As we reported in February, betaworks and the New York Times are collaborating to launch a socialnews reader for the iPad called News.me. And we heard more details on the app as it readied for launch this week. Today, Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick announced that the iPad app is finally live on the App Store for your viewing and browsing pleasure (link).

News.me, which has been in development since last August, is a social news reading iPad app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall.

The app charges a subscription fee to cover the costs of licensing content from publishers (News.me will pay publishers based on how much their content is read).You can purchase a one-week subscription to News.me through the in-app store for $0.99 or a one-year subscription for $34.99.

News.me faces competition from Flipboard, Pulse, Taptu and others.

We’re big fans of Bnter, an app that allows you to share your conversations with others publicly. The same way you share photos via the web or your mobile phone, Bnter allows you to share snippets of conversations you have with friends on the web. While the startup initially focused on SMS, Bnter recently broadened its scope to allow users to share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more. Today, Bnter is launching a free Android app (which joins an existing iPhone app) and is launching a bookmarklet, and in-depth Twitter integration

The Android app (which works on OS 2.1 or higher) is similar in functionality to its iPhone cousin and the web app, and allows you to read your feed of conversations and people you are following, comment, search and add conversations. And because it is a mobile app, Bnter for Android can pull your text message stream into the app so posting is fairly easy.

Bnter’s new bookmarklet, which you can download here, allows for posting conversations directly from open chats in GChat, Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, Twitter and Campfire to your Bnter profile.

Bnter, which has raised seed funding from a number of high-profile investors including Founder Collective and SV Angel, has also added a feature for automatic Twitter import of mentions on the service. Bnter users easily post Twitter conversations by linking their Twitter account to Bnter, and can review all conversations in a drafts folder before deciding to post the most interesting ones to Bnter.

For the New York Based startup, this release has been somewhat of a challenge. As Sarah Lacy wrote last week, Spark Capital reportedly reneged on a termsheet offered to Bnter, forcing the bootstrapped startup to take some drastic measures (for example, co-founder Lauren Leto isn’t taking a salary) to continue the release and product development. It just goes to show that despite certain hardships and bumps in the road, founders’ passion for their ideas can help sustain a startup in the most trying situations.

Also, you can see Leto explain why she founded Bnter in this recent Founder Stories clip.

It’s no secret that Facebook is deepening its ties with the Beltway crowd. As we saw yesterday, the company hosted a town hall meeting with President Obama and has steadily ramping up its lobbying efforts in 2010, spending over $350,000 on lobbying efforts last year. But the company recently disclosed its Q1 spend on lobbying and the company shelled out a record $230,000 on lobbying activities in the quarter, which is up by over 400 percent from $41,390 spent in Q1 2010. This data is recorded in the U.S. Senate's lobbying database.

Policy areas of focus for Facebook this year include global regulation of software companies and restrictions on internet access by foreign governments; online safety measures, internet privacy regulations, cyber security, and FCC regulations on net neutrality. A new issue that the company spent lobbying resources on is discussing House, Senate, and Government rules to allow more Government and Congressional offices to access social media to engage with citizens.

Other new additions to Facebook’s lobbying efforts include patent reform and lobbying for Oregon power and water needs to support high-tech growth and investment in Oregon. Facebook just opened a new, energy-efficient data center in Oregon.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, the social network spent $130,000 in the quarter (up from $38,117 in the fourth quarter of 2009). In total, Facebook spent $351,390 on lobbying in 2010. Not only is this quarter the most Facebook has ever spent on lobbying, but the social network is well on its way to surpassing its 2010 total spend in the first two quarters of 2011.

It’s not surprising that the company is building out its presence in D.C. That’s something that both Google, Microsoft and others have been doing for some time now. Lat year Google spend millions on its lobbying efforts, so it should be interesting to see if Facebook will catch up.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Cliff1066

Greenpeace just released its latest snapshot of major corporation’s impact on the planet with IT data centers the main target. The 35 page report [PDF link] details just how much energy is required to run the massive centers powering the so-called cloud. It’s huge according to Greenpeace, consuming 1.5%-2% of the world’s total power consumption and growing at a rate of 12% a year. Somewhat surprisingly Greenpeace sort of applauds the virtues of living in a massive data cloud, pointing to the advent of the smart grid and increased amount telecommuting. Even digital streaming music gets props for having a smaller carbon footprint than physical media.

But this is Greenpeace and so there has to be some finger pointing and letter grading. The main purpose of this report is to reveal top company’s impact on the environment by mainly examining their dependency on fossil and nuclear fuels rather than using renewable sources. However, even Greenpeace notes that these numbers might not be exact since they were calculated without all the facts. Simply put, these ten companies didn’t divulge this info; Greenpeace pieced together their data. It’s a bit dirty itself, actually.

Read More

With $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, webpage sharing service Bo.lt launches today after about a year in private beta. Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers.

Once copied, Bo.lt lets you quickly edit the page itself. You can change the text, edit and delete images and text and change links — either through the Bo.lt visual editor or its HTML editor. You can then share the page on Twitter or Facebook through its customizable URL and let other people edit or make changes which are tracked.

The page editor tool itself is extremely intuitive to use, and is pretty fun if you’re creatively messing around with web pages and pretty useful if you’re trying to complete actual work like A/B testing site code changes or codelessly trying out different headlines, images and fonts on a content page.

Bo.lt serves up realtime analytics on each page, showing you the amount of traffic from Twitter, Facebook and Google as well as providing more webmaster-friendly data like differences in page load time. The service also lets you see all user Bo.lting activity in a Community feed, and lets you explore other users’ activity visually when you click on their profile page.

As with any content aggregation service, there’s always the looming specter of copyright issues, but co-founder Matthew Roche tells me that the tool is content provider friendly in that Bo.lt still serves up a given page’s ads and analytics systems. “It’s way of preserving the form ad and visibility of the content while increasing the reach,” he says. As a tool enabling sharable webpage changes like this has never existed before, it remains to be seen exactly how content owners will react to their content being altered and shared in this way.

Bo.lt plans on monetizing through premium accounts that give users the ability to create Bo.lt pages under their own domain names as well as other power user features like suppression of the automatic share to the Community feed. Right now partners like Houseplans.com, Second Porch and Smart Destinations are all using Bo.lt to target web pages to customers.

While the simple page-editing aspect of this is pretty awesome, co-founders Matthew and Jamie Roche have a grander vision, “We are building a true page sharing network, you should be able to share webpages the way you share stuff on YouTube and Flickr.”

The service begins rolling out to early signups at 8am PST today, and a hundred interested TechCrunch readers can get priority access here.

What exactly is the deal with all of these group text messaging apps? In the Founder Stories video above, GroupMe founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci tell host Chris Dixon why they think group texting coud be the thin edge of the wedge to something bigger. Call it private social networks. Small groups can do and say things that larger groups can’t.

When Martocci first heard the idea for GroupMe, he wasn’t that into it, but he quickly saw where it could lead to. He thinks it is about helping people make plans and decisions. “We want to be a pocket companion,” he says.

In the interview, the two also recall how they approached the Hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, where the product was conceived and the first prototype was built. The plan was to claw their way onto the main stage, blow away the judges, and get funded on the spot. It didn’t happen quite that way, but almost. The company raised $850,000 later that summer from Ron Conway, betaworks, First Round, and Lerer Ventures, and then $10.6 million earlier this year.

Speaking of Ron Conway, everyone gushes over how great he is to have as investor in the video below. He doesn’t get in the way, he just makes things happen. In terms of investors, Martocci advises other New York City startups to “make sure you get someone from the West Coast.” Dixon concurs: “It shouldn't be New York Versus California. It should be New York [startups] versus Wall Street.” (Disclosure: Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through the Founder Collective).

Be sure to watch Part I of this GroupMe interview. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.

With launch reviews that rivaled Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark, the Playbook didn’t seem to get any breaks. However, depending on if you’re a “glass half full” kind of person, the company did sell about 50,000 Playbooks on opening day, arguably a fairly strong showing for a device that was not initially well-received.

Read more…

Ever since its launch in November 2010, Blekko has been on a mission to eliminate spam and content farms from search results. The human-curated search engine, which is also known both for using actual mammals to edit search results and for its employ of slashtags for easy categorization, announced in March that it had banned over 1 million spammy domain names from its site. Using a new algorithm it calls “AdSpam”, Blekko investigates the quality of a doman’s content, as well as the type of ads it includes, to identify those of the lowest quality. Those that don’t pass muster get the boot — which should be music to any searcher’s ears.

Now, whether or not Blekko can compete with the Googles of the world in the long-term remains to be seen, but I hope so. You might say that Google has rested on its laurels for a bit too long, and, in the meantime, Blekko seems to have been taking the necessary steps to make search a more pleasurable and less spam-loaded experience. Search is desperately in need of a fresh and holistic approach. And, today, Blekko is further rounding-out its competitive engine by going social, announcing that it will be integrating Facebook comments into its results pages.

Considering that the Facebook News Feed has become an extremely popular source for link-sharing, updates, and social commentary — and Facebook Connect now practically blankets the Web — the social network is a logical partner for Blekko. And it gives it that much-envied social flair it had been lacking.

But, how does it work? Using Blekko’s Facebook integration is easy: You simply connect with your Facebook account on the Blekko homepage, and go about your normal searching. The major difference, though, is that when you type “TechCrunch” into the search bar, you’ll still the same search results you would otherwise; yet, now, all mentions of TechCrunch in your Facebook news feed (and thereby mentioned in your friends’ feeds) populate the right column. Look out!

You can also use a hashtag in the Blekko search bar (“/facebook”), and the engine will serve you with results from your Facebook comments and those of your friends. There’s also a box above your Facebook comment results in the right sidebar that allows you to post directly to your wall.

Blekko search was already pretty fantastic, if just for low spam counts, so why the integration? "The Web is increasingly a social experience and search has got to get more social too", said Blekko Mastermind and CEO Rich Skrenta. "This brings the social graph and social commentary right to the results page. Because what your friend says about information is as important as any expert's advice could ever be."

I haven’t yet been totally convinced by the social recommendation evangelists that I’m better off hearing suggestions from my friends than a group of experts, but the social wave has crested, and it’s impossible to avoid. Get on the bandwagon, or get out of the way.

After all, my friends do know what kind of pizza I like, so if I happen to be searching for pizza places on Blekko, this will likely enhance Blekko’s search results. And, on the flip side, though my gut reaction would be to think that search results for something more obscure like, say, “translational research in neuroscience” might not exactly be augmented by the Facebook peanut gallery. But maybe one of my friends happens to be studying that very thing in med school.

Regardless, this is a smart (and logical) move for Blekko, especially considering that it began leveraging Facebook Likes in its search parameters earlier this year. Users who login to Blekko with Facebook can see whether or not their Facebook friends “like” particular search results. Users can also refine their results by opting to search only those sites that have been “liked” by their friends. At first glance, this idea seems fantastic, but it’s really only useful if your friends (in the former example) are actually using Blekko and (in the latter) if they are frequent users of the like button.

In the end, I applaud Blekko’s efforts to become more social, and look forward to (what I hope) is its inevitable integration with Twitter. Not that you asked. Combining actual human editors with intelligent anti-spamming algorithms is a dynamic combo for search. So, here’s to hoping that Blekko gets the kind of user adoption it needs to reach the tipping point and give Google (and Bing) a run for their respective monies.

The New York Times Company this morning reported Q1 2011 earnings per share of $.04, compared with $.08 in the same period of 2010.

Total revenues decreased 3.6 percent to $566.5 million from $587.9 million. The publisher’s operating profit came in at $31.1 million for the quarter, compared with $52.7 million in the same period of 2010.

Approximately three weeks after the global launch of its digital subscription packages, The New York Times Company reports paid digital subscribers have surpassed 100,000, although it cautions that it does not yet have visibility into conversion and retention rates for these paying customers after the initial promotional period.

The NYT’s digital subscription packages were first introduced in Canada last month and globally at the beginning of the second quarter.

Back to the earnings report: NYT’s digital advertising grew 4.5 percent, but it was unable to fully offset the 7.5 percent decline in print advertising revenues in the first quarter.

In the first quarter, total digital revenues increased 6.1 percent to $95.9 million from $90.4 million. Digital businesses include NYTimes.com, About.com, Boston.com, other websites and related digital products. The NYT apparently sold a portion of its stake in job listing aggregator Indeed.com, netting $5.9 million ($3.4 million after taxes).

Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total advertising revenues were 28 percent for the first quarter of 2011, compared with 25.6 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Circulation revenues, meanwhile dropped 3.7 percent in the first quarter of the year due to a decline in copies sold across the News Media Group.

Erick recently got a sneak peek at Intuit’s GoPayment app for the iPad, a mobile payment app that lets anyone who sells a product or service get paid on the spot by processing credit cards.

This morning, the company announced that the iPad app is now available.

The GoPayment apps brings a new layout that takes advantage of iPad’s large, high-resolution display and multi-touch interface. It also includes new features such as the ability to add product photos.

GoPayment is compatible with the free Intuit Credit Card Reader.

As Erick wrote when he saw a preview of the app:

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.

Square has its own iPad app, which has been available for over a year.

Funding Circle, the peer-to-peer lending site for small businesses in the UK, has raised £2.5m in a Series A round led by Index Ventures. Unnamed co-investors as well as existing shareholders have also participated, while Neil Rimer, co-founder and Partner of Index, will take a seat on the Board. Before today's round, the London-based company was Angel funded to the tune of $1.1m from private investors.

Cloud computing is all very well until someone trips over a wire and the whole thing goes dark.

Reddit, Foursquare and Quora were among the sites affected by Amazon Web Services suffering network latency and connectivity errors this morning, according to the company’s own status dashboard.

Amazon says performance issues affected instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and its Relational Database Service, and it’s “continuing to work towards full resolution”. These are hosted in its North Virginia data centre.

Aside from announcing that the deal with Microsoft has now been signed, Nokia this morning also released quarterly results.

Nokia, until further notice still the world's largest maker of mobile phones, reported a (predicted) 1.4 percent decline in profit, albeit beating analyst estimates.

Net income was 344 million euros (roughly $500 million), compared with 349 million euros a year earlier, while sales rose 9.2 percent to 10.4 billion euros.

Smartphone sales were up 6 percent at 7 billion euros.

Nokia shipped 108.5 million mobile devices in Q1 2011 in total, up 1 percent year-on-year.

Nokia’s preliminary estimated mobile device market share was 29 percent in Q1 2011, down from an estimated 33 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and an estimated 31 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The company expects operating margins from its handset business to fall in Q2 – Nokia of course faces stiff competition from iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones in the smartphone segment.

Roughly 10 weeks after Nokia and Microsoft announced an alliance to build a series of Nokia Windows phones, the two companies today signed the definitive agreement for their strategic partnership.

We don’t learn much new from the blog post and video announcing the inking of the deal, except maybe that hundreds of people are already working together toward a multi-year product roadmap and are ‘on-schedule’ to deliver volume shipments in 2012, and possibly make first delivery in 2011.

From the blog post:

ESPOO, Finland & REDMOND, USA – After 10 weeks of intense collaboration, we are pleased to report that Nokia and Microsoft have signed the definitive agreement for our strategic partnership to build a new global mobile ecosystem that is unlike any other.

It's a bold claim.

But collectively we've moved from intent to agreement in such a short period. Actually, it's even faster than we expected which makes this a perfect example of our commitment to our partnership and the speed at which we plan to move together.

On tidbit of news from the announcement: Nokia and Microsoft are making Windows Phone developer registration free for all published Nokia developers in an effort to entice more developers to start building apps for Windows Phone.

Busuu.com, the language learning community, has raised an Angel round from FON-founder and serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. The Madrid-based startup is remaining mum about the size of the investment, however, but says that to-date Busuu has received less than €1m in funding. That's a figure dwarfed by its main competitors. US-based Livemocha has raised $14m, while European rival Babbel has raised over €1m. On that note, Busuu claims to have recently overtaken market leader Livemocha in terms of traffic, citing data from Compete.

A tipster informs us that Power.com is no more and that the domain name will be sold through an auction that ends on August 17, 2011. Interested parties can pre-register on the hideous, superlative-laden website in order to receive detailed instructions for the auction in May 2011.

Power.com originally made its debut in November 2008 as a site that aggregated data from a variety of social networking sites in a single, Web-based interface.

All our coverage of the company that followed was about litigation: Facebook promptly sued Power.com, after which they were forced to make some changes to the service (they also bumped heads with MySpace at some point).

Power.com then moved to countersue Facebook over data portability back in July 2009, but the lawsuit was dismissed fairly quickly, and a federal judge later ruled that violating a website terms of service is not a crime.

We don’t know much about what happened to the startup, which raised $6 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson, but I assume they simply faded away into obscurity until someone finally decided to pull the plug.

Now, the domain name is for sale and is being exclusively brokered by some company named RokMe – you can follow @PowerAuction if you’d like to stay updated on the auction.

We’ve contacted some of the people who were involved to learn what happened.

RockMelt, the social browser, came out with an iPhone app today. If you are familiar with RockMelt, which opened up publicly last month after much of its initial fanfare died down, it adds feeds and streams along the righthand rail. RockMelt Mobile is essentially this right-hand rail repackaged as a mobile app. Co-founder and CTO Tim Howes showed it to me recently (watch the video).

RockMelt Mobile expands that rail into all of your favorite feeds, both news and social. In one place you can read your Twitter and Facebook streams, as well as RSS feeds from your favorite sites. Web pages can be saved for later, or shared via Facebook. The app also gives you access to your bookmarks. And like Mobile Firefox, it syncs with the desktop browser. A web search bar is also thrown in.

If you are one of the couple hundred thousand or so hardcore RockMelt users, you are going to love this companion mobile app. It combines a mobile Twitter client, Facebook news feed reader, RSS reader, and Instapaper-like page saver all in one. If you are not a RockMelt user, you can still try it, but it probably won’t replace all those other mobile apps for you.

Lloyd’s Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyd’s Trustee Savings Bank, the third largest bank in the U.K. (and state-backed) announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in leading web hosting provider UK2Group. The equity group paid a total of $77 million for its majority stake in partnership with the current management team.

Founded in 1998, the UK2 Group is an international provider of domain name registration and website hosting services, best known for its acquisitions of big hosting properties, such as midPhase and WestHost and for launching its own innovative hosting services, like 100TB.com and VPS.NET.

Ditlev Bredahl, UK2 Group's CEO of 5 years will be leaving the company to focus on his role as CEO of OnApp — a cloud hosting software platform spun off from the technology behind VPS.NET. Phil Male, previously Chief Strategy Officer at Cable & Wireless Worldwide and Chief Operating Officer of Thus Group plc, was appointed by Lloyd’s as executive chairman.

With a state-backed bank behind them, and a reputation for acquiring hosting companies, look for UK2Group to be getting involved in some M&A activity in the near future.

My mother flew from San Francisco to Seattle today, and was annoyed to be kept sitting on the runway for two hours while President Obama flew into town. “How rude,” she said. Obama probably shouldn’t count on her vote when he’s up for reelection.

But I’m guessing the trip was worth it anyway. Besides pissing off my mother, he entertained the rapturous digerati at a Facebook town hall meeting today. Afterwards, though, it was back to the business of raising money.

And the tech elite did not disappoint.

Seventy or so CEO and finance types congregated at the San Francisco home of Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff, paying $35,000 each for a steak dinner with the president, plus a photo opp. Yes, I did the math, too. That’s $2.5 million. Not bad for a day’s work, even when you factor in disappointing my mom. It probably almost made a dent in the government’s security and other expenses in sending him out here.

Among the techy attendees: Drew Houston (Dropbox), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Marissa Mayer, Craig Newmark, Jonathan Kaplan (presumably still lamenting the end of Flip), Ron Conway, Frank Quattrone and others. Will.i.am was also there, as was Stevie Wonder (who sang for the president).

What’s fascinating to me is how eagerly all these fabulously wealthy men and women look forward to another term for Obama. He’s going to tax these people until they cry, and then tax them some more.

And then I realize, these people aren’t really getting taxed. That’s because they’ve already made their money, and it sits safe and untaxed in whatever investments they’ve chosen. That’s because there’s no wealth tax in the U.S. like some European countries have implemented. All that gets taxed is the income and the capital gain. The big wealth sits untouched.

I wonder how eager they’d all be if Obama suggested a tax on accumulated wealth. Say 1% to start things off. And like any progressive tax, the people in that room would pay far more. Maybe 5% for a billionaire. That’s just $50 million a year. And they can more than afford it, right? Enough with Silicon Valley coasting along, riding on the backs of those hard working people in Washington. It’s time to pay up, Silicon Valley. Our leaders just said so.

Yahoo had another lousy quarter. Revenues were down 6 percent, profits were down 28 percent. What’s more, it’s search partnership with Microsoft isn’t going so great. And the finger pointing is starting.

In a very detailed analysis, Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land charts the decline of Yahoo’s search revenues over the past two years. What he calls “net search revenues” (the money Yahoo gets to keep after paying off partners) is down 35 percent from a peak of $551 million two years ago to $357 million. He shows the decline in this first chart below.

During the last two quarters, Microsoft has taken over Yahoo’s U.S. search advertising in return eventually for 12 percent of Yahoos’ search revenues. The red line shows what Yahoo got to keep after paying Microsoft, and the blue line is what it makes off of search before paying Microsoft. That blue line is down 8 percent in the last two quarters You can see the gap between the red and the blue lines in the second chart below.

Remember, handing over search to Microsoft was supposed to come with all sorts of benefits like lower costs and more money for Yahoo.

But the deal is not working out as planned, and Yahoo blames Microsoft. It’s not quite where it should be yet in terms of its revenue per search. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said during the earnings conference call:

On the downside, however, adCenter isn't yet producing the RPS [revenue per search] we hoped for and are confident as possible.

In other words, Microsoft is under-monetizing. And organic search results from Bing apparently are too good, which makes people click the paid search ads even less. Even Yahoo’s inflated search market share figures (due to slideshows and other forced search methods) weren’t enough to generate more revenues.

Perhaps the most powerful phone on the market, the G2x is certainly impressive technically, but physically it’s uninspiring, and a lack of compelling HD and gaming content compatible with Android makes its greatest assets (large screen and powerful processor) underwhelming. And where’s my Gingerbread?

Head over to MobileCrunch for the full review.

Finding the right venue space within budget, location and size constraints can be the toughest part of planning an event. And the most time-intensive part of the process is doing the due-diligence around booking a space, from finding contacts to calling event managers to find info about size, price, to signing contracts and more. While hiring an event planner can save some of the strain caused by this responsibility, this can be an expensive undertaking. Today, Y Combinator-backed Venuetastic is launching as an easy to use event venue marketplace. It’s essentially a comparison shopping site for booking event venues.

Venuetastic lists features of event space, ranging from those catered towards corporate events, to wedding spaces. People can search for venues and compare them (based on capacity, location, price, type of space, and type of event), and bookmark venues that are promising.

For venues, Venuetastic is free to list on the site and free to use it. Venues can upload all the information about their space, including photos, videos and more. And Venuetastic essentially automates the booking process, and coordinates contract signing, and payments. The startup makes money by charging a commission on bookings.

The startup’s co-founders Helen Belogolova and Christine Yen (this is the first all-female startup Y Combinator has funded), tell me that the site also aims to bring businesses who don’t specifically work in events (i.e. art galleries) with non-traditional, large commercial space into the mix to provide more options for consumers and potentially give businesses a new revenue stream.

While Venuetastic is initially focusing on the Bay Area, the startup already covers a vast number of potential spaces in the region with over 500 venues listed. And the company has already helped coordinate event space for a number of startups. For example, DropBox recently used Venuetastic to coordinate a arty, explaining that using the service “allowed us to have the free time to focus on making it a good time.”

Venuetastic faces competition from Evenues and Cvent. But event planning and booking is such a large market, there is room for a number of players in this space.

Obama spent a considerable amount of time preaching to the choir at today’s Facebook Town Hall event, first bringing up Intel founder and Hungarian immigrant Andy Grove as an example of the kind of immigrant the US should be focused on retaining, in a response to a question about Immigration Reform and the Dream Act Education.

“We’ve got ambitious people from all around the world, that come here because they have a new idea … If we’ve got smart people who want to come here and start businesses, who’ve got PhDs in math and science and computer science. Why wouldn’t we want them to stay? … These are job generators,” the President said.

Then in response to a later question about Education reform, Obama said he was inspired by how many smart people were here in Silicon Valley and referred to the ongoing Silicon Valley talent crunch as reason for cultivating the technological talent we’ve got at home, “I always hear stories about how we can’t find engineers, and that’s why we’re emphasizing Math and Science … We want to start making Science cool. I want people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big Internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk.”

Sitting here at Facebook Headquarters watching the President of the United States address constituents via Facebook, and have those constituents provide commentary via Twitter, the utter sanity of this statement struck me. Why aren’t Internet achievements treated as miraculously as Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong’s lunar footsteps on July 20, 1969?

“That’s one small tweet for a man, one giant status update for mankind …”

Well how do we start? The president emphasized that Education reform, which he is pursuing in one way through the Zuckerberg-approved  "Race to the Top" initiative, needs to emphasize STEM fundamentals, or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics for females and minorities. “There’s got to be a shift in American culture when we realize this stuff is important,” he said.

He continued, “We’ve got to lift our game up when it comes to science, math and technology. That’s hopefully greatest legacy I can have as President of the United States.”

The president peppered his talks with zingers about how wealthier people like Zuckerberg should have to pay more taxes, but as Semil Shah points out, at a $70B valuation, Zuck’s approximately 24% Facebook stake puts him at less $16.8 billion, making roughly 9,880 times more than the $1.7 million the Obamas raked in last year.

In a time of rampant unemployment and $14 trillion in National Debt, if that’s not a big argument for teaching kids how to code, I don’t know what is.

Image: @SuePolinsky

It is difficult to understate what a run Apple is on right now. Look no further than the blowout earnings Apple reported today for its second fiscal quarter ended in March. Revenues were up 83 percent to $24.7 billion, and profits grew even faster, up 95 percent to $6 billion. Growth was strong across the board (with the exception of iPad sales which suffered from supply constraints and built up “the mother of all backlogs,” according to CFO Peter Oppenheimer).

But if you dive into the numbers (click table to enlarge), you will see that three areas drove the overall growth more than any others: iPhones, MacBooks and China. The iPhone now makes up half of Apple’s revenues, or $12.3 billion in the quarter. Sales grew 126 percent in dollar terms, with unit sales up 113 percent. In the U.S. alone, iPhone sales were up 155 percent. Bringing Verizon on board helped goose the numbers, but AT&T wasn’t exactly complaining either.

As fast as U.S. sales of iPhones keep growing, it is not the fastest growing region. In “Greater China,” iPhone sales were up 250 percent. Sales of all products across Asia Pacific were up 151 percent to $4.7 billion. In contrast, Europe is a $6 billion region for Apple, and the Americas is $9.3 billion. “Greater China” (which presumably includes Hong Kong, Taiwan and other Asian markets, could soon become Apple’s second largest region.

Finally, Apple’s MacBook sales were up 59 percent to $3.5 billion in the quarter. Those MAcBook Airs are very popular. Half of all Macs (both portable and desktop) sold were to new customers switching from Windows. Sales from its own retail stores were up 90 percent overall in the quarter to $3.2 billion. And the iTunes store (which is all music, movies, and apps) is now doing $1.4 billion a quarter.

So what happened to the iPad? Apple sold only 4.7 million iPads, compared to 7.3 million in the December quarter. To some extent consumers delayed purchases in anticipation of the iPad 2, which came out at the end of the quarter. Apple sold every iPad 2 it could make, but supply issues impacted how many it could manufacture. Apple says the iPad supply issues are now resolved, at least for this quarter.

And what about Steve Jobs (who is on medical leave and was not on the earnings call)? Asked about Jobs’ active role in the company, acting CEO Tim Cook responded: “We do see him on a regular basis. He is involved in major strategic decisions. I know he wants to be back full time as soon as he can.”

At last year’s NYC Disrupt, we had a star-studded lineup. Ron Conway, Tim Armstrong, Carol Bartz, Jack Dorsey, Dennis Crowley, Yuri Milner, and Sean Parker, just to name a few.

This year promises another awesome cast of speakers, and we can’t wait to tell you who will be there.

Beginning today, we will announce new guests each week until we name them all.

For starters, Charlie Rose, who interviewed legendary VC John Doerr last year, will be back. Nobody gets big-name subjects to open up like Rose. Disrupt in New York City wouldn’t be the same without him. We are also ecstatic to welcome back super angel investor Ron Conway of SV Angel and super VC Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital. Both are in the business of finding and funding the most disruptive startups out there, which is what the conference is all about. And joining us this year for the first time will be our own Arianna Huffington, who knows a thing or two about shaking up staid industries.

That’s not all we are excited to announce today. Disrupt NYC is so big this year, we have taken over a whole Pier in New York City. That’s right, we will be holding the year’s Disrupt NYC at Pier 94—overlooking the beautiful Hudson River in west Midtown Manhattan. Located at 711 12th Avenue (at 55th Street & the West Side Highway), this venue is by far the largest venue we’ve ever had. At over 133,000 sq. ft., this year's main stage will be an unforgettable launch platform.

Not only do we have an amazing venue, we have partnered with Oyster.com who will provide a Disrupt hotel reservation list PLUS your very own Disrupt Concierge Service for all Disrupt conference attendees. To make this even better, Oyster.com is also giving an additional 20% off room rates. You can read more about it here.

This is one event you don’t want to miss. If you would like to be a part of this year’s Disrupt, tickets are available HERE. Be sure to purchase them soon for the best prices because as we lead up to the event, the prices will increase. We want to give everyone a chance at coming, so if you are feeling lucky and really want to come, we are giving 1 free ticket away every week. Look for our next giveaway this Friday!

Ron Conway
Angel Investor, SV Angel

Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top "deal-makers" in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. Ron is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.

Roelof Botha
Partner, Sequoia Capital

Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focusing on financial services, cloud computing, bioinformatics, consumer internet and mobile companies. Roelof sits on the boards of Aliph, Eventbrite, Mahalo, Meebo, Nimbula, Square, TokBox, Tumblr, Unity and Xoom. Roelof is a champion of consumer Web plays and considers himself as "just another consumer. Roelof's previous investments at Sequoia include Insider Pages and YouTube. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal during its sale to eBay. Earlier, he worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries).

Arianna Huffington
Co-founder and Editor-In-Chief, The Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of eleven books including her latest, "On Becoming Fearless… in Love, Work, and Life". Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union. She is co-host of "Left, Right & Center," public radio's popular political roundtable program, and a frequent guest on television shows such as "Charlie Rose," "Real Time with Bill Maher," "Inside Politics," "Larry King Live," "Hardball," and "Countdown". In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Charlie Rose
Host, Charlie Rose Show

Charlie Rose is an American television interviewer and journalist. He entered television journalism full-time in 1974, when he became the managing editor of the PBS series Bill Moyers' International Report. He currently hosts the Charlie Rose Show, where he has developed a reputation as a skilled interviewer.