Google+ is taking another major step needed to become a full-fledged Facebook rival: it’s launching Google+ Pages, which allow brands, products, companies, businesses, places, groups, and everyone else to establish a presence on the service. The product is a lot like Facebook Pages, but there’s one major difference: Google is baking some elements of Google+ pages deep into its bread-and-butter search product.

It’s been a rocky road getting here. As you may recall, when Google+ first launched, Google asked brands and publishers not to create pages for their own sites, promising that there would be an official solution coming shortly. Not everyone heeded Google’s request (and, in hindsight, TechCrunch shouldn’t have either), but rather than apply its own rules, Google started making exceptions. A lot of people got upset, a new TechCrunch employee was spawned (and unceremoniously banned), and Google SVP Vic Gundotra later went on to say that the ordeal “was probably a mistake“.

Anyway. Now Google+ Pages are officially launching, and it’s good news all around.

I haven’t gotten to use the new Pages feature yet, but Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product and one of heads of the Google+ project, walked me through a set of slides outlining how they’re created, and how users will engage with them.

The first thing Horowitz did was to rattle off some stats: the service launched a little over 100 days ago, now has 40 million users and 3.4 billion photos uploaded, and has launched over one hundred new features. Not a bad start. Onto the Pages.

If you’ve established a personal Google+ profile before, then the features offered through a Page will be familiar. You can place people into Circles, which lets you share content with specific sets of users. You can launch video hangouts, which lets you have face-to-face conversations with your followers. And the Pages work through the site’s mobile app.

But Google has made some key tweaks. The first is that a Page cannot add someone to a circle until that user has already added the page to one of their circles. In other words, a Page can’t start sending you messages until you’ve elected to add them to one of your circles. Another key change: the content on a page defaults to public (as opposed to ‘My Circles’ for personal profiles) and Pages can’t share with extended circles.

And then there’s the feature that leads to my biggest gripe: Pages have both a +1 button and an ‘Add to Circles’ button. The latter is what lets the page send you updates. And the +1 button? It does essentially nothing, at least as far as users are concerned.

Yes, your +1 recommendation might show up in a friend’s search query at some point, but this not exactly a strong incentive. So what’s the point? Horowitz acknowledges that the +1 button is still a bit opaque, but says “we’re not done with the full realization with what happens” when users click on it, and that we can expect some big things coming soon. I still think it’s going to confuse the heck out of users, though.

And, finally, there’s the integration with search, which was foreshadowed several weeks ago.

For many years, Google Search allowed users to create advanced queries using the ‘+’ operator, which allows you to find results that include an exact term. Then, much to the chagrin to many advanced users, Google announced that it was deprecating the feature.

Today, we find out why: when a user goes to Google and types in ‘+TechCrunch’, they’re asked if they’d like to add TechCrunch to one of their Google+ circles. If they say yes, then this behavior becomes automatic: I could type in +Harry Potter + Android and immediately start following the Pages for both of those pages, assuming they existed. Google is describing this feature as Direct Connect to the brands it’s working with.

Of course, this behavior isn’t exactly natural. But Horowitz points out that brands could start advertising it — it’s not hard to imagine a trailed with +MovieTitle on it.

Sleek real-time chat + to do list app Orchestra is announcing its funding this morning, with a just closed $5 million Series A round from Charles River Ventures and SV Angel, in addition to an earlier $500K in seed funding from Kapor Capital and other angel investors.

Orchestra co-founder Gentry Underwood describes the free app as a “texting with a purpose” but also likens it to “a very simple to do list”; “We've taken away everything that doesn't absolutely have to be there.” With the co-founders each having done stints IDEO and Apple, it’s no surprise that Orchestra’s interface is remarkably user-friendly — it seamlessly guides you through the tapping, swiping and shaking gestures needed to navigate upon first download. In the same “frictionless” spirit, he app also syncs automatically to http://www.orchestra.com.

Underwood tells me that biggest differentiator between Orchestra and other to-do list services like OmniFocus is that it is social at its core. Orchestra lets you speak (it’s like the “poor Man’s Siri”) or type in a task and then share it with others within the app or on Twitter and Facebook. Users don’t need an Orchestra account to respond to tasks, and you can even turn emails into Orchestra tasks by forwarding them to tasks@orchestra.com.

In the three weeks since its launch, Orchestra has been iTunes “App of the Week” in every app store worldwide, and was selected by Lifehacker as “Best To-Do App for the iPhone.” Over 1.2 million tasks have been posted, with 1/4 of those assigned to somebody else. Design superstar Jack Dorsey, who has never met or interacted with either co-founder, even tweeted about it.

Underwood plans on using the new funding to bulk up his seven person Palo Alto-based team, and is looking specifically for engineers and product designers. “There's potential here to build something that's more a platform than a product,” he says. Android and iPad versions of the app are also in the works.

You can download Orchestra from the App Store here.

Today we take some time to dive into Clipboard, an intriguing new Web clipping and social bookmarking service started recently by Gary Flake, a former Overture executive who went on to found both Yahoo’s Research Labs and Microsoft's Live Labs. We’ve also learned the names of the fledgling company’s many, top notch investors.

Clipboard aims to become the go-to service for saving and sharing the relevant parts of any page or service available on the Web, including much of its core functionality, or put differently taking care of everything in between simply bookmarking a URL and having to save an entire Web page.

Using a bookmarklet, Clipboard users can ‘clip’ things like search query results, stock quotes, tweets or Facebook status updates, video clips, images with captions, a Google Maps map, a forum answer, an Amazon book review, an eBay product summary, a digital coupon, and the likes.

Select part of a Web page or service, and use your mouse (simply by hovering over something or, preferably, by using the scroll wheel) to increase or decrease the number of ‘zones’ you would like to clip. Your selection – including links and images etc. – will be saved to your Clipboard profile instantly, and you can jump straight to it to visit your clip collection. Difficult to make it any easier.

Check out Flake’s public clips to get a better idea of what Clipboard can do. A screenshot of mine:

Clips can be annotated, saved, shared publicly and with specific users, tagged and all that jazz. But you can also just bookmark simple services you use, games you play, or parts of Web pages you often visit, and interact with your clips by visiting just one website instead of all them separately.

Having tested the service extensively over the past week, I’ve run into some of its limitations, and some bugs which have since been squashed. Not all of a site’s functionality can be simply clipped to Clipboard, as you will notice, but that’s of course not necessarily their fault. Inevitably, some services that reside on other websites or rely on third-party API calls or whatever, will be tougher to clip in full.

For basic things like saving search results, Web videos, simple Flash games, Wolfram Alpha results, online coupons and so on, Clipboard works like a charm most of the time though. It’s addictive, too.

Don’t take my word for it. You can visit this promo page to gain early access to Clipboard. Note that this link will only work when you click on it from the TechCrunch website.

Or check out similar services like Snip.it, Snipi, the new Delicious or Pinterest.

Oh, and about the company’s backers. TechCrunch has learned that Clipboard has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from the following, impressive list of investors:

- Andreessen Horowitz
- Index Ventures
- CrunchFund (note: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a founding partner)
- DFJ
- SV Angel / Ron Conway
- Betaworks
- First Round Capital
- CODE Advisors
- Founder’s Co-Op
- Acequia Capital
- Vast Ventures
- Ted Meisel (former CEO of Overture and now at Elevation Partners)
- Blake Krikorian (former CEO of Sling and now an Amazon board member)
- the elusive Vivi Nevo

Clipboard is expected to debut its service in public beta in the coming months (again, TechCrunch readers can get early access to the current version of Clipboard right here).

Alternatively, you watch the video below to get an idea of how Clipboard works.

The pending launch date of the next Google phone, Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, has been a bit of a mystery up until now. “November” has always been a sure thing, but when exactly we’d be able to get up close and personal was as yet unknown. However, Droid-Life seems to have stumbled upon a Verizon roadmap, which should give us a clear peek at the Nexus’ availability, as well as that of couple other forthcoming phones.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

According to the leaked image (below), availability for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus will begin on November 21, four days after the international launch. We’re still unsure whether or not this handset will only be available online as its forefather the Nexus One was, but that “w/o” seems to suggest a web only launch. Luckily, this bad boy will be on sale through Black Friday, which falls on November 25 this year.

The roadmap also outlines availability for a few other special devices, including the duo of new XOOM tablets we heard about last week (launching on November 30), as well as the Samsung Illusion and the BlackBerry Curve 9370, both of which will hit shelves on November 17.

Twitter has just announced a key engineering hire today. Adam Messinger will be joining the company as Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering.

Messinger was previously Vice President Development at Oracle, where he was responsible for managing the Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

At Oracle he was responsible, for the development Exalogic, Java SE, FX, ME, and Card, Coherence, Virtual Assembly Builder, Middleware Lifecycle and Applications Lifecycle. Prior to his time as a VC, he founded Gauntlet Systems Corp., which was acquired Borland.

It’s a big development hire for Twitter, as the company says Messinger “was doing web engineering before many used the web.”

In October, Twitter’s VP of engineering Mike Abbott left the company to join Benchmark as an EIR.

Photo Credit/Jaxenter

Dum dum dum dummmmm. Do do do dee dee dooot! The London Philharmonic Orchestra has just released “The Greatest Video Game Music” featuring full orchestrations of all of your favorite themes including Super Mario Brothers, the Legend of Zelda, and Halo. That’s right: Angry Birds finally has its own multi-part score and trilling woodwinds.

And the cover art, featuring a soldier playing a cello, is wildly goofy.

You can listen to a sample of the Call of Duty theme composed by Hans Zimmer and pick up the album here. With the coupon code “GAMESMP3″ you can get the MP3 version for a mere $1.99, about the price of a tiny Super Mario Brothers eraser at the Nintendo store.

Here’s what you get:

1. Advent Rising: Muse (Composed by Tommy Tallarico, Emmanuel Fratianni, and Laurie Robinson)
2. Legend of Zelda: Suite (Composed by Koji Kondo)
3. Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2: Theme (Composed by Hans Zimmer)
4. Angry Birds: Main Theme (Composed by Ari Pulkkinen)
5. Final Fantasy VIII: Liberi Fatali (Composed by Nobuo Uematsu)
6. Super Mario Bros Theme (Composed by Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo)
7. Uncharted – Drake’s Fortune: Nate’s Theme (Composed by Greg Edmonson)
8. Grand Theft Auto IV: Soviet Connection (Composed by Michael Hunter)
9. World of Warcraft: Seasons of War (Composed by Jason Hayes)
10. Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty Theme (Composed by Harry Gregson-Williams)
11. Tetris: Theme (Composed by Alexey Pajitnov)
12. Battlefield 2: Theme (Composed by Joel Eriksson)
13. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (Composed by Jeremy Soule)
14. Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare: Main Menu Theme (Composed by Stephen Barton and Harry Gregson-Williams)
15. Mass Effect: Suicide Mission (Composed by Jack Wall and Sam Hulick)
16. Splinter Cell: Conviction (Composed by Michael Nielsen, Kaveh Cohen, and Amon Tobin)
17. Final Fantasy: Main Theme (Composed by Nobuo Uematsu)
18. Bioshock: The Ocean on his Shoulders (Composed by Garry Schyman)
19. Halo 3: One Final Effort (Composed by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori)
20. Fallout 3: Theme (Composed by Inon Zur)
21. Super Mario Bros: Gusty Garden Galaxy (Composed by Koji Kondo)

No Castlevania theme? Come on, London Philharmonic Orchestra, aren’t you down with Akumajō Dorakyura?

Luxury car-sharing service HiGear is announcing a new product called “Swap Club,” which will allow its existing car owners the opportunity to swap cars among each other in exchange for HiGear points. To participate in the “Swap Club,” vehicle owners will either need to accumulate points by renting out their cars on HiGear or they can optionally purchase points via HiGear’s website.

Now live in the Bay Area and L.A., HiGear differentiates itself from car-sharing competitors like RelayRides, Getaround, Zipcar and others, by specializing in “high-end” luxury vehicles only, like Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Porsche, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Tesla.

The company will begin to roll out its new “Swap Club” service to select members next week for testing purposes, says CEO Ali Moiz. The feature should serve as an added incentive for vehicle owners to rent out their own cars on HiGear, as doing so means more points that can be used towards swaps – swaps which, given enough points, will be free.

The number of points a vehicle owner is awarded depends on the type of car and the rental length. A BMW 3 Series may go for 40 points per day, for example, while an Aston Martin DB9 could be 140 points per day.

“Our vision is to bring down the cost of access to awesome cars, and the new ‘Swap Club' will create the world's first luxury car-swap program that gets you into a sports car starting at $0,” says Moiz. “If you're into cars, this is godsend.”

HiGear has now logged over 25,000 hours of car shares on its service since its beta launch in August. Over 2,000 of those hours were in L.A., where HiGear arrived just a week ago. If the current growth rate continues, Moiz says he expects to see 40,000 to 50,000 hours over the next 90 days.

The company also plans to launch in five additional markets, including Portland and San Diego, by year-end.

HiGear has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from BV Capital, Battery Ventures, 500 Startups and angels including Zipcar investor Craig Sherman and Kevin Chou.

Spotify just seems to be popping up everywhere, doesn’t it? In addition to the myriad media streamers and network receivers that Spotify has been appearing on lately, the music streaming service has just entered some wild and woolly new territory: Windows Phone 7.5.

Yep, it took the Spotify team long enough (especially considering they’ve been working on it since at least April), but Redmond devotees will finally be able to get their streaming groove on.

Spotify has been available on most major smartphone platforms for a while now, from mainstays like Android and iOS to even dying operating systems like MeeGo. All that extra time seems to have gone into giving the app a nice Metro facelift though, which is sure to please ardent Mango fans.

Swiping back and forth in typical Windows Phone fashion allows users to navigate between new releases, playlists, friend feeds, and the like. Spotify also wins a few brownie points (in my book, anyway) for setting up their live tile to display playlist information — a particularly thoughtful use of live tiles if ever there was one.

The new Spotify Mango app is set to go live in the Windows Phone Marketplace sometime today, but no further details were divulged. Sorry Spotifans: guess you’ll just have to stick it out a little longer.

Image credit: @tomwarren

Fresh off a $600K round of seed funding, developer education startup Treehouse is launching to the public this morning, using videos, quizzes and badges to take ostensibly anyone from n00b to 1337 in months.

Unlike Codeacademy and Lynda, Treehouse offers a breadth of expert-curated web design, development and iOS development topics (HTML, CSS Foundations, Technology Foundations, Aesthetic Foundations, Introduction to Programming, and others) and is already profitable as it charges users from $29 to $49 dollars a month to use its programs.

What also sets Treehouse apart from others in the space is that users win badges (see below) for getting five questions in a row correct on its quizzes or completing in-browser code challenges, with the objective of building out their public profiles at http://teamtreehouse.com/yourprofile.

Already several blue chip companies like Estée Lauder, Disney and Virgin have signed on to use the service for employee training and startups like LivingSocial, WordPress/Automattic and BankSimple are on board to recruit qualified Treehouse Members after they pull in the requisite badges.

“We plan on getting millions of un-employed or ‘under-employed’ people out of low-paying and unsatisfying jobs and in to higher-paying and exciting design and development jobs,” says co-founder Ryan Carson. He hopes that the service will put a dent in the number of open web and iOS app job opening around the world, and positively impact the world economy.

“A Computer Science degree might cost you $50,000 and take you four years to complete,” Carson tells me, “Treehouse can give you the skills you need and a potential job at the end, all for $150 in six months.”

To further increase the employability of its members, Carson plans on adding more courses — e.g. iOS 5 Foundations, Ruby Foundations and PHP Foundations — to the Treehouse curriculum as soon as possible. “Basically, any topic that web developers, designers and iOS designers/devs need to know, we’ll be tackling,” he says.

Treehouse’s notable list of backers include investors Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose, David Sze, Chamath Palihapitiya, Mark Suster and advisors like Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg, Twitter’s Doug Bowman and BankSimple’s Alex Payne.

Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, has raised $40 million in new funding led by Ignition Partners, Greylock, Accel, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera previously raised $36 million from Accel Partners, Diane Greene, Qi Lu, Jeff Weiner, Marten Mickos, Gideon Yu, Caterina Fake, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel. The startup actually just raised $25 million last Fall.

Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.

Cloudera has steadily launched a number of applications around its technology including Cloudera Enterprise, which includes authorization management and provisioning, integration configuration and monitoring and resource management.

The startup also rolled out Desktop Management platform that allows for copying and browsing the data files stored on a cluster; creating, running and saving jobs for later reuse or customization; and helps monitor the health of a Hadoop cluster and alerting operators in case of problems.

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, says of the funding round, “This investment validates the success and innovation that Cloudera has achieved to date and the enormous market opportunity for Big Data managed by Hadoop…We are confident that by working closely together, we will continue to accelerate Cloudera's leadership in the space and deliver game-changing technology. We are excited to have an experienced team of investors that have actually built and rolled out world class software platforms as our trusted advisors.”

More recently, Cloudera has created a strong foothold in the enterprise as Hadoop becomes the defacto technology to manage large amounts of data. Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more.

Ignition Partner Frank Artale says of the investment: “The Big Data space is moving fast – we looked at many investment opportunities and chose Cloudera due to their clear leadership.”

The company recently launched a comprehensive partner program recently for the companies that use its services. And in June, Cloudera debuted a new version of its service, Cloudera Enterprise 3.5 and released Cloudera SCM Express, which makes it fast and easy for anyone to install and configure a complete Apache Hadoop-based stack

Last year,Olson told GigaOm that the company could have the legs for an IPO down the line. It’s unclear if that will happen, but certainly it appears that the company has been able to make a business out of commercializing an open source framework.

The new funding will be used towards sales and marketing efforts and towards strategic partnerships and initiatives.

Search analytics provider Searchmetrics spent the weekend examining the effects of last week’s changes to the Google algorithm – changes that Google said would affect around one in three Web searches. According the company’s initial analysis, sites with fresher, more-up-to-date content, including many news sites, blogs, broadcasters and brand sites, have indeed seen a boost from the update, as Google promised. This includes sites like TechCrunch parent The Huffington Post, Salon.com, the U.K.’s Daily Mail, plus a number of blogs, celebrity news sites and a large list of brands.

However, the sites that lost SEO visibility after the changes didn’t seem to represent any one group, as they also included some brands, blogs, broadcasters and even Google’s own Blogger.com, which dropped over 20%.

Google’s most recent algorithm update was announced last week as an extension of its previous “Caffeine” update. The so-called “freshness update,” as it’s called, aims deliver more current and relevant search results, specifically in areas where the most recent content matters. This includes things like current events, hot topics, reviews and breaking news items.

To determine how various websites were affected, Searchmetrics performed its analysis using its own SEO database, which ranks sites using its “SEO Visibility” metric. This metric is based on the search volume of a keyword, the type of search (informational, navigational or transactional) and the rank of the URL in question.

In the initial list of winners and losers (see below), Searchmetrics provides the previous SEO Visibility for the sites as of October 30th and the current rank as of November 6th. The percent change is also indicated on the far right, while the type of site is on the far left.

Winners

Losers

The full list is also available on the Searchmetrics blog, where you can click through on the individual URLs to see the changes in more detail. Searchmetrics’s software is available here.

Image credits: Searchmetrics

Never mind the Internet – the TV was invented for pr0n. And now Google TV users can get their fictional passion fix, too, thanks to adult film studio Vivid Entertainment. The latter, always aiming to please, is today giving birth to a dedicated Google TV app (NSFW) – or channel if you will.

According to Vivid, it will be the first app “designed to make sexually explicit content available through the new Google TV set top device”. In high-definition, no less.

Obviously not safe for work – unless you work from home like I do – but you can watch a video demo of the Google TV app on Vivid’s website. Again, NSFW, depending on where you W.

I’m not an expert, but my coworker Jason Kincaid made me promise to mention how awesomely awesome the background music for the video demo is. Listening to it is SFW.

Vivid for Google TV will be available at no additional cost to subscribers to Vivid.com, which currently offers a package of features such as streaming of Vivid’s adult movies, celebrity sex tapes, educational videos and more. Access to the site is restricted to persons over 18 years old.

Obviously, Google won’t be publicizing this app on the Android Market. Presumably, you’ll have to enable non-Market downloads and obtain Vivid’s app on your own – just like you’ll be watching the channel on your own. It’s all easy enough to do, really. I’m talking about the downloading.

Anyway. Said Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of Vivid:

“[Vivid for Google TV] is a central part of our making Vivid available everywhere concept, which gives fans unified access to our content through their personal computers, mobile devices, tablets, television sets and DVD players.”

Hirsch says Vivid spent more than a year developing a code base for a “robust, standalone Internet-TV channel with a friendly interface for the consumer that can be used with the current Google TV technology and other Internet protocol presentation methods now in development”.

I’m left wondering which category the app will fall in: Entertainment, Lifestyle, or TV & Movies?

For your further reading pleasure:

Android’s App Store For Pornography, MiKandi, Adds Support For Paid Applications

Google TV Update Rolls Out On Sunday: Better Content Discovery, Android Market, But Hulu Is Still Blocked

Google TV 2.0 Review: A Brillant Interface, But Still Lacking Substance

Ebook creators are notoriously tight-fisted with their sales stats but today William Lynch, CEO of B&N, announced the company has sold “millions” of devices and said the Nook Color was one of the top selling low-priced tablets, placing the company high in the pantheon of slate device manufacturers.

The Nook Color has always been seen as a stalking horse when it came to tablet sales. Although woefully underpowered for the average Ice Cream Sandwich lover, the device, even jailbroken, offers an introductory experience and is seen as sort of a gateway drug to more powerful Android and iOS devices.

The Nook Color has dropped $200 at Best Buy and the Nook Tablet is, well, a tablet. It’s clearly aimed at the tablet market and, more important, it acts as B&N’s entree into a currently hot market. By avoiding “reader” branding entirely, the device seems to hit on a number consumer touch points.

While we can’t expect B&N and Amazon to ever back down in the numbers arms war, the fact that they are announcing even nebulous numbers is a testament to the growing popularity of their devices.

Steve Jobs was a tweaker, Malcolm Gladwell writes in a New Yorker book review of the Steve Jobs biography. He took existing technologies and perfected them, obsessing about everything from the title bars at the top of windows in the Mac OS to the color of paint in his factories. This obsessive quality was part of who he was and extended to his personal life as well. He spent two weeks deciding what kind of washing machine to buy for his family.

Gladwell notes that tweakers who perfect inventions often bring about more progress than the original inventors:

Jobs's sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it

He was an editor in the sense that he saw his job as making hard choices on behalf of consumers. (Other product-oriented CEOs following in his footsteps, such as Jack Dorsey, also see their role as that of an editor). Jobs was really good at saying “No,”, as I’ve written before:

One of Jobs' greatest talents was as an editor, selecting what not to include in a product. It was that ability which helped him save Apple from going off in 18 different directions and do a few things better than any other company.

In order to do so, he went through countless choices himself, typically rejecting a long line of options from those presented to him by the people who worked for him until he found perfection. He didn’t always know what he wanted until it was placed before him. “I'll know it when I see it. That was Jobs's credo” Gladwell writes, “and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.”

In late September, Amazon unveiled a $199 tablet called the Kindle Fire. Obviously this left a massive divide in the market between the much pricier iPad 2 and the new Kindle Fire, which Barnes & Noble has this morning responded to. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce you to the Nook Tablet.

B&N CEO Willian Lynch made sure to note the Nook tablet’s superior (fully laminated) display isn’t the only feature that is “better” than the Amazon Kindle Fire. He also touted the fact that the Nook tablet offers almost twice the RAM, along with in-store support that just isn’t possible with Amazon.

The 7-inch Nook Tablet looks much like a thinner (less than a pound) and lighter Color, but has innards that couldn’t be more different. Under the hood you’ll find a dual-core 1GHz processor courtesy of Texas Instruments, along with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage (including a microSD slot supporting up to a 32GB card). When Nook cloud isn’t available, all that storage will certainly come in handy. But that’s not to say that Nook cloud won’t be involved — the new Nook tablet has the same Nook cloud support you’ve grown accustomed to.

But the real differentiator between this and the Kindle Fire will be the amount of content available, which B&N contends should be no trouble. The book seller touts 2.5 million books, thousands of apps, and deals with Hulu Plus and Netflix for our video lovers. Oh, and speaking of video, the tablet also supports video playback in full 1080p HD, although the Netflix app will only play video in 720p.

All those books and videos galore mean strong battery life is a must — luckily B&N promises at least 11 hours. Past that, there are plenty of other fun features to keep things interesting, including “Read & Record,” which lets parents record children’s stories so that kids can have their parents voice reading them to sleep at times when parent and child can’t necessarily be together. Angry Birds is also in tow.

The Nook tablet will begin to arrive in stores at the beginning of next week for $249. Meanwhile the rest of the Nook line is getting some price drops: the Nook color has been dropped down to $199, and the more basic Nook Simple Touch has gone from $139 to $99.

Today, Adobe is launching a hosted service for online ad testing which it’s calling Project Adthenticate. Available to publishers, rich media vendors and creative agencies, the service will help to test, validate and optimize ads based on the IAB’s 2011 Rich Media Creative Guidelines.

These guidelines provide a list of requirements for online advertising units, including things like maximum frame rates, max CPU usage, length of in-ad video play and more.

The idea behind the IAB’s Guidelines, which had not been updated since 2008, is to balance the needs of advertisers and publishers with the need for “positive consumer experiences,” explains the organization explains. Since its last update, advertisers have been increasingly interested in the usage of interactive ads and rich media formats. Of course, these sorts of ads are more complex and require additional testing.

With Adobe’s Adthenticate, publishers and agencies will be able to do that testing right in the browser. After signing into the service, they can select a local file, enter an ad’s URL or an AdTag and then chose the IAB specification they want to test it against.

After running, the test displays the results in a simple chart, displaying allowed and actual value for things like SWF width, height and filesize, framerate, animation time, sound and more. A performance monitor below maps out the CPU usage during the ad’s run.

According to Adobe, the key features found in of the (beta) service include:

• Dynamic Validation: Online ads are run in a hosted, browser-based environment
• Standardized CPU usage: Without Project Adthenticate, the ad ecosystem must compare CPU usage across machines that vary greatly in different agency and publishers’ QA departments
• Advanced Instrumentation: Adthenticate can detect any requests for tracking pixels, animation beyond specified durations and clickTAG issues
• Rich Media Rules: This lets the publishers set complex rules regarding the “polite, user-initiated, and automatic loading and playback of additional media, such as animations, video, and audio”
• Web Service API: Adthenticate is also available as an API

Mobile marketing companies iLoop and Lenco are merging, according to a release issued today. Under the terms of the agreement, iLoop will become a subsidiary of Lenco, with iLoop's shareholders receiving a combination of cash and stock valued at approximately $42 million.

According to the companies, Lenco's international operations and rich media platforms are complimentary to iLoop's strength in the United States. Together, the combined company will have operations on five continents.

Lenco's technologu provides advertisers and wireless carriers the means to deliver large, high volume, rich-media campaigns with highly personalized content, optimized for each different device. Similarly, iLoop’s mFinity platform makes it fast and easy for brands, marketing agencies, content owners and other companies, such as Lexus and Coca Cola, to create websites, ad campaigns and more.

Unlimited streaming music service MOG is expanding its footprint yet again with a new AT&T deal that will see its mobile application pre-installed on AT&T’s first new LTE smartphones: the Samsung Galaxy S Skyrocket and the HTC Vivid. The app will be pre-loaded onto these two AT&T 4G (LTE) phones, and customers will be able to try the service for free for a week. In addition, the company has integrated with AT&T’s billing system, so customers can pay for MOG via their regular phone bill.

This is the first carrier pre-load deal for the all-you-can-eat streaming music service which is now offering a catalog of over 13 million songs for $9.99/month on mobile. MOG is already available as a standalone iOS app, Android app, desktop app, in BMW vehicles, and on media centers, TVs and Blu-ray players, including LG and Samsung TVs, Samsung Blu-ray players, Boxee, Roku, Sonos and more. The service also recently saw a big bump in usage thanks to the Facebook integration. Over the past month, MOG reported seeing its monthly active users jump over 264%, reaching 160,000 users via its Facebook app during the month of October (source: AppData). If the growth rate continues, that could bring MOG to 2 million Facebook users by year-end, CEO David Hyman says.

Now as a pre-installed app on AT&T’s new LTE phones, the removal of the pre-registration process eliminates a big hurdle in acquiring new mobile user sign-ups. However, MOG will not disclose the current size of its user base, or how many more it expects the AT&T deal to bring, only saying that it expects the growth to be “significant.”

Short Version

The Droid RAZR has been one highly anticipated phone, but can its performance keep up with the hype? Is it too big to be comfortable? Is there a catch that comes along with that 7.1mm waist line? Does 4G LTE paired with a dual-core processor really make a difference? Well, it’s basically the entire point of my existence to answer these questions for you. So off we go.

Features:

• 4.3-inch 540×960 qHD Super AMOLED display
• Dual-core 1.2GHz processor
• 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, autofocus and video capture in 1080p
• 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera
• Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
• 4G LTE
• MSRP: $299 on-contract, available November 11

Pros:

• 7.1mm waist line makes the Droid RAZR the thinnest smartphone in the world
• Truly beautiful and unique design paired with an equally gorgeous display
• MOTOCast support — stream any media seamlessly between PC and handset

Cons:

• Tends to overheat a bit, and thus slow down
• Is so light that it feels cheap, and for a $299 phone that’s not exactly what you’re going for
• This should be expected, but battery life was a bust

Long Version:

The Droid RAZR for Verizon is no doubt a beastly little phone. The combination of 4G LTE support and a dual-core processing chip makes for quite the snappy experience, and the design speaks for itself. While I’m not sure I can tell you it justifies its $299 price tag, I can say it certainly deserves its spot as one of the top contenders for this holiday season.

Hardware:

There’s one thing to be said for the Droid RAZR’s design before all else: it’s crazy thin. So thin, in fact, that I’m not sure pictures or video will do it justice. If you’re on the fence, please go pick up a device in-store and get a good feel for it in the hand because I have a feeling the RAZR suits a certain type of taste.

To start, it was a tad big for me. I’ve always thought I had pretty large hands for a girl and I still felt awkward maneuvering around with the RAZR, pulling it in and out of pockets, or simply switching from portrait to landscape. Perhaps comfort with that is something that will happen over time, but it’s worth considering. Then there’s the matter of weight. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but just because this or that gadget is the “lightest” doesn’t mean that’s a good thing. The lightest gadgets are usually the cheaper gadgets, made of plastic and thus easily damaged. The Droid RAZR teeters on that line pretty nicely, but I have to admit that at times it felt a bit lighter than I wanted it to. Especially for a phone so thin, a little heft in the hand would go a long way to ensure sturdiness.

Design-wise, I’m pretty much infatuated with the RAZR. Android devices tend to all blend in together, and when you venture deeper into the category of Motorola-branded Android devices it only gets worse. The RAZR has a different style than its fellow Moto brethren — while it keeps some of the design language like that classic Moto hump on the back, the sharpened and squared off corners and Kevlar fiber casing give it a distinct look. Not to mention, that back panel feels really nice in the hand, like a pricey alternative to soft touch rubber.

If anything shines on the Droid RAZR at first glance, it’s the screen. The 4.3-inch display is a beauty in its own right, and if you enjoy gaming or mobile video you definitely need to think twice about this guy. Plus, the display is coated with Gorilla Glass to protect against small drops and the ever-famous “back pocket test.”

Software:

As you should already know, the Motorola Droid RAZR runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and (thank the heavens!) without MotoBLUR in the way. There is still some form of a manufacturer skin running over Android, but it’s not nearly as heavy and annoying as Blur, by any stretch of the imagination.

Quite unexpectedly, the majority of the Droid RAZR’s pre-loaded apps are actually useful, and may even play a role in your purchasing decisions. For one, NFL Mobile is free to 4G LTE customers through the 2011 season. Then, we have Netflix HD which simply must be put to use on such a stunning and massive display.

I assume the MotoCast integration will also be a big pull for many consumers, and in my time with it it proved to be a nifty little service. It’s a similar idea to Apple’s iCloud, albeit less comprehensive. But on the whole the service is quick, easy and reliable, which is all you can ask out of streaming media between devices. It makes tasks that used to be tedious seamless, and makes you wonder why we haven’t been doing this all along.

Verizon’s left its print on the RAZR, in the form of the V CAST Tones, Verizon Video, and VZW Navigator apps. Meanwhile, Moto has included MOTOPRINT and the MotoACTV app, which lets you sync information between your MotoACTV smart watch and the RAZR. Quickoffice also made its way into the RAZR, along with GoToMeeting, which is sure to keep any suit satisfied and smiling.

Verizon included the BlockBuster app as well, along with a trial version of Madden NFL 12.

Performance:

Speaking of Madden, it killed the RAZR. Motorola made all kinds of unrealistic promises about the RAZR’s battery life at the unveiling in NYC, and none were more skeptical than myself. 4G radios suck up a ton of power — they don’t mean to, they just can’t help it. That said, 4G LTE devices will always be positioned for swifter deaths, and the RAZR was no exception. With about six hours of standby and about 3 hours of pretty intensive use, including gaming, video, and browsing, the Droid RAZR let me sleep in this morning after it died. Motorola’s thrown in a number of battery saving tools, which I highly recommend for any potential owners of the RAZR.

As far as basic performance goes, I didn’t have much to gripe about with the RAZR. Switching between home screens, scrolling within the browser, and pinch-to-zoom commands within the image gallery were all as smooth and snappy as I had hoped. The browser loaded up pages with no trouble at all, but I was surprised to find that the Android browser got beat by both my iPhone 4S’s Safari browser and the Focus Flash’s IE9 Windows Phone browser. I ran the tests both over WiFi and the phone’s respective networks and in both instances, the Droid RAZR came in third. Still, there’s no reason to complain. IE9 is one of the fastest browsers I’ve seen on a phone, and the iPhone 4S… well, that’s where the real decision-making needs to happen. If you’re an Android loyalist, try not to let this particular speed factor matter too much. Otherwise, consider the iPhone 4S. Especially if you’re always surfing the interwebs.

One thing I noticed rather quickly is that the Droid RAZR is hot. Yes, it’s a sexy phone to say the least, but it also overheats really easily. Within moments of booting up the phone and getting started it was burning up, and did so each time I used it. The slow-down in performance is a small one, to be sure, but if you’re paying attention you’ll notice it. The hotter the phone gets, the longer it takes to load up apps, or resume apps during multi-tasking.

The camera on this bad boy simply can’t be ignored. Still images taken with the 8-megapixel shooter are high-quality to say the least, but what really impressed me was the RAZR’s video capture abilities. Taking stills, the camera adjusts for a while to get focused, and then takes another second or two to snap the picture. Mobile photography obviously doesn’t do well with any form of lag, so that was a bit sad to see. But video capture, on the other hand, is quick and responsive.

The camera seems to focus well, even if you’re a bit shaky. Plus, I noticed that while shooting video the camera adjusts really quickly between dark and light settings. On many phones, the time it takes to go from a dark room out into the sunlight can be excessive, but I found the RAZR to squash those concerns pretty quickly. Naturally, the Droid RAZR packs a port for HDMI-out, so you don’t have to be shy with your 1080p videos either.

Conclusion:

All of Motorola’s pre-release hype set my expectations pretty high, but did the Droid RAZR manage to win me over? Almost. I still don’t think the lightweight feel lends itself well to the premium sort of experience Motorola was going for, and the RAZR’s battery left a lot to be desired. Even so, Motorola has managed to put together a really impressive (not to mention gorgeous) package with the Droid RAZR, and there’s a lot to like if you can live with a few shortcomings.

Enterprise CRM giant Salesforce.com is getting a COO today. The company is announcing that it is promoting George Hu to Chief Operating Officer. Hu previously held the title of Executive Vice President, Platform, Marketing, and Operations and will continue to report to Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff in his new role.

Hu joined Salesforce.com in 2002 and served as vice president of product marketing, senior vice president of applications, executive vice president of products, and chief marketing officer prior to joining the executive team in his most recent role. Hu also led Salesforce.com's corporate development and investment strategy since 2009, including the acquisitions of Jigsaw, Heroku, and Radian6.

Previously, Hu held product management and strategic consulting roles at North Point Communications and Boston Consulting Group.

Salesforce actually didn’t have a COO previously, so Hu isn’t filling anyone else’s shoes. Founder Marc Benioff serves as Chairman & CEO and co-founder Parker Harris is the company’s Executive Vice President of Technology.

“George’s leadership over the past nine years has been key to driving salesforce.com’s growth to over a $2B run rate,” said Benioff in a statement. “I look forward to seeing his vision and leadership as COO scale our growth toward $10B and beyond.”

As COO, Hu will lead all major shared operational functions for the company including information technology, employee success, facilities, security, as well Salesforce.com’s platform division, global marketing, strategic alliances, and corporate development.