Search-targeted advertising network Chitika  reached a settlement this week with the Federal Trade Commission over illegally tracking consumers behavior online. According to the FTC, Chitika allowed users to opt out of having cookies placed on their browsers and receiving targeted ads, but unfortunately, Chitika’s opt-out only lasted 10 days. After this period, Chitika continued to track these consumers’ behavior on the web even though they opted out. This took place from at least May 2008 through February 2010, says the FTC. Chitika says this was an unintentional error in their tracking systems.

How much was it worth to Chikita to flaunt the privacy rules? Not much. Chitika tells us that it earned an estimated $0.55 from the users who requested to opt out but were tracked starting ten days after their request instead of ten years. Basically, their claim is that this was totally accidental and not a way to create more revenue (illegally) for the network. Chitika's cookies track search history and sites visited but the network says no personally identifiable information is collected – the cookies contain no information on a user's name, age, gender, etc.

The FTC settlement not only bars Chitika from obviously doing this again, but also requires that every targeted ad include a hyperlink that takes consumers to a clear opt-out mechanism that allows a consumer to opt out for at least five years.

The FTC also mandated that Chitika destroy all identifiable user information collected when the defective opt out was in place. In addition, the settlement requires that Chitika alert consumers who previously tried to opt out that their attempt was not effective, and they should opt out again to avoid targeted ads.

Chitika says that since March 1st, 2010, Chitika's opt-out cookies have been set to last for ten years, which is twice the length required by FTC regulations. While the ad network didn’t profit from the error, the fact is that they broke a law by illegally tracking consumer behavior without their consent. And Chitika seems remorseful enough: "Obviously, it would be incredibly stupid of us to intentionally break the rules of online privacy over a million dollars, much less fifty-five cents," says Chitika CEO Venkat Kolluri.

But the FTC has been broadly cracking down on ad networks and web sites that track consumer behavior without consent, most recently calling for a “Do Not Track” system for websites. Perhaps Chitika only deserved a slap on the wrist, instead of a public flogging.

Exclusive - Footbo, a provider of interactive sports sites and applications, has raised an additional $2.5 million from Pitango, the Israeli VC firm who has now invested about $4.5 million in the startup. Footbo announced the financing round as it formally launches its latest venture, 11Runs, a new fantasy baseball game.

The new initiative is Footbo’s latest move as it vies for a leading position in the world of fantasy sports – the site complements the company’s 11Kicks (‘real’ football, which Americans call soccer) and 11Rush (for the sport Americans, in turn, call football) websites.

11Runs basically enables fans to play fantasy baseball in quick weekly competitions and win cash prizes. The site features integration with social networks, allowing users to sign up using their Facebook, Twitter or Yahoo profiles. Users can also post updates about their winnings directly to social networking services to brag to their friends.

The company is set to release an accompanying iPhone application early next week, and is also working on a custom application for Android handsets.

Footbo was founded in 2007 by co-founder and CEO Mani Honigstein. The company originally started out as an online social community for football lovers from across the globe.

People love to take pictures of their food, especially with their mobile phones. And like all things mobile, apparently this activity started in Japan. “Most social networks have been inspired by East Asian tech trends,” declares Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi on this episode of Founder Stories (watch the video). At least that is where the idea for Foodspotting came from when her co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski was visiting Japan and noticed everybody snapping pics of their food with their phones. Now Foodspotting geotags those pics and lets you share them with your foodie friends.

Darabi, who started out as the manager of digital partnerships and social media for the New York Times , talks about how Foodspotting got started, its mission to help “the world discover great dishes,” and some of its recent traction. The company recently raised $3 million, now has more than 650,000 downloads of its iPhone app alone, launched an Android app, and its website traffic doubled in January. (This interview was taped in February before SXSW).

In the video segment below, Darabi and host Chris Dixon talk about her earlier role at the New York Times, social media in general and consuming news via Twitter versus a newspaper. (Note that here Vivian Schiller reference was made before Schiller resigned from NPR earlier this month). “I still drink the Kool-Aid, I love the Times,” she says. Dixon says he gets all his news from Twitter.

Nokia CEO (and former Microsoft executive) Stephen Elop has told Reuters that the mobile phone giant has begun work on the first smartphones based on Microsoft’s software.

The tidbit of news comes about a month after the Finland-based company announced the partnership with Microsoft along with a series of management and organizational changes.

Nokia’s chief executive, who transitioned to that role after leaving his position as president of the Microsoft Business Division, also commented on speculation that Microsoft might lodge an attempt to acquire Nokia:

I’m not aware of a strategic interest that Microsoft would have in the rest of the business.

To the extent that a partnership has been formed around what they’re really interested in, then what would an acquisition bring other than a good year of anti-trust investigation, huge turmoil, delays?

Elop said he hopes to produce a Nokia-Windows phone by the end of this year, although we might have to wait until well into 2012 to really start seeing the fruits of their labor.

It better be worth the trouble: Nokia’s decision to dump its software platform in favor of Microsoft’s unproven Windows Phone software already wiped 29 percent off its share price.

PayPal has quietly released a mobile application for Nokia devices on the Finnish mobile phone maker’s Ovi Store marketplace, a tipster points out.

Indeed, while I can’t find the app from where I’m searching (Belgium), other TechCrunchers in the United States can find the app just fine (see screenshots above and below). I’ve also tracked down blog posts from eagle-eyed bloggers in France and Italy.

The application is free, but apparently lacks support for displaying in landscape mode and consumes an excessive amount of RAM according to some early users.

According to the blog posts linked above, the application functions much like its iPhone, Android and BlackBerry siblings: you can use it to send money, manage your account, split a check and transfer money to your bank account.

From what I can gather, the app was made available on the Ovi Store earlier this week with very little fanfare. I’ve asked PayPal for confirmation as they have yet to effectively announce the existence of any mobile applications for Nokia handsets, and requested a list of countries in which the app can be downloaded from Nokia’s Ovi Store.

It is important news for an obvious reason: Nokia remains the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones with a global device market share of 31% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

PayPal, meanwhile, says it supports more than 94 million active accounts in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world.

Screenshots of the app – in French – below courtesy of Blog-n8.fr.

As a modern man whose dreams and ambitions have been charred to a cinder by the vagaries of time and circumstance and whose life has been reduced to hours of overtime interspersed with a few moments of stolen sleep and, if my ulcerous stomach can handle it, the sweet oblivion of drink, I find myself drawn to this iPad app, called Nursery Rhymes Storytime. It allows your neglected child to read any number of nursery rhymes to themselves or, if you have a properly powerful device, you can read the rhymes to them as they turn the pages. While the cold, unyielding glass of the iPad is little comfort to a toddler just learning to love, I suppose, in a small way, it’s better that they learn that most of their human contact will soon be mediated through metal and circuitry as they drift farther and farther into isolation, never to return even as your boots finally crunch up the drive on the morning you’re laid off from the job that tore them from you in the first place, your arms open for that hug at last and you find them lost to you forever.

Click through for video.

An app called MyWi allows you to tether your iPhone or iPhone 2 without AT&T’s explicit permission, a situation that has led the carrier to send a stern letter to tetherers requiring that they stop tethering or automatically be added to a $20/month DataPro plan.

Read more…

A while ago I wrote about how neglected the sports vertical was online, given the largest properties are mostly the same portals or online versions of old media sites that were launched in the late 1990s. It turns out another macho-content vertical is even more neglected– cars.

Quietly, a company called HighGear Media is building a pretty impressive business. It’s raised $12 million from top consumer Internet investors Accel and Greylock and the management team is riddled with ex-Yahoos. Similar to Bleacher Report‘s approach with sports, HighGear Media operates 100 different sites, staffed by more than 350 staff and freelance writers from around the world.

In January, the network of sites had four million unique visitors– growth of 36% year-over-year. That makes it one of the larger auto content sites, and sub-sites concentrating on green cars, electric cars and family cars are surging between 50% and 110% year-over-year.

CEO Matt Heist stopped by the studio to talk about why this vertical is still so wide open and how auto blogs are different than other content sites.

Video below.

Millennial Media’s monthly mobile report is out today, giving us a view into how each OS and manufacturer is performing on the mobile ad network. Millennial, whose ads reach 90.3 million users monthly in the U.S.; reports that for the third month in a row, Android continued to lead iOS as the largest Smartphone OS the network with over half (51 percent) of all U.S. mobile ad impression share (which is around 21 billion each month) in February. This is actually down from 54 percent share in January.

iOS followed with 27 percent of mobile ad impression share, which is decrease of 1 percent. RIM followed with a 14 percent impression share, which is up 3 percent from last month. According to a recent IDC report, Millennial is the third largest network behind Google AdMob and Apple’s iAd, so data shared on Millennial’s network is certainly indicative of the state of mobile advertising.

Millennial actually expanded its connected device platform stats this month, which measures impression share on tablets, gaming consoles and other connected devices. In February, iOS accounted for 80 percent of ad impression share with Android trailing far behind with 17 percent of the impression share. Millennial accounts Android’s presence in the category to growth of the Samsung Galaxy Tablet.

Generally, Connected Devices increased 56 percent month-over-month in February and accounted for 14 percent of the Smartphone, Feature Phone & Connected Device Impression Share. Clearly, tablet devices are becoming a growing platform for advertising as more consumers buy iPads and Android tablets.

Apple topped the list of leading device manufacturers on Millennial’s network, with 28 percent of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share in January, an 8 percent increase month-over-month. Android smartphone manufacturer Samsung grew 50 percent month-over-month to reclaim the number two position on list, passing HTC, which took 11.35 percent of share.

In terms of actual devices, the iPhone took the top spot with 16.75 percent share. But Android manufacturers Samsung and HTC also performed well in terms of top mobile devices on the ad network. Samsung had three new Smartphones enter the Top 30 Mobile Devices ranking in February and HTC had seven devices on the list with a combined impression share of 10 percent. HTC actually passed RIM (6 devices) this month in terms of the number of devices on the Top 30 list. In total, Android devices accounted for 19 of the Top 30 Mobile Devices, up from 16 devices in January.

Touch Screen devices grew 4 percent month-over-month, with approximately 59% share of impressions in the February Device Input Mix. This growth, says Millennial is largely attributed to Smartphones accounting for 25 of the Top 30 Mobile Devices.

Millennial’s report also included a few unique stats this month. For example, the network examined the impact of the Verizon iPhone, which was broadly released in mid-February. Millennial says that the Verizon iPhone represented 4.5 percent of all U.S. iPhone impressions on the network in the first two weeks following the launch. We’re told AT&T’s share is “considerably higher.”

In terms of carrier distributions, each of the four major U.S. carriers having an impression share of 10% or greater on Millennial’s network. Verizon accounted for largest share, with 20% of the carrier impression share, followed by Sprint with 13 percent of impression share in February.

Android’s share of ad impressions actually dropped slightly this month, which shows just how much of a competitive race there is between Android, Apple and even RIM for share. As we heard recently from Nielsen, because RIM and Apple create and sell their own smartphones with their operating systems, these companies are actually in a better position in the three-way race (in terms of device manufacturers).

The SXSW interactive and technology programming has just ended and the music festival is getting underway. The interactive portion featured hundreds of panels inside the convention center. But much of the action, networking and fun took place in the streets of Austin. As MG Siegler wrote, maybe “people should just show up in Austin next year and not even go to the actual conference.” If you did that this year, here’s what you might have seen.

In between our interviews, we sent our TechCrunch TV videographer John Murillo and his Canon 7D out to capture the sights and sounds of SXSW – the food, beer, games, and parties. SXSWi was a very fragmented event. In many ways, it was an 100-ring circus, with each participant having a unique experience. Share you own experiences and links to your videos in the comments.

In case you missed them, check out some of the interviews covered by TCTV:

• GroupMe’s founders at their grilled cheese stand
• Inside Zaarly’s RV van
• Keynoter and science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling
• Keynoter and star of “The Guild”, Felicia Day
• Snarky post and interview with Jake Gyllenhaal and the director of “Source Code”
• The directors of Press, Pause, Play
• Steve Jang on the iPhone app, SoundTracking
• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land on Search
• StumbleUpon’s Garrett Camp
• Senator Al Franken on Net Neutrality and Facebook
• John Biggs walks the SXSWi trade show floor
• Meet the guy who bought the 1st iPad2 at the Apple pop-up store

We’ll also be releasing several more in-depth interviews on our weekly show “Keen On.”

There aren’t many startup founders that have done what Garrett Camp has done. After selling content discovery service StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million in 2007, Camp and investors decided to buy it back for a reported $29 million in 2009.

After the initial Series A that was folded back into the spinoff, Camp raised $17 million from August Capital, Accel, and others in a Series B just last week, making StumbleUpon the most rare of comeback success stories.

Thus far buying yourself back after an acquisition is a feat that’s only been accomplished on a large scale by Webshots (which bought itself back from Excite@Home and resold itself to Cnet) and TicketFly, formerly TicketWeb, which bought itself back from TicketMaster and proceeded to directly compete with its former owner.

I sat down with Camp during SXSW to talk about the process of reacquiring your company, what he plans on doing with the StumbleUpon’s rare second chance, and which startup he likes better, StumbleUpon or Uber (of which he is a co-founder).

Highlights:

On the motivation behind the acquisition: “A desire for flexibility. I think bigger companies require more approvals, it takes longer to get stuff done. So I thought we would grow a lot faster if we were a smaller company.”

On the advantages of being part of a larger company: “The great thing about eBay is that I could totally focus on product, totally focused on engineering, I didn’t have to deal with fundraising, I didn’t have to deal with all the operational issues you have at a company. Because I was focused on that we actually grew really well. We tripled in size during out time there. We were there times bigger when we left than when we came in.”

On whether he’s more excited about StumbleUpon or Uber (the company he co-founded with Travis Kalanick: “That’s like saying ‘which is your favorite kid?’ I mean that’s hard to pick. Uber was basically a side project …”

Advice to other founders that find themselves bored post acquisition: “The decision you want to make is ‘Do you want to keep working on what you’re working on?’”

Pulling a phoenix from the ashes is that simple, except when it’s not.

CoolPlanetBiofuels — a company that converts grass, woodchips, and other non-food crops and farm residue into high-grade fuel — attracted a series B investment From Google Ventures, the companies revealed Thursday.

Based in Camarillo, Calif. CoolPlanet claims its biofuel products are not just net zero, but “negative carbon fuels,” because the byproducts from making and using them can sequester carbon, and therefore act as a soil conditioner. Converting cellulosic plant material into gasoline could help the agricultural sector by creating demand for non-food crops, and potentially new jobs in rural farming communities.

The investment represents Google Ventures’ first foray into biofuels. CoolPlanet was previously backed by North Bridge Venture Partners, and GE Energy Financial Services in an $8 million series B round. Google Ventures did not disclose the amount it invested into the round.

(Company representatives did not respond to a TechCrunch query as to how much money went into their series B investment by the close of business on Thursday.)

How bad are things at the once-mighty Digg these days? Not so good. It’s been months since Digg relaunched in August in a quest for relevance. They had 18 million unique worldwide visitors that month according to Comscore. That dropped to just under 12 million in January, a 33% drop in just five months.

Everything official coming out of Digg says things are great and that a the company will find a way to success. But everyone knows how unlikely that is. Even, it seems, founder Kevin Rose.

He’s barely even using the service anymore. There was one 22 day period in December that he didn’t submit, comment on or even “digg” a single story.

Over the last 30 days, he’s only had seven actions on Digg, less than one action every 4 days. He hasn’t submitted a story in over a month, on February 13. You can see his account here. It’s not much better with CEO Matt Williams, although he manages to Digg, comment or submit a story about once a day on average.

In stark contrast, Rose is very active on Twitter, running up 181 tweets in the last month. He’s 26x more active on Twitter than the company he founded.

There isn’t much chance for Digg to ever turn things around if the senior team, particularly Rose, aren’t even using the service any more. A sad fate for a once mighty startup.

I am currently in Austin at SXSW 2011, but mentally absent: I was at Tokyo airport on Friday to fly off to Texas, on my way to the gate, when the earthquake hit Japan (where I am based). As everybody knows by now, the quake marked the biggest disaster in Japan’s history after WWII, leaving thousands of people dead, wounded or homeless. After 6 years of living in Japan and being there when it happened, I, too, am devastated.

The Japan delegation for SXSW Interactive consists of about 10 people, and in the light of what was and still is happening in their home country, everybody toughed it out, took part in their panels and did a great job. (I know because I got a ticket at a later date and luckily was able to moderate two panels related to Japanese tech and speak at another one. I was too late to attend the first Japan panel.)

One of the speakers, Takahito Iguchi from Tonchidot (the company behind mobile app DOMO), says that the idea was to show the world that Japan won’t give up in the light of the disaster and to send a signal of encouragement back home. And what’s more, literally all of the speakers’ companies quickly reacted and started to collect donations for the victims of the disaster.

Just a few examples:
Iguchi and another SXSW speaker, Ryo Shimizu (CEO of Tokyo-based tech company Ubiquitous Entertainment) decided to not leave SXSW after their panels but rather cooperate with the event organizers to collect donations from attendees – who thankfully donated thousands of dollars so far (here is Shimizu’s very personal blog post about the earthquake and SXSW 2011 for the Japanese delegates).

Eiji Araki from GREE, Japan’s mobile social gaming juggernaut, says users of his platform donated over $2 million so far by buying special virtual items. That’s about the same number another SXSW panelist, Tak Miyata from Mixi (Japan’s largest real-identity social network) is reporting at this point. (More information on Japan’s SXSW delegation and their efforts to “save Japan” can be found in this article in the New York Times).

These are pretty impressive efforts, but if you now ask yourself how you can help Japan, here is a quick list of links to make it easy:

• SXSW4Japan
  (You can donate via credit card or PayPal even if you’re not an attendee – $69,000 have been collected already. Follow #SXSWcares or @SXSW4Japan for updates.)
• American Red Cross
  (All donations go to the victims of the earthquake in Japan.)
• Salvation Army
  (same as American Red Cross above)
• Japanese Red Cross Society
  (bank transfer only)
• Google Crisis Response
  (You can use Google Checkout to donate to the Japanese Red Cross and other organizations.)
• Text “Japan” or “Quake” to 80888 to donate $10 (Salvation Army)
• Text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to donate $10 (American Red Cross)

You can find a larger list of earthquake relief options here.

Video service Ustream has seen an interesting six months, between broadcasting the Chilean miner rescue, the news feeds of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the debut of the Charlie Sheen show and the news surrounding the Japanese Tsunami and earthquake last Friday. VP of Marketing and Communications Lynn Fox tells me that the service has seen unprecedented growth, and hit 10 million total broadcaster signups at the end of February, averaging a rounded 20% growth month over month since December.

According to Quantcast, Ustream’s monthly unique viewers are 60 million across the entire network. Vistors to the Ustream site have grown from 18 million in January to 25 million in February, and are on a trajectory to grow 10% on the 25 million to 27.5 million in March. 174,000 broadcasters signed up in the past month alone. (I’m still waiting for word on how many of those are active users.)

Fox also tells me that revenue was also at all time high and that Ustream has had nine straight quarters of growth — at 45% average growth month over month. Fox would not tell me whether the company had yet achieved profitability.

Fox attributes the service’s upswing to combination of good content choices, product improvements and increased awareness. Future plans include, “Improving what we already have, and continue to improve platform monetization with Pay Per View and Ad Free and other services.” Ustream monetizes through a combination of advertising, pay per view, ad free and conference production services.

Ustream, which has $87.8 million in funding, revamped its mobile app (combining both broadcasting and streaming capabilities). It also recently announced that all 4G Verizon Android phones will be bundled with Ustream as well, further increasing potential for mobile distribution which grew 77% from January to February.

Most recently the news surrounding the Japan earthquake brought in record numbers of viewers, apparently people flooded Apple stores on the ground in order to watch the news on the service. On just the day of the quake Ustream hit 7.2 million views due to all of us who were glued to the stunning and terrifying imagery on the streams, an audience greater than Sheen’s antics and greater than those who watched the Chilean miner rescue.

“We’re pretty big in Japan, so people in Japan were watching Ustream and people outside of Japan were watching Ustream and people were sending social stream messages through Ustream to look for people. Just like people are using Twitter individually as a medium to do that,” said Fox.

Watch me and my three chins walk through the SXSWi trade show talking to all sorts of exciting people including GroundLink, Animoto, and Volusion. Fast forward to 5:15 to see me talking to a giant, mute penguin!

The tradeshow at SXSWi is always a bit small – the real action happens at the panels – but it’s an interesting collection of established brands and up-and-comers that made it worth a walk-through. It’s a bit long, be warned, but 17:00 brings us a cool technology from Japan and 20:00 in brings us Kinect Robot Boxing. Regardless, if you want to see, as Kyle said, “an old Michael Cera” walk the show floor, this is your video.

A lot of the talk surrounding SXSW this year has reminded me of one of my favorite skits from IFC’s show Portlandia. It starts off with a guy peering into the window of a bar and telling the locals inside how much he loves the place. The next day, he comes back to the same bar and sees some new guy in a buttoned-up shirt sitting there. ”Aw come on — a guy like that is hanging out here? This bar is over,” he declares.

Likewise, SXSW is over. Or is it?

Depending on what you read or who you talk to, this was definitely the year that SXSW jumped the shark. In fact, I think we even declared it over before it even began. What was once a conference that was hip, now attracts the guy in the buttoned-up shirt — therefore, it’s over.

The truth is that this is at least the third or fourth year in a row that someone has declared the conference to be “over.” But a funny thing keeps happening each subsequent year: SXSW keeps getting bigger. And even those that declare it over keep going back. And that has led to my favorite kind of backlash: backlash against backlash. A number of posts over the past few days have now declared that saying “SXSW is over”, is over.

This was my fourth year in a row going to SXSW. I already outlined some of my initial thoughts about this year’s conference yesterday — and yes, they were pretty cynical. We’re now seeing a rush of data pointing to which of the group messaging services “won”. But those graphs, based on tweets and other transient forms of information, are a stretch at best. At worst, they’re simply promotional content for another breed of startups — the startups that track the chatter about startups on other startups.

And that’s fitting because again, to me, there was no clear winner of anything at this year’s SXSW beyond the promotional stuff — and maybe the iPad 2. Believe me, I tried looking for more of a story than that. For that one big trend. I failed.

But don’t mistake my cynical tone for a declaration of doom for SXSW. It might be “over” in the sense that I no longer get much out of it, but I’m no longer the key demographic. The truth is that the conference has simply evolved. And the conference organizers need to tap into that evolution.

The fact of the matter is that SXSW is now far too large for it to be an insidery show where a handful of tech hipsters (the people who already hang out with each other in San Francisco or New York City all the time anyway) decide what’s “cool”. It is no longer the “spring break for geeks” that it once was.

SXSW is now a full-on trade show. There were something like 20,000 attendees at just the interactive portion of the show this year. That’s supposedly bigger than the music and film aspects — combined. And that shouldn’t be too surprising given that SXSW makes most of its money from the interactive portion and all the sponsorships and pass sales that come along with it. This year simply showcased that more than ever.

The overall conference atmosphere is now more akin to a CES or a Comic-Con. But this was an awkward growth year for SXSW because unlike those larger trade shows, there wasn’t a lot of actual news coming out of Austin. Even the majority of the startups that chose to launch there did so the week leading up to the conference.

SXSW is going to have to fix that going forward if they want to continue to enjoy the press coverage that they have in previous years. Or they won’t, if they don’t. (Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing in my view, by the way — but they love the outside promotion as much as they love the promotion going on inside.)

Instead, this year you had us writing about how insane the marketing was. And we were interviewing people in an attempt to try and squeeze something newsworthy out of them. It’s why the biggest story of the conference wasn’t actually a real story at all: Google’s “Circles” social network, which was rumored to launch but then was almost as quickly debunked. We were all looking for something. Anything.

The model that worked when the conference had 1,000 attendees is now stretched far too thin. Dozens of panels were added over all different parts of Austin because the enormous convention center isn’t quite enormous enough anymore. And instead of everyone staying at the Hilton or the Courtyard Marriott, many people were shacked up in places that were more than a drunken stumble away — in some cases miles away.

Everything just felt fragmented — including the apps that did try to launch there. There was simply too much going on for what was initially conceived as a smaller show. This year was like watching a mouse trying to give birth to an elephant.

But then again, some people loved this new SXSW with 30 percent more of everything. I spoke with a number of attendees who couldn’t have been happier with the experience they had. The main takeaway there? The networking. Because there are so many like-minded people from all over the world hanging out in one city, connections were fast and furious.

Oh, and the drinking was better than ever before. Last year, the economic downturn seemed to directly affect the beer taps in Austin. This year, the beer flowed like wine.

But all of this doesn’t really speak to the conference itself, just the surrounding ecosystem. In an ecosystem, bigger is often better. But from a conference perspective, that’s not always the case. Sometimes bigger is just bigger.

Maybe the takeaway is that people should just show up in Austin next year and not even go to the actual conference. After all, that’s what many people do for the music part of it.

Or maybe SXSW should branch out to other cities at other times of the year — though, admittedly, the name would be pretty silly then. SXSW-W, anyone?

Or maybe SXSW should change nothing at all. The current model is still clearly working for them. I’m sure this was the biggest money-making year yet. And I’m also sure that all of us who are now saying it is “over” will be back again next year — and back complaining about it being “over”.

As Portlandia has taught us, at some point, “everything’s over!”

As a result of the ongoing tragedy in Japan, in particular the threat of meltdown or catastrophic radiation release from the Fukushima nuclear power plants, there has been a renewal of the discussion of nuclear power and its risks. As a tech site that occasionally covers scientific research in this area, and has a whole section dedicated to “green” technology, I thought we should at least touch on the subject, though of course to delve more deeply requires expertise we obviously lack. That said, I just want to put down a few words regarding the safety and development of nuclear power.

I feel we must be careful to maintain in this area the most powerful weapon we have in the rest of the tech world: a strong disinclination to cleave to common wisdom. We’re a community of early adopters, entrepreneurs, and creatives — let’s not fall into the traps of fusty prejudice and common misconceptions. We don’t do it when we talk about the internet, so why should we when we talk about something as serious as the future of our power infrastructure?

Continue reading…

If you’ve ever worked on a big music or video project you’ll probably love Gobbler immediately. Just don’t get too excited – it’s still in early beta and for now all they’ve released is their audio product. The company first debuted publicly at the Launch conference last month, but seems to have attracted almost zero notice from the press until now.

But users have definitely noticed Gobbler. Feedback on their first project is so intensely positive, says CEO Chris Kantrowitz (who cofounded Gobbler with his sister, former MySpace exec Jamie Kantrowitz), that the company is accelerating plans to support video. It should be here by summer.

So what is Gobbler? First it’s desktop software that keeps your media projects organized. Gobbler will locate all of your projects across your various internal and external hard drives, and then keep track of them. Even when you disconnect that external drive, Gobbler knows the project is there and keeps showing it in the file system. That alone makes Gobbler incredibly useful for people who keep grabbing new hard drives to store their terabytes of photo, video and audio projects. Do you even know where all your photos are? I don’t. A lot of them used to be on Flickr, but my pro account lapsed and Yahoo is holding them hostage until I pay up. But that’s another story.

Second, Gobbler will back up your projects to their cloud, powered by Amazon Web Services. And it’s also hyper intelligent. When a new version of a project is created, for example, Gobbler knows it only has to upload, and restore, the tiny number of files that were changed. In a multi-gigabyte project (as we regularly see for TechCrunch video projects), that’s a really big deal.

Finally, Gobbler lets people collaborate on project much more easily than before. FTP just isn’t a good solution for sending 5 gigabytes back and forth. It and other online solutions are so cumbersome that people often just fedex actual hard drives. It’s easier, and quicker.

But the way Gobbler manages and stores data makes it all a lot simpler, at least after the first upload/download. In fact, the more people are collaborating and sending files back and forth, the quicker Gobbler becomes because most of the files are already on all the various user computers and in the cloud. Chris explains:

When whole projects have to be sent back and forth between collaborators the only thing being sent are new and updated files. How does this work? If you and are are working together and i have shared the my project with you. you have downloaded it you make a bunch of data and want to send it back to me. There is a high likelihood the other thing that has changed is data in the source project file. When you go to send the project back to me we will upload the new or changed data only. The efficiency is the cloud sits in the middle and knows what is contained in each project AND Gobbler knows what is being stored locally. So it can reassemble projects via data which is found locally and in the cloud. Here is where it gets really neat. Let’s say had a bunch of files from a previous project you were using with a whole new project you incorporate those old files in the project and add a bunch of new ones… when you go to send this project all you will be sending is the new stuff, gobbler will see the fils as having already been in the system and will note that they are associated with the new projects as well.

It all seems like common sense, of course, and startups like DropBox have been smart about not re-uploading redundant files for online storage for some time. But as far as I can tell, no one has been so intelligent about file management on both the upload and download side. The fact that Gobbler is desktop software makes all this possible.

The company also (carefully) compresses audio files to ease bandwidth issues. They use open source FLAC for compression, and have added their own metadata layer that follows projects/files around the Gobbler ecosystem. They plan to expand the types of metadata they’re storing to include deeper information about the project for long term archiving, says the company, using standards like the METS schema.

All in all this is a really useful and tidy product that may become indispensable to the 6 million music makers, 12 million pro and prosumer photographers and 3 million videographers out there in the world. We’ll almost certainly be using Gobbler as soon as the video product comes out, and I may use it personally for photo management.

The company quietly raised, but never announced, $1.3 million from Dave Goldberg, Sky Dayton and Tim Wyatt in January. They’re raising a new round immediately to help deal with all the user demand, they say, and to speed development of the video product.

As an aside, this is just another example of how amazingly efficient platforms like Amazon Web Services are. Once you’ve properly built your product it just scales effortlessly as users flock to the service. In the old days it would have taken tens of millions of dollars on the operations side and many months to scale quickly. I wonder how Friendster would have turned out if they hadn’t crashed and burned as they tried to deal with too many users.

As Groupon pursues its plans for an IPO, it’s proposed valuation keeps on going up. First it was $15 billion, now it’s $25 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg. Remember, it was only in January, 2011 that it closed a $950 million venture round at a valuation just shy of $5 billion.

What’s going on here? Is this yet one more sign of Internet valuations getting out of hand—dare I say the “B” word? One of Groupon’s venture investors, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, doesn’t think there is a bubble. At a press dinner last night in New York City, we were discussing valuations in general and he pointed out that Groupon is now doing “multiple billions of dollars in revenues.” To be fair, Horowitz was in a roomful of bloggers and journalists trying to pin him down on a number and he was hemming and hawing, but he seemed to be referring to expected 2011 revenues. I take “multiple billions” of dollars to mean more than $2 billion, which was the annualized run-rate back in December. (Update: Bloomberg Businessweek puts Grupon’s revenues at an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion this year). Compare that number with the $760 million in revenues for 2010 reported by the WSJ and you get a sense of its growth. Remember also that Groupon is only two years old. The faster the growth rate, the higher the valuation.

But this isn’t only about valuation, it’s about ego. At $25 billion, a Groupon IPO would nudge Google to become the largest venture-backed IPO ever. Yup, the same Google which offered to buy Groupon for only $6 billion last December as well. And that sounded crazy. An IPO at $25 billion would be as much about taking Google’s mantle as anything else.

The key to the valuation is not so much revenues as it is profits, and right now Groupon seems to be wildly profitable, supporting the salaries of thousands of sales people and other employees, and expanding across the globe. The number thrown out yesterday was 5,000 employees. Groupon’s revenues are split with the local merchants who offer discounts through the service much like Google splits AdSense revenues with participating Websites. So the local merchants take at least 50 percent of the revenue off the top. What’s left is still an extremely high-margin business that has managed to bridge the divide between online and local commerce in a major way for the first time.

Local commerce is a huge chunk of the economy, and whoever brings those businesses online successfully could arguably be tapping into a market as big or bigger than online search advertising. At least that’s what Groupon’s prospective bankers will be saying when they try to convince investors to buy the IPO.

But there is a huge catch here. Nobody, not even Groupon, really knows how big it can become or how long it can sustain its 50 percent revenue split with merchants. If the size of the U.S. economy alone is $14.7 trillion, how much of that is local? I don’t know, but it’s enormous and any dent in bringing even the smallest fraction of those local businesses online in terms of advertising could mask problems in the underlying model for some time.

When a small business like a restaurant puts out a Groupon offer for 50 percent to 70 percent off a meal, it gets flooded with new customers, so much so that many businesses can’t deal with the foot traffic. But that is all just marketing dollars in the forms of discounted services. It’s lead generation for local businesses. But how many of those customers come back to pay full price? There is no good way of measuring that yet. And that is going to be the key to Groupon’s long-term valuation, whether or not it is creating repeat, loyal customers for merchants or just a stampede of deal-hungry coupon clippers.

You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them. Those screamingly pompous email footers that IT departments append to millions – billions? – of emails every day, urging us to “Consider the environment!” before asking “Do you really need to print this email?”

I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that they are literally the most antisocial human innovation since McDonald’s started giving away chewing tobacco with Happy Meals.

Worse, they’re so utterly pointless: never once in the – what? – two decades? – the messages have been plaguing our inboxes has a single soul ever heeded their message and considered the environment before printing. Most people don’t print emails, and those who do, do. There is not a single tree still standing because some Dilbertesque corporate responsibility dickhead had nothing better to do with his time than to lecture total strangers on their obligations to mother earth.

Enough is enough.

For me, the final straw came a few weeks back when my publisher emailed me and I noticed that they too had been infected. Seriously, the IT department at Hachette – a company that has as its business model the decimation of forests in the pursuit of knowledge and entertainment – was urging me to think twice before using a couple of sheets of A4.

“Please consider the environment. Do you really need to print this email? “

No, I thought, but I will now, Just to spite whoever wrote that footer. What’s more, just because I have too much time on my hands, I updated my own email footer…

–
Paul Carr

http://www.paulcarr.com

Fuck the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.

As it turned out, I’m not the only person to be frustrated by enviro-preachy email footers. The very first person I emailed after making the change decided to tweet about it…

Shortly afterwards, someone mentioned it on “Quora” (whatever that is). Steadily, friends and strangers alike started getting in touch asking if I would mind them adding the text to their own email. Of course I wouldn’t mind. This morning I received an email from Mike Arrington, and wouldn’t you know it…

–

Michael Arrington

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-arrington

http://techcrunch.com/

Screw the environment. Please print this email immediately. And then burn it.

And so the idea is slowly spreading – mutating into slightly-more-SFW variations at it goes. But I want it to spread even further.  I love the idea that eventually the world being divided into two camps: one camp with its pompous “Think before you print” auto-footers, and a rival camp with the “fuck the environment” equivalent. If enough of us embrace the latter, we could even win this thing.

So, for the sake of human civilization, I urge you to join the fight. Update your footer right now and help us take back our inboxes from the footer fascists. And if you work for a big company’s IT department… well… go on… you know you want to…

 

Update: Turns out Mike has been irked by preachy email footers since 2008.

I’ll be the first to admit that I thought the 3DS would be a gimmicky also-ran. I followed the handheld console from E3 to a hands-on at CES and now with the device in my hands I can report that Nintendo will have a hit on their hands.

The 3DS is the DSi grown up. The UI is highly polished and there are a number of interesting features including a “suspend mode” for games that allows you to drop into Nintendo’s communication and photo interface to take pictures and send notes. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Nintendo was trying to create a lifestyle device a la the iPod Touch, a path they’ve hinted at in the past with the DSi.

At age 15, most normal people are going to high school, learning to drive, not listening to their parents, and doing things that they’ll later tell their kids not to do. Josh Buckley is not a normal teenager. At 15, he was selling his first company for just over six figures.

Today, the 18-year-old entrepreneur and angel investor has partnered with 17-year-old engineer Tyler Diaz to co-found MinoMonsters, a social game in which players collect and battle pet monsters.

According to Y Combinator Partner Paul Graham, Buckley and Diaz are the youngest pair of founders it has ever accepted into the fold. What’s more, to put the icing on the Millenial entrepreneurs’ cake, Buckley told me that the startup just hired Apple’s youngest engineer. (But cannot yet reveal his name for legal reasons.)

As for the game: MinoMonsters is basically what Pokemon would look like if it were started today. The company that Buckley sold when he was 15, Menewsha, was an online community that produced customizable avatars. MinoMonsters’ impressive graphics owe their style both to Buckley’s prior work with avatar animations as well as the renderings of Pokemon and Japanese anime.

Of course, the ambition of the young dictates that not only does MinoMonsters pay homage to the style of the Japanese media franchise, Buckley said that he sees Pokemon as a direct competitor, “We want to take on Pokemon … They were one of the huge brands at the start of the decade, but their strategy has stayed with the declining console market, where as we are focusing on social and mobile.”

As such, the social game allows you to adopt and name various pet monsters, after which you can embark on quests across the game’s virtual world, battling your friends’ monsters to earn pieces of gold. You can then use this currency to buy different items, like potion to improve your health. You can also invite friends, and share your conquests on Facebook.

There’s a great voice-over (that sounds like it’s narrated by some martial arts-hardened Japanese actor) and interactive tutorial that will walk you through the game’s backstory and teach you how you how to develop your different attack moves.

Over the last few years, Zynga has proven that social games are no longer played only by kids, so MinoMonsters is making an effort to offer deeper content and more detailed character bios (than, say, Pokemon), hoping that enriched features and the game’s availability on a number of different platforms, will encourage people of all ages to join. Initially, Buckley and Diaz launched MinoMonsters as a website-only project, but Facebook Founder Jesse Eisen … er … Mark Zuckerberg, Buckley told me, convinced them to port the game over to the social network, which they were able to do in less than a week. Obviously, if you get a personal invitation from Zuck, you can’t turn him down.

The startup soft launched last month and has been growing quickly since. Within a week, the game had amassed 25,000 players, and today the site’s data shows that it has just under 95,000 active monthly users. The startup has already raised money from Y Combinator, and Yuri Milner and SV Angel’s Start Fund. And the company is currently in the process of raising another angel round.

When asked if he had any advice for aspiring young entrepreneurs, Buckley said that young guns should surround themselves with “brilliant people and other entrepreneurs. Trust your gut and learn from the experience of others”, he said. “It’s a deadly combination”.

Amen.

MinoMonsters is currently available at its website and on Facebook, and a mobile app is in the works. TechCrunch readers can visit this splash page to get 5 free bonus points.

While its not magic, it’s close to it – Pixelate 2.0 landed in the iTunes store today. The app, which is yet another step towards the future, allows you to try out colors of paint on your walls, or clothes or what ever you’d like to change the color of by selecting an image, selecting a color and and gradually using the UI to paint one color over the other.

With Pixelate you can either grab images from your phone or snap a picture, choose a color from the Color Matrix or by selecting one from an image. Once you’ve decided on what you want to replace and with what, use the Update Image button to automatically paint over the colors selected. It usually takes a couple of iterations of color selection to cover the whole wall.

Select Erase to erase away any color spill over and select Paint if you’d like to manually color in smaller areas through touch. You can then send the final product to someone via email, or save it to your photo library.

While you need at least some artistic talent to use the app to its fullest extent, Pixelate is a lot easier than picking paper color samples and eyeballing it. The Pixelate 2.0 iteration has added a new algorithm that allows for the more optimized coloring in of clothing (etc) functionality. You can now also use Zoom to drill down into color selection as well.

And because everything nowadays has filters ala Instagram, Pixelate 2.0 lets you turn your pics Sepia, Blur them, use Color Splash and yes, Pixelate!

You can buy the iPhone/iPad app for .99 cents in the iTunes store here.

Earlier today, Mike Butcher over on TechCrunch Europe gleefully reported that the UK had beaten the US in creating an entrepreneur/startup visa.

One of the organizations credited with helping the British Government in crafting the terms of the Visa was Seedcamp, an early-stage micro seed investment and mentoring programme, not hugely unlike a European YCombinator.

As someone who has been – to say the least – cynical about the future of tech entrepreneurship in London, I was keen to find out more. And who better to ask than Seedcamp partner Reshma Sohoni, who joined me via Skype to explain what this means for London tech, and whether it represents a genuine step forward for European entrepreneurship.

Video below.