As TechCrunch readers know by now, I speak my mind and don't shy away from controversy. I am even more provocative when I talk to students. My goal is to make them think outside the box. I encourage students not only to challenge authority, but also to challenge me. I tell them that with my research on globalization, entrepreneurship, and U.S. competitiveness, I am learning as I go; no one has all the answers; I could be wrong. In some talks, I present the available data; in others I just discuss what I have learned.

Over the last ten days, I have lectured at four universities: Columbia, Emory, MIT, and UC-Berkeley. The discussions were all lively, and I received very positive feedback from students.

But my talk at MIT, last Monday, seems to have set off a firestorm.

When MIT Entrepreneurship Club co-president Slava Menn invited me to speak at the Sloan School of Management, he said that students would be very interested in learning about the differences between Silicon Valley and Boston and why Silicon Valley is so far ahead of Boston in tech entrepreneurship. I suggested we make this more constructive, and focus on how Boston's entrepreneurs can help it catch up. Since this was a lunchtime talk and not a for-credit class, I thought I would make it a Q&A-type session—without boring PowerPoint slides. And I assumed that, just as everyone knows that Boston's weather doesn't compare favorably to Palo Alto’s, everyone also knows that Boston lost the race to Silicon Valley—20 years ago.

I started with an informal discussion of my background—a tech entrepreneur who became an academic and researcher. I discussed the myths my research has been shattering, and how surprised I am that, with the data we have gathered, I can challenge governments on their innovation strategies. I said I had spent 18 months in Silicon Valley researching the success of its immigrant groups (they start 52% of its tech companies). I explained that there are valuable lessons that can be learned from these successes and that these lessons can be applied to fixing some of the Valley's problems—such as its dearth of women and minorities.

I also discussed my experiences in Silicon Valley and what it is that, in my opinion, makes the Valley what it is.

In Silicon Valley, sharing information is the norm—unlike most places in the world, including Boston. In the Valley, techies are far less secretive and are generally helpful to one another. Silicon Valley cherishes failure—because people understand that building a technology company requires experimentation; that it takes trial and error to perfect a technology and business model; and that you learn from failure.  Many entrepreneurs who achieve success, such as Jeff Clavier and Mike Maples, stay in or move to Silicon Valley and become  angel investors and mentors.  Students stay in the area after they graduate, and they move here from all over the U.S. Silicon Valley is one giant network with dozens of networking events happening every week.

I also said that the most important characteristic of Silicon Valley is its ability to reinvent itself: it readily accepts new ideas and tries new things. Yes, it sometimes drinks its own Kool-Aid and obsesses with the latest fad, but it also discards dated concepts and ideas very fast. I gave the example of the business plan, which, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is the greatest piece of fiction that a startup creates. Whilst the market research and planning that go into creating them are very valuable, the financial projections and five-year plans never bear resemblance to reality. Silicon Valley’s thought leaders, such as Steve Blank and Eric Ries, are now advocating the concept of the lean startup—which takes small steps and iterates.

MIT is known for its $100K business-plan competition. I said that it was time to rethink it. I discussed a TechCrunch post in which I’d said that very few contest winners made it big.  Even the company that MIT boasts about—Akamai—lost the contest; and the products and business model that Akamai eventually developed bore no resemblance to what it had entered in the contest. And I said that I didn't know of any other big successes that have resulted from MIT business plan contest. (The students corrected me on this and said one company, SmartCells, was recently acquired for $500m. And there were a few others from the '90s—the good old dot com days.)

I really enjoyed the session.  And many students told me that they’d learned a lot from it. So I was very surprised to see the spate of criticism that followed.

In the audience was Scott Kirsner, a columnist for the Boston Globe—who had been very upset at an article that I’d written, last year, about how Silicon Valley had left Rt. 128 (Boston) in the dust. I noted his smirks, grins, and distraction during the class. But he didn't challenge my assertion that Silicon Valley was ahead of Boston—despite his Tweets demanding data. And then Kirsner descended into the mud with a series of unprofessional, nasty, personal attacks against me on Twitter. He dug up some old material on battles that I’d fought—and won— during my recovery from a heart attack in 2002.

In every community you have immature, opinionated loudmouths. These are usually outliers whom people tolerate but ignore. That is what I thought Kirsner was—until dozens of other Bostonians, including some tech CEOs, chimed in with him and demanded data. Then the MIT Entrepreneurship Center posted a disrespectful blog on its website: Why the MIT Ecosystem and the $100K are important (or why @vwadhwa has no clue what he is talking about). (This missed the point—I hadn’t said that MIT hasn't made a major impact. Of course it has; it is one of the greatest universities in the world.) And then the Boston Globe published this silly piece by Kirsner (I say “silly” because it distorts the conversation).

To be fair, a number of Bostonians have written to me to apologize and say that this group does not represent the larger community. One of Boston's most respected VCs, Fred Destin, wrote a post discussing The ridiculous Vivek Wadhwa furore and the new Boston Tea Party. Even European tech journalist Milo Yiannopoulos came to my defense (‘Over the hill’ Boston tech community lashes out at academic).

Still, many people have demanded that I present data that validate my views. Instead of cluttering up TechCrunch with these data—which will seem obvious to most people—I have included some highlights below and posted far more on my personal website. In my talk, I had also commented that Boston is at a disadvantage because its "weather sucks". Here are some data that prove this.  And here is an academic paper by University of Michigan Prof. David Albouy which shows that the quality of life is far better in Silicon Valley than in Boston.

The two people whom I have learnt the most from about regional competitiveness are the UC-Berkeley School of Information’s dean, AnnaLee Saxenian (who is my sponsor at Berkeley and a coauthor on several papers), and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at University of Toronto, Prof. Richard Florida. They have both published books that explain why Silicon Valley triumphed over Boston and what it takes to build a successful tech center. I have included summaries below. I suggest that all Bostonians read these. They explain the issues far better than I can. And they contain lots of data.

Why is it that business in California's Silicon Valley flourished while along Route 128 in Massachusetts declined in the 90s? The answer, Saxenian suggests, has to do with the fact that despite similar histories and technologies, Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations. The result of more than one hundred interviews, this compelling analysis highlights the importance of local sources of competitive advantage in a volatile world economy.

Florida, an academic whose field is regional economic development, explains the rise of a new social class that he labels the creative class. Members include scientists, engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists, and entertainers. He defines this class as those whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content. In general this group shares common characteristics, such as creativity, individuality, diversity, and merit. The author estimates that this group has 38 million members, constitutes more than 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and profoundly influences work and lifestyle issues. The purpose of this book is to examine how and why we value creativity more highly than ever and cultivate it more intensely. He concludes that it is time for the creative class to grow up–boomers and Xers, liberals and conservatives, urbanites and suburbanites–and evolve from an amorphous group of self-directed while high-achieving individuals into a responsible, more cohesive group interested in the common good.

Here are some of the data that you can find on my personal website

*Source: Richard Florida, Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto

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, and Distinguished 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.

HipChat, a private instant messaging service for companies, is releasing native iPhone and iPad apps.

Similar to Campfire, HipChat provides a simple application for communication within businesses. The startup, which launched in private beta in 2009, offers both a web and desktop client based on Adobe AIR that lets you chat with your entire team at once, or hold more private discussions with select team members. The application includes support for quick attachment sharing, notifications when you receive a message, video chat, and a searchable web archive for past messages. It’s incredibly easy to use and setup and doesn’t require a company email address.

The apps, which are free, have much of the same functionality as the web and desktop apps, but with a few extras including syncing between the client, push notifications for new messages, room invites, or mentions. We are told and Android app is on the way and the startup plans to add collaborative features like group video chat and screensharing.

And HipChat is growing like a weed (40 percent each month), and has hundreds of paying companies, including GrubHub, AllRecipes, and TED. HipChat was founded by Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, who previously founded calendar startup HipCal, which was acquired by Plaxo in 2006 (which was eventually acquired by Comcast). HipChat, which recently raised $100K in funding, faces competition from 37 Signals’ Campfire and Yammer.

CBS has acquired Clicker, a TV Guide for internet programming, according to a release just issued by the companies. Clicker’s CEO Jim Lanzone has been named President of CBS Interactive. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; Clicker raised a total of $19 million in funding. According to multiple sources, the deal was in the $50 million to $100 million range.

Clicker is a comprehensive search engine for TV content on the web. The startup made its debut at TechCrunch50 in 2009, and currently indexes more than one million full length TV episodes on the web.

The startup also released a more social version of Clicker that allows people to discover, share, rate, discuss, and check-in to shows on Clicker and third party partner sites, and rolled out Clicker Mobile, which allows users to access Clicker's service through free Android and iPhone apps. Most recently, Clicker launched a deep Facebook integration to offer personalized TV recommendations.

Besides a technology play, the acquisition was also a talent buy. Before founding Clicker, Jim Lanzone was the CEO of Ask.com, which was acquired by IAC in 2005. Considering Lanzone’s experience in both web and content technologies, he seems like the perfect fit for CBS’s interactive arm. As President, Lanzone will succeed former CNET CEO Neil Ashe, who announced that he was leaving CBS in December 2010.

Clicker will become a property of CBS Interactive, whose other sites include CNET, TV.com, CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com and Gamespot.

CBS Interactive to Acquire Clicker.com
NEW YORK, March 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Jim Lanzone, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Clicker Media Inc., has been named President of CBS Interactive, it was announced today by Leslie Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBS Corporation. In this role, Lanzone will oversee all of CBS Interactive’s operations worldwide.

“Jim is a dynamic, creative executive who knows the interactive space and its key players,” said Moonves. “Throughout his career, he has proven to be both a leader and an innovator, and now he’ll bring both of those skills to help CBS Interactive build on its success. In these last couple of years, we’ve grown CBS into a top 10 global Internet property. I’m confident that with Jim at the helm, we will continue to expand our digital footprint, and capitalize on our scale in this fast-growing marketplace.”

At the same time, CBS Interactive has also entered into an agreement to acquire Clicker Media Inc. Upon closing, Clicker.com will join CBS Interactive’s roster of leading Internet properties, including CNET.com, TV.com, CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com and Gamespot.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“In just over a year, Jim has created one of the leading navigation and discovery tools for video programming on the Internet,” added Moonves. “Clicker’s products and proprietary technologies add firepower to our existing portfolio of entertainment properties, and if we can help grow Clicker to its full potential in the years ahead, the strategic value could be tremendous.”

“This is such an incredible opportunity,” said Lanzone. “Leslie and the CBS Interactive team have created an unrivaled arsenal of Internet properties – properties that have unlimited potential for expansion. I look forward to beginning my new role and working with the team to help lead CBS into the future of online information and entertainment.”

Lanzone succeeds Neil Ashe, who served as President of CBS Interactive since the Company acquired CNET Networks, Inc. in June 2008. Ashe announced in December 2010 that he’d be leaving the Company upon the naming of a successor.

“Neil oversaw one of the smoothest corporate integrations imaginable,” said Moonves. “All of us at CBS wish him the best, and thank him for all he’s done to position CBS for continued growth and success.”

Launched in November 2009, Clicker is the first comprehensive and structured guide to legal broadcast programming on the Web, indexing more than 1 million online TV shows, movies and videos, from free and paid services alike. Clicker’s proprietary recommendation engine, Clicker Predict, and its social integration with Facebook, bring its 2.5 million monthly users an instantly personalized guide to what’s worth watching online. Clicker was recently named one of the Top 100 Sites of 2010 by PC Magazine, “Top 10 Companies to Watch” in 2011 by Mashable and the #1 technology development in television for 2010 by the Writer’s Guild of America.

Prior to his work at Clicker, Lanzone was the former CEO of Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), a top 10 global Web property acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI) in 2005. From 2001 to 2008, Lanzone held various executive roles at Ask ranging from SVP of Product Management, to General Manager of Ask Jeeves U.S., and finally CEO. He is considered to be one of the executives most responsible for turning around Ask Jeeves prior to its sale to IAC, and establishing Ask as an innovation leader. After leaving Ask, Lanzone joined Redpoint Ventures as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and raised $8 million to develop Clicker in October 2008. Jim was recently named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Names You Need to Know in 2011.” Lanzone holds a B.A. from UCLA and a J.D./M.B.A. from Emory University.

Startup Geotrio is launching today as a centralized platform for anyone to create, take and share tours. Tours range from historical and architectural tours for travelers, campus tours for prospective students, neighborhood tours, local shopping tours, and more.

The startup is also unveiling an iPhone app that will detect tours in your geographic area and allow users to download audio tours created by professionals as well as by amateur guides. And users will be able to upload tours on the fly. Geotrio will also mark a professional-created tour with a recommendation (as opposed to user generated tours).

So far, the bootstrapped Geotrio has signed partnerships with a number of partnerships with universities and businesses to create tours. For example, the startup has partnered with bike rental company in America, Bike and Roll to create a tour of the sights in San Francisco and will soon create several more for New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, and Miami. Geotrio also partnered with the DLD Conference to create two city tours of Munich.

The company wants to be the “YouTube for Tours,” but it will need to scale significantly to get to that point. It would make sense for Geotrio to partner with a travel information and content site to tap into a large set of users.

You can find Geotrio’s iPhone apps here and here.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley has been thinking about and building geo-social apps for ten years. In Part III of this episode of Founder Stories, he tells host Chris Dixon, “Now is our best shot to push that stuff out there . . . [and] invent the future.” What motivates him and his team is “just to get the deas out of our heads and get it into the hands of people.”

Crowley has been waiting a long time just for GPS chips to find their way into every phone, and now that is becoming a reality. It opens up so many possibilities beyond just the check-in. It can remind you of things you want to to do and recommend activities based on where you are and what your friends have done in the same place in the past. “If you think of the phone as a bunch of sensors stuck in this device connected to the network, how can I walk around the city and have the phone come alive and remind me, ‘Oh this is a place you should go to lunch” or “this is the place you read an article about 6 months ago.’”

Crowley also stalks about dealing with Internet celebrity (“building something helps keep you focused”), the pros and cons of being a high-profile startup (raising awareness versus signaling your strategy to competitors), and his notion of bookmarking the world. Just like Instapaper allows you to find stuff on the Web and Read It Later, we have this idea of ‘Do It Later,’” he says. You should be able to click on an article about a restaurant or artwork and add it to your Foursquare so that you can be reminded of it when whatever you want to do is nearby. He also wants to close the gap between publishers like the New York Times that “comes up with a list of the 50 best sandwiches” and the places that benefit when people seeking them out.

When you are done watching this video, be sure to check out parts I (on Foursquare’s origins) and II (on building a company). Now you also can subscribe to Founder Stories on iTunes.

Sweet merciful fates: this is a robot. Called a Geminoid, these things came into fame with an early version in 2005 by Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro of ATR. This new version seems completely revamped and updated and, more interesting, this is the first Geminoid from outside of Japan.

This new Geminoid comes from Alborg University in Denmark and is considerably less complex – but much more realistic – than Ishiguro’s original model. This one, called Geminoid-F, appears to really breathe and perform involuntary muscular reactions.

Click through for video.

AOL’s Patch has acquired hyperlocal news aggregator Outside.In, we’ve confirmed with Patch’s president Warren Webster. It’s unclear what the terms of the deal are but Business Insider reported earlier that the acquisition is valued at less than $10 million. Outside.In has raised $14.4 million in funding to date.

Webster tells us that Outside.In, which has a previous relationship with AOL, will be integrated with Patch, the company’s hyperlocal news platform. The New York-based Outside.In is a local news aggregator aimed at bringing together all the hyperlocal news around a given location. Via its search portal, you simply enter your zipcode, neighborhood or address and the site will surface the most relevant news in your particular area. Outside.In focuses on sourcing information and news from local bloggers as opposed to large publications.

The startup has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, the New York City Investment Fund, Marc Andreesen, Esther Dyson, John Seeley Brown, John Borthwick, and George Crowley and others.

Considering Patch’s hyperlocal focus, the integration of Outside.In’s it makes sense from a technology standpoint. Outside.In’s traffic has been declining over the past six months and only saw 317,000 unique visitors in January, according to comScore. In addition to the coverage that Patch reporters provide in a given area, Outside.In will be able to supplement news with its search platform, and scale coverage. It’s no secret that AOL has been aggressively looking to expand Patch’s coverage and reach.

This isn’t the first exit for a hyperlocal news aggregator. Chicago-based EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC back in 2009. And of course, AOL bought Patch in 2009 as well.

Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch.

You’ve seen the parodic banned white iPhone 4 promo video, so you know what to expect.

Below is the transcript of “Johnny Five”‘s introduction, just in case you hadn’t seen the previous fake Apple promo video, so you too will know what to expect.

Or you can just watch it, of course.

“Last year, iPad revolutionized technology as we know it. Before iPad, people were checking their email … on computers. They were playing Angry Birds on their phone! iPad defined a category of its own. It’s like an iPod touch. It’s like the much earlier iPod touch that didn’t have cameras. But the new iPad is like the iPhone 4 … minus the retina display”.

And maybe watch the earlier iPhone 4 promo video parody too for good measure:

The above videos were created by LA-based production agency JLE. Good stuff.

Or in one word / hashtag: #winning.

Oh, and here’s the official iPad 2 promo video:

Search engine Blekko is taking its initiative to insert itself into the news as much as possible one step further today, and is launching a Blekkogear hub for its publishing tools, presenting a package suite of search-related iframe embeds (sorry WordPress users!) for publishers as well as its already existing toolbar and other goodies.

Instead of coming up with its own version of Google Analytics or AdSense, Blekko has gone the widget route, riding the wave of publicity surrounding the JC Penney paid links controversy by emphasizing search transparency. Perhaps the most useful tool in the suite, Blekko is offering publishers a Link Roll Widget, an easily embeddable way to “show off” the organic links to their sites (customizable by number and size) much like they show off retweets or Facebook “Likes,” among other things.

Along with a free t-shirt and Blekko trading cards (yeah) for anyone who asks, here’s a sampling of what you can find on Blekkogear.

Blekko Link Roll Widget

The Blekko Link Roll Widget allows you to customize a widget showing recent inbound links to your site as they happen in “realtime,” as organic linking is a the web’s foremost method of validation.

Embeddable Search Box

Blekko now offers publishers the ability to embed a custom Blekko search box on different verticals, using the Blekko curated slashtags like /techblogs or /food or even something more personalized like my slashtag that only searches TechCrunch. This might be useful for sites that don’t have their own powerful search functionalities.

Blekko Toolbar
In the same vein as the Google Toolbar, the Blekko Toolbar allows you to search from Blekko, add your Blekko slashtags from your browser, view a site’s SEO statistics (including visible stats for Inlinks and Site Rank) as well as mark sites as spam while you browse.

Lack of Chrome support is heartbreaking, though not surprising.

Blekko RSS Feeds

Blekkogear now provides you with a one stop shop to create RSS feeds for slashtag searches, like this one for techblogs.

Blekko Search Engine Default

Allows you to easily make Blekko your default search engine, another one that’s a no-go for Chrome and inexplicably Safari.

Site Badge

Blekko is also offering a badge with it own Site Rank score and Inbound links numbers, for websites who want to take pride in where they stand on Blekko and look super nerdy in the process.

While I’m suspect of the actual utility of some of these (specifically the Site Badge) Blekkogear is an interesting move by the search underdog as a way to get more distribution and eyeballs on its unique approach to search. And with its $24 million in funding from Conway, Andreessen and others, I wouldn’t be surprised if Blekko, who most recently paired up with hacker darling StackOverflow, pulls another similar stunt next week.

MyBuys, provider of multi-channel personalization solutions for online retailers and brands, has secured a third round of funding to the tune of $20 million.

The round was led by Rho Ventures with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Ventures and Palomar Ventures.

MyBuys builds profiles based on individual shoppers’ behavior, and then uses a patented portfolio of algorithms and real-time optimization to deliver the most relevant recommendations to them. The company says over 300 online retailers, brand and agencies currently partner with them to offer personalized recommendations to their shoppers.

The company recently launched predictive display advertising and personalized mobile commerce solutions, enabling clients to optimize the shopping experience for individuals using the iPhone, the iPad, Android or BlackBerry devices.

MyBuys is so certain that it can create a better-performing personalized mobile website for retailers that they let them test the performance of the solution free of charge. The creation of the mobile site comes without implementation fees if MyBuys’ mobile site doesn’t perform better than their current websites.

With every new Apple product launch, there’s now an expectation that we’re going to get a video made by Apple to help explain the product. You know the ones. They feature Apple executives (though, oddly, never CEO Steve Jobs) set against a white background telling us how great and revolutionary the product is. They’re brilliant and effective. But they definitely also take themselves way too seriously. And that’s why they’re the perfect target for parody.

We’ve seen dozens of people/groups mock these on the web. And now the professionals are getting involved. During his TBS show tonight, Conan O’Brien decided to take his shot. Like Jobs, O’Brien isn’t in the actual video. Instead he sets it up and lets his minions do the work. “I personally think that the people at Apple are starting to get a little bit cocky,” O’Brien says to set up his take on the iPad 2 (here’s Apple’s real video).

Enjoy below. I personally enjoy the Vice President of “Dream-Telligence”.

Backed by Y Combinator and SV Angel (outside of Start Fund), Noteleaf helps you prepare for meetings, in one of the more novel ways I have seen. Launching today, the service pulls information from your Google Calendar and LinkedIn accounts inorder to send you comprehensive notifications of what you need to do, where you need to do it and who you need to do it with.

“But wait?” you say. “Doesn’t Google already do that through email notifications?” Noteleaf goes a step further, using machine learning technology to read your calendar entries and build you a mobile profile of your meeting, complete with LinkedIn profile and work history of the person it guesses you’re meeting with. In addition, you get a link to a thread of every email you’ve ever exchanged with the person and a map of the meeting’s location.

(Note: The app only works with your default Google Calendar, and as a user with multiple Google accounts I had some trouble toggling back and forth between my different accounts.)

Says co-founder Jake Klamka, “If you’re running late for a meeting it’s painful to open Gmail or open LinkedIn to figure out who this person is. Here you’ve got it happening in one click.”

The app texts you with a link to your meeting “dossier” 10 minutes before your meeting, both as a reminder and a way to brush up fast on the personal details of the person. This is awesome if you’ve got back to back meetings and don’t have the time to background research and especially useful in the tech industry, where everyone’s done something important.

While you could improve its chances by entering the person’s whole name, the app has 80% accuracy rate in guessing who you’re meeting with, even if you write something vague like “Lunch with Paul.”

But Klamka and co-founder Wil Chung tell me that the most important aspect of this is the emphasis of the mobile experience, “There’s little things, that people expect to work on mobile that don’t really work that well, like pulling up location on a map or finding emails in Gmail. It’s a painful experience on mobile, small keyboard, you have to launch multiple apps.”

The founders eventually plan on adding even more information into the dossier, like a user’s Twitter account, so you can become well-versed in not just where people worked, but what they did over the weekend — Great for building rapport.

It’s no secret that a well-managed online marketing campaign can be a powerful weapon for small businesses eager to get in front of new customers — there’s a reason Google’s AdWords pulls in billions each year. But while many online platforms offer self-service tools that businesses can use to manage their own campaigns, the legwork involved with running these (especially on multiple platforms simultaneously) can be daunting. That’s where Vurve comes in.

The startup, which just raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round, promises businesses “Advertising on autopilot” — it automates many of the most time-intensive aspects of running marketing online. The funding round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups and True Ventures.

Vurve’s signup workflow is pretty simple, relatively speaking (the startup says that it generally takes less than five minutes to complete). To help streamline things the company has been working on partnering with ecommerce platforms like Shopify — which has integrated Vurve directly into its administrator dashboard — and Yahoo’s storefronts. Vurve says that Magento support will be launching in two weeks, and that it’s in talks with “all but two” of the most popular hosted ecommerce platforms for further integrations.

Once you’ve signed up, Vurve will ask you to set your monthly budget — the minimum is $200, the maximum is $10,000 (Vurve doesn’t want to be working with very large businesses that require huge marketing campaigns). From there Vurve’s engine, dubbed Sophie, will automatically run ads through a variety of marketing channels, including search ads on Facebook, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and display ads on various shopping sites, like Amazon. Ad copy is generated using a combination of templates and information garnered from simple questions (What is your company’s tagline?) The service will also automatically post your products to shopping search engines like Bing and Google Product Search, and over time it will adjust which channels it invests in based on performance. Vurve makes money by taking 15% of your budget as a fee.

Vurve has been in beta since February 2010, and it launched publicly in November. It previously raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2009.

You know who else is #WINNING in this whole Charlie Sheen on Twitter thing? The Twitter ad sales team.

At upwards of $100K a pop, the revenue that Promoted Tweets bring in is no a joke. And it looks like big name brands like Ford Focus, Arbys and Audi and AMC Theatres have all forked over some cash to capitalise on the attention being lobbed onto to Sheen at the moment, buying into what is likely a Promoted Tweet keyword auction on the hashtag of his infamous catchphrase, “Winning.”

The reason these tweets cost so much is that Promoted Tweet engagement on hashtag search is high, 5% of users who see the tweets react to them either by re-tweeting, clicking on a link or replying. And impressively, 80% of brands that buy one ad end up buying another.

Right now only one of the #WINNING Promoted Tweet products is directly related to Sheen, and it’s for a cheesy Shepard Fairey-style WINNING movie poster, proliferating the meme.

Branding in this day and age is so strange and somewhat shady, as one man’s media meltdown can become another man’s venue for pimping their bacon cheeseburger.

@McDonalds
McDonald's

Despite all the rumors there r no plans 2 bring #mclobster or mcsushi 2 the US menu. We r working on a new menu item called McWinning.

March 3, 2011 7:05 am via CoTweetRetweetReply

As Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic points out, “In purchasing the #Winning hashtag, [brands] get all of the benefits of celebrity endorsement (eyeballs, psychological association) without the risk that when the guy finishes losing his mind, they look bad.”

Note: While I was writing this post, it looks like the Ford Tweet got “Un-Promoted.” Did someone over at Ford have a change of heart?

We’re a week away from the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas and it’s becoming very clear what the big battleground will be this year: group messaging apps. Just like micro-messaging apps a few years ago, and location apps last year, a bunch of players are poised to battle for the conference crown. But the fight will be even crazier this year as apps from players big (Ask Around) and small (Ditto) will be in the mix. And one of the larger players is taking a unique approach to the war.

TextPlus honestly doesn’t need SXSW. With 7.7 million monthly active users, the very well-funded app by GOGII is already massive. For comparison’s sake, until their public launch today, Yobongo had 140 users. And the previous huge winner at SXSW, Foursquare, just hit 7 million users. TextPlus is going into this battle with quite a head start.

But they’re smart enough to know that no lead is safe. Rivals like GroupMe, FastSociety, and Beluga have gotten a lot of buzz and some traction recently. So much so that Facebook has already scooped up Beluga. But textPlus is going to use SXSW to build on their success by doing some good.

At the conference, the service is launching a new monthly campaigned called Groups4Good. The premise is simple: for every group created within textPlus, GOGII will donate $1 to charity. For SXSW, they’re capping this at 10,000 groups (meaning $10,000). But again, this will be a monthly thing. For each month after SXSW, they plan to give up to $1,000 to charity.

Plainly: if you use textPlus to group message other people, GOGII will give $1,000 to charity each month. (And $10,000 in March to kick things off.)

For the SXSW initial campaign, three charities will get this money: EnoughIsEnough, A Good Idea, and LIVESTRONG. And they’re not restricting it to users in Austin for the conference, that’s just the kick-off point — anyone can create groups in the app to add to the cause.

And beyond this month, textPlus is going to open up the charity picking process to the users. Within the Groups4Good Communities Channel in the textPlus app, users will be able to vote on which charities should receive the money each month.

It’s a nice gesture, and a solid way for textPlus to leverage their huge userbase at SXSW in a slightly different way. Sometimes war can be used for good too.

The DEMO Spring 2011 conference wrapped up yesterday in Palm Springs, and echoing the current climate in the Valley, day two of the conference belonged to startups focused on social technologies. From social CRM platforms, photo sharing, and social networks to aggregation and reader engagement tools to video and group chat, the day’s startups showed that the interest in the “social” Web only continues to blossom.

Here, in no particular order, is a look at seven new interesting startups worth keeping an eye on:

1. Marginize: Marginize is a browser add-on that allows you to annotate Websites and to leave comments, adding a social layer to every site you visit. The user can add or join an existing “margin” layer to browse and discover what others have said about the site you’re visiting. You can leave a comment or browse those left by others.

   The widget is similar to other real-time commenting platforms (like, say, Disqus), except that Marginize puts interaction and commentary back into the hands of the individual user, rather than allowing the owner of the Web site to control and moderate what’s said. In a way, Marginize is akin to a private Twitter feed for Yelp, because the widget creates this pop-out tab (or “margin”) on the side of every Website, where users can provide supplementary information about the site, write reviews, or discuss the site’s credibility.

   Though the company launched six months ago (and was mentioned even before that on TC by Don Dodge), yesterday at DEMO they announced an amendment to their product strategy, now offering publishers and content creators a chance to enter the game. The company added a “publisher widget”, which allows publishers to seamlessly insert the feature on any Website so that the tab is visible to both publishers and users. The idea behind Marginize itself may not be new, but the product has an eminent usability and interface that sets it apart from those that came before it.

2. Gut Check: In today’s digital world, the traditional methods of market research have become too cumbersome, expensive, and too much of a drain on manpower. Gut Check, the winner of DEMO’s “People’s Choice Award” (and $1 million in free advertising from IDG publications) is a DIY research tool that allows companies to conduct qualitative research, like focus groups, over the Web.

   Users define the type of audience they want to canvass from an exhaustive list of categories, and Gut Check then uses the profile to select a targeted group from their bullpen of 5 million research participants. Following that, the service allows you to perform interactive interviews with individual participants through its portal while sharing images and asking questions.

   At $40-per-session, I can see this relatively cheap tool coming in handy for both big and small companies that make frequent updates to their products or services and want to gather feedback from a targeted consumer in near real-time.

3. Enterproid: Divide by Enterproid, Qualcomm’s QPrize winner, is software that allows busy professionals to finally start using their personal phone for business needs. Unfortunately, many of the Web 2.0 tools people use on their personal phones are not backed by corporate IT, and security compliances prohibit the use of many apps and features you would like to use in a professional setting. To resolve this issue, Enterproid adds an entire, separate enterprise section to your phone, which contains its own email, calendar, contacts, messaging and browser apps that encrypts — and can securely access — all your corporate data.

   The Enterproid apps appear as a separate home screen, yet enables both your enterprise and personal homescreens to be aware of each other, alerting you if you receive a personal email while in the enterprise section, for example. Enterproid also offers a set of rules that can be accessed by the corporate IT department, allowing IT to change security setting and shut off access to a particular app when worried about security issues. Though VMWare is planning a virtualization platform that allows a user to have two profiles on an Android phone, Enterproid’s platform is likely to be very appealing for small businesses, especially in terms of cost optimization, as employees can now keep their personal phones for business.

4. Live.pro: Television is, by nature, a social experience, often enjoyed in the company of friends and family. However, social television technologies have by-and-large failed to take off, seemingly launching before the average TV viewer is ready for them. eLive Entertainment applies social technology to the Web with a free site that allows you to show videos from YouTube and other video sites to your friends, while encouraging interaction and commenting on what you’re watching.

   Users can pull in videos and annotate them with voice-overs, drawing mark-ups, or add typed comments in a dialogue box. Videos can be slowed down to enable this annotation, made into links that can later be shared, stored on-demand, watched simultaneously, and synced with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. While it may still be too early for a social TV solution to gain mainstream adoption, enabling an interactive and social viewing experience on the Web is a very appealing idea.

5. HeyStaks: Many in the tech industry and beyond have become disillusioned with the current state of search. Content farms litter search with annoying links, with seemingly little being done to disrupt search as Google did when it first hit the Web. Heystaks, a new search startup, hopes to be a part of the evolution by making search social — and not simply by searching social data, like Tweets and photos, as others have done, but by using your social community to drive better results.

   HeyStaks uses a comprehensive back-end social search algorithm to drive highly relevant community filtered recommendations. The idea was developed over a number of years by group of scientists in Ireland and is now teamed up with Jonathan Dillon, former VP of M&A/Integration at Yahoo!. Dillon was part of the team that acquired Delicious, which offered a scaled-down (and relatively unsuccessful) version of Heystaks beginning in 2005. Part of the reason it didn’t take off, according to Dillon, was that social graphs and networks were not yet as pervasive as they are today.

   HeyStaks hopes to leverage the now more mature social graphs and collaboration technologies not by becoming a search engine, but by improving your Google and Bing results through the addition of community-sourced content to the top of those pages. To target those with a common goal or shared interests to better parse results, users can create "search staks", or collections of the best Web pages from a group of users on a particular topic. These "staks" can be made public and easily shared with colleagues and friends via email, Twitter, or kept private or shared on an invite-only basis. Heystaks currently offers an iPhone app, a Firefox plug-in, and a Chrome extension still in alpha. I’m not positive that this can work, but the presentation was intriguing. Check it out here.

With the growing influence of Facebook’s social graph, several DEMO startups became advocates for the value of incorporating the social network into both our personal and professional circles. So, for good measure, I’m including a bonus: Two startups that caught my attention for how they’re attempting to improve upon the Facebook experience — both at home and at work.

6. FetchFans is a social media design engine that allows businesses to create custom-branded pages on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in an effort to make them look more professional. FetchFans targets companies with multiple holdings in, say, the form local branches. Specific customer demographics can vary regionally (think real estate companies), so FetchFans offers ten specially designed Facebook page templates branded to the parent company, which localized representatives can choose from and modify according to their particular needs. Targeted at social e-commerce with add-ons like chat, photos, video, and real-time lead generation, this service looks like a great way to improve upon the somewhat underwhelming state of business profiles on today’s social networks.
7. Pixable’s Photofeed is a free application for the iPad that provides curated, personalized streams of photos, like "top photos of the day", displaying them in a full-size, one-touch, swipe-through format. During their demo, the startup said that there are 60 billion photos on Facebook and 5 billion photos are added each month, making it difficult to sort through them all to find what you’re looking for.

   Pixable’s WonderRank technology, which reminds me of Pandora’s Music Genome, takes your friends’ photos and analyzes the metadata associated with the photos (think “likes” and comments) to create combined and categorized viewing, as well as an easier way to rank and discover new photos. The app also allows you to like, comment, or tag photos, follow your closest friends, and receive alerts when they upload new photos. Knowing the importance of photos to Facebook’s overall success (and evolution), I wonder if Pixable could become a potential target for acquisition? We’ll see.

Check out Day 1 coverage here.

Photo Credit: Rodrigo Pena

ContextLogic, an information relevancy startup that is focusing on optimizing the online ads space at the moment, has raised $1.7 million in angel funding from (for effect) SV Angel’s Ron Conway, former Global President of Sales at Google Aydin Senkut, Keith Rabois, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Microsoft VP Hank Vigil, former Microsoftie Fritz Lanman, Twitter Director of Search Elad Gil, Nils Johnson, Digital Garage, Michael Stoppelman, Raymond Tonsing, Paige Craig, Farmville creator Sizhao Yang, CRV partner Bill Tai, Brian Koo, Naval Ravikant, Paul Bricault and Transmedia.

Whew!

Right now the stealthy ContextLogic is working on using machine learning and NLP to leverage information context in order to increase relevancy of advertising as well as content. Its algorithm uses a topic hierarchy to better break down what people actually are looking for or find interesting. Basically its like an AdSense on steroids, that can be applied outside of Google to anything from ads to content like tweets, Facebook profiles and text messages.

Founder Peter Szulczewski, who used to be a Google Ambassador, describes his product (which is still in private beta) as being at the forefront of the Age of Relevance, somewhere between the “Personalized” and the “Serendipity” quadrants here.

“Our technology makes information discovery fully automatic so in a way it will be serendipitous, but also highly personalized. It will also be popular but in the personalized very long tail sense (only ‘popular’ to you and other people that care about that topic) so that we can surface information that you will find interesting and only information that you will find interesting, we hope you won’t miss anything very relevant to you and that we don’t send you anything non relevant.”

The startup has already partnered up with publishers responsible for “billions of pageviews” (it wouldn’t disclose who) and is focusing on its advertising offerings at the moment, hunkering down on two relevancy products, “Reach” which helps advertisers target ads and “Lift” which increases ad performance. “We take it very seriously, as seriously as Google took their search quality,” Szulczewski said.

In case recent political uprisings have given us too many reasons to feel good about the impact Facebook is having in the world, we just got a study from Cornell that shows the mega-site is also helping boost millenials’ self-esteem. Because, you know, the so-called “self-esteem generation” needs more of that.

All quips about millenials aside, the study trumpets the findings as a sign that the Internet is doing something good for the world. To us, it proves the exact opposite. The reason Facebook boosted college kids’ self-esteem more than looking in a mirror (we’re not kidding, that was the methodology) was because it’s an artificial representation of ourselves, the we that we wish we were. Since when did we count self-awareness and true self-examination as negatives?

Video below.

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

Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Wednesday introduced the iPad 2 at a special event in San Francisco, taking even more momentum away from its competitors.

I’ve had a lot of people in the last 24 hours tell me that the iPad 2 isn’t as revolutionary as the first generation device. Yes, that’s true. But not every device a company releases has to be or can be revolutionary.

Apple has released three revolutionary products in the last decade alone: iPod, iPhone and iPad. I really can’t think of any products from Apple’s competitors that fit in the revolutionary category in that same time period.

People also said that Apple wasn’t very forthcoming with the specs of the iPad 2. Again, that’s true, but there’s a good reason for that—nobody cares.

Well, some people care. Those of us who are geeks care about specs. However, have you ever noticed that when you sit with your non-geek friends and start listing off specs their eyes glaze over and they rest their chin in their hand.

That’s because they couldn’t care less.

The iPad 2 is no slouch either. It lost one-third of the thickness of the previous generation, and therefore it is one-third less than the size of the iPad competitors too. It also has new technologies like a gyro built-in that will launch another round of cool apps.

Yesterday’s iPad 2 announcement wasn’t about the geeks—it was about all the other people who will buy an iPad. What those people want to know is “what can I do with it?”

If it fits into their lifestyle, most people are good with that. Apple showed many ways how the iPad 2 can fit into your lifestyle.

From the very beginning, Apple was very smart with how it marketed the iPad. The first thing it did was get the device into businesses and promote the fact that it could be used to get work done. And it was quite successful with that.

In an analyst call in October 2010, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said the iPad was already being used in 65 percent of Fortune 100 companies. That was four months ago and the iPad has grown since then, so we can only imagine where that number is now.

This strategy allowed Apple to do two things. If it came out with the iPad and pushed the gaming capabilities of the device, the business world would have looked at it as a toy. That would have certainly meant slower adoption. It also allowed them to work on some consumer software, two of which we saw yesterday.

In addition to the iPad 2, Jobs also unveiled iMovie and GarageBand for the iPad. This is what people want to know about—what can I do with the iPad that’s exciting and new.

Obviously, creating movies and being able to edit and share them with friends and family is a very popular thing to do these days. iMovie makes that easy.

Creating music, whether a novice or pro is also a cool thing to do. GarageBand is a great app to get that done and you can move your projects to your Mac and continue working on them.

It’s not just about the hardware. Apple delivers the whole experience that nobody else can. Jobs said yesterday that there are 65,000 apps on its App Store specifically designed for the iPad. That’s a lot of things you can do.

If you think Apple’s competitors are jumping for joy because the iPad 2 isn’t revolutionary, I believe you are wrong. I think they’re scared. Yesterday, they figured out Apple’s strategy too, but a little too late.

A couple weeks ago, Google rolled out the beta of Chrome 10, the latest version of their web browser. Today they’re bringing it to Chrome OS too — and it contains more goodies. Most importantly, Google is touting trackpad fixes, presumably for the Cr-48 device that people have been testing the OS with. Finally!

I haven’t had the chance to test out the trackpad fixes yet, but the fact that Google specifically mentions “new trackpad” in the opening sentence of their blog post seems like a good sign.

In my initial write-up of the Cr-48, I ripped the trackpad pretty hard. And for good reason: it’s pretty awful. Hopefully it is something that software can fix.

The full list of updates in the new Chrome OS build — there are a lot of them:

• 3G modem activation fixes
• 3G connection to the carrier fixes
• Wi-Fi connectivity/Out of the Box fixes
• New trackpad and sensitivity setting adjusted
• Auto update engine and debugging improvements
• Power optimizations
• GTalk video/chat optimizations
• Audio CPU utilization improvements
• Improved on screen indicators: brightness, network status, update icon

There’s also a scratchpad application security vulnerability fix included in this release. Technically this is version 0.10.156.46 of Chrome OS.

Yfrog is attempting to go beyond being just a photo landing page and comments, soft launching an entirely new product in beta today. This relaunch is a big departure, actually asking users to look at Yfrog as more than just a client for sharing photos on Twitter and more like a social aggregation platform.

Users on the new Yfrog will have a much more streamlined Yfrog profile with an immediately organized view of all their photos, counter of who they’re following and followed by as well as recent links that they’ve shared. “We’re trying to build a unified interface where you can aggregate your social stream in real life and make it useful to people,” says founder Jack Levin, ambitiously.

Reminiscent of a next generation Friendfeed, the new Yfrog creates profiles (like this one) semantically from public APIs, so you can view the activity of people that you know, as well as the inline media in their feeds. Signed in users can participate in threaded conversations from their Yfrog account, as well as upload photos and videos to both Yfrog and Twitter with its new http://fro.gy/ URL shortener.

Even though it is currently heavily reliant on Twitter, Levin eventually hopes to extend the new Yfrog platform to other services like Facebook, Quora, Instagram and even Foodspotting.

When asked whether he was giving up on photos entirely, Levin said, “We’re not giving up on photos at all, this is just an extension. Besides being able to post photos in an easy way, you should be able to post messages in an easy way. If it’s anything it’s just an augmentation of what you can do with photos.”

Right now Yfrog is seeing over 500,000 uploads daily and almost 20 million unique visits a month according to Quantcast — As opposed to the 30 million at competitor Twitpic (the whole Yfrog/Imageshack network gets over 50 million worldwide). The new redesign will be rolling out slowly in the am so the team can get feedback and fix bugs (right now there’s something interesting happening with pulling in @replies), unveiling to 1000 users the first hour hour, to 10,000 the next and so forth. Everyone hitting a Yfrog link should see it by tomorrow evening.

Says Levin, “We’re trying to do something with social that Google did really well with search. Trying to organize the world’s information and make it useful. It’s very clean and unique and to the point. How the social experience should be.”

And indeed, from my first impression, the new Yfrog interface is beautiful if just by comparison to the old one. And even if its social aggregation ambitions do not pan out, anything is better than this.

Interested readers can sign up for the limited beta here, using the password “techcrunch” and can watch the walkthrough video, below.

This little study by Nielson doesn’t actually say “vivacious,” but it’s implied — right there in the headline. The study is just an exercise in statistics and a look at the smartphone market, but it’s always worth taking a look and speculating based on the big bottom-line numbers like total market share.

These two attractive charts detail the distribution of OSes and manufacturers among smartphone owners, which, it should be noted, make up only about 25% of the mobile-using population, in the US at least. The information is through January of this year, so it’s quite current. So who’s winning? Everybody, it looks like. It really is a dead heat at the moment, but like Jell-O, there’s always room for analysis.

Continue reading at MobileCrunch…

What’s the hardest part of building a hot startup? In Part II of his Founder Stories interview, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley tells Chris Dixon it’s not building the product, it’s building the company that builds the product. The product is easy. Crowley and his team have been thinking about the product for years. “The hard part is building the machine that builds the product,” he says.

Foursquare has grown from 2 to 50 people, moved into bigger offices, and had to build a backend system that can support millions of users. But all of that was behind the scenes. “This is our year to build all the stuff we have been thinking about,” he declares.

Dixon starts off this clip asking why Crowley decided to build Foursquare in New York City instead of Silicon Valley Moving to California was simply never on “the roadmap.” Crowley also thinks “the product is better because it is in New York. San Francisco can feel very early-adopterish.” And while New York users can also be faddish, “not everyone works in technology,” so startups can get a more diverse set of early users. Crowley credits Google’s efforts to build a New York City presence with 2,000 engineers as an inflection point in the city’s startup eco-system because it attracted a lot of the right types of engineers (focused on the consumer Internet instead of Wall Street).

Crowley also discusses how he thinks about fundraising and acquisition offers. It’s all about getting the company in the best position to build the product. “We have these things in our head and we just want to get them built,” he says. “We are trying to make the moves that put the company in the best position to do what we want to do.” Why is Foursquare going it alone? “We just ultimately decided we should continue working on this,” he explains, “because the kernel of what we are doing is different than everything else that is out there. So we should ride this as far as we can and see where we can take it.”

Watch the whole interview in the video clip above and Part I here. (You also can subscribe to Founder Stories on iTunes)

photo © 2007 Ed Schipul | more info (via: Wylio)Does anyone know where I can find some daily deals? Everywhere. Taking a cue from the New York Times and everyone else in the world Bing has launched a daily deals service today, Bing Deals.

Now visitors to m.bing.com will find a deals tab that will allow you to search and drill down for localized daily deals around you via mobile. Eventually Bing wants to integrate deals into its homepage as well, as now you have to actually search for the name of a business to find the Bing Deals on the web.

Groupon, with reportedly $2 billion in revenue and a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google last year, is everyone’s great white hope at the moment. Success at this scale is eye-opening and when a new way of getting cash into a companie’s bank account happens, everyone takes notice. What’s the last time we saw this kind of “Omg that’s a lot of revenue” industry earthquake? Google.

(Google, hilariously enough, is now planning its own deals service, Google Offers.)

The problem here is that humans just don’t have the energy or space to track so many deals. When we first heard the news about Bing, Mike Arrington commented, “Someone needs to create an app that just aggregates all the daily deals in your city for you.” Somebody does, it’s called TheDealmap, and they just partnered with Bing on this launch.

Groupon had a great model: exercise editorial oversight and charge the deal maker for the distribution. I’m not sure the revenue from chain of affiliate partnerships in these kind “me too” plays will be enough to justify maintaining the product.  Owning the deals space takes effort, not afterthought — Twitter shut down down its @Earlybird service after two months of tweeting out uninspiring deals.

And while setting up an ancillary deals service might work for hyper-targeted audiences, your newspaper/search engine/social network/used car wiki is not Groupon. And it will never be Groupon.

@semilshah
Semil Shah

@alexia old days, we'd pay for content & get free ads. Nowadays, tables have turned.

about 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhoneRetweetReply

@zec
Zec

RT @kluoma: @alexia Groupon is an ad format.

about 22 hours ago via webRetweetReply

The Phosphor Reveal is one of the coolest timepieces I’ve seen in a long time. This is an extremely simple digital watch with a surprising trick: it shows the time by “flipping” little jewels from dark to light. The face is actually covered in little crystal nubs but some of the nubs can retract into the body of the watch and, in essence, disappear.

The watch contains a few hundred Swarovski crystals and uses a micro-magnetic mechanical movement to move them up and down. This model, made and sold by E-ink watchmakers Phosphor will be available on March 7 for an unannounced price.

Click through for a video.