OpenText this morning announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire London-based weComm, which offers cross-platform mobile application deployment software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to OpenText CTO Eugene Roman, weComm's technology supports the mobility strategy it debuted in 2010 with the introduction of OpenText Everywhere.

Three weeks ago, Google kicked off the Year of the Rabbit with a beta version of Chrome 10. Today, the company is launching a stable release of the upgraded desktop browser solution, which it points out comes with a speed boost that corresponds to a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance on the V8 benchmark suite. (see chart below)

Get it here, while it’s hot.

The browser comes not only with speed improvements but also a simpler settings interface (see video) and an extension of Chrome's sandboxing tech to the integrated Flash Player.

In addition, you can now quickly log on to the websites you frequent even when you switch computers by synchronizing passwords across all your Internet-enabled devices. You can also choose to sync bookmarks, extensions, preferences, themes and more.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just launched craigconnects, which he says is a long-term initiative to “connect and protect organizations that are doing good stuff”.

Newmark on the site’s homepage says craigconnects is “the biggest thing” of his life, and that he’s committing 20 years to the project, which will initially focus on non-profits and public service organizations that “get stuff done on a sustainable basis”.

To be clear, craigconnects isn't a fundraising or grant-making organization, but an entirely different beast with a big bold vision (getting everyone in the world together for the common good via the Internet). The overall purpose of the project is explained here.

It’s all a bit hazy if you ask me (the welcome message video, embedded below, didn’t quite help either) but who would like to bet against Newmark to turn something rather basic into something enormous using the power of the Internet?

E-book retailer Kobo has announced a new Series C round of funding. The company did not disclose the amount raised but said that the investments was led by a major institutional investor and previous investor Indigo Books & Music also participated in the round. Kobo previously raised $16 million in funding.

According to the release, the new funding will be used towards product development and international expansion with new distribution partners. Of course, one of Kobo’s main distribution partners, Borders, recently filed for bankruptcy. Kobo powered and developed a Borders’ branded e-bookstore and reader. Kobo assured users that despite the bankruptcy, Borders’ Kobo readers and bookstores would be fully operational.

Kobo most recently added social networking features to its e-reading experience, with the ability to earn rewards and post and share to Facebook.

Currently, Kobo offers 2.3 million e-books, has 2.7 million users and customers from over 100 Countries buy from Kobo every week. And Kobo says that hundreds of thousands of e-Books were downloaded per day during peak holiday periods. Other distributors include Samsung, Research In Motion and HTC. Kobo claims that there will be over 20 million Kobo-ready devices in market in 2011.

Of course, with Amazon and Barnes and Noble currently leading the e-book market, competition is tough in the space. And Apple also has its sights set on providing an e-book experience for iOS users.

On Tuesday, a San Diego-based startup Grid2Home raised $2.6 million in a new round with its previous investors, Granite Ventures according to a new SEC filing.

The company sells integration software and systems to: semiconductor manufacturers, smart device makers, utilities and automotive companies, currently. Its technology ensures that grid-connected devices — like smart home meters, and household appliances — communicate effectively with power providers’ systems, and vice versa.

Systems integration allows power providers to use the data generated by a wide variety of devices and different networks to deliver electricity more efficiently and economically.

According to The Smart Grids: A Global Strategic Business Report by the research firm Global Industry Analysts, the world market for smart grids overall will likely reach $186.7 billion by 2015, driven by increasing demand for electricity, policy and safety requirements that call for aged electrical infrastructure to be replaced with newer systesm, and by environmental concerns related to the development and use of more renewable sources of energy.

The evidence is mounting that Android phones are surging past the iPhone in terms of subscribers and now mobile ad impressions, at least in the U.S. A new report put out this morning by mobile ad network InMobi shows that mobile ad impressions on Android devices eclipsed Apple’s iOS devices in January, representing 37 percent of all U.S. mobile ad impressions on its network versus 23 percent for the iPhone.

Android’s share jumped a full 21 percentage points since InMobi’s last report in October, 2010. (Android actually passed the iPhone for the first time in December). The iPhone’s overall share of mobile ad impressions actually dropped 1.3 percent.

Obviously, there could be other things going on here, such as a preference on iOS for other mobile ad networks including Apple’s own iAds or more premium ads. InMobi only measures ad impressions on its own network. Although a majority of its 5.9 billion North American ad impressions in January (58 percent) came from the mobile Web rather than apps, so these numbers should be fairly representative. And 4.1 billion of those ad impressions came from smartphones, nearly double from October.

Globally, Nokia and Symbian OS phones still make up a larger share of InMobi’s ad network, with 20 percent and 18 percent share, respectively. The iPhone is third globally with 16 percent, and Android has 14 percent. Android’s share globally grew 8.6 percent since October, 2010, whereas the iPhone’s growth slowed to 1.7 percent.

One of the reasons a lot of big companies shy away from using open source software is because the plethora of open source licenses can make things confusing. The licenses themselves can be confusing, as there are a lot of grey areas with very little case law to help make things clear. Some open source licenses are compatible with certain other open source licenses, but completely incompatible with others. Of course, open source software does get used, intentionally and unintentionally, in a great number of commercial products, and I think we’re seeing more and more companies figuring out how to “Do The Right Thing” with respect to license compliance.

A report unveiled today at AnDevCon, an Android developer conference in San Francisco, raises some questions about the use and misuse of open source software in apps for both Android and iOS devices. OpenLogic, a company that advocates for and helps ensure the proper use of open source software, has run their OSS Deep Discovery license compliance scanner against a number of apps in both the Android Market and the Apple App Store and found a non-trivial number of license violations.

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Microsoft has teamed up with Psychster, a research firm that apparently specializes in “the psychology of social media”, to study how companies should use Twitter to address a site outage, unscheduled downtime or interrupted service. Provided Twitter is available, I might add.

Anyway, you can download the whitepaper here (PDF).

According to the collaborative study, people are increasingly turning to Twitter in the case of an online service outage, while companies often don’t know what to say, who should say it, and what the impact of all that ‘joining the conversation’ will be.

Microsoft Learning and Psychster conducted a multivariate scenario study (see survey) to explore how best to reassure users during an outage, and how tweets affect brand perception and support call center demand.

The results showed that half of the (120) respondents in the sample would consult a Twitter feed to get information about an outage, and that negative feelings about the downtime would reduce if they find out the responsible company seemingly cares enough to tweet about it.

According to the study, acknowledging an outage and giving an explanation also reduces users' likelihood to contact support – but only when the tweets were posted by an employee/social media manager rather than ‘the company’ or its executives.

What also helps reduce call center demand during outages: informing users about the breadth of the impact rather than stating whether it was a frequent or expected occurrence.

Facebook, Skype, Tumblr, Foursquare, WordPress and … Twitter: the whitepaper can be downloaded here. It’s free of charge, no registration required.

Mobile advertising continues to be a hot topic, with new startups cropping up everywhere lately. And now we have South East Asia- and US-based Chalkboard throwing its hat into the ring, a hyper-local mobile ad network for brick-and-mortar stores that want to increase their walk-in traffic.

Chalkboard’s goal is to boost the relevance of mobile ads, by bringing promotions to potential customers when they’re near the store. The way it works is extremely simple: business owners hoping to drive footfall traffic can let Chalkboard place targeted ads or real-time promotions in mobile apps (developers can integrate ads via a customizable API).

Setting up an account and entering a 160-character text for a promotion is enough to have it instantly appear in apps that are part of the Chalkboard ad network. The promotions then show up on the cell phone screen automatically when shoppers are within 1km or 1 mile of a store (when they are much more likely to actually walk in and make a purchase).

Users can click on the ads to view the promotion, access maps/directions or share the information with their friends on Twitter and Facebook. Here’s how an ad/promotion delivered via Chalkboard typically looks:

Customer heat map around a store:

Business owners can run an unlimited number of promotions (sent in via the dashboard, Twitter or SMS) to an unlimited number of users for a flat fee, which starts at $0.99 per day.

And the Chalkboard concept seems to work: the eponymous company says in 6 months, it has attracted 1,373 businesses in Singapore (via a combination of local retailers, shopping malls and credit card companies) and 1,170 businesses in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (where operations will start next month).

Chalkboard received an investment from Joi Ito’s Singapore-based Neoteny Labs fund and now plans to expand its operations to the US, right after SXSW 2011.

For the US market, Chalkboard says it already has a number of mobile app developers signed up to be part of the network. Most notably, the company has teamed up with Oecoway, maker of the popular Facebook app Friendly for the iPad (ads and promotions will be integrated in Friendly’s “Places” function soon).

See below for early screenshots:

Here’s the official Chalkboard company video:

Local mobile advertising network xAD has acquired the remaining assets of Go2 Media. These assets include Go2 Media’s direct-to-consumer business as well as the mobile web properties, brands and search sites of the company.

xAD says that with this acquisition, the mobile ad network will gain the consumer-facing content and traffic of go2 Media, expanding its reach to millions of new users. Go2 Media was led by CEO Dan Smith, former SVP of Product and Operations for 80108 Media, a local SMS business that merged with Go2 in 2007. Go2′s local advertising publishing platform assets were sold to Poynt earlier this year.

xAD, which recently raised $4 million in new funding and wants to be the “AdMob of Local,” offers a local mobile search and advertising network in the U.S. The company's patented mobile optimization technology identifies who, what, and where an end user is, and serves the most relevant click, call and check in based advertising.

For example, on the White Pages iPhone and Android apps, xAD will serve an ad for a local restaurant when a user searches for a restaurant within the app. The startup promises to return relevant ad results 80% of the time. Currently, xAD has more than one million local and national advertisers.

For xAD, the acquisition (which were assuming was below $1 million), is a reach play. Go2 will boost the consumer reach for xAD’s advertiser base.

Pixazza, a Google Ventures-backed photo tagging service that has been compared to an "AdSense for Images," has hit a major milestone today. The company’s in-image advertisements now reaches more than 70 million unique visitors per month, which is an 80 percent increase in reach in just five months.

Pixazza allows publishers to identify, tag and match products found within online images on their sites and then link them back to the inventories of Pixazza's network of advertisers. The service, which can be integrated in a site by adding a single line of code, allows consumers to browse the photos featured on a site and mouse over it to reveal information and pricing about similar products, and if desired, click to purchase.

As of last July, the startup reached 25 million unique visitors per month through its 75-plus publishers, which include US Weekly and Access Hollywood, and was serving 8 billion image views per year. Asof March 2011, the number of publishers in the Pixazza network has grown by 15 times, and Pixazza now enables images at a rate of 20 billion image views per year (Similar to the way that page views are used to measure web site traffic, Pixazza tracks image views, which count the number of times a web publisher serves a Pixazza-enabled image).

So why is Pixazza growing so fast? Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Pixazza, says the answer is simple. With three trillion images on the web, says Lisbonne, publishers realize that they can do more with images, monetize and increase engagement rates.

The startup, which has raised nearly $20 million in funding, faces competition from Image Space Media, GumGum and others.

Leading Chinese search engine company Baidu has led a $50 million financing round for Anjuke, a major real estate marketplace in China. Anjuke, which was founded in Shanghai in 2007, provides a platform that connects property buyers, homeowners and real estate agents to buy and sell secondhand properties online.

Anjuke last year also launched Haozu.com and Aifang.com to expand to property rental and new property sales, respectively.

The company currently boasts over 800 employees in 20 offices, and offers its service in 20 Chinese cities. Anjuke in a press statement says it will use the additional capital to invest in geographic expansion and R&D.

Matrix Partners China, which is affiliated with U.S.-based venture capital firm Matrix Partners, also participated in the round. Anjuke has raised $72 million to date.

Vringo, which offers video ringtones and personalization solutions for mobile devices, this morning announced that it has signed a (non-binding) Letter of Intent to acquire substantially all of the assets of m-Wise, a New York-based provider of enabling technologies for the mobile entertainment and marketing industries.

m-Wise provides a SaaS platform used by content owners and service providers to manage, deliver and monetize mobile entertainment, content and apps.

The platform is said to be used for over 300 applications across more than 50 mobile networks by a host of international content and media providers, powering over three million daily mobile service transactions worldwide.

According to the press statement, m-Wise has handled over one billion mobile transactions in the aggregate since it was founded in March 2000.

Its current customers include companies like Jesta Digital (formerly Fox Mobile Group), Thumbplay (just acquired by Clear Channel), Universal Music Group and others.

These m-Wise-enabled applications include content delivery services, ringtones, music, video, games, information services, alerts and advertising and promotions, all of which were developed and delivered from the cloud on a hosted basis.

For the nine months ending September 30, 2010, m-Wise reported sales of $2.1 million, gross profit of $1.2 million and a net loss (including non-cash, stock-based expenses and options accounting) of $0.8 million.

Vringo says it believes that the m-Wise acquisition will be cash-flow accretive with the potential to reduce Vringo’s overall burn rate in the first full year of combined operations.

Here are the terms of the Letter of Intent:

Vringo will issue m-Wise 1.9 million shares of its common stock, provide m-Wise’s management with a retention package comprised of options to purchase 500,000 shares of common stock, and assume and pay over a two year period certain of m-Wise’s expenses and related costs in the amount of $615,000.

Vringo will also issue a five-year promissory note for $320,000 convertible into 200,000 shares of its common stock for certain services provided in connection with the transaction.

Vringo provides a carrier platform currently deployed for international partners in six markets.

The company’s cloud-based distributed application architecture enables the carrier’s subscribers to browse and download mobile videos, set them as video ringtones and share them with friends.

Are you a MOG user in proud possession of a Sonos Multi-Room Music System? Let me make you a happy man or woman: US-based MOG users will have access to the company’s on-demand music service through Sonos later this spring, the companies jointly announced this morning.

With the addition of MOG, and recently Rdio and Spotify, the list of available music services is beginning to look like a very appealing offer for most anyone (the list also includes Last.fm, Napster, Pandora, Rhapsody, SiriusXM, among others).

MOG will offer Sonos customers high-quality sound, streamed at 320kbps, on-demand and ad-free, as well as its patent-pending “MOG Mobius” music discovery engine, which enables users to switch between “artist-only” radio stations or a full mix of similar artists.

The company says it will offer a 14-day free trial to all new and existing Sonos customers after which users can sign up for its $9.99-per-month ‘Primo’ subscription plan.

Immediately following their launch a few months ago, I noted that Beluga was my group messaging app of choice. I didn’t expect that to change leading up to SXSW — then Facebook stepped in and bought the service. When I first heard about it (when we broke the story), my heart sank a bit — another Facebook acquisition casualty, I thought. But Facebook immediately started saying that this deal was different, that Beluga would continue to be fully supported for the time being. And sure enough, today we get an update.

Specifically, the iPhone version of the app has gotten some final pre-SXSW polish today. It’s not a huge update, but it’s an important one. With the conference now just days away, competition in the group messaging space is really heating up. Both GroupMe and Fast Society have significantly overhauled their apps. Beluga needed to step up with some sort of update. And they have.

So what’s new in version 2.1? First of all, not surprisingly, Facebook Single Sign-On has been implemented. Secondly, there are now mute options to allow you to silence your pods for either 1 hour or until 8 AM in the morning. (And you can do this just for certain pods, or for all of them.) Third, the app now has a much better navigation system with the “Pods”, “People”, and “News” sections all broken up along the bottom of the app.

Hopefully we’ll keep seeing regular updates like this from the Beluga team into the future. But eventually, you have to believe that they’re going to have to get to work on their Facebook assignments (Groups and Messages). Let’s hope SXSW isn’t the last hurrah.

You can find Beluga in the App Store here.

If you are a group texting startup worth your salt, you’ve got to have a new app ready for the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin. GroupMe, Beluga (which was just bought by Facebook), Kik, TextPlus, and offshoots like Yobongo will all be strutting their stuff. Not to be outdone, Fast Society just pushed out a completely revamped iPhone app and an Android app will be coming out later today as well.

I recently visited the three-man team in the New York City’s Dog Patch Labs. CEO Matthew Rosenberg game me a demo of the new app (see video above). Instead of simply launching a group chat into SMS, it takes advantage of push notifications to bring the message stream into the app itself, much like GroupMe’s latest release.

The app is a vast improvement over the previous version. You can create up to five temporary or permanent groups with up to 25 people in each. The app let’s you chat, add photos inline, initiate conference calls, or share your location. Fast Society also offers some unique features such as the ability to record a short audio “Shout Out” like a group voicemail that gets sent right into the stream. It also lets you distinguish on a map between where you are and where you want to go.

Creating a new team is easy with the “rally” feature that sends out a prompt to everyone in an existing team. You can also share an invite out via Twitter or Facebook and then only let in the people you want to hang out with (I know, that could turn mean). There is also an archive feature, which lets you relive past group texting moments with your friends (it’s all kept server-side).

How is Fast Society going to break through all the noise? For one thing, it is offering free rides from the Austin airport to SXSW to anyone who downloads the app. The startup is going up against much better funded competitors—GroupMe raised $10 million and Beluga is now part of Facebook. Fast Society so far has only raised $275,000 in seed capital from Eniac Ventures, Quest VC, and hedge fund investor Jim Pallotta. Rosenberg says he’s been able to keep SMS costs under control by entering int an agreement with an SMS aggregator which charges a flat fee for unlimited texts instead of a penny or more per text. That should help Fast Society scale cost-effectively. Now all it’s got to do is win over those group-texting partiers at SXSW and beyond.

This past weekend, I saw the film The Adjustment Bureau. It’s an entertaining movie — not great, but sort of fun and interesting. The plot (and I’m not giving anything away that the trailer doesn’t) involves a man who stumbles upon a shocking reality: he’s not in control of his destiny. Instead, there’s actually a secret group, the Adjustment Bureau, that runs the show behind the scenes.

The story is actually a somewhat rehashed one in movie lore (The Matrix, Dark City, etc). And it’s even older in the science fiction realm (this one is loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick). But reading over the blogosphere the past couple of days, I feel like I’m still watching the movie. It’s as if some people on the web truly believe that Facebook is this Adjustment Bureau. Increasingly, they control the network, and thus, our lives, and maybe even our fate.

So while we’re all having this discussion about Facebook Comments, let’s be clear what this is really about: Facebook. It has very little to do with the actual commenting side of things. That’s becoming more and more apparent.

(For a good discussion on the actual commenting angle, see Laura June’s editorial tonight on Engadget. She makes several excellent points, many of which I agree with — though maybe not for TechCrunch, specifically.)

The fact is that Facebook Comments are just the latest extension of the fear of the growing power of Facebook. This backlash seems particularly heated because the comments are seen as spreading over parts of the web previously free of the Facebook Bureau’s reach, like TechCrunch.

The reality, of course, is that this is bogus. Facebook sharing buttons have been on this site for years, just like everywhere else on the web. (If we sold out, we did it years ago.) This commenting situation is perceived as different because it’s more directly being tied to visible identity and is being forced upon the very, very small percentage of TechCrunch readers who ever actually leave a comment.

The truth is that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes here. Some people hate the commenting system because they don’t use Facebook and prefer to login through another method (they apparently don’t use Yahoo either). Others hate the system for deeply conflicted reasons related to who they work for or who they invest in. And still others hate the system because they alter the time-honored tradition of (perceived) anonymous commenting on the web. Yadda, yadda.

The common thread shared by every one of these groups is the same: they’re all scared shitless of Facebook.

Again, the underlying notion is that Facebook is the Adjustment Bureau and out to get us. This is nothing new, every few months there’s some level of Facebook backlash during which dozens of very loud people threaten to quit the social network — and never quite seem to. This undercurrent of paranoia is hardly exclusive to Facebook: Microsoft, Google, Apple — they’re all evil and out to screw you depending on what day it is and what article you read. But the sentiment seems the strongest with Facebook. And it’s clear why: they’re currently winning.

At first, I too thought this latest episode was simply about wanting the option to log in with Twitter or Google. But now I’m really not so sure. Those were going to be offered by Facebook, but I suspect that wouldn’t have been good enough. People still would have been screaming bloody murder because it’s Facebook. It’s fascinating. People really are afraid of them.

As frequent TechCrunch contributor Steve Cheney wrote in his own post on the matter:

And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.

What Cheney leaves out is that this is also exactly what Google and just about every other tech company large enough hopes to do. How do I know? Google CEO Eric Schmidt has matter-of-factly said it numerous times. In fact, his vision may even be a bit more extreme than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s.

But the cold hard truth is that Facebook is getting all the attention because they’re they ones in the best position to make this actually happen. And again, that scares the crap out of some people.

My immediate reaction is that this is sort of silly — especially because this will naturally shift in a few years (if not sooner). And if Facebook were to do something to screw their users over, those users would just leave. Facebook is not actually the Adjustment Bureau. But hey, who am I to tell people what to be paranoid about?

While we’re on the subject, I thought it would be fun to also address some of the other conspiracy theories about the Facebook comments on TechCrunch. I’ve already seen a few references to this being a decision made to bolster traffic. Here’s more or less the way this decision was actually made (which I know, because I was there):

MG: Facebook has been talking to us about maybe being a launch partner for their new commenting system.

Mike: Oh really? Will it be hard to implement Vineet? [our lead engineer]

Vineet: Nope, it will just take a few minutes.

Mike. Cool, let’s do it.

Yep, it really is that simple. No layers of AOL bureaucracy. No TPS reports. No extensive testing. We do it live.

And, as we’ve said from day one, that may mean switching things up again. We’ll see. It’s just fascinating to watch the blogosphere twist itself into a knot over such a seemingly small thing. Right now, if you want to comment on TechCrunch, you can to log-in with Facebook. Or if you don’t like/have Facebook, you can use Yahoo. That’s it. No biggie.

But it’s very clear it’s not a small thing to at least .5 percent of you reading this right now. And certainly not to those that see the Facebook Bureau approaching in matching fedoras.

[images: Universal Pictures]

I had a conversation today with a colleague to discuss our SXSW Interactive strategy. My coworker figured, rightfully, that SXSW would be a shitshow and that maybe we should use one of the much talked about group texting apps to stay in touch. I only “use” one group texting app, one that I covered for TechCrunch, and thus suggested GroupMe. My colleague said that he liked Beluga better and that we should use Beluga. And then he hesitated, “Hmm … Well maybe we shouldn’t use Beluga because what if Facebook ‘does something to them’ ?…”

!!! This is the hyper-techy microcosm that we live in, where you’re scared to use a budding app to communicate with co-workers during a conference lest a company “do something” to it. And what? You end up looking uncool?

While there’s no way I’m going to ever be the ideal use case for Group Texting (… the new “Location Based”), because it necessitates having more than one friend, I can’t really see the big problem it solves. Or rather, I have no idea why there are tens of tens apps in in the space.

Also, I have no idea why a SXSW breakfast with Guy Kawasaki is presented as a prize, but the email promoting it has miraculously found its way to my inbox, along with a bunch of nonsense “VIP” events sponsored by non-tech companies and a ton of pitches from a bunch of startups that just confuse me by their reluctance to say what it is they actually do, lest someone out there clones their killer app before their plane hits Austin-Bergstrom.

A follow through on one of these pitches leads you down an inbox rabbit hole where seven emails later you figure out it’s a Group Texting app but the founders don’t want to reveal that just yet because they don’t want anyone to copy them.

“Then why pitch to the press so early?” “To build “buzz” before SXSW.” Geez. Geez.

While I wouldn’t miss it for the world (Rachel Sklar and I are moderating an incredibly worthy and industry relevant core conversation here), SXSW creeps me out, if simply because it makes otherwise sane people act so silly.

But this SXSW 2011 Influencers Guide, a mashup of Plancast and some shady thing called Socmetrics, is the epitome of why I’m already sick of SXSW four days before it’s even started. Mainly because it reminds me that we’re now viewing each other as “influencers” and have somehow stopped looking at each other as “people” — I didn’t study so hard to get out of high school just to be faced with a whole ‘nother high school as an adult.

And I just RSVP’d in a panic to some super-duper VIP thing while writing this, so trust me, I understand the allure of hobnobbing with the tech snobs and am not immune. But at the drunken end of the SXSW day proceed with caution: You almost never want to be a part of the cool kids, because they’re not the ones actually getting anything done. I promise.

Video: Alex Blagg

If you’ve seen the name Nyoombl before, it’s for one of two reasons. First, it’s a really weird way to spell a word that sounds like “Nimble”. Or second, they launched at DEMO last spring as one of the 65 startups. At the time, they were working on a dead-simple solution for videoconferencing on your television. But that space is both tricky and now crowded with the likes of Cisco. So about five months ago, founder Oladayo Olagunju decided it was time for a don’t-call-it-a-pivot-pivot. He decided to take what he had learned about the video conferencing space and transfer it over to a new, unexplored area. And his team has been working hard on this new Nyoombl ever since.

But it’s not ready yet. And Olagunju is reluctant to share much about their plans until it’s ready. But here’s what we do know: it’s going to be a completely new service that’s a sort of hybrid of Skype and YouTube. In other words, it will allow any two people to take a video conversation and share it with the world, for all to see on the web. But think: debates and interviews, rather than straight up chats. “We are a broadcasting technology company, not a communications tool,” Olagunju says.

Bigger picture, Olagunju says that the aim is to breakdown the walls that you see around the majority of important conversations being had today on places like cable television. “We hope to bring the entire notion of a studio setup worth millions of dollars and compress it into a laptop,” he says.

And he has some good people advising him on how to do that, including entrepreneur Adam Rifkin, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, and venture capitalist Lara Druyan. Nyoombl has also received funding from one ex-Facebook executive, though Olagunju declines to say who just yet as the round isn’t fully closed.

Nyoombl plans to start inviting a very limited amount of people to try out their service shortly, you can sign up here. Olagunju says that they’re going to take the roll-out slow so they don’t overwhelm the servers with all the video streaming required to make this work. For now, you can sign up here.

Nyoombl is currently a team of three people working out of Palo Alto.

It’s a problem as common as it is ugly: between your television, Blu-Ray player, surround sound tuner, cable box, and DVR, you probably have at least three remotes sitting on your coffee table. And then there’s the elaborate list of steps required to get each component working properly (don’t forget to set the tuner to HDMI2 before firing up the Blu-Ray!) The associated headaches have spawned an entire industry of super-remotes like Logitech’s Harmony devices. But what about the mobile powerhouses we’ve already dropped hundreds of dollars on — shouldn’t our smart phones be able to control our home entertainment systems?

That’s the promise of Peel, a Santa Clara-based startup that is looking to help you take control over your entertainment system using your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or (soon) Android device. The company has just launched its first product — the Peel fruit —  that retails online and in the Apple store for $99. Check out the videos below for an interview with the startup’s founders.

The plastic ‘fruit’ essentially acts as a middleman between your phone/tablet and your television components — Peel uses a Wifi connection to relay commands from your phone to the ‘fruit’, which then blasts the appropriate infrared signals to all of your hardware devices. You control everything — be it a channel change, or swapping between different content sources — using a free Peel application for your phone. The application includes a visual guide of the shows that are available (you see thumbnails with each show’s logo), and you can customize the app so that it only recommends shows you’re interested in.

Because of the way Peel works you’ll need to position the fruit device in a place where it can ‘see’ all of your components, which means you’ll have to place it several feet in front of your TV set (and possibly in plain view). It’s not exactly inconspicuous, but it could probably pass as some sort of tribal macaca.

As with similar universal remotes, setup isn’t painless (you can watch a demo of the process in the video below). After firing up the app and connecting the device you’ll be walked through a wizard designed to automatically figure out the remote codes for all of your components. But there’s some trial-and-error involved, and if you have numerous components, the process will likely take at least ten minutes. That said, there really isn’t a whole lot Peel could do to make it easier.

Peel has promise, but the mobile application itself is still pretty early. It currently allows you to browse your shows using a slick, visual interface that lets you flick between show listings on your phone or iPad, but only when you’re watching live cable — it doesn’t have deep integration with your DVR or media streaming devices. It can still control these components, but it switches to a generic browsing mode that relies on gestures: instead of showing thumbnails of available content, you essentially navigate through menus the way you would using the arrow buttons on your remote.

However, Peel has some deals in the works that will improve the situation for some users. It has signed a partnership with TiVo that will allow the app to visually navigate through shows you’ve recorded to your DVR, and it plans to launch Netflix integration in Q3 2011.

The application will also gradually add more social features, like the ability to tell friends what you’re currently watching. Here, it will face plenty of competition: IntoNow, yap.TV, Comcast’s Tunerfish and others are all trying to add a social layer to the TV experience.

Recently funded by Y Combinator, Like.fm is a way to keep track of and share what music you’re playing. Right now the service uses a Chrome, Firefox and Safari extension to automatically track what you’re listening to on YouTube, Pandora, Rdio, Meemix, Grooveshark and Earbits and a desktop client to track what you’re listening to on Winamp, iTunes, MediaMonkey or Windows Media Player.

Founder Chris Chen says that its emphasis on song tracking is what separates the Like.fm from streaming services like Last.fm and music buying networks like Apple’s Ping (which he describes as “a step above adding share buttons to the iTunes store.”) says Chen “Like.fm isn’t meant to be a destination music site, it’s meant to be a place to find songs that you like. It’s not meant to be a Pandora but a compliment to it, it’s a place for sound discovery, where you go and listen to music.”

At the moment very barebones and work-in-progress (there’s a lot of “Coming Soon” on the site) Like.fm uses Facebook Connect to automatically follow your Facebook friends on the service.  Through the Top Played chart on your Dashboard the service allows you to track the songs most played by people you followed and lets you play songs by linking to the corresponding video on YouTube (if it exists).

On a Like.fm profile you can view a Summary of the top songs a user has listened to, their entire song History or the songs they’ve set up to listen to in the Queue. Users can also easily download all their play history.

Aside from letting you comment on songs and manually share/recommend links, the service also lets you set up Auto-Share to Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm for songs that you rate at four or five stars on iTunes or Windows Media Player (Chen says that in-app rating should be coming in the next couple of weeks).

Chen hopes to eventually add more robust recommendation features like Songs You May Like, based on stuff your friends have listened to that you haven’t heard. He also hopes to build a mobile version soon and add better data visualizations like custom charts of your chronological music listening history, “I’d like to create charts of the YC Class, and what days they listen to music the most. You can guess what time people sleep by the music they play, with the YC class I’m guessing it’s probably around 5am.” That sounds about right.

Apple’s retail stores are well-known for their clean layout, product-first mentality, and obsequious staff. Though they stock things like iPod cases, printers, and so on, the focus has always been on Apple’s devices, and may soon be even more so, as it appears a fair amount of software and peripherals will be taken off the shelves to make room for more Mac-focused space. It’s an interesting indicator of the Apple ecosystem endgame.

After all, Apple is positioning itself as not just a maker of quality computing goods, but the gatekeeper and distributor for everything you purchase, be it media, software, or accessory — even in the “real world.” The iPad is a magic window into an Apple-controlled marketplace; why shouldn’t Apple stores be the same way?

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Last week, as we rolled out our new Facebook Comments system, we noted that two useful options were pulled at the last second: Twitter and Google login. And today brings more proof of that: the code still exists and works in the comment plugin itself!

As dug up by Inside Facebook, a simple line of JavaScript can add back in the option for users to log-in with their Google and Twitter credentials from the Facebook Comment widget. And you can also enable MySpace and OpenID logins as well. In other words, many of you could get your wish, and be able to use something other than Facebook or Yahoo logins to comment on TechCrunch.

But not so fast.

As Inside Facebook also notes, even when the options are enabled, errors are thrown on the other side of the equation. For example, Twitter login can’t find the page it need to successfully OAuth you in. But it does look like Google is working, for now. I suspect that will end in 3, 2, 1…

The main issue remains: Facebook cannot come to terms with their rivals to be able to work together to enable this functionality. And while the code remains (probably “just in case”), either or both sides could and would kill it in a heartbeat even if we enable it.

That Yahoo remains an option is interesting. As Josh Constine writes, “Yahoo's inclusion in the Comments Box could be a repayment for this favor, a sign that Facebook doesn't consider Yahoo a threat, or the result of it signing some terms or deal with Facebook.” Number two would be the most humorous (and, sadly, true), but it’s likely number three. Remember, Yahoo has gone all-in with Facebook, unable to do the social stuff on their own.

I’m curious if having the Google/Twitter/MySpace/OpenID options in the Facebook Comment box would alleviate some of the uproar over this system? That data would still be touching a service run through Facebook, so I suspect many still wouldn’t like it. But it would enable some of the trolls could more easily leave comments again, so there’s that.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on some of this.

Cute kittens and toddlers may be YouTube’s bread and butter, but Google’s video portal needs more than that to encroach on the goliath that is cable TV. But instead of shelling out for the rights to premium content from cable networks, YouTube is hoping it can nudge its existing community toward making high quality videos.

Today the company has confirmed that it has acquired Next New Networks, a firm founded in 2007 that focuses on producing high quality original video content for the web. Alongside the news, YouTube is announcing ‘YouTube Next’, a team of experts (made up by many of the NNN team, no doubt) who are setting out to “supercharge creator development and accelerate partner growth and success”. In other words, YouTube is going to give certain partners access to a team of experts that can hopefully help them produce better content. YouTube’s pending acquisition of Next New Networks was first reported by the New York Times in December.

From the YouTube blog:

In fact, the number of partners making over $1,000 a month is up 300% since the beginning of 2010 and we now have hundreds of partners making six figures a year. But frankly, "hundreds" making a living on YouTube isn't enough and in 2011 we know we can and should do more to help our partners grow.

The YouTube Next initiative sounds good on paper, but it’s not really clear how YouTube is going to be able to scale the program to make it useful to more than “hundreds” of partners.

Last year YouTube launched a Partner Grants Program that allows promising content creators to receive an advance on their future ad revenue so that they can invest in making videos with higher production values. And it gave a $1,000 credit to 500 partners late last year to buy new video equipment.

But both of those programs revolved around money, which scales. This YouTube Next team is about expertise — YouTube will be contacting partners that it believes could use some help, and will send in its team of experts who can offer tips on YouTube’s platform and the kind of content that tends to do well online. This training will be free, but, again, only select content partners will get access to it.

YouTube says that Next team will be global, but it isn’t saying how many people will be involved. Beyond this partner training, it sounds like YouTube will be launching further grant programs under its Next brand.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The strategic partnership between Microsoft and Nokia, announced in February, was regarded as auspicious by some and desperate by others, yet some specifics of the agreement were largely a mystery until today. Most notably, Microsoft was rumored to have led the partnership with hundreds of millions of dollars, outbidding Google (!) to woo the once-magnificent Finnish giant. Considering Google’s sights are increasingly set on the low-cost phone market, it’s interesting that they didn’t just write a blank check. Or maybe Nokia didn’t want to appear to be flattened underneath the Android machine. Either way, Microsoft won out in the end, and the settlement paid has been reported by Bloomberg to be over a billion dollars.

Considering the sums involved in control of even a small segment of the mobile world, a billion doesn’t even seem like much. But it is, of course, a billion dollars. The question is: even at that price, did Nokia sell itself short?

Continue reading at MobileCrunch…