After talking to Conan, and CNN’s Piers Morgan last night, Biz Stone made an appearance on another mainstream media show today: Howard Stern. You can access the interview here.

Unlike many of Stern’s interviews, this one was PG-rated. One of the most interesting tales revealed in the interview was the backstory behind Facebook’s offer to acquire Twitter back in 2008 (the story is at the 16 minute mark in the interview). As we know, Facebook reportedly offered Twitter $500 million to acquire the company in the fall of 2008. Biz tells Stern that he showed up at work one day and Twitter employee Jason Goldman (who is no longer with the company) told him that fellow co-founder Evan Williams was waiting for him downstairs in a car.

When Stone got in the car, he had no idea that the two co-founders had a meeting scheduled with Mark Zuckerberg to talk about the acquisition. In the car ride to facebook, they casually talked about a possible price, and Stone threw out the $500 million number, which they agreed would be a starting place in acquisition talks. When they got to Facebook, Zuck entered the meeting room and took the only single chair in the room, forcing Biz and Ev to share a small love seat. Talk about intimidating.

He said it was awkward from the start. Biz was trying to throw jokes around, and each joke died. “It seemed like he had twelve people in his head,” explains Biz, “He was prepared for every scenario.” Zuck told Ev and Biz that he doesn’t like to talk numbers, but if they told him a number he would say yes or no. The $500 million price was thrown out and Zuck responded with “that’s a big number.” Eventually Biz says there was an offer of a mix of cash and stock but when Ev returned to the office that afternoon, he wrote Zuck a note that they were flattered by the offer but not interested in selling. And the rest is history.

Other tidbits from the interview included the story behind how Twitter was formed within Odeo, why Biz is known as Biz (he couldn’t pronounce his first name Christopher as a child, and said ‘Biztopher’ instead) and that he takes a salary (that isn’t terribly large). He also said that Twitter needs to add the ability for people to add a comment to retweets.

The entire interview is around 45 minutes but it’s pretty entertaining if you have the time.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Back in February 2010, Google announced its plans to build out a fiber-optic network for a city in the United States, promising connection speeds around 1Gb/s — 100 times faster than the broadband most people are used to. The announcement led 1,100 cities to apply, and today Google has just announced the winning city: Kansas City, Kansas.

For you lucky Kansas City residents, Google has launched an informational page outlining what their plans are (it also provides some background about Google itself). The site’s FAQ says that Google hopes to begin building the network by the end of the year and that service should begin in the first quarter of 2012, with plans to roll out to all communities in Kansas City. Once the service is live pricing will be “competitive to what people are paying for Internet access today” though Google hasn’t yet named the plans.

Dont be too depressed if you happen to live somewhere outside of Kansas City, though. In the video below announcing the news, Sergey Brin says, “That’s why we’re rolling out to communities, starting with Kansas City, that are going to give one gigabit of access to every home.” So it sounds like we’ll be hearing about more community launches in the future. And hopefully Google’s roll-out will put pressure on major broadband providers to speed up their fiber roll-outs.

Last night I caught up with Intuit founder Scott Cook and Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint who know runs Intuit’s personal finance group. I whipped out my iPhone and did an impromptu interview. Cook and Patzer talk about where growth is coming from at Intuit, how it tries to encourage entrepreneurism, and the “payment graph.”

Cook is really excited about SnapTax, the TurboTax iPhone app that lets people do their taxes by snapping a picture of their W-2 forms. The same OCR technology will soon be baked into the company’s upcoming GoPayment apps for accepting checks via photo. Patzer came into Intuit through the $170 million acquisition of Mint. Cook knows the value of injecting entrepreneurial DNA into the larger organization, and he tries to foster that spirit throughout Intuit.

Since Intuit bought Mint, it’s kept on growing from 1.7 million to 5.6 million users, and gradually it is being connected with hooks into Intuit’s more established products like TurboTax and Quicken. Off camera I asked why doesn’t QuickBooks offer a similar service to help businesses visualize and organize their expenses like Profitably does with QuickBook’s APIs, and Patzer agreed, “That is something that should be in QuickBooks.” (That is just his opinion, he doesn’t run QuickBooks).

In the video, Patzer imagines a Mint-like service which suggests deals on business services to QuickBooks users. Patzer goes beyond that and talks about the idea of a payment graph which tracks relationships between businesses and how much they are paying each other. Before the video, he told me: “People talk a lot about the social graph and interest graph. One third of the economy goes through QuickBooks in terms of businesses invoicing other businesses. Each invoice contains a connection between vendors, suppliers, and customers, and also the price of that connection. Representing the payment graph is huge opportunity and something no other company can do.” At it’s core that is a very interesting idea—to map out business relationships based on payments, with the strength of each tie determined by the flow of money either way. I wonder if it would look anything like social influence graphs that look at who retweets and @replies whom.

It is clear that Intuit is still extremely product focussed. I asked Cook what is more important to nail down first, the product or the business model. For Cook, product always comes first: “If you’ve got delighted customers, you can figure out downstream where the money is. If you don’t have delighted customers, stop. Don’t go there.”

FuzeBox, the developer of an online meeting software, is launching its multi-party HD video conferencing technology for the iPad 2 and Android devices. Previously released in private beta, the software had been updated with support for more devices, an improved user interface, and more multimedia sharing and annotation options.

As I’ve written in the past, Fuze’s video technology provides a WebEx-like conferencing service that allows users to share screens and run meetings online. As opposed to its competitors, Fuze promises a sleeker more lightweight interface that incorporates HD video. I’ve tested the technology out multiple times, and not only is Fuze easy to use, but there is little to no latency and features high video quality.

With the debut of video capabilities in the newest version of the iPad, Fuze has updates its own technology to support the device and has also added a few bells and whistles. The multi-party conferencing, which works for up to 10 participants, includes support for multimedia sharing (documents, presentations, videos and images), real-time annotation within the conference and activiate a laser pointer within meetings.

The company is also introducing French and Spanish support and more international toll-free numbers. And what makes the meeting application unique is that it works across all major platforms including Macs, PCs, iOS devices, and Android tablets.

While Fuze has a somewhat unorthodox past, the company has made a big met on video conferencing and meetings software recently, which could pay off with enterprise customers. To date, Fuze has been awarded 23 patents around telephony and collaboration with an additional 42 pending.

Fuze is also offering TechCrunch readers 5 VIP Fuze Meeting accounts (a value of $210). The first five readers to email techcrunch@fuzebox.com will receive a free account.

Microsoft has had its share of executive departures lately. The latest one to exit the software giant is Mich Mathews, senior vice president for Microsoft’s Central Marketing Group and one out of only two women on the company’s senior leadership team, reports AdAge.

Here’s why this is rather big news: Mathews has been with Microsoft for 22 years and currently oversees more than $1 billion in ad spending and marketing efforts for consumer brands such as Windows, Bing and Xbox.

According to AdAge, who spoke with Mathews about the news, she announced her retirement last night to company execs after making a decision to leave the software company over the Christmas holidays.

Mathews started working with Microsoft in 1989, and for nearly four years worked with Microsoft as a consultant in the UK before switching to a full-time role in 1993. By 1999, she was named an officer of the company, and rose all the way to the top.

She will now be helping Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, to whom she reports, and chief executive Steve Ballmer find someone to replace her when she steps down next Summer.

Mathews reportedly plans to take a break and then start ‘chapter two’ of her career, although she doesn’t have a new job lined up yet.

This isn’t exactly the first high-profile departure at Microsoft in recent times.

Microsoft also lost Bob Muglia, the president of its server and tools business, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, the head of its business division Stephen Elop and both J. Allard and Robbie Bach, who headed its Entertainment and Devices Division.

Japan’s telecommunications juggernaut SoftBank, the third largest mobile carrier of the country, had to register quite a lot of damage after the big earthquake that hit Japan on March 11. 3,800 of SoftBank’s base stations were knocked out, meaning no customer in the affected areas could make or receive calls via cell phones (the situation was similar with other carriers).

But it turned out that this damage wasn’t the main concern of SoftBank’s president and founder Masayoshi Son (pictured above). After visiting Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato in his prefecture on March 22 and seeing the real damage done, Son promised his company will offer free cell phones to all children who became orphans due to the earthquake.

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Not a fan of infographics? Be gone!

For I felt compelled to share with you this infographic made by the folks over at Webhostingbuzz, visually showing how fast the Internet has made its way to the people of this world in the past 15 years – and how fast the Internet has become in some parts of it.

Here’s what stood out for me: the United States leads the world in broadband penetration, with Americans consuming way more gigabytes per month than Europeans or people in Japan and South Korea.

The United States only ranks 30th when it comes to downloads speeds, however, thus trailing countries like South Korea, Latvia, Andorra and the Republic of Moldova. Surprisingly, downloads speeds in the US still surpass those in the UK, Canada, Australia and Israel.

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster) a VC at GRP Partners. He blogs at BothSidesoftheTable

I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

In the initial phases of any new market you’re developing a product (hopefully with a minimal set of features), getting feedback from customers, refining your product based on user feedback and then re-launching your product. Rinse & repeat. Nobody really knows whether or not the idea is yet going to be big, so I believe in not over capitalizing too early. This benefits you, the entrepreneur. It’s the whole basis of my investment philosophy, which I call “The Entrepreneur Thesis.”

I believe that over capitalizing companies too early often favors the VC. It takes options off of the table. It produces only one kind of outcome. It drives perverse incentives.  If you’re creating truly innovative products, you often have no idea whether the proverbial dog will eat the dog food. You have a hunch. Testing is what helps determine whether you’re really on to something.

In the late 90′s I saw a dangerous trend creeping into the startup world, which was that companies were suddenly raising huge amounts of money too early in their existence. It seemed to be purely speculative. It’s not clear that there was big customer demand for some of these products yet entrepreneurs were egged on by VCs to “take the money” and try and push the market. I was a victim of this kind of thinking. “If my competitors have raised $40 million then I need to in order to keep up.” This is total bullshit.

Here’s what those VCs (and us entrepreneurs, myself included) didn’t understand: 9 women can’t make a baby in a month.

Markets develop for a complex set of factors that are often beyond all of our control. It is often the fortuitous mixture of new technologies, customer awareness and then acceptance of the technology and then the slow adoption into our daily lives that leads to markets exploding.

Often the timing of this is luck. And one of my favorite sayings is that “being too early in a market is the same thing as being wrong.” Throwing more money to speed up market adoption very seldom produces results. Yet it tempts us all. And it seems to be creeping back into startup culture of late in a worrying way. Great product ideas (and even potentially great companies) are being thrust at us in an attempt to go more quickly.  I recently read this anecdote in the press (I won’t mention the company name because I actually really love the concept, but it’s not too hard to figure out). Talking about whether to raise more money or not, their VC allegedly said to them:

“If you had more capital, could you get to the future faster?  Will (many more) millions help you get five years into one?”

9 women. Baby. Month. You can’t get 5 years into one. That’s falling prey to the “mythical man month” line of thinking.

Over funding often produces bad behavior in early-stage companies. You hire people too fast, you over build your products, you try to force market adoption and you do PR blitzes before your product is really ready for prime time. And having too much money certainly raises board expectations that you will do big things quickly. No board is going to give you $25 million up front and then expect your year-one staff expenditures to be $2 million.

I would argue that the father of the lean startup movement might actually be Bill Gross as he talked about in this interview I did with him on “why your company needs to be 10x better than your competitors to win” in your market. And I believe that strength of the Y Combinator movement in America has been exactly this: take incredibly talented technologist who have a passion for an idea, let them launch it and let’s see what they produce and what the market reaction to this product will be. It’s interesting to me that two of the most talented tech leaders of our era – Bill Gross & Paul Graham – have both opted for a model of incubation to encourage young tech entrepreneurs to build disruptive businesses.

The moment that you have a product that seems to satisfy the needs of a large enough market you enter what startup people like to call “product / market fit” characterized by the rapid acceleration of customer demand and therefore adoption. This is the so-called “tipping point.”  It is at this point that your startup needs to consider “going fat.” In fact, not going fat at this stage can also cause problems. Once you’ve woken up the sleeping lions (e.g. Facebook, Google) to a large market opportunity then you had better have enough resources to compete.

Some of the best new companies of the past several years seem to stay lean until they figure out their product / market fit. Twitter took a few years until people (or the company) really understood how to use it effectively. I’d hate to see what Twitter would have become if they had started with $50 million. Quora is one of the better designed new products of the past few years in my opinion. And they seem to have been going really slow in building out the team and you certainly don’t see a ton of too-early PR blitzes from them.

Those of us that espouse “lean startups” often do so from personal experience. We made mistakes ourselves that proved to us that you can’t make markets move faster than they inherently want to just by throwing more resources at them. Those of us that are willing to admit that we fawked things up in the first dot-com explosion and learned from our mistakes have the battle wounds to make more pragmatic decisions in 2011. It is encapsulated in one of my favorite quotes that I first heard from Bruce Dunlevie of Benchmark Captial,

“Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment”

I loved the quote so much I wrote an entire blog post on the topic. That’s why when you hear Steve Blank talk about lean startups you can hear his experiences ooze out of him in real-life examples of 8 startups. He knows that in the earliest phases of your businesses you’re trying to discover whether there is actually a large market for your product. If you’re a startup or product person and haven’t read his book Four Steps to Epiphany please do.

And let’s be clear. “9 women behavior” is not restricted to just fund raising. We technology leaders also make this mistake. I certainly did in my first company. I continually felt the market pressure to get new product releases out the door. I had my sales teams telling me we needed certain features to be competitive. I had my dev team asking for us to work through new architectural components to improve performance. I had my operations team telling me it was too hard for them to run analytics unless we built in our new BI platform.

It was so tempting for me to throw extra resources at our technology debt for a couple of quarters. And that’s exactly what I did. Our lead architect argued against it. He said that they were in a tight, small, very productive team and if we left them alone he felt they could be incredibly productive. As we added more resources we added more strain on his high-calibre core team. They had to spend time training our new resources, reviewing code, refactoring where mistakes were made, attending meetings, etc.  He argued that in some cases less was more.

What did he know? He was tech. I was management. He didn’t feel my pressures on sales, marketing and ops. I had built computer systems before. I had been part of large, multidisciplinary teams. So I added a third-party developer in Bulgaria to increase output on one of our products. I added a dev team in India to spearhead new initiatives and design our future UI. The former was outsourced, the latter was our own team.

In the end, of course, our productivity actually suffered. It is he who first taught me this lesson. It was Ryan Lissack, now senior director in tech at Salesforce.com. He understood “the mythical man month” long before I did.  The beauty of working with uber talented teams is that no matter how experienced you are as a leader you’re always learning from your team if you’re willing to listen. Eventually I did. And ever since then I have been reluctant to over-resource tech projects. Ever since then I have been in favor of smaller teams focused on core tasks. I have been in favor of lean development.

I hope this phase of the economy – the 9 Women phase – doesn’t last too long. And I hope that entrepreneurs will have the confidence to resist VCs who are pressuring them to over-fund too early. I know how it feels when the “siren calls” of money. It’s tempting. Just know how the end game often plays out …

** Image courtesy of Fotolia. Check ‘em out.

As a person who consumes dozens, if not hundreds, of articles on the web each and every day, it’s easy to remember that I’m an extreme outlier. Most people would prefer to read only a few articles a day — only the ones that they know are worth their time. That’s what Summify does in a nutshell. They survey the content on the web and condense it into the articles that will interest you the most.

Today marks the formal launch of Summify. After a few months in beta testing, they believe their social algorithms are ready for the world to try. And they also have a fresh round of funding to further spread the service.

Here’s how Summify works: it asks you to enter at least one account you use on the web to get information. This can mean Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. And if you can enter two or all three, even better. Summify then analyzes your social graph and the data flowing through it to see which stories it should serve up for you.

The default is to do this on a daily basis, but you can set it longer (weekly) or much shorter (every 6 hours). When the summary is returned, you’ll find a nicely laid out digest of the five or ten most important stories that you should read at that time. This includes which of your friends shared the story on Twitter and how many likes it got on Facebook.

It works very well. Each of the stories served up to me were the ones that I cared about (though it did miss a few major ones I would have also liked to read). But the best part is the end of the summary which reads “that’s it, you’re done!” How refreshing.

Techmeme, My6Sense, and even Google are trying different techniques when it comes to web curation, but Summify may have the most straightforward approach: these are the five to ten articles you should ready today.

These digests are served to you on the web and via email. And next quarter, there will be a mobile experience as well, we’re told.

“The nature of social media is such that even the most devoted users miss more than half of what comes at them, so we started with the idea that you can’t and shouldn’t read everything — read just the good stuff which is typically what your friends and sources are talking about the most,” is how co-founder Mircea Paşoi explains the service.

“Obviously, we had to put a lot effort in making sure it doesn’t become a popularity contest, and I think we’ve struck the right balance of highly relevant and diverse stories,” he continues.

To help with the cause, Summify has closed a new seed round of funding from Accel Partners, Rob Glaser, Stewart Butterfield, Steve Olechowski, and Canadian super angel Boris Wertz. The amount is undisclosed and follows a smaller round from August of last year.

The company is based on Vancouver, British Columbia.

Google just settled with FTC over agency’s accusations of “deceptive privacy practices” in the rollout of its social communications tool Buzz. The FTC issued a release here (we’ve pasted it below) and you can also access Google’s Blog post on the subject here. Updating.

Buzz, which launched last February, has been plagued with privacy issues. And the communications tool, which lives inside Gmail, has not exactly taken off.

The FTC claims that Google’s “deceptive tactics” when launching Buzz (i.e. not adequately informing users of the privacy issues surrounding the product), violated the FTC act. Specifically, the FTC says that Google didn’t properly inform users of the choice of declining or leaving the social network. For users who joined the Buzz network, the controls for limiting the sharing of their personal information were confusing and difficult to find, says the FTC.

The agency also claims that those who did join the network didn’t realize that the identity of individuals they emailed most frequently would be made public by default within the network. Google also offered a “Turn Off Buzz” option that did not fully remove the user from the social network. Apparently, Google received “thousands of complaints” from users who were upset and worried about the public disclosure of their email contacts which included, in some cases, ex-spouses, patients, students, employers, or competitors.

Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC said in the release: “This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations.”

The settlement bars the search giant from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits by independent third parties for the next 20 years. The charge also requires Google to obtain users’ consent before sharing their information with third parties. And the FTC says this is the first time in history where a settlement has required a company to conduct a privacy program of this kind.

Google writes in its blog post announcing the settlement: We'd like to apologize again for the mistakes we made with Buzz. While today's announcement thankfully put this incident behind us, we are 100 percent focused on ensuring that our new privacy procedures effectively protect the interests of all our users going forward. The company also admitted that the launch of Google Buzz “fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control—letting our users and Google down.”

I think the question lingering in everyone’s minds is when is Google going to finally “sunset” Buzz?

FTC Charges Deceptive Privacy Practices in Google’s Rollout of Its Buzz Social Network

Google Agrees to Implement Comprehensive Privacy Program to Protect Consumer Data

WASHINGTON, March 30, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Google Inc. has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises to consumers when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, in 2010. The agency alleges the practices violate the FTC Act. The proposed settlement bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations, requires it to implement a comprehensive privacy program, and calls for regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. This is the first time an FTC settlement order has required a company to implement a comprehensive privacy program to protect the privacy of consumers’ information. In addition, this is the first time the FTC has alleged violations of the substantive privacy requirements of the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework, which provides a method for U.S. companies to transfer personal data lawfully from the European Union to the United States.

“When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honor them,” said Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC. “This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations.”

According to the FTC complaint, Google launched its Buzz social network through its Gmail web-based email product. Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective. For users who joined the Buzz network, the controls for limiting the sharing of their personal information were confusing and difficult to find, the agency alleged.

On the day Buzz was launched, Gmail users got a message announcing the new service and were given two options: “Sweet! Check out Buzz,” and “Nah, go to my inbox.” However, the FTC complaint alleged that some Gmail users who clicked on “Nah…” were nonetheless enrolled in certain features of the Google Buzz social network. For those Gmail users who clicked on “Sweet!,” the FTC alleges that they were not adequately informed that the identity of individuals they emailed most frequently would be made public by default. Google also offered a “Turn Off Buzz” option that did not fully remove the user from the social network.

In response to the Buzz launch, Google received thousands of complaints from consumers who were concerned about public disclosure of their email contacts which included, in some cases, ex-spouses, patients, students, employers, or competitors. According to the FTC complaint, Google made certain changes to the Buzz product in response to those complaints.

When Google launched Buzz, its privacy policy stated that “When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information. If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The FTC complaint charges that Google violated its privacy policies by using information provided for Gmail for another purpose – social networking – without obtaining consumers’ permission in advance.

The agency also alleges that by offering options like “Nah, go to my inbox,” and “Turn Off Buzz,” Google misrepresented that consumers who clicked on these options would not be enrolled in Buzz. In fact, they were enrolled in certain features of Buzz.

The complaint further alleges that a screen that asked consumers enrolling in Buzz, “How do you want to appear to others?” indicated that consumers could exercise control over what personal information would be made public. The FTC charged that Google failed to disclose adequately that consumers’ frequent email contacts would become public by default.

Finally, the agency alleges that Google misrepresented that it was treating personal information from the European Union in accordance with the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor privacy framework. The framework is a voluntary program administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce in consultation with the European Commission. To participate, a company must self-certify annually to the Department of Commerce that it complies with a defined set of privacy principles. The complaint alleges that Google’s assertion that it adhered to the Safe Harbor principles was false because the company failed to give consumers notice and choice before using their information for a purpose different from that for which it was collected.

The proposed settlement bars Google from misrepresenting the privacy or confidentiality of individuals’ information or misrepresenting compliance with the U.S.-E.U Safe Harbor or other privacy, security, or compliance programs. The settlement requires the company to obtain users’ consent before sharing their information with third parties if Google changes its products or services in a way that results in information sharing that is contrary to any privacy promises made when the user’s information was collected. The settlement further requires Google to establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program, and it requires that for the next 20 years, the company have audits conducted by independent third parties every two years to assess its privacy and data protection practices.

Google’s data practices in connection with its launch of Google Buzz were the subject of a complaint filed with the FTC by the Electronic Privacy Information Center shortly after the service was launched.

The Commission vote to issue the administrative complaint and accept the consent agreement package containing the proposed consent order for public comment was 5-0, with Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch issuing a separate concurring statement. Commissioner Rosch concurs with accepting, subject to final approval, the consent order for the purpose of public comment. The reasons for his concurrence are described in the attached separate statement.

The FTC will publish a description of the consent agreement package in the Federal Register shortly. The agreement will be subject to public comment for 30 days, beginning today and continuing through May 1, 2011, after which the Commission will decide whether to make the proposed consent order final. Interested parties can submit written comments electronically or in paper form by following the instructions in the “Invitation To Comment” part of the “Supplementary Information” section. Comments in electronic form should be submitted using the following web link: https://ftcpublic.commentworks.com/ftc/googlebuzz and following the instructions on the web-based form. Comments in paper form should be mailed or delivered to: Federal Trade Commission, Office of the Secretary, Room H-113 (Annex D), 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20580. The FTC is requesting that any comment filed in paper form near the end of the public comment period be sent by courier or overnight service, if possible, because U.S. postal mail in the Washington area and at the Commission is subject to delay due to heightened security precautions.

Here’s the live stream from the GeeknRolla conference for European startups, organised in association with TechCrunch Europe HERE.

And follow the action on twitter on the hashtag #GKNR

We’ll be updating this shortly with the startups that launched today. Here’s the programme.

Bubble Motion, which offers a popular a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India, Japan, and Indonesia, has raised $10 million in new funding led by SingTel Innov8 with participation from Singapore's Infocomm Investments in addition to insiders Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures, and NGC. This brings Bubble Motion’s total funding to $45 million.

Bubble Motion's Bubbly platform is a voice-blogging phone service that allows people to share status updates in their own voice with fans and followers. It essentially takes Twitter’s model and applies this to voice blogging and mobile phones. These 'bubblers' record their voice update into their phone, and their followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to click and listen.

The startup recently updated its platform to allow users to send notifications of newly recorded “Bubbles” to Twitter with a link to the message on Bubbly. Bubblers also send an update to Facebook friends whenever they update their Bubbly status and post text updates on the platform.

Currently Bubbly has over 7 million users across 4 countries and has delivered more than 250 million bubble messages through its service. The new funding will be used to bring Bubble into new countries outside of Asia. CEO Thomas Clayton tells us the company is eying entries into Brazil and Europe.

Of course entries into these markets involve partner ships with local carriers. Already Bubbly has relationships with Bharti Airtel in India, Telkomsel in Indonesia, and Globe in the Philippines. The company says SingTel brings a network of operator partners and contacts as an investor.

Bubbly faces competition from Facebook and Twitter in Asian markets. But Clayton says that the voice blogging aspect of the service, and the SMS-focused technology make it an ideal communications platform in countries like India.

Jive CEO Tony Zingale is finally announcing the results of a big project he’s been working on since he took over the company in 2010. It’s not an acquisition or a product release: It’s a massive upgrade to Jive’s board of directors.

Joining the board are McAfee’s outgoing chairman Charles Robel, McAfee CEO (now at Intel) Dave DeWalt, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger and Google’s vice president of product management Sundar Pichai.

Beyond the titles, it’s an impressive array of skills. Robel has served on the audit committees of several public companies. DeWalt has been the CEO of both McAfee and Documentum selling both for a nice premium. Heiliger is responsible for delivering Facebook to 650 million users out of a cloud environment. And Pichai was in charge of the Chrome OS and Chrome Browser, amid other products at Google. Each of them also straddle the line between enterprise and consumer experience.

In one swoop Jive ups its depth around corporate finance, strategic operations, scale and technology and product vision. These four join Zingale– whose already been a public company CEO twice and served on six public company boards– and Kleiner’s Ted Schlein and Sequoia’s Jim Goetz among others on the packed board.

That is a board designed to make the company better, yes. But it’s also a board that sends two messages: We’re serious about building the next big enterprise software company, and we were serious when we said we were going to go public in 2011.

While Zingale knew Robel and DeWalt well, recruiting all four of them has taken some work. “I could have easily chosen the route of picking dusty old executives sitting around doing nothing, but that’s not the case here,” he says, brushing my IPO speculation aside without comment like a good private company CEO planning to file. “I think companies require an unfair advantage of this kind of expertise to drive technology decisions, governance decisions and financial decisions as we pursue more M&A and make strategic decisions.”

That’s right, he said M&A. Jive bought Filtrbox early last year and apparently more deals are on the horizon. “Watch this space,” Zingale said. “A couple of things are cooking.”

Top Gear fans? Remember the episode from a few years back where the crew tried to flog the Tesla Roadster? Yeah, it didn’t end so well for the Tesla after Clarkson started off praising the little electric supercar. The entire segment is embedded for your viewing enjoyment after the jump, but the skinny is that the Top Gear testers sort of died prematurely — a few times.

The first car’s battery’s ran out only after 55 miles. Then another car’s motor overheated. When they went back to the original car, something was up with the brakes. So yeah, one of the most watched TV programs in the entire world didn’t exactly portray the Tesla Roadster favorably. Enter the libel lawsuit.

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Yet another example of why even the savviest of Internet users need to keep their anti-malware software current and fully working. Spotify, the popular European streaming service, discovered that it was inadvertently serving ads that were laced with malware.

The ads were served to the Spotify Windows desktop application by a third-party server. The company quickly pulled all third-party-hosted ads—cutting the head off the monster, if you will.

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As we wrote a few months ago, people search site MyLife may have a ton of traffic from searches, but doesn’t really have the social elements that Facebook and LinkedIn offers. Today, the people search site is launching a number of features to help increase engagement on the site.

MyLife is a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. MyLife pulls information from public records and also allows users to subscribe to the search site to connect with others, track their searches and more.

MyLife’s new "Work & Jobs" section is designed to help members hire others, get hired, and network on MyLife. MyLife’s founder and CEO Jeffrey Tinsley compares the feature to a LinkedIn for the broader market, with the focus not limited to white-collar professionals. A "Local Services & Deals" section allows members to find other members providing local services, including Realtors, Accountants, Lawyers and much more.

In terms of traffic, the search site is booming, with 30 million unique monthly visitors (vis Omniture), which has nearly doubled year over year. And MyLife is adding 2.5 million new registrations per month, mostly US, and mostly over 35 years of age. And in terms of revenue, Tinsely says that MyLife will see $60 million in revenue in 2010, and is expected to grow by 40 percent in 2011.

But while LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are able to engage its users with its social network, MyLife lacks this. Which is why the site is trying to become a LinkedIn and add more social elements.

Below are the TV commercials MyLife is currently airing:

According to Russian business newspaper Vedomosti (via Quintura), star investor Digital Sky Technologies has set up a new fund dubbed DST Global – 2. The fund has already made investments in Groupon (January 2011) and is close to investing $50 million in exchange for 5 percent of online music startup Spotify as part of a $100 million round, according to the paper.

You may remember we broke the news that DST was indeed about to lead a huge financing round for Spotify back in February.

In other news, DST has also joined a group of investors who’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into 360buy.com, a Chinese online retailing powerhouse often dubbed China’s Amazon.

Another report says 360buy is securing $1 billion in financing in total and plans to IPO in 2013, which indeed sounds like a company right up DST’s alley.

Interesting sidenote: the DST Global – 2 fund this time includes international investors (“Western funds”) as limited partners, according to Vedomosti’s report.

We’re digging for more information and will update when we learn more.

Further reading: DST's Yuri Milner Buys $70 Million Home In Silicon Valley

Washington D.C.-based startup EverFi has acquired Outside The Classroom, the provider of the largest online alcohol prevention course AlcoholEdu.

Founded in 2000, Outside The Classroom’s online curriculum focuses on alcohol prevention in America's youth. Its online products, AlcoholEdu for College and AlcoholEdu for High School, are used in hundreds of high schools and over five-hundred college campuses. More than 3 million students to date have taken AlcoholEdu.

EverFi, which just raised $11 million, has created a SaaS application for schools to help educate young adults on financial literacy, student loan default prevention, filing taxes, credit card debt and more. The application’s curriculum incorporates virtual worlds, gaming, social media and videos to help teach children these life skills.

For example, the company’s Buttonwood platform, aims to prevent teenagers from student loan defaults. The application includes a Second Life-like virtual world where users can learn and implement key financial literacy concepts, such as credit worthiness, the loan application process, interest rates and more.

EverFi will add AlcoholEdu to its existing coursework in Financial Literacy and Nutrition and Obesity.

Cloud computing giant Salesforce.com has acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash. In addition, approximately $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash will be issued to Radian6′s founders (subject to vesting conditions over two years).

Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. Salesforce argues that the acquisition of the company will enable it to enhance all of its products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com.

Commented Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce:

With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring. We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.

Founded in 2006, Radian6 helps companies monitor the social web (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, forums and so on) in order to provide actionable insights in real-time and thus enable its clients to effectively join conversations with customers and prospects.

The company just made an acquisition of its own, snapping up one of its resellers, 6Consulting, to establish a presence in the UK.

Salesforce expects the transaction to close in its fiscal second quarter ending July 31, 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.

Skype realizes full well its software is used by many school teachers and students from around the globe, and today announced that it has built a dedicated social network to help them connect, collaborate and exchange knowledge and teaching resources over the Web.

This morning, the company launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom, an online platform designed to help teachers find each other and relevant projects according to search criteria such as the age groups they teach, location and subjects of interest.

The platform, which has been in beta since the end of December, already has a community of more than 4,000 teachers, across 99 countries.

Teachers need only sign up with their Skype account at the website, create a profile with their interests, location and the age groups they teach and start connecting with other teachers by exploring the directory, where they can also find projects and resources that match their skills, needs or interests.

A members-only community, Skype in the Classroom lets teachers easily add each other to their Skype contact lists or message one another.

It’s a wonderful idea, and I sincerely hope it takes off (without hurting but instead hopefully inspiring many of the existing social networks and collaboration networks for teachers).

Amazon’s move into the cloud music storage and streaming game is nothing if not controversial. I love it. They’ve seemingly looked at what companies like Apple and Google have been dealing with for months, if not years, and just said “screw it, let’s just do it.”

Ballsy. Brilliant. Wonderful.

Of course, the service itself seems kind of “meh”. But I’m more than happy to take “meh” over nothing at all — which is exactly what the other big players have given us. It has been all empty promises (Google) and endless whispers (Apple). Amazon actually did it. And they deserve credit.

And now comes the legal game.

CNET’s Greg Sandoval has a great rundown of what exactly is going on following Amazon’s maneuver. MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka has a good follow-up on what comes next. And our own Robin Wauters looked at things from the perspective of the competitors. The basic gist? The labels are trying to figure out what action to take — if any — against Amazon for doing this without their permission. Of these, Sony seems the most annoyed and likely to act. But can they really do anything?

Amazon’s stated position seems to be “no”. Their basic argument is that when a customer buys a piece of content (be it music, movie, or something else), they own it. It should not matter if it resides on the hard drive in their computer or in space they lease from the cloud.

To that, I say: amen.

Of course, the actual situation is much more murky. It’s always been a bit of a gray area as to whether or not you actually “own” a piece of music when you buy it. This is because the labels have done a great job over the years negotiating comical terms of usage that you agree to without even realizing it. And that may include the ability to store your music on a remote server and stream it. That’s what this is all about, after all.

Further, as both Sandoval and Kafka point out, this may be more of a move by Amazon to simply get the ball rolling. The argument here is that Amazon could change things down the road as necessary. This may just be version one of their cloud offering, and it could be that version two does require some licensing agreements with the labels. Again, this is a very savvy move by Amazon.

But the fundamental issue here remains: should storage in the cloud that you pay for really be different from your local hard drive? Think about that for a second. It’s actually pretty ridiculous that people think it should be different.

Currently, if you buy a song on iTunes or Amazon or elsewhere, you’re free to play that song as often as you wish on your machine. You’re also free to burn it onto a CD or transfer it to an MP3 player. I’m just not sure how moving it to the cloud is any different.

The streaming aspect may seem to be an issue as that does require a different license. But this isn’t the same as listening to streaming music via a subscription service. Again, you’re supposed to “own” this music.

And going forward, we’re only going to see more and more of our content stored in the cloud. Services like Gmail took us one step, Google Docs took us another, now Dropbox, MobileMe, and Chrome OS are taking us the rest of the way. This is the future.

Of course, there’s an easy answer as to why the labels think the cloud is different from your hard drive: greed. As in, these guys are greedy and see dollar signs at every corner. It’s sad, really — and it speaks to the current state of the industry.

Here’s to hoping that Amazon sticks to their guns and continues calling the record labels on their ridiculous bluff with regard to music in the cloud. I don’t care what the fine print on the terms say, if you bought a song, you should be able to store it where you choose and play it back where you want.

Unless the labels would prefer that we not buy music in the first place…

[image: flickr/kevindooley]

In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, we cover two big launches—Amazon Cloud Drive and Color—and a Quirky DIY pocketKnife called the Switch. Just yesterday, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive, which is a general storage service in the cloud which is being pushed as a media locker, starting with music. Amazon beat both Apple and Google to the punch with an online music locker. Anytime you buy an MP3 or album from Amazon, you can back it up in your Cloud Drive, from where it can be played no matter what computer you are on (unless it is an iPad or iPhone).

When you buy a digital song, there should always be a backup available to you. That’s just obvious, and Amazon just took an important first step in that direction. Is it the best online music service? No, there’s no radio, no sharing, only playlists you make yourself. It’s kind of boring, to be honest. But it is useful.

Color is the $41 million photo app nobody can figure out. Is it the future or is it a dud on arrival? Color actually works impressively as a social camera when more than one person is using it simultaneously in the same place. It taps into all the iPhone’s sensors to gather data about places and people in proximity to one another—conjuring images of that scene in Batman where he tracks signals from all the cell phones in the city to find the Joker.

The app creates more of an experience network than a social network of people experiencing the same things, and then creating visual connections between those people that must be reinforced over time. But the big problem is nobody knows what to do with it when they launch the app by themselves. CEO Bill Nguyen joins us as our special guest and explains how his team is going to “solve the loneliness problem.” We also talk about the funding, the backlash, whether Steve Jobs is an investor, and his thoughts on Amazon’s online music ambitions (his previous company was Lala, which he sold to Apple).

Finally, we take apart the Quirky Switch—literally. This DIY pocketknife, which my co-host John Biggs shows off in this video review, lets you assemble your own Swiss Army Knife, picking which tools you want. It sounds better than it actually is. Trust me.

Check out previous episodes of Fly or Die, and subscribe, on iTunes.

This one’s for you, cricket fans. For those not familiar with “the gentleman’s game”, we are currently in the grips of the ICC World Cup — or The World Cup of Cricket, if you prefer. “Who cares?” or “what’s a cricket?” you may be asking. Well, considering there are only five proclaimed cricket pitches in the U.S., you may have a fair point. But for countries (and cricket powerhouses) like India, Pakistan, Australia, and South Africa (to name a few), cricket is serious business.

In fact, The Economic Times is reporting that the international gambling industry collectively has more than $1.5 billion riding on tonight’s match between India and Pakistan in the World Cup semifinals.

Considering the combustible relationship between the new nations, the rivalry is a fierce one, and the matches tend to take on a significance greater than game itself. This is the first time the two teams have met since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will be accepting the personal invitation of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a miraculous show of “cricket diplomacy”.

As a further example of how rabid cricket fans are, last week 1,000 tickets were made available for the World Cup final, and more than 10 million people flocked to the ICC’s site in less than 20 minutes, causing it to crash and burn.

Seeing as cricket matches can take up to 8 hours to play, certain countries may see a bit of a dip in GDP during tomorrow’s work day. My guess is that half of the Indian population will be using one of its “sick days” Wednesday.

For those in the U.S. interested in catching the match, it begins at 2am PST and can be found on Dish Network and DirecTV. For those without satellite TV, check out Willow TV’s website.

Cricket fans who also enjoy placing a bet or 600 while watching a match are advised to check out Khelo Cricket, a social game that allows fans to place bets and interact with friends in realtime during a match. The startup was founded by a group of cricket fans and alumni from Stanford University and MIT’s Media Lab.

The game works like this: At any point during a match, you can predict what will happen in the next play, based on your mad cricket skills and ill intuition. If your prediction proves to be correct, you win points. The person with the highest number of points at the end of the match wins. It’s as simple as that. The service is free, and unfortunately, it’s completely legal because there’s no real money at stake. It’s basically the same as playing free online poker, with the added social element.

So, to all those cricket fans out there, enjoy the remainder of the tournament. And please keep rioting to a minimum. Please feel free to chime in with your favorite cricket and tech-related applications, utilities, and services.

Mobile payments are finally taking off right now. But it is not mobile wallets for consumers with NFC-chipped mobile phones leading the way. It is payment apps for small merchants like those made by Square and Intuit’s GoPayment. Tonight at an Intuit showcase in New York City, I got a sneak peak at several new Intuit products still in development, including an upcoming GoPayment tablet app that aims to replace the cash register for small businesses, Intuit 401k, and an iPad Check-in app for doctor’s offices.

The GoPayment app will work on both the iPad and Android tablets In addition to taking credit card payments with a swiper that plugs into the headphone jack, it also lets merchants set up a cash register with their own products and prices. They can even take pictures of the products with their iPad 2 and the picture is placed on a virtual button to make it easy for any employee to ring up the items. It will also have the ability to take pictures of checks and deposit them from the image.

Square, of course, has its own iPad app which has been available for almost a year. Add a cash drawer, and these systems can readily replace a register that can cost thousands of dollars. All a merchant needs is an iPad and the software. Intuit and Square still make a tiny fraction off each transaction, but they get rid of much of the equipment, and all the maintenance, costs associated with typical credit card readers you find in most stores.

GoPayment has been around for two years, but only recently started to target the lower end of the market where Square is gaining traction—small businesses without merchant accounts at banks who don’t already take credit cards. Another competitor, VeriFone, is making noise in an attempt to enter this market as well, but Square should be more concerned about Intuit. The company already has relationships with 4.5 million businesses through QuickBooks and has a few advantages in payments processing.

The trick to making money in payments processing is to keep the fraud rate down. Intuit already handles payments for many small businesses through and has built up an expertise in fraud detection to the point where it transfer money to its payments customers in a matter of two or three days. Square reduces its risk for larger accounts by holding the money for 30 days. Intuit’s credit card swiper might be uglier than Square’s, but don’t underestimate how important it is for small businesses to get getting paid faster.

Both services seem to be neck and neck in terms of the volume of payments that go through each. GoPayment processes about $9 million a week, whereas Square is processing about $7 million (but GoPayment’s numbers include payments from the Web and QuickBooks, not just mobile). GoPayment has processed $113 million since it launched in 2009. Intuit’s director of mobile strategies, Omar Green, who happens to live in the same building in San Francisco as Square founder Jack Dorsey, acknowledges that Square led the way in opening up this new market. But it’s a wide open field and Intuit is going after the opportunity just as aggressively. Update: Intuit says it is now up to $12 million a week in payment volume and $120 million cumulative GoPayments.

While I was at the showcase, I also saw some other new Intuit products for businesses. One is called Intuit 401(k), and is part of Intuit’s Payroll business. Any small business that uses Intuit Payroll can now also set up a 401(k) account for their employees for significantly cheaper than other 401 (k) management services. It costs $495 to set up and starts at $75 a month for up to ten employees. The contributions are withdrawn automatically from payroll and managed by Morningstar, with a few simple options based on risk tolerance. Intuit also removes the financial risks of any liability associated with managing the plans off the shoulders of the small businesses

The other iPad app I saw is being developed by Intuit Health, which already offers health portals for doctor’s offices to help manage appointments and billing. Now it is working on an iPad Check-In app which will replace the paper forms on the clipboard you have to fill out every time you visit the doctor. Instead, you just sign in with your name and password, and fill out any necessary details on the iPad app. It also ties into payments and will allow patients to charge their co-pays electronically.

One of the biggest gripes Android developers have about the ecosystem has been Android Market — it was slow to add support for paid apps internationally, and it’s taken ages for it to support in-app payments. Today, it’s finally fixing the latter issue: Android Market now supports in-app billing.

The news doesn’t come as a big surprise, as Google pre-announced the feature’s impending launch last week so that developers could prepare for it. But it’s still a big deal. In-app purchases have proven to be very lucrative for developers on Apple’s iOS (which launched in-app payments back in 2009). They’re particularly important for free applications, which often entice new users with a price-tag of ‘free’ and then upsell new levels, upgrades, and customizations.

As with application purchases, Android Market charges a fee of 30% for anything sold via in-app billing, which is the industry standard.

Hopefully this will help developers more effectively monetize their applications on Android Market — historically users have been less willing to pay for apps on Android than they have on Apple’s App Store.