Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a blooming of new Q&A sites which are both social and informative. While Quora gets a lot of our attention here at TechCrunch because of the quality of the answers it generates, it is still tiny compared Formspring, Stack Overflow, and most of its other competitors. Formspring, in particular, is killing it once again after a drop-off in activity in the middle of last year.

According to comScore, Formspring had an estimated 1.1 billion pageviews in January, up 65 percent from September, and almost back up to its peak of 1.3 billion last May. Formspring also attracted an estimated 19 million unique visitors worldwide in January, compared to 3.1 million for Stack Overflow and only 496,000 for Quora. (Albeit, Quora’s visitors grew nearly 90 percent from December to January alone, compared to 5 percent monthly growth for Formspring. However, Formspring is adding about one million new members a month).

Formspring is much lighter and less intimidating than Quora. It’s a social Q&A site where you can ask your friends anything and the answers get stored on Formspring. You can follow people on Formspring, or spread your questions out to Facebook or Twitter. The startup just raised $11.5 million last month.

One reason for Formspring’s growth since September is that it really appeals to college students. It’s biggest demographic, according to comScore, is 18-to-24-year-olds, followed by 12-to-17-year-olds. But it’s also been putting out new features that help questions go viral. These include “smiles” (Formspring’s version of a “like”) and a featured Question of the Day. Formspring is seeing between 3 million to 4 million smiles per week, and a Question of the Day can elicit as many as 500,000 responses. Sites can also embed Formspring questions across the Web with “Respond” buttons.

As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot recently switched its business model; shutting down its search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. Today, the startup is launching a social targeting service for mobile ads, that the company claims offers highly targeted ads within mobile apps.

By way of history, OneRiot first ventured into the advertising world in 2009 with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. OneRiot also launched RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, and rolled out self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise. Currently, OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs says the company is seeing 2 billion impressions per month across its network (for context, Google’s AdMob sees 2 billion impressions per day).

With the new social targeting service, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience
segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot's audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e.Twitter). The company says that this data is derived from users that heavily engage with content on their mobile device that is relevant to their current social activity, including status updates, tweets, photos, advertising and more.

The company recently implemented the service during the Super Bowl for car manufacturer Chevy. OneRiot targeted Chevy's campaign to male US sports fans and car enthusiasts who were talking about "football" across a network of mobile Twitter apps (these include UberTwitter, Echofon, TweetCaster and others) during the game. When the audience checked their app, they saw the ad for Chevy, which prompted viewers to check out Chevy's Super Bowl video on YouTube.

OneRiot contends that its mobile targeting is more specific and granular than competitors in the social advertising space, such as 140Proof. Of course, I’m sure Twitter itself can provide the best targeted advertising to consumers.

While social targeting is useful for advertisers, it’s important to evaluate click-through rates of the ads to determine how the mobile formats are performing. Peggs says CTRs are consistently above 1 percent for mobile ads. OneRiot declined to give us any further information on the company’s overall revenue and performance.

It’s that time again: time for a live discussion of a new piece of technology LIVE. Today we’re talking about the Xoom for a full hour and I’m going to try to go through what I can and hopefully you can tell whats going on given the various limitations of the MacBook Air’s camera and the high gloss of the screen.

I’ll be going over some of your direct questions and you can feel free to Tweet us with the hashtag #crunchgear, chat, or, if you’re feeling particularly Web 2.0, leave a comment.

Read more…

A few weeks ago, social commerce network Lockerz acquired photo sharing app Plixi as a way to boost photo sharing on its platform. It looks like the company has hit the ground running in terms of integrations and today is launching a new photo sharing app.

Lockerz, which has raised $30 million from Kleiner Perkins newly launched sFund, Liberty Media and Liberty Media’s CEO Greg Maffei, revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends. The site attempts to build a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play and connect on the Web and allows users can earn points and discounts on brands by sharing content on the site.

With the rollout of Lockerz Photos, members will now be able to post, share, "Like" and comment on photos within the network, similar to interactions on Facebook. But Lockerz is adding a interesting twist to photo sharing—Lockerz members earn points that can be turned into discounts on brands when they upload photos. In the next few weeks, members will also earn points when friends "Like" and comment on their photos, which can be shared to other social networks as well. The site is also holding Lockerz Photo Challenges in which members submit photos of their favorite outfit, best Ninja move, best friend and more to earn extra points for brand discounts.

And Lockerz plans to extend the same functionality to Plixi, which is remaining as a standalone photo sharing app. So any Plixi users who share photos will accrue Lockerz points that can be redeemed on the network. The caveat is that Plixi users will have to join Lockerz to access their rewards (which is a plus for Lockerz, of course).

Lockerz CEO and founder Kathy Savitt tells us that the Plixi integration is going so well that the company is looking at other startups to acquire in the next year. She says she has a few “irons in the fire,” but can’t reveal more about what companies Lockerz is looking at.

I’m curious to see if Lockerz can actually match Facebook’s scale of photo sharing. Rewards are certainly a compelling way to incentivize engagement on the site, so it should be interesting to see if Lockerz can expand its userbase and create loyal members using photos.

Auto maker BMW recently established a New York-based venture capital firm dubbed BMW i Ventures that it seeded with $100 million to seek out partnerships that might facilitate BMW-i product adoption in urban markets. BMW-i is a BMW sub-brand solely focused on developing and producing sustainable mobility vehicles.

Its first investment was made public this week: BMW pumped $5 million into MyCityWay, a user-driven, location-aware city guide. FirstMark Capital and IA Ventures, who participated in an earlier $1 million seed round, joined BMW.

Useful for locals and visitors alike, MyCityWay is an interactive tool for urban exploration and discovery on your mobile device (iOS, Android, BlackBerry coming soon). The app brings together more than 50 local mobility apps in one interface to act as a one-stop, location-aware platform to discover, connect, experience and share.

The app is available for more than 40 cities worldwide, including New York City, Shanghai, Tokyo, London and Paris.

According to a late Thursday SEC filing the New York City startup behind Flavorize.com, FlavorMetrics Corp., is seeking a $1 million investment to build a “Pandora for food.” The company’s web and mobile app is now in private beta.

Currently, Flavorize.com allows users in New York City or San Francisco to enter a few key attributes of meals that they enjoyed before — including ingredients, a restaurant where they got something delicious before, a specific dish, or a flavor — to generate suggestions, based on the wisdom (and palate) of the crowds, as to what they might try next and where to get it.

The startup — co-founded by chief executive Eunice Chou and engineering lead Franco Yuvienco — will compete for users and dollars against a huge number of search and recommendation tools that already help people find recipes and restaurants online today.

Just yesterday, Google offered specialized recipe search capabilities, following in Bing’s footsteps.

Meanwhile, funded startups like Yumm, Foodily, Cookstr and Foodspotting make a case that there’s always room for more creativity in food search where investors are concerned.

Good old Yelp, GrubHub and Epicurious are still thriving, too.

Given the competition, the market and the company’s concept, would you fund Flavorize.com?

We have a bemused relationship with most folks from the PR industry here around TechCrunch, and with good reason (trust me on that one).

Most of the time (but not always), we keep our peace when PR flacks go off on us with or without a shred of reason, but sometimes one of them goes off the deep end and we need to point it out. It’s a public service we do for the PR industry to show them the error of their ways.

Consider this a lesson in what not to do in PR.

The culprit in this case is Mr. Timothy Johnson, who just went off on my extremely sweet and mild-mannered colleague Leena Rao because she declined to cover some tidbit of news about a company he represents.

For context, the company Tim(othy) represents is mig33, which recently announced a significant round of funding and decided to not include TechCrunch in their pitch—which is fine, happens all the time since we don’t care too much for embargoes around here.

But it didn’t stop them from trying to get our attention now (as it shouldn’t).

Here’s how Timothy starts out pitching Leena:

Hi Leena,

We spoke frankly last fall when mig33 announced a $9m round and TC was not kept apprised. I promised you a story in the future, provided you took the time to speak with an exec.

I'm writing to see if you want to see if you want a Skype chat with CEO Steven Goh about a press announcement we're issuing Tuesday, March 1.

The news? We sold more than 40 million virtual gifts in 2010. Also, updates on where that growth is coming from, why, how we're spending the money, the working relationship with Sugiono (Indonesia) and GREE (Japan), and what's next in terms of partnerships with handset makers that will have mig33 embedded.

Let me know?

Thanks! I hope we can work together, Leena.

Cheers,

Timothy Johnson

Nice guy, reasonable pitch, right? Only, the story doesn’t stand out that much considering the thousands of pitches we deal with on any given day.

So Leena responds:

Hey Tim,

I’m not sure if just the 40 million is enough. Can you circle back when you have a product announcement?

Thanks!

Leena

And that’s where it should have ended. (To put that 40 million virtual gifts sold in a year number in perspective, Pet Society sells 90 million virtual gifts every single day). But Timothy doesn’t take rejection well. He just can’t let it go. His next response is pretty baffling:

Seriously?

- You wrote about platforms that move maybe $40 million in 2009. Platforms. Not communities. Not much since.

- Even if mig33's virtual goods averaged 50 cents USD – and that's a HUGE if – that'd mean about $20 million in rev, which is over twice mig33's recent round

- You guys devote little coverage to SE Asian/Asian sites – don't you think it's time, or is FB all that matters?

Really? Wait for a product announcement? Is that a joke, Leena?

tim

That’s right, we never cover Southeast Asian startups. Never. Later, he adds:

Well, when you're interested again in doing analysis and not just product launches, let me know.

Just wow.

tim

Nice going, Timothy Johnson.

You’ve just managed to get the TechCrunch coverage you desired. Well, maybe not the coverage you wanted, but whiners can’t be choosers.

Just wow indeed.

And by the way, mig33, you might want to reconsider who you work with. Seriously.

While this device may look like an old Fisher-Price Tape Player, what we have here is a bonafide music playback device designed for Google (probably as some sort of Tchotchke/giveaway) by Chord Electronics. The stereo is a variant of Chord’s Chordette Carry with inputs on the back for multiple devices as well as Bluetooth support.

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My, how things change. A few years ago, anyone proposing that Facebook games would turn into a wildly profitable multi-billion dollar industry would probably be met with some pretty strange looks. Yet now market-leader Zynga has a higher valuation than Electronic Arts. Some might say the gold rush has passed, and that the entrenched players are going to be impossible to beat, but now a new wave of companies has set its sights on a related, but fundamentally different genre: casual mobile gaming.

Today, a startup called TinyCo (formerly known as Brooklyn Packet) has closed an $18 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and they’re setting out to become the most successful mobile gaming company out there. It’s a lofty goal and TinyCo has some steep competition, but their thesis — that mobile gaming is about to take off in a huge way — seems right on the mark. Oh, and they now have Marc Andreessen on their board, which isn’t a bad start.

TinyCo founders Suleman Ali and Ian Spivey started working on Facebook games two years ago, focusing on games that included virtual currencies and persistent worlds (like FarmVille). Unfortunately while they learned a lot about game mechanics, none of their games got much traction.

Then in Spring 2010 the team started working on an iPhone game called Tap Resort Party — a resort sim that prompts gamers to check back in every few hours to collect their earnings and reinvest them. The game quickly took off and the TinyCo team realized they were onto something, so they began to focus exclusively on mobile gaming. Tap Resort Party has since gotten over 5 million downloads, and has hundreds of thousands of active players per day.

The company released Tap Galaxy several months later to a more tepid response, but the founders explain this was primarily because the game was just a reskinned version of Tap Resort Party. So they want back to the drawing board and cooked up an entirely new game.

In November 2010 they released their next game — a restaurant management sim called Tiny Chef. Again, they struck gold, reaching as high as the number two top grossing spot on the App Store, and over 5 million downloads overall (Tiny Chef also has hundreds of thousands of daily active players).

Which brings us to today. Spivey and Ali say that mobile gaming is about to see a huge leap, driven by a combination of the introduction of in-app payments to Android and an estimated 150 million iOS and Android devices that will ship in the next year (and those numbers are only going to grow higher). The company now has 40 employees, many of whom are veterans from the likes of Playdom and Digital Chocolate.

I asked Marc Andreessen why the fund decided to choose TinyCo as one of their big bets in mobile. The answer, he explains, has a lot to do with their technical focus.

“It’s the strength of their vision. In particular, they really have a deep product vision, though most of it isn’t public yet. They want to make a first class tech company that wants to make games. We’ve been looking at companies like this for two years, and this is the first time that we’re seeing first-class technology entrepreneurs.”

Andreessen also explained why his firm is so optimistic about mobile in general.

“There have been mobile gaming startups for 15 years. The opportunity didn't exist before because you didn't have real smart phones — they weren’t real computers in your pocket. It’s only in the last year or two that the opportunity has opened up. We think that opportunity is going to expand. There's 100 million smartphones, right now — great. In three to five years there’s going to be 2 billion. Everyone in the developed world will upgrade to smart phones, and the developing world will follow in five to seven years — everyone who has a feature phone will have a smartphone. It’s going to be one of the greatest market opportunities that we’ve ever seen.”

Of course, TinyCo isn’t alone on its mission to dominate mobile gaming. Pocket Gems raised $5 million from Sequoia, and SGN is focusing on this space as well. And who can forget the established Facebook game companies like Zynga, which doubtless have their eyes on mobile as well.

Last year, AuroraFeint launched the private beta of OpenFeint X (OFX), which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods. Last December OFX exited private beta and today, OpenFeint is releasing a new version of the suite, OFX 2.0.

With OFX, developers can create Farmville-like iOS games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. OFX's premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet. OpenFeint says that future updates will allow game developers to offer virtual currency and virtual goods for sale in their games.

OpentFeint is partnering with Adknowledge for new version of OFX to bring pay-per-install distribution to developers, allowing a game developer to increase their own application's downloads by purchasing inventory in other freemium games to generate installs. Players looking to earn virtual currency in those freemium games are given the option to download the game developer's app in exchange for more currency.

In addition, OFX’s suite also allows developers to manage a virtual good economy in the cloud, with the ability to swap out virtual items from the platform itself. Once a player completes one of these simple actions, game publishers are paid a revenue share from OpenFeint. Freemium game developers can also measure their economies with analytics and other data that tracks conversions.

OpenFeint says that social gaming platform CrowdStar is integrating OFX 2.0 into their mobile social games. Of course, this isn’t entirely surprising. Both CrowdStar and OpenFeint were incubated and funded by YouWeb. But OpenFeint now boast 66 million users of its social gaming platform, which indicates that the startup is growing in terms of usage. The company recently took an $8 million investment from Intel Capital and Chinese gaming company The9.

ContextIn, an Israeli company I first got to know when they launched their semantic technology platform at my Plugg conference back in 2009, has recently shifted focus to the buying side of the online advertising equation. We’ve now learned that the company has raised “a few million dollars” in a Series A round led by Spark Capital and Pitango.

I have to admit I’m not 100% clear on what they are building – the company has yet to formally launch its solutions publicly – but the general idea is to bring an algorithmic approach to the optimization of media buying across the various display ad exchanges (e.g. AdECN, Right Media and DoubleClick Ad Exchange).

The aim is to provide advertisers and agencies with a way to broaden the target audience for ad impressions at a fraction of the cost through a real-time bidding system similar to those used by companies like MediaMath, AppNexus and Invite Media (recently bought by Google).

ContextIn has also appointed a new CEO since I last heard from them. His name his Tomer Afek, a former Principal at VC firm Evergreen Partners.

Vocus, the publicly-listed provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, has moved to acquire Facebook apps maker North Social, which enables businesses to create, manage and promote their business on the popular social network.

Vocus bought substantially all of the assets of North Social.

Under the terms of the agreement, Vocus paid $7 million in cash and could pay up to an additional $18 million over the next 24 months based on the achievement of certain milestones.

North Social offers 19 Facebook apps delivered in a single self-service subscription, allowing businesses of all sizes to create engaging fan pages and fan experiences.

The software basically allows users to set up custom Facebook pages in order to launch social media campaigns, integrate photos and videos, incorporate feeds from sites like Twitter and Yelp, offer sweepstakes, sign up volunteers and more.

North Social says its software is used by over 1,300 organizations of all sizes and types, including major brands like Coca-Cola, Sony and Hard Rock Café. Under the terms of the deal, North Social's operations and staff will remain in Oakland, California.

Earlier this month, Vocus acquired Engine140, a social media recommendation engine that makes it easy for businesses to build their brand on Twitter and other social networks.

The move in fact marks the fifth acquisition Vocus has made in the last 12 months or so.

Increasingly, Vocus thus rivals Dachis Group, which has been snapping up Facebook apps makers and other social media companies left and right recently.

Vocus meanwhile registered a loss of $400,000 in the fourth quarter. Revenue rose to $26 million, compared with $22 million a year prior.

Fresh off the heels of Box.net raising $48 million, cloud storage startup Scality is set to announce next week that they’ve raised $7 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity), with previous backers CAPE, Galileo and Scality CEO Jerome Lecat chipping in.

Scality provides ‘storage-as-a-service’ solutions for enterprises around the globe.

The company says it will use part of the proceeds to complement its San Francisco headquarters with an East Coast sales and services office in New York. Furthermore, Scality will step up development of its object-based storage platform, adding full multi-tenancy for service providers who want to offer virtual private clouds (VPCs).

Scality's total investment to date is $13 million.

The company claims its valuation doubled after the Series A round of funding secured in May 2010, thanks to the successful delivery of a complete email platform to cable operator Telenet for over 2 million users (coincidentally, I’m one of those).

For the past two years I’ve been holding onto the belief that Israeli entrepreneurs should devote particular focus on the opportunities available to products and services that cater to Small & Medium Sized Businesses (SMBs). Slowly but surely, more and more companies have indeed started targeting this space, the most notable being Kampyle, SohoOS, and Clarizen.

Today, Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple is announcing a $1.1M round led OCA Ventures with participation by the I2A Fund, as well as angel investors.

Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Future Simple has already launched two SMB products: PipeJump, a small business CRM, and QuoteBase, a project/job quote generator that is claiming thousands of users. The investment will be used to bolster the management team, market the current products, as well as develop additional ones.

As an interesting side-note that proves yet again that startup entrepreneurship is (a wonderful) disease, Shmilovici was co-founder at Netcraft, an Israeli design firm that was acquired by a local portal last year. His co-founder at Netcraft, Joey Simhon, is today co-founder and CTO at Do@, a stealth startup which Robert Scoble noted on Quora: “[the] first company since Siri that makes me think that search still can be greatly improved on mobile will launch a compelling new mobile search product.”

If there was any doubt in peoples’ minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc, it was put to rest today. This morning’s unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that it would only be available one way: through the Mac App Store. And while Apple wouldn’t say if they intended to release the final version of Lion to consumers this summer in the same way, it’s pretty clear that they’re going to do just that.

But this important push into the post-optical disc era hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for all so far.

Since the beta was first put up for download this morning, angry developers have flooded Apple’s forums. Why? Because many can’t install the software. But it’s not a bug in the OS itself that’s preventing them from doing it, it’s a bug in the distribution method — the Mac App Store.

In the past, when Apple has distributed test software to developers, they’ve done so through a website devoted to that. Once a developer entered their credentials, they could get access to a download link to get the software. But with the new method in place for OS X Lion, Apple had developers log in and get a special redemption code that they were told to use in the Mac App Store to get OS X Lion.

For some, that worked just fine. But once a large rush of developers started hitting the Mac App Store, deployment slowed to a crawl. And at points, things were at a total stand-still, several developers tell us. Given the interest, that’s somewhat understandable, except for the fact that if the connection to the Mac App Store was interrupted, paused, or cancelled after the download had started, it then became impossible to download OS X Lion at all.

This is apparently a bug in the deployment system. It seems that Apple is limiting downloads of the beta software installer to one machine. You can install the software on multiple machines, but you have to copy the installer from one machine to another manually. You cannot re-download it as you can with other software distributed through the Mac App Store.

And once the one-time download starts, Apple apparently assume it’s going to finish and they cut you off from being able to resume or restart a download. Hence the swarm of angry developers unable to get access to Lion today.

Clearly, this more strict distribution model is in place to prevent piracy and to ensure that regular users don’t move over to Lion before it’s ready to really show its stripes. But the situation today has been bad enough to lead many developers to question why Apple just didn’t stick with the old method for developer distribution. And it’s lead others to question the distribution method itself for such a high-scale roll-out.

Presumably, by going this route today, Apple wanted to further test the CD-killing system they’ve spent time and money building. Up until now, it has run pretty smoothly since its launch in January. And Apple undoubtedly needed to test the ability to dish out huge software downloads via this method — things like the final build of OS X Lion. It’s definitely better that they get the bugs out now, rather than when consumers flood the store to get Lion this summer.

I suspect we may end up seeing a hybrid launch this summer, with Apple using both DVDs in their retail stores/website and the Mac App Store to sell Lion. And perhaps Apple may even give those who decide to go the Mac App Store route, a discount. The one tricky thing about pure software distribution are system restores. Apple got around using an optical disc for this with the new MacBook Airs by using a USB stick. Perhaps they’ll include details on how to make your own such stick/disc if you download OS X from the Mac App Store.

With talk of MobileMe and other retail boxes vanishing from Apple Store shelves, this software distribution method is clearly the future for the entire platform. But it’s a future that’s still a work in progress.

Google search is powered by algorithms. Computers slice and dice data looking for signals that a web page is more or less interesting than other web pages for a given query. PageRank is a big part of this, where Google looks at inbound links to a site as well as the text relevant to that link. But Google also uses lots of other signals to determine the relevance of a web page. They have to, because PageRank on its own is infinitely gameable.

If no one ever tried to game search results PageRank would work just fine.

Inbound links are simply votes for various web pages. If you take the authority of the site linking into account, it makes for really good search results. That’s why Google was so great in 1999, when there was less incentive to game search results, and less expertise by the people doing it.

But today all that’s changed. There’s a feeling that Google’s algorithm is falling further and further behind the very motivated people and companies out there fighting that algorithm. It’s an arms race, and Google is losing that arms race.

Today we saw yet another algorithm change by Google, designed to fight some of the more annoying internet polluters - content farms and scrapers. The arms race continues.

No Humans Involved!

What fascinated me most today was Google’s insistence that they are not directly using the block data they crowdsource from their Chrome extension in determining search relevance.

It's worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we've received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week.

But then they talk about how the algorithm is coming up with very similar decisions anyway:

However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

The more I think about this, the more strange it seems to me.

There’s a good explanation for not relying on that data – if they publicly said they did there would then be a huge incentive for SEOists to start to manipulate that block data, too. Forget linkfarms, just hire thousands of people on Mechanical turk to download the extension and block competitor’s sites. Another angle on the arms race.

But I don’t think that’s why. Like the Wizard of Oz, Google hides behind their mighty and mysterious search algorithm. If good search was as easy as analyzing simple clicks of a mouse on a web page, all the magic could vaporize.

And if you could somehow remove as much spam as possible from that data, and even slice it demographically, geographically and even personally for a given user, then things might really get sticky.

Particularly if Google didn’t have access to any of that data.

And Facebook did.

One of the most interesting experiments going on in search right now is Blekko’s Facebook Like powered search engine. Search results and search relevance is determined by what your friends have “liked” on Facebook, a very deep store of data indeed.

Facebook has more than half a billion users, and half of those log on every day. These people spend 700 billion minutes on the site and share 30 billion pieces of content. Links are being shared and people are clicking “like” to vote for that content. And it turns out that it all adds up to a pretty useful search engine experiment on Blekko.

Imagine what Google could do with all that data and you start to understand why social is so darned important for them right now. Not to kill Facebook, but to try to neutralize the threat that the next great leap in search engine evolution doesn’t happen completely without them. A lot of the searches that Google is really bad at – commerce and travel, for example – can get really good really fast if you can look at deep data from friends about those very things. I don’t need pages and pages of results. Just a nice hotel in Paris that a friend vouches for. Or a movie I’ll enjoy. Or the right set of pots and pans. All that data is right there on Facebook.

It may take Facebook a few years to really start to get interested in search. But there is so much advertising revenue in that business that they can’t ignore it forever. And that must scare Google more than just about anything else.

Offhand internationalization doesn’t seem like it should be a problem for websites, or at least it should be a problem that should be easy to solve. Well not so much,  at least according to Wordchuck founder Shelly Roche.

We brought Roche into the newly redesigned TCTV studio to talk about her efforts at automating translation (in over 20 languages!) for the Ruby on Rails community, what its like to not win a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon as well as her future plans for the internationalization of web content, a project which evolved out of her own attempts to make localization less painful for her own personal development efforts.

Workchuck received 100K of angel funding shortly after TechCrunch Disrupt, and Shelly’s been working on wearing multiple hats ever since, building a startup by herself  out of her 17-year-old 23′ Class C RV. Watch the video above to catch up with Shelly and get a taste of her “RV Profitable” adventure.

You can also catch Shelly back in the day here, or in the Wordchuck walk through, below.

Social ads on Facebook are supposed to be cheap. In fact, they are one of the cheapest ads on the Web in terms of cost per thousand impressions. So imagine Facebook advertiser Joshua Niamehr’s surprise when he logged into his Facebook ad campaign and saw the following notice:

There is an outstanding balance of $8,804,978.14 USD on your account. Your ads will not be displayed until your account is settled. Please enter a valid funding source. When you submit that information, we will charge your funding source for $8,804,978.14 USD.

Needless to say, he did not click “Make Payment.” Niamehr’s credit card had expired, which is why his account was delinquent. But his actual outstanding balance was $58.07, not $8,804,978.14. (He was placing ads to market his site LaundryLocal).

Facebook did eventually correct itself and showed the correct amount, to Niamehr’s relief. So was that $8,804,978.14 just a glitch. Niamehr thinks the number was too specific for it to be random. His theory: “I think this may be the outstanding balance across all or many of their accounts.” That’s just a theory. But if that’s true, it’s not an inconsequential amount. Maybe Facebook should get into social debt collection. It could offer Facebook Credits to friends of delinquent advertisers who shame them into paying their bills.

Google made a substantial revision to its search algorithm today, the company says. And while no one in particular is being called out, it’s clear that the big losers are content farms and related spammy-content producers who have been having an absolute field day on Google over the last couple of years.

11.8% of search queries have been “noticeably” updated, says Google – meaning there have been changes in the top 2-3 results.

Google is also making it clear that they have not used user data from a recent Chrome extension they released which lets users block specific sites in Google results that annoy them.

Google is saying they’ve compared the data they’ve collected from that extension to the sites most impacted in the new search rollout. 84% of the most blocked sites via the Chrome extension were impacted, they say.

What are those sites? Google isn’t saying. But the changes are designed to weed out low-value content, they say, such as content copied from other websites or non-useful content. That means sites like Demand Media, Associated Content and Mahalo are likely on the list. In a couple of months traffic data to those sites will likely confirm that they were impacted.

In a post a couple of weeks ago I heavily criticized Google for lack of quality search results, particularly in certain categories like travel and commerce. It’s unclear if these changes will fix all that, but I’m keeping an open mind.

And either way, the time when content farms dominated Google search results may be finally coming to an end. Cheers to that.

With regime change in Tunisia and Egypt, and Libya’s uprising continuing apace, a growing number of commentators are hailing the influence of Facebook and Twitter in helping world-be-revolutionaries coordinate their actions.

Earlier this week, SGN founder and angel investor, Shervin Pishevar tweeted that “Twitter and Facebook are shields against future genocides. Like new antibodies in the body of humanity” – which is pretty damn profound. So profound, in fact, that I brought him into the TechCrunch TV studio to explain himself.

As an on-the-record skeptic of the role of social media in causing revolutions, I wanted to know how the “social media revolution” differs from previous communications revolutions. We also discussed how the Rwandan genocide might have been covered differently today, how the Internet can avoid being shut down by dictators and Pishevar’s involvement with Openmesh – a project that aims to use technology to keep communications channels open.

Video below.

Today in SXSW jockeying … Introduction service Hashable, which has the pretty ambitious goal of ridding the world of business cards, is announcing its Android offering and a slew of features just in time for the Interactive party event to end all Interactive party events, SXSW. In case the message wasn’t loud and clear, its also got a fancy SXSW set up on its site, so I guess its hoping to win the app Super Bowl or some other stupid sports analogy pertaining to being the app with the most SXSW usage.

Aside from it now being available for nerds Android users (I kid! I kid!), the Hashable product team has taken a long hard look at what extra features would be useful to the drunken professionals at the conference and has bulked up its core functions of facilitating introductions through Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to search for them by tag and plotting your progress on the Hashcred leaderboard.

Both the iPhone and the Android app now allow you to check into Foursquare though Hashable, and “Check-in w/Someone” has replaced the “Post a Connection” option on the app interface. Tapping on the location icon in the options view will bring up a list of venue options, and the checkin will be recorded on both apps provided you link the account in your Hashable profile.

Hashable has also simplified its contact exchange function, known as “Just Met,” making it easier to connect with non-Hashable users by entering in their email addresses and Twitter names. The app can then send a “business card” with your contact info over email or Twitter, allowing you to add an optional message or share the connection internally within the app. The app also adds the person to your address book.

“We think this will be the primary usecase for SXSW” says Hashable UX designer Oz Lubling about the cloud-based contact trading. “Hopefully everyone who uses our iPhone and Android app can return from south by with an address book of all the people they meet and where they met them.”

Hashable, which builds your network by bringing in existing Hashable users from your address book and Twitter, is also taking a stab at its own version of a social graph with the new “Inner Circle” function, which brings up a stream of #intro and other activity of people you have invited into your circle, so you can see who they’re meeting and where. You can also now post connections when you’re offline, a major plus during the smartphone saturated conference.

Interested users sign up for the Android beta here. The app should be available in the Android marketplace over the weekend.

Single-use plastic grocery bags, and the various fees, taxes and bans proposed to curb pollution from their disposal, are causing controversy again this week.

A newly surfaced study, still under peer review, suggests that disposable bags aren’t as bad for the environment as re-usable cotton bags.

The study — The Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags by Dr. Chris Edwards and Jonna Meyhoff Fry — was done for a government environmental agency in the UK. As reported by Martin Hickman for The Independent its authors found:

“[By] assessing pollution caused by extraction of raw materials, production, transportation and disposal…an HDPE plastic bag would have a baseline global warming potential of 1.57 kg Co2 equivalent, falling to 1.4 kg Co2e if re-used once, the same as a paper bag used four times (1.38 kg Co2e). A cotton bag would have to be re-used 171 times to emit a similar level, 1.57 kg Co2e.”

These results make it seem like a shopper would have to use a cotton bag 171 times or more before displacing the equivalent environmental impact of one plastic bag. Contextualizing studies that make disposables look downright green, however, environmental researcher Susan Freinkel — whose book PLASTIC: A Toxic Love Story will be out in April — told TechCrunch (via email):

“If energy is a top concern, then plastic bags do come out with a nicely ‘green’ profile. But that’s not the only measure of a bag’s environmental impact.

Plastic has one big downside: it persists in the environment…Unlike paper or cotton, it doesn’t biodegrade. It only breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces. Persistence is a big deal if you’re concerned about pollution and the health of wildlife.

Plastic bags can clog storm drains, which was why Mumbai, among other places decided to ban them. [They] are one of the top categories of beach debris collected in international beach clean-ups every year, according to the Ocean Conservancy’s annual beach clean-up reports.

Wildlife often mistakes plastic bags for food and can choke on [or get entangled in] them— from camels in Dubai to sea turtles in the Pacific.”

While startups like EcoLogic LLC are trying to get plastic manufacturers to make their materials less persistent, using high-tech additives and processes, several industry players want to increase plastic bag recycling programs.

Unfortunately, though plenty of municipalities and retailers collect plastic bags and polyethylene film for recycling in the U.S. today, it’s still not available everywhere, according to website of the American Chemistry Council (a strong opponent to regulating plastic bags).

Hilex Poly — a corporation that both makes and recycles massive amounts of plastic bags — created a legislation tracker via GoogleMaps to protest bag bans and promote recycling instead.

Waste reduction has proven significant in cities and countries where bags have been banned and taxed: Ireland saw a 90 percent reduction in disposable plastic bag use post-regulation the BBC reported; and San Francisco lowered plastic bag waste citywide by about 20 percent according to theSF Environment Department.

[Ed's note: If you know of any recycling initiatives that produced similar results, we'd like to hear about them. Send research to tips@techcrunch.com noting "green tech" in the subject line.]

Sustainable packaging and bioplastic companies have joined both sides of the debate.

Metabolix, a company that spun out of MIT in the 1990s and now makes renewable crop-derived plastics, along with the Biodegradable Products Institute and many others opposed legislation that would have banned free, disposable plastic bags at large retail outlets in California, for example.

Meanwhile, Cereplast sees regulation as a market opportunity. In January this year, the bioplastic company issued a press statement noting:

“Stores in Italy alone use approximately 20-24 billion plastic bags a year, which accounts for one-fifth of all European use. This is the equivalent of a potential $1 billion bioplastics market in Italy as manufacturers now have to replace traditional plastic with environmentally-friendly materials.”

Will reusables always trump throw aways when it comes to environmental concerns? Or could clean tech and sustainable packaging innovators give us a net zero, single-use bag?

It’s not a material issue, says Freinkel, behavior and context matters too. She wrote:

“Comparing the environmental impacts of different type of bags diverts away from the real issue here, namely that the problem isn’t so much the material a bag is made from as the way in which the bag is used. Single-use bags made of any material are a waste of valuable resources. Both paper and plastic single-use bags involve using finite and precious resources that took decades, in the case of trees, and hundreds of millions of years in the case of oil or natural gas to make, to produce something we use for the 15 minutes it takes to get from the grocery store to our front door.

Reusable bags are a step away from that throwaway mindset. As long as it can be used over and over, a reusable bag of any type is the best, most sustainable choice.”

Images:

Infographic, via 2009 International Coastal Cleanup, Ocean Conservancy

Plastic bag in branches, via Katerha

Intel’s new Thunderbolt interface, which made its debut this morning in an upgrade to Apple’s MacBook Pro line, may be effectively an Apple exclusive for quite some time, according to Intel. At their press release, held shortly after Apple’s update when live, Intel noted that the developer kit for the interface would be provided to other computer manufacturers this spring, and that they didn’t expect OEMs to ship with Thunderbolt until 2012.

It’s not exactly an exclusive, but it’s close. That’s a pretty big coup for Apple — assuming Thunderbolt catches on faster than USB 3.0, and has no problems and plenty of applications. It’s actually a lot to assume, and although Apple is definitely a winner here, there are also some risks involved.

Continue reading on CrunchGear…

Editor’s Note: The following guest post is by Matthew Prince, CEO of a CloudFlare, which came in as a close runner-up at the last TechCrunch Disrupt. We asked him to give us an update on the startup since Disrupt.

It’s hard to imagine a web performance and security service “going viral,” especially one Mike Arrington described during the Disrupt awards ceremony as “Muffler Repair for the Internet,” but a glance through our Twitter feed gives credence to one of Silicon Valley’s axioms: if you make a great service that solves a real problem, users will come.

And come they have! While I have to confess our engineering team was initially bummed about losing to a demo of a website that could read Wikipedia articles aloud, I’m happy to report that they’ve channeled any frustration into building an incredible service that improves the lives of millions of web users every day.

A quick snapshot of the four months since our Disrupt launch:

• Tens of thousands of websites have signed up with CloudFlare to be faster and more secure
• We grew from a trickle of traffic to powering more than 1.2 billion monthly page views in January
• Nearly 3% of the Internet’s users (approximately 50 million unique monthly visitors) passed through our network last month
• By making sites faster (a 40% performance boost on average) we’ve helped Internet surfers collectively save nearly 1,000 years worth of time
• And we’ve stopped nearly 600 million attacks launched against our users’ websites

We’ve done no additional PR, marketing, or outreach since Disrupt and yet every day hundreds of new websites sign up for CloudFlare. From the Disrupt stage, we reached an incredible number of users worldwide. Today, the websites on the system span the globe from San Francisco (where CloudFlareis headquartered), to Accra (where we power the Official Government Portal of the Nation of Ghana), to Islamabad (where we power the Pakistani version of the IRS). We power sites for actors (Michael Rooker), popular bands (Counting Crows & Jack Johnson), and ecommerce shops like the one belonging to Lisa Freede. Lisa is a jewelry designer who was featured on The Today Show earlier this week. We’re proud that CloudFlare kept her site online and taking orders in spite of the staggering traffic generated by her appearance on the show.

Beyond introducing CloudFlare to the world, TechCrunch Disrupt was the event that really brought our team together. We actually launched the service live on stage in front of thousands of Silicon Valley’s thought leaders. That’s pressure. Nothing motivates better than a little fear, and knowing we would soar or crash in front of a live, influential audience had us all cranking for the months leading up to Disrupt. Even as I was back stage, the CloudFlare engineering team was in the audience with a list the final 27 bugs that needed to be fixed. I watched our IM channel as our team banged through the problems. When Michelle and I stepped on stage, they were down to 8. By the time we stepped off, they squashed the last few, flipped the switch, and we were live across five data centers on three continents.

No one on our team will ever forget the experience. If you’re a startup thinking of launching at Disrupt, that’s the only way to do it. You may not win the trophy, but you’ll receive something else far more important.

Our team is growing fast, we have a new office in downtown San Francisco, and we all still come to work each day excited to solve real, meaningful, hard problems. While we may just be doing “Muffler Repair for the Internet,” it turns out the Internet’s muffler is broken and needs fixing. And, as you’ll see from the video below, we’re having a great time while getting that done.

Remember MySpace Music? It was supposed to put online music streaming on the the right track. But with all the layoffs, shrinking audience and turmoil at parent MySpace, MySpace Music is singing the blues. According to comScore, only 17 million people in the U.S. visited MySpace Music in January, 2011, which is down 46 percent from the previous year. Pandora is now bigger on the Web, with an estimated 20.3 million monthly U.S. visitors.

Today, MySpace Music president Courtney Holt is stepping down. He joined two years ago from MTV. But with MySpace itself on the wane and Rupert Murdoch looking to unload it, MySpace Music can no longer hold its own.

Below is the internal MySpace email Mike Jones sent to employees announcing Holt’s departure. No replacement was named, instead Jones will be adding MySpace Music to his responsibilities.

From: Mike Jones
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 10:44 AM
To: Myspace All
Subject: Organizational Update

Myspacers,

I wanted to let everyone know that Courtney Holt's role in the company will soon be changing. Over the next several weeks, he will be moving from being the President of Myspace Music to becoming a key advisor to both Myspace and Newscorp. Courtney will provide guidance on the strategic direction of Myspace Music and lend his incredible depth of experience, industry expertise and creativity to Myspace and Myspace Music. Additionally, Courtney will continue to serve on the board of Myspace Music.

Sam Wick will now oversee all of marketing for Myspace and operationally I will be taking over as the interim president of Myspace Music.

Please let me know if you have any questions about these changes.