kenny Loggins’ Footloose.

A few faces you might recognize:

Robin Wauters (ha!), famous angel investors Esther Dyson and Yossi Vardi, Googlers Marissa Mayer, Anil Hansjee and Lior Ron, Scobleizer, physician and writer Deepak Chopra, rock star venture capitalist Howard Morgan from First Round Capital, digital technology historian George Dyson, and last but not least TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher.

Can you name more people in the video (which you may have to watch on YouTube)?

The video was directed by the charismatic Yosi Taguri.

Credits:
Director: Yosi Taguri
Camera: Tassilo Letzel
Props + art work: Rina Donnersmarck
Organisation: Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck
Assistant: Nora Abousteit
Gali Ross
Alexander Henckel-Donnersmarck
Pierre Ostrowski
Technical support: Melanie Landa
Organisation support: Sabine Schmid
Producer: Franziska Deecke
Inspiration: Steffi Czerny + Marcel Reichart of DLD

ignitAd is today introducing an ad optimization solution for publishers that includes ‘Bid Optimization Management’ technology developed in-house, which enables publishers to generate more revenue through predictive analysis and advanced bidding technology.

Coinciding with the product release, the startup has announced that it has completed a $2 million seed funding round led by DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures and JVP Media Labs.

ignitAd’s ad optimization solution auctions any publisher's available display ad inventory across ad exchanges, networks and other demand-side partners.

Based on proprietary predictive analysis and bidding algorithms, ignitAd is able to forecast demand patterns at various price points and thus proactively predict the highest paying advertising source for each impression.

Babylon, the publicly listed provider of translation and dictionary software and language solutions, has been around since 1997. Today, the company is launching version 9 of its flagship translation product in an effort to turn it into a veritable ‘Quora for linguistics’ (their words), referencing the Q&A startup that was launched in June 2009.

Babylon says it can leverage some 72 million members to morph its revamped product into a live Q&A linguistics community, allowing users to help one another with any translations, linguistic advice or tips about local culture.

In addition, Babylon has teamed up with a company called Ginger Software, which provides a contextual spell and grammar checker.

The goal of that partnership is to be able to offer its millions of users a – and I quote – ‘proofreading, context-understanding digital writing aid capable of shaping any document into a flawlessly written tour de force‘.

Babylon is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices.

The company claims it processes roughly 90 million translation requests on a daily basis, and that its software is downloaded over 100,000 times every day. Its database contains some 18 million definition terms, and the website is visited by 3.5 million people on a daily basis.

Aside from the social aspect, new in Version 9 of its translation software is the ability to let your computer read to you in English, German, French and more. Babylon’s so-called human voice engine provides pronunciations in over 18 languages.

Crowd Factory, a startup that creates white-label social marketing applications, has raised $6.5 million in funding led by Storm Ventures with Hummer Winblad, Peninsula Ventures and several angel investors participating in the round.

Crowd Factory’s social marketing applications allows marketers to amplify and optimize campaigns, and view social-analytics and interactions. For example, Crowd Factory will take a contest held by a brand and socialize the campaign, increasing interactions and responses.

The company’s social offers applications lets marketers build group buying and social gaming elements into their promotions. And marketers can then track and optimize engagement from a single dashboard.

Since launching the suite in June of last year, the company says it has more than tripled its customer base, working with companies such as HBO, Sony, Speck and Universal McCann.

As we’ve seen from the recent Quora wars, the Q&A space has come into its own in the last couple of months and this week we’re seeing reports of crazy growth in yet another contender, Q&A site Stack Overflow. A blog post called the “State of the Stack 2010 (a message from your CEO)” reveals that the StackOverflow.com site has grown 131% this year from 7 million to 16.6 million monthly unique visitors. Stack Overflow has also grown 129% in terms of page views from 31.8 million views per month to 72.8 million per month, according to Google Analytics.

Last time we checked in with Stack Overflow it had just crossed the 10 million mark on Quantcast back in November. But co-founder Joel Spolsky is skeptical of  “notoriously inaccurate“ traffic gaging systems like Quancast, Google Analytics and the terminally unreliable Compete and holds some other more tangible success metrics close to his heart.

Says Spolsky,

“The true measure of success for any Internet company is how often people come up to me in swank hotel lobbies and offer to buy me meals, let me use their corporate jet, etc. But since there is a great deal of disagreement as to how to measure that, we track a reasonable proxy called "eyeballs," on the theory that if a site is useful, people will load it up in their browsers and eyeball it.”

Spolsky is right, there is a direct correlation between the amount of random people who approach you in hotels asking for stuff and how confident you should be about your success during family holidays, especially if you’ve already got a flattering “Forget Quora!” profile in the New York Observer under your belt. As proof of Stack Overflow’s coolness, Spolsky writes that he’s  pretty sure “ALL the programmers in the world use Stack Overflow” (source: completely made up).

But aside from traffic and $6 million in funding and sycophants and the fact that if it grows as projected the company will be “bigger than Facebook in 15 months,” Spolsky has yet another metric for success, and this one (he swears) is the most important, he swears. Percentage of questions answered is the holy grail of Stack Overflow, and as of right now three of the sites (Cooking, Photography, and English) have a 100% answer rate, which means at least one user thought the question was respectable enough to pass muster and garner an upvote.

Indeed Spolsky and his co-founder Jeff Atwood are committed to answer excellence and recently started a program to send their power users to industry conferences as a way to gain knowledge and further evangelize the sites. Stack Overflow and the StackExchange network don’t tolerate subjective or conversational questions either, which is a boon for people who want to browse the Apple topic with out having to read anything inquiring about Steve Jobs’ health, myself included. Hallelujah.

“Essentially, we’ve already learned how to deal with ‘big city problems,’” says Spolsky, referring to the network’s overall 90% answer rate. “We think of Stack Exchange as being more like the reference section of the library where you go when you really need a specific answer and you have to talk to experts; all the other Q&A sites are structured more like social hangouts where you shout out your question in a crowded bar and hope there’s one person who hears it and knows the answer.”

And on that note, the Q&A showdown continue.

Image: 3-Fach

Three weeks into his job, Facebook Director of Gaming Partnerships Sean Ryan made bold advances to developers during the M&A panel at Inside Social Apps. When discussing what games should be built on what platforms, Ryan said, referring to Facebook, “Well if you’re building social I can’t image you not building on the world’s best social network” a statement which made some noise in the crowd.

Ryan went on to say that single player games like the immensely popular Angry Birds “wouldn’t make a lot of sense” on the social network, as building on the almost 600M strong Facebook platform isn’t just about an endless supply of users but about games that highlight interactions.

When asked to explain further about ‘Angry Birds’ versus a game like ‘CityVille,’ Ryan said,

“We don’t bring anything to the table but it’s still a great game. If you have a social game, we believe you should build it for us, that’s what we do. If you have a single player game, it’s not clear why you should build it for us, you should probably build it for other people. Folks like PopCap have been able to brilliantly take a downloadable game, which was Bejeweled and after a lot of work turned it into a social game. So you can do it, but there’s not much point.”

When asked if there was a game that wasn’t on Facebook that he thinks should be Ryan said “‘Civilization’  … it’s one of the best multiplayer games ever, and it’s not yet on Facebook. Whenever there’s a true multiplayer game that involves a lot of social interaction it arguably should be on our platform, because that’s what we do.”

When asked if Facebook would ever acquire a gaming company or go into the content business themselves Ryan said no, “That’s not our gig.”

Image: Just Push Start

Abound Solar, which makes thin-film cadmium telluride solar panels, has attained certifications that will allow the company to receive feed-in tariffs in the U.K. and pursue sales there aggressively.

With a feed-in tariff, utilities agree to pay a premium, but stable, rate for power generated from renewable sources, both as the utility uses the power, or as it is fed back through the grid to be redistributed and sold elsewhere.

Often controversial, feed-in tariff are meant to drive the rapid adoption of clean energy by homeowners and utilities alike. Critics believe they give a better payout to utilities, and hurt consumers, or that they tip the scales in favor of one technology (like solar) over others (such as wind, or geothermal) unfairly.

Solar subsidies in France, Bloomberg reported last week, led to an all-out boom in the installation of residential solar systems, and then to government debt. The agency that guaranteed premium rates for solar generated power can’t cover as much as installed systems have begun to produce at the locked-in, higher-than-market rates according to the report. As a result, the country is cutting the incentives, and that could hurt solar companies that have heavily invested, there.

A similar thing happened to the solar market in Spain around 2008, according to a report by analyst Stephen Marcus for Cleantech Group. Japan is currently considering cutting down its solar feed-in tarrifs now, too PV-Tech reported today. A decision there is due in February.

Abound Solar's modules previously received certifications from Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and the California Energy Commission (CEC) which helped the company to gather momentum, domestically. The company manufactures its technology in Indiana, having recently secured a federal loan guarantee of $400 million to build its operations there in a facility that once made auto transmissions.

To date, Abound Solar (formerly known as AVA Solar) has raised $150 million from private investors and institutions, including: Invus Group, DCM, Bohemian Companies, Technology Partners, GLG Partners, and the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Program.

Mark Chen, a director of marketing and product manager at Abound Solar, said on Tuesday:

“We have no immediate projects in the pipeline in the U.K. but are optimistic about our market potential there, as the government is highly supportive of solar. We will follow some of our existing customers there from Germany, Italy and the U.S. including probably Juwi Solar and WirSol both German companies.”

We’ve all walked down the street and seen someone with a weird tattoo and thought, “they’re going to regret that later”. What may seem cool at the time, might not seem so cool years from now. Is it possible that the current crop of mobile photo filters will lead to the same type of regret? PicPlz clearly thinks it’s possible.

A new feature the service announced today is Dropbox integration. This nifty ability has been turned on from the backend, so iPhone, Android, and web users can use it immediately. And if you do use it, you’ll be able to automatically save both your original photo and your filtered photo to your Dropbox account in the cloud.

It’s a cool integration that’s a good idea. I’m sure we’ll see more mobile services utilize it.

But the reasoning behind PicPlz’s move here is just as interesting. As they write:

This way, you can use picplz to post images with filter effects and not worry about:

Permanently and irreversibly altering your valuable pictures

Leaving the unfiltered version of the picture trapped on your phone

While PicPlz, like rivals Instagram and Hipstamatic, is built around the idea of taking and sharing photos that have been altered using filters, they’re also clearly aware that some users are hesitant to do this. In fact, there’s no shortage of people who think this type of behavior is simple a fad that will pass. And then we’ll all be longing for our original, unfiltered pictures — we’ll want to remove the tattoos.

Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen. Plus, both PicPlz and Instagram have already allowed you to save both the original version of a picture and the filtered version. But this new integration does make it a bit easier  to not think about.

Never before has an electric vehicle been named European Car of the Year, but this year that honor falls to the Nissan Leaf. Similar to the North American Car of the Year, which the Chevrolet Volt won, the European COTY is chosen by auto journalists: 58 of them from 23 European countries. So why did the Nissan Leaf win?

When you look at just how efficient the Nissan Leaf is you begin to understand just why EVs will become a part of our everyday life. The award jury seems to have been motivated by a distinctly forward-looking philosophy this year.

Continue reading…

Earlier today, we reported on a lot of chatter that Twitter was being blocked in Egypt amid rising protests. We can now confirm that they are being blocked. Two tweets from the service tonight confirm it.

“We can confirm that Twitter was blocked in Egypt around 8am PT today. It is impacting both Twitter.com & applications,” Twitter communications head Sean Garrett just tweeted out via their new PR account. “We believe that the open exchange of info & views benefits societies & helps govts better connect w/ their people,” he continued in a second tweet.

The protests began happening in Cairo this morning after people rallied together using services like Facebook and Twitter, and after seeing similar protests in Tunisia about corruption.

@twitterglobalpr
Twitter Comms

We can confirm that Twitter was blocked in Egypt around 8am PT today. It is impacting both Twitter.com & applications. (1/2)

about 16 hours ago via webRetweetReply

@twitterglobalpr
Twitter Comms

Re Egypt block: We believe that the open exchange of info & views benefits societies & helps govts better connect w/ their people. (2/2)

about 16 hours ago via webRetweetReply