Online spending in the fourth quarter of 2010 reached record levels, according to comScore’s latest data on retail e-commerce. After a stronger than expected holiday shopping season, online retail spending in Q4 reached a record $43.4 billion, which is up 11 percent from the same quarter in 2009. Additionally, 84 percent of U.S. Internet users conducted an online transaction in Q4 2010, which is up from 78 percent last year.

comScore reports that the growth rate for the quarter represented the fifth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and second quarter of double-digit growth rates in the past year, thanks to an improved economy.

Of course, Q4 spending was largely buoyed by holiday shopping and this year there were a number of factors besides an uptick in the economy that helped push spending to record levels. Free shipping offers, and the Northeast Blizzard following the Christmas holiday also propelled shoppers to look online for deals in the quarter.

For the quarter, the highest grossing prodict categories were Computer Software, Consumer Electronics, Books & Magazines (which exclude digital downloads), Computers/Peripherals/PDAs, and Toys and Hobbies. Each of the categories grew at least 15 percent in Q4 2010 vs. a year ago.

And comScore says that the top 25 online retailers, including retail giants Amazon and Walmart accounted for 68.4 percent of dollars spent online, which is up 5.6 percentage points from a year ago. Interestingly, in Q3 2010, the top 25 retailers accounted for slightly more, with a share of 69.9 percent of dollars. This could show that shoppers also bought items from smaller retailers online this holiday season.

It’s hard to imagine that 2011 could break 2010′s records in terms of e-commerce sales, but it should be interesting come holiday shopping season to see if U.S. consumers continue to spend freely.

By now you’ve probably seen the Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pondering the wonders of the Internet. It’s a bit hokey and of course shows the NBC hosts talking nonsense about something outside of their expertise. Well, NBC clearly didn’t find it as cute as everyone else and reportedly fired the employee that uploaded it. Best Buy almost did that once. Remember how that turned out?

NBC went and pulled most of the videos from the Internet. The video we embedded is dead. But of course they couldn’t get them all. Simply searching Google for Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel pulls dozens of copies. Nothing ever goes away online. NBC should know this by now. It’s called the Internet.

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GroundLink — a New York City transportation technology and travel services business — released a new mobile app this week. The second iPhone app from the company, GroundLink allows users to book a hybrid, electric or otherwise clean-vehicle car, shuttle or limo to get around cities around the world.

Users can also opt to book a ride by lowest price, highest service rating or soonest and nearest available driver with the app. The company’s chief executive Alex Mashinsky noted:

“Over 5,000 of our [transportation] providers offer green vehicles – all forms, including hydrogen fleets in Los Angeles, even. It's not all hybrids and electrics. Some countries have promoted natural gas vehicles.

That said, we let the customer choose by their own preferences. If they want an SUV, a stretch limo or whatever, they can book that service, too.”

Mashinsky expects to see the user-base for his company’s phone apps grow in travel hubs in the U.S. and Europe, rapidly. GroundLink’s goal is to have 10% of its overall bookings being taken on smartphones by the end of the year, increasing to over 25% by 2013. It plans to release an Android app in March.

In late January, GroundLink struck a partnership with the travel search engine, KAYAK hoping to reach new audiences online and on mobile networks.

KAYAK now uses a GroundLink API to offer a ground transportation marketplace within its own applications. Overall, GroundLink’s service covers some 5,000 airports, 15,000 cities and 45,000 providers of ground transportation related services, today.

If it takes off in the Bay Area market, the GroundLink app could prove a competitive threat to Uber, the sometimes controversial California startup that also offers driver-booking services via iPhone.

As with Uber GroundLink users can view a map that shows a vehicle’s whereabouts in real-time, once it is booked and en route to a pick-up. Users can also share a map showing their whereabouts and progress towards a destination (Loopt-style) with authorized friends, family, colleagues, or employees.

Avoiding some problems that Uber encountered with the incumbent taxi industry and its regulators around San Francisco, GroundLink books rides through a central dispatch system that company representatives say is controlled by a local base, and authorized by relevant regional and national transportation authorities.

GroundLink deals with taxis but does not focus on or make revenue from sending business to taxi dispatchers at this time, nor does it advertise itself as a cab-hailing service. If users want an immediate taxi service, they can access a list of dispatchers in the area through GroundLink, which refers users to book through the dispatchers, directly.

Instead, GroundLink bills itself as the OpenTable of ground transportation, a reservations system and marketplace that lets travelers book a limo, car or shuttle ride within 30 minutes’ notice in the U.S., or in the world on 1 hour notice, seeing a price for the ride before they book it.

PPLive, a Chinese online video company, has raised a monster Series D round from SoftBank, securing as much as $250 million.

With the investment, SoftBank has taken a 35% stake in PPLive, which offers China’s leading online streaming and VOD service PPTV.

As PPLive CEO Vincent Tao is keen to point out in a press statement, the round is larger than what rival Youku (often dubbed China's YouTube) raised in its IPO ($203 million).

PPLive says PPTV now boasts 200 million registered users and 105 million active monthly users (as of December 2010). Its website produces programming for more than 120 TV stations supported by a mix of advertising and pay-per-view. The average viewing time per person per day is said to have reached over 2 hours and 30 minutes.

PPTV is powered by the online video company’s proprietary video distribution technology, PPCloud, which it says combines computing and peercasting algorithms capable of supporting millions of co-current viewers for live and high quality videos.

It’s also a super colorful website, to say the least.

Search engine Trademarkia, which launched at TechCrunch50 in 2009, is an comprehensive database of over 6.5 million U.S. trademarks filed since 1870, including dead marks. Today, the database is launching a new feature that’s sure to be useful for both startups and large companies—automatic trademark activity notifications.

Trademarkia scans of all the marks and returns results in a visual grid that’s a lot easier to make sense of than the USPTO’s trademark database. You can search by company, theme, product category, or even filing attorney. Companies can also file a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the site. And Trademarkia.com offers trademarked logo search that allows users to search inside millions logos for specific features or design elements.

With the new feature, the search engine will deliver instant notifications about new trademark filings and other activities by email. Anytime activity takes place, such as a new filing, approval or "office action," Trademarkia will deliver you an email alert for the companies, brands or filings you choose. And the service is free.

TiVo this morning launched a free website for anyone interested in commercial ratings (particularly marketers, I guess). The ‘Ad Scorecard’ is designed to let people analyze how effective a brand’s TV commercials are at retaining viewers and how well they are performing relative to competing brands.

And by launching, I mean the company pretty much bashed every other audience and effectiveness measurement companies out there, saying they are no longer effective themselves.

The site, which is powered by TiVo’s research tool, Stop||Watch ratings service and its self-reportedly ‘second-by-second’ measurement capabilities, was launched to “demonstrate that there is more accurate information available to the media industry to help them determine the efficacy of their TV ads beyond the limited data used as the industry currency today”.

Fighting words, if you ask me.

Tara Maitra, VP of Advertising & Research Sales at TiVo, also stepped up to the plate, and in a statement deemed current methods of measuring the quantity and quality of television advertising audiences “antiquated and broken”.

Visitors of the site can compare up to three brands with national broadcast and cable TV spots against each other – after registering – to determine which one most effectively retains viewers over a timeframe ranging from one week to three months. Visitors are also shown the weekly performance for each brand broken out in a graphical chart display.

TiVo’s decision to offer a free look into its anonymous ratings data is of course meant to help marketers discover the company’s full suite of research offerings.

But at least they’re not pulling any punches upon launching the free site.

Verizon Wireless just published a press release claiming “record sales” on yesterday’s ViPhone pre-order day, CEO Dan Mead saying that things were “exciting” and that “In just our first two hours, we had already sold more phones than any first day launch in our history.” Well, duh!

Sadly, Verizon didn’t offer any hard numbers on overall sales which suggests that availability will be wildly limited on the first day of general sale. Considering no other phone flew off the shelves like the ViPhone – ever – Verizon should be sending fruit baskets to Steve Jobs right now full of fruit and miniature giraffes.

Press release after the jump.

Read more…

Tremor Media is making another acquisition today—mobile ad platform Transpera. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Transpera’s ad platform enables the distribution and monetization of web videos on mobile phones. With the Attention Network, the company offers publishers a way to monetize off of mobile video ads and gives advertisers a way to market their wares by serving targeted ads in the form of interactive display banners, pre-roll videos, overlay ads, post-roll experiences and mini sites.

And Transpera says its ad platform provides the highest revenue per impression; its video ads delivered through Transpera can be placed across the mobile Web and on a variety of platforms such as iPhone, iPad, Android and of course BlackBerry. Transpera's network includes publisher brands such as AccuWeather.com, CBS News, Discovery Communications, MSNBC.com, MTV, Travel Channel and more. The startup has raised a total of $17.3 million in funding from Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Intel Capital and Labrador Ventures, JLA Ventures, RBC Venture Partners, and BlackBerry Partners Fund.

So why does Tremor Media want Transpera? Tremor Media, which is one of the largest video ad networks on the web, is eying a share of the mobile video ad market. And now Tremor can offer its advertisers the ability to target consumers on a number of platforms within one campaign buy.

Tremor has steadily been growing its network; most recently acquiring streaming ad placement service provider ScanScout. And according to comScore’s latest video metrix data, Tremor Media is the largest video ad network on the web, with 1 billion ad views in December (only behind Hulu). And in terms of total reach of the U.S. population, Tremor Media had the largest reach out of all video ad networks at 51.4 percent.

Of course, the company has pretty deep pockets in terms of funding. Tremor has raised just south of $80 million to date (half of which was secured in April of 2010). And Tremor’s fast growing revenues are on track to top $100 million in 2011.

LOC-AID Technologies, provider of a location-enabling mobile transaction platform, has raised $13 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company is backed by Intersouth Partners and H.I.G. Ventures (Bain Capital Ventures managing director Jeffrey Glass is also on the board).

LOC-AID operates what it says is the world’s largest mobile location data gateway, essentially a location aggregation platform for carriers. The platform is designed to help wireless operators such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon deliver location-aware content to their customers faster.

To clarify, LOC-AID is an LBS aggregator that integrates deep within those carrier’s infrastructures and processing systems. The company does not operate any location-based service applications, and as such is more of an enabler.

LOC-AID recently announced that it had surpassed the 300 million mark for mobile device access. The company is led by CEO Robert ‘Rip’ Gerber, previously GM, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Nokia/Intellisync, a provider of platform-independent wireless messaging and mobile software. He also writes novels.

An SEC filing reveals a startup called Needle (they have the .com, and a very cool logo indeed) is raising $2 million in its first round of financing.

Needle is trying to bring some innovation to the ecommerce space, building a ‘guided shopping platform’ that enables connections between potential customers of online shopping sites and ‘real’ product experts they can talk to before making a purchase decision.

The Needle platform connects crowdsourced experts and brand advocates with online shoppers through a chat platform layered with social commerce tools, providing shopping sites a way to cater to website visitors real-time conversations with product owners and people who are passionate about their brands (who in turn get paid for their efforts).

The idea behind the platform is that this should increase conversions at a low cost.

Needle was founded by chief exec Morgan Lynch, previously founder, CEO and chairman of Logoworks (acquired by HP in 2007) and Mikko Valimaki, former Chief Scientist at NASDAQ-listed Blue Coat Systems.

Sam Decker, former Dell exec and CMO of Bazaar Voice, sits on the company’s board. Another board member (and angel investor) that popped up in the filing: Jeff Kearl, who was instrumental in selling Logoworks to HP in the first place.

We’re keeping an eye on this one.

Before there was Twitter stats site Twitter Counter, there was TwitterHolic (now called Twitaholic). Now Twitter Counter has acquired Twitaholic to bolster its Twitter stats services, and the combined entity will be named TwittaHolicCounterTweet (just kidding there).

Are you still twith me?

In all seriousness, Twitaholic was the first site to put up a ranking of the top 100 users on Twitter, while TwitterCounter was the first site to offer detailed personal stats and embeddable widgets and banners to brag about your follower count, so this makes sense.

TwitterCounter has been talking to the people behind Twitaholic, which was always a bit of a side project for its founders, since early 2009, but has now gone ahead and bought the site outright (obviously not for a large amount, although details remain undisclosed).

TwitterCounter says it can monetize the traffic Twitaholic still pulls by offering premium statistics (currently used by companies like Microsoft, eBay, Coca-Cola and Facebook) and with its Featured User spots, which give people an easy way to gain more followers.

TwitterCounter may look gimmicky, but it’s actually quite a nice little business – the company has 3 full-time employees, logged about $500,000 in revenues in 2010 and is still growing.

The founders of Twitaholic are moving on to other projects. The site will be kept live, although TwitterCounter says small changes may be made to the layout or functionality.

In the interest of full disclosure: turns out Twitaholic was part of the same company that held Emurse, which was acquired by our parent company AOL back in April 2009 (AOL had no interest in Twitaholic, however). Twitaholic’s founders will now focus on opening and working from AOL’s brand new Orlando office (actually opening next week).

Update: Background: how Twitter Counter acquired Twitaholic

In what is perhaps the most brilliant move in the whole Bing copies Google search results fiasco, it looks like Google Taiwan employee Chih-Chung Chang has redirected http://www.hiybbprqag.com, a URL inspired by the nonsense terms Google used to bait Bing, straight to the Google Jobs page. Search Engine Land points out that that Chang registered the domain on February 1st, the day the story first broke, using the Google Taiwan office address.

A quick Google search reveals that a person by the name Chih-Chung Chang is a Google Taiwan employee and another search in ironically Bing (after Google mysteriously failed to bring up more informative results) reveals his google.com email. I’ve emailed both him and Google for confirmation but it seems pretty clear that there’s an affiliation here.

Perhaps what’s most awesome about the whole thing is the big “Lets work together”  you get on the Google splash page after typing in the now infamous nonsense term hiybbprqag. One can’t help but think that Chang innocently bought the domain pre-emptively, in order to circumvent spammers, or worse, Microsoft.

Neither Google or Chang have returned my multiple requests for comment. Needless to say hiybbprqag now has tons of relevant results in both Google and Bing

Related.

Image via/ Search Engine Land

Thanks: gomery

One thing about The Daily that bugged me from the second I first laid eyes on the iPad newspaper that launched yesterday is that there is no one place where you can see a simple list of every story in the issue. There is a table of contents, but it shows only ten featured stories. Like any good hack, The Daily: Indexed creates a feature that is missing from the original but is deeply needed. The Tumblr blog put together by Andy Baio creates a complete table of contents for The Daily.

The Daily: Indexed is causing a stir because The Daily is a subscription-only publication meant to be read on the iPad. The Daily’s website is not much more than brochureware for the iPad app at this point, but there is a backdoor to every story. Whenever a subscriber shares a story via email, Twitter, or Facebook from their iPads—like this one about Amish raw milk smugglers—the recipients get a link to the story on thedaily.com. You can’t find these stories by searching the site because there is no search or even any way to navigate from the home page to any of the articles. But the pages are there and Baio simply found the links and created a table of contents pointing to each page.

I really don’t think this does anything other than provide free marketing to The Daily. The articles on the Web look like crap compared to reading them on the iPad. And many of the interactive graphics and photos are not available on the Web. It’s just a better experience on the iPad (whether it’s worth paying for is another question, but time will tell).

The iPad version could use a better table of contents, though, or an index of every story in the issue. Right now, if it is not one of the ten featured stories in the table of contents, you have to flip through a carousel or timeline of images to see everything. The iPad app would be much easier to navigate if it had a page that was like The Daily: Indexed, but pointing to other stories inside the app. You can see what I mean from this shaky-cam video) I took yesterday at the launch event:

Ever come across a lengthy Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker essay that all your unemployed friends will probably  be talking about later, but you simply don’t have time in between tweeting working to read?

Well Founder Showcase winner Topicmarks was made for the case of Gladwell and even denser documents like research papers and legal texts, breaking them down into digestible pieces when all you really need to read is an executive summary.

Using semantic text extraction and personalization technologies, Topicmarks extracts text from the .pdf, .doc, .html and .txt documents that you upload, copy/paste, email in or enter the URL of. The service then gives you the option to view the “Overview,”"Facts,”"Summary” and”Keywords” of the document as well as “Properties” where you can see the original source. You can also interact with the “Overview” in a multitude of ways, including searching by key word and adding more or less text to the summary as needed.

Topicmarks is like a more-fleshed out TL;DR, with an “an enormous breadth of possible applications across various use cases and verticals” says co-founder Roland Siebelink. It has the same aspirations as enterprise solutions Autonomy and OpenText but available for free to consumers within a certain usage amount.

When given the criticism that the Topicmarks.com site sure had a lot of text on it for a service that summarized text (specifically, “Maybe you should run Topicmarks through Topicmarks?”) Siebelink told me, “Up to now the site has been geared particularly towards power users who understand how the technology works, now we’re focused on polishing the interface for the general audience who does not want to know how it works.”

Ambitiously, Roland says his future plans are to make the summarization technology readily available across all devices, “wherever people read digital information.” Topicmarks is currently raising a 500K seed round.

We’ve made note of both the first Verizon-made iPhone commercial and then the first Apple-made Verizon iPhone commercial. Both are effective and interesting in different ways. But neither takes a shot at AT&T. But a new Verizon one that has just started airing on television, does. At least, indirectly.

The new commercial, which we’ve embedded below compliments of quick-with-the-TiVo TechCrunch reader Kacy Fortner, has a very different tone than the initial “clocks” Verizon commercial. In this one, there is triumphant music playing as glimpses of the iPhone 4 are shown. It almost seems as if it’s meant to conjure up Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The voice-over begins:

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s intelligent.”

“Ingenious.”

Then the music speeds up.

“But does your network, work?”

A call comes in. And the person answering the call is revealed. It’s the Verizon guy!

“Yes. I can hear you now.”

Boom! Then we get the typical message of Verizon’s network being the “largest and most reliable”. Very nice. Wonder if Apple was hesitant at all to sign off on it? Or maybe they just prefer not to know as their two partners about about to enter an escalated war of words with one another.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the commercial.

Update: Verizon has just posted a higher-res version so I’ve included it below.

Google has made a big deal recently about not making a big deal about the version numbers of Chrome. “It’s just a number” is the basic take these days. In fact, they can barely be even bothered to announce them at all sometimes. But today, they did actually take some time to acknowledge the latest version — and a funny partner who made it all possible.

Google has officially rolled out Chrome 9, meaning the stable version of the browser has been updated to that iteration. They don’t make any mention of the number in the blog post about the update, but trust me, it’s version 9. Instead, Google focuses on the three new major features available to all in this build: WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store.

Many users will already be familiar with all of those as they’ve been on the beta builds of Chrome for a while, and the dev builds longer before that. But still, each is worth noting as all three are now a pretty integral part of the Chrome experience. WebGL brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support. Chrome Instant brings Google Instant support to the Omnibox. And the Chrome Web Store is part of Google plans to push web apps farther.

But the more humorous part of the release comes from the Google Chrome Releases blog post. This post details the bug fixes that have come in Chrome 9. And in it, Google gives a special shout-out to the Reddit community for pointing out one critical bug. As Google notes:

Special thanks to the Reddit community, for playing so much of the game "Z-Type" that they uncovered a Chromium audio bug — see below!

Below, they detail the bug:

[69195] Critical Race condition in audio handling. Credit to the gamers of Reddit!

So there you go, while it wasn’t an “elite” bug or even a “l33t” one, it’s fun to see Google given credit to another service for pointing out their flaws.

YC-funded CarWoo is announcing its Version 2 launch today. In the same space as TrueCar, CarWoo is a reverse auction marketplace for cars i.e. it makes car dealers bid for your business and focuses on covering all aspects of  car buying transactions up to purchase. In the true spirit of a marketplace, Carwoo saves consumers an average of $3763 off the sticker price by making dealers compete against each other.

Says co-founder Tommy McClung, “There’s thousands of different things you have to think about when you’re buying, and our plan is to make that process as easy as possible from start to finish.”. In the traditional car buying process a consumer would have multiple dealers, doing what CarWoo does on their own.

New features in CarWoo Version 2 include the ability to see offers from dealers on leases instead of just purchases and a name your own price feature on dealer offers, allowing even more of the functionality of an in real life dealer relationship from your computer. Buyers can also now engage with dealers across brands when trying to decide between a BMW and an Audi for example.

Along with sale price, CarWoo customers will also be able to get “out the door price” estimates, i.e. prices that include taxes, license, registration which can add up to several thousands of dollars on top of the price you have to pay. In addition, Carwoo 2 will include an e-bay like dealer reputation and ratings system, where buyers can rate their experience with a given dealer as a warning to future buyers. CarWoo founder Tommy McClung says that in fact 53% of the time buyers don’t choose the lowest deal because into account the dealer’s reputation.

CarWoo is also announcing two new partnerships, the first with autoguide Driverside and the second with autobuying guide Nadaguides, which offers car buying information to consumers. CarWoo is currently working with over 5000 dealers nationwide.

Carwoo has $6 million in funding from Y Combinator, Interwest, and notable angels like Paul Buchheit, Joshua Schachter and Aydin Senkut. In order to celebrate the release of CarWoo Version 2, CarWoo will be making their $19 basic plan free (which guarantees that 2-3 dealers will bid for your purchase) for the month of February.

Last week we debuted a new show on TechCrunch TV that took us on a whirlwind tour of Scribd, the popular document sharing website. Feedback to that episode was extremely positive, so we’re not wasting any time in bringing you another awesome tour of a hot tech company. This week’s blinged-out pad: Yelp.

We’re still taking suggestions for more companies to check out, so feel free to leave your requests in the comments (be sure to tell us why it’s a great office!). And yes, we’re definitely interested in scoping out startups that don’t necessarily have millions in funding — provided your office has some character. We’ve also gotten a bunch of requests to check out offices in other parts of the country (I hear you, NYC), so we’ll do our best to get out there too.

But for now, sit back and enjoy today’s episode. Make sure to listen to my insightful comments, like “Dog!”

Once again, a big credit goes to TC’s John Murillo for editing the video.

I love Boxcar. In a world where the iOS Push Notification system is pretty much a nightmare, it allows me to sleep easy. We’ve written about it a number of times before, but essentially, it’s an app that allows you to get Push Notifications for a wide range of services — and more importantly, it allows you to organize those messages in a manageable manner. And now their bringing that notification system to the web.

The latest version of Boxcar’s website launches today. You’ll notice that it has been completely revamped to give users a pleasing interface that utilizes a Twitter-like two-pane stream system. But more significantly, it also now gives you notifications when new messages come in to any of the services you’ve tied to your Boxcar account.

“Using the latest WebSockets technology, just like Twitter, we’re delivering thesame real-time notifications that you receive on your device  to your browser,” creator Jonathan George tells us. These notifications appear both in the browser tab (this shows the number of new messages you have), and as a little notification bar at the bottom of the browser (though this is currently only in the Boxcar window itself and not browser-wide).

“This is a huge milestone for us and marks the transition for Boxcarfrom being just an app, to an internet service.  From here we’ll be bringing real-time notifications to every device imaginable,” George says. “The Boxcar philosophy is that we want to deliver actionable, relevantmessages to you – wherever you’re at.  iOS was the first step, and now it’s time to start delivering on that premise,” he continues.

This close connection between mobile apps with web apps is a very cool trend we’re seeing. For example, I love using the Beluga messaging app on my iPhone, but also being able to use it in the browser when I’m sitting down. Now I can check Boxcar on the go, or when I’m sitting at my computer as well.

Incredibly, George says they’ve served up over 700 million Push Notifications now.

Look for this latest version of Boxcar on the web to go live shortly.

Update: Despite a number of people talking about it on Twitter, it appears that this is not an official Twitter button. How do we know? Twitter engineer Dustin Diaz responded in our comments:

This has to be some sort of extension (maybe Bitly? We don’t know) – this is not found in our code source.

We’ve reached out to Twitter officially, but have yet to hear back. But I see no reason to not go with Diaz here. So, sorry for getting everyone all excited! It does appear that some extension which multiple users have installed is causing this button to appear — we’re still trying to figure out which one.

Previously: For as great as Twitter’s website is now, there’s been one big glaring problem for many people using it: link shortening. Unbelievably, Twitter.com has not offered a way to shorten links either automatically or manually. You had to do it yourself and then paste those shortened links in. Well, good news, it looks like that’s finally about to change.

As the site Gizable first spotted, Twitter today was briefly testing a “Shorten” button next to the standard “Tweet” button on the website. Several other Twitter users have reported seeing this button as well before it vanished. And Gizable’s @AndrewBrackin even grabbed the screenshot above.

Another user notes that it was using Bit.ly rather than Twitter’s own t.co address that they use on their other clients.

Update 2: Aha! It is Bit.ly. Their Chrome extension does this as an option.

[thanks Christian]

The Google/Bing fight over search results-stealing has gone from inspiring jokes like this one on Twitter all the way to Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” last night, where Stephen Colbert took advertiser Bing to the mattresses regarding the news that the search engine had been caught copying Google’s results. “For the first time ever, someone’s search history has been busted for something other than porn,” Colbert said.

Riffing on the ridiculous synthetic search terms that Google used to entrap Bing (searches like “hiybbprqag,” “juegosdeben1ogrande,” “jiudgefallon,” “indoswiftjobinproduction,”"mbzrxpgjys” and “delhipublicschool40 chdjob”) Colbert went out of his way to call out Microsoft, “Apparently ‘hiybbprqag’ is a word meaning ‘You got served.’”

You can read the Danny Sullivan post that started this mess here.

Also, in the same vein.

Via @alexia_tsotsis/@issaco

Ankur Jain is the 20-year-old founder of the Kairos Society, a group that tries to discover the world leaders of the future and bring them together for support, mentoring and networking. He swung through San Francisco in between being named one of the partner organizations for President Obama’s Startup America initiative and the Kairos Society’s Global Summit in New York February 25-27, no doubt feeling as light and celebratory as this picture I found on his blog.

But as impressive as Jain’s organization is, I had some tough questions about the viability of the President’s plan. Most government initiatives to spur entrepreneurship– on a local, national and international level– fail spectacularly. Culturally, structurally and geographically the beltway could not be farther from Silicon Valley. Even if you believe that “replicating Silicon Valley” is feasible, it’s a several-decade initiative, not something that will solve a job crisis now.

Parts of Obama’s plan look great, and he’s dead right that an emphasis on federally-funded research and removing barriers to entrepreneurship are national imperatives. But what are the odds his successors stick to that fortitude with pressures to reduce taxes and cut an out-of-control deficit? And what about the most glaring omission from United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra’s post on Startup America: A Startup Visa or some kind of immigration reform to ease the war on talent most tech companies are facing?

Jain tells us why he’s encouraged by the plan in the video below.

In previous posts, I wrote about the epic battles that are brewing between spammers and content farms—which are turning the web into a massive garbage dump—and search providers, which have to choose between profit and customer satisfaction. This is a serious problem. The content farms are "dumbing down" the web by churning out thousands of mostly low-quality articles, every day, on topics that Google tells them they can make money from. All of these players are raking in billions of dollars at our expense.

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft.  As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of "evil" monopolist; Microsoft, the "good" contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall.

I had originally invited Google SEO development head, Amit Singhal, and Microsoft Research GM, Ashok Chandra. But Ashok dropped out in favor of Corporate VP of Bing, Harry Shum; and Amit dropped out in favor of Webspam team head, Matt Cutts. I was very disappointed, because Matt has the reputation of being a really nice guy—a "teddy bear". Harry has the reputation of being feisty. I was afraid that Harry and Rich Skrenta (Blekko CEO) would devour Matt. And it would seem as if I had set up an ambush for Google.

Little did I know that Google had its own ambush cooking: that Matt was more like a tiger than like a teddy bear.

At the conference, I gave my spiel on my vision of search: how I want my computer to serve me and tell me what I want to know, rather than my having to cater to its whims by entering specific keywords in a text box and reading through text links—which are often baited by spammers. I challenged Matt to tell everyone what Google was doing about the spam. Matt, instead, went on the warpath and accused Bing of stealing Google's information. He disclosed a sting operation that his team had run. He expressed outrage at Microsoft's ethics. Harry Shum fired back, defended Bing, and accused Google of playing games.

There has been extensive media coverage of this. Harry Shum and Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft both posted blogs to respond to Google's allegations. So I don't need to visit the same territory. You can watch the video of the event and form your own opinions. There was a lot more discussed in 40 minutes than was covered by the media, so this is worth watching.

Both sides have strong views and believe they are right. In opening the debate, I said that, as a professor, I can't condone any kind of plagiarism or cheating—and that is what Microsoft's usage of Google data seems to amount to. But in the tech world, such information exchange is the norm. Everyone cheats and this may be a good thing for innovation. So there is no black and white here. Both sides are right and they are wrong.

The one thing that is clear is that Google pulled off a huge PR coup. It changed the topic. Media coverage isn't about spam and how Google profits from this any more; we are debating how valuable Google's search results are.

Here are the real issues we should be discussing:

1. Who really owns the data that Google and Bing are tussling over? Is it the search providers—which "cheat" and copy from all over the web? Or is it the content creators—us—who they "steal" from? Why do Google and Microsoft believe that they own our information? And why aren't they paying us for using this?
2. Facebook rivals Google in web traffic and will get way ahead. And Google can't search within Facebook's walls. Doesn't this give a huge, long-term, advantage to Bing, which can (within limits)?
3. Blekko announced a bold decision to block content farms—sites such as eHow and Answerbag. Will Google and Microsoft take similar steps? Will they be able to forsake the revenue? Can the volumes of spam we are dealing with even be screened algorithmically or do we need curated search solutions?
4. We need a standard measure of web quality. Google says that it has not noticed any reduction in web quality. Yet most experts agree that this has declined significantly over the past two or three years. Why doesn't Google, as the market leader, work with its competitors to create an open measure that can be used by everyone? Let Google prove to us that it is, indeed, better than the rest.
5. Why not allow web users to designate what sites are spam and make this information publicly available? Google lets you filter your own results, but why not share these data with everyone? Sites that believe they are unfairly labelled can lodge an appeal. Why the secrecy?

So let's get back on topic. Harry Shum and Matt Cutts can duke it out in a bar somewhere. What I want is for them to clean up the web and give me the best search results.

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 , Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, andDistinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Ever wished you could have multiple email addresses that all routed to the same inbox, without having to set up a bunch of different accounts and forwarding options? Hotmail — yes, the email service you probably haven’t looked at in years — has just added a very handy new alias feature that lets you do just this. In other words, I can now setup a Hotmail inbox that lets me seamlessly handle correspondence to both jasonkincaid@hotmail.com and JediMasterJ@hotmail.com from the same inbox — woohoo!*

Aliases aren’t anything new for webmail services. Hardcore Gmail users are probably familiar with the old ‘+’ trick: if your email is jason@gmail.com, you can use a + symbol to create a variety of aliases that all go to the same place. For example, you might create jason+receipts@gmail.com, jason+deals@gmail.com, and so on — each with a different filter to route the emails to different labels (or deletes them immediately). It’s not perfect, but it works decently well.

Hotmail has offered the same ‘+’ feature too, but this new alias option is more powerful. One issue with Gmail’s solution is that it’s trivial to bypass — I might enter jason+spam@gmail.com as my address on a site I don’t care about, but they can easily strip out that “+spam” and bypass any filters I’ve set up.

With this Hotmail feature, you set up an entirely different email address. Hotmail is also intelligent about when to use each address — by default you’ll reply to messages using the address they were sent to. And you can swap between multiple addresses when you go to send an outbound message.

Yes, you can accomplish similar things using multiple Gmail accounts and their ‘Send As’ setting, but this is a very nice option from the Hotmail team.

*Those aren’t my actual email addresses. Swear.

If you care about startups or how hit products are made, watch the video above, which is Part II of Chris Dixon's Founder Stories conversation with Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. Instagram is of course the hot social photo app that just raised $7 million this week. Yesterday, in Part I, Systrom talked about why he decided to change the product entirely before it even launched and the stress of that launch day when the servers started to crumble.

In today’s video, he really goes into his Instagram’s approach to making a product. “I think the best products in the world start out as features,” he tells Dixon. Critics might say that Instagram is nothing more than a couple features (putting filters on photos and sharing them on social networks), he responds: “It is absolutely fair. Sure, those are features, but Twitter was just posting your status. Look at what happens when you are so specific that you can go really deep, and build a product around one feature.” He points out that “often features solve a specific problem.” And if you can solve a problem better than anyone else, you have the start of something that can continue to evolve. (You can jump to this part of the video here).

Instagram was trying to solve three problems

1. “The first problem we tried to solve was making your photo more interesting.”
2. “We wanted it to be fast to upload photos, so you can get back to hanging out with your friends.”
3. Make it easy to “send a picture to as many social networks as possible.”

About halfway through the conversation (jump to this spot in the video). Systrom also addresses the fact that there is a lot of competition among photo apps right now (PicPlz and Path, just to name two).: “Sure, money is being thrown at a lot of people right now. I don’t think of Instagram as an iPhone app company. Anyone can build filters, anyone can build a photo-sharing app. Anyone can figure out how to scale at launch better than we did. The hard part is the community.” That community of users is now posting 4 photos every second.

Instagram is a social app, but it is building a new interest graph on top of existing social graphs. One of the startling things about Instagram is that people who don’t speak the same language follow each other because the communication is all visual. The fact that Instagram transcends language is one reason it is taking off in Japan, Russia, and all over the world.

Towards the end of the interview (jump here in the video), Dixon and Systrom talk about how hard it is to be an entrepreneur in a big company. Systrom used to work at Google, but without a computer science degree he felt hampered. He says: “To be a product manger at Google they love you to have a CS degree, but people who start social products are not necessarily engineers. Being really successful at Google is not the same as being successful as a social entrepreneur.”

Dixon concurs: “Having a sense of ownership is why you stay up all night. I am not sure that stock options . . . can ever feel like ownership.”