Verizon's FiOS footprint may be on an expansion hiatus, but that's not to say the company's abandoning existing users. Nearly 3.5 years after boosting FiOS internet speeds with G-PON, the company is now out testing XG-PON2 -- a newfangled iteration that somehow enables 10Gbps upstream and downstream from its existing fiber network. If you'll recall, we heard just a few weeks back that the outfit was close to being able to serve GigE on its existing platform, and now that this field trial has been successful, we'd say the boundaries are stretched even further. In the test, technicians were able to suck down a 2.3GB movie in four ticks of the second hand, and if you're hoping to see the nerdiest video of the day, a highlight reel of the trial awaits you just past the break.

[Thanks, David]

Continue reading Verizon FiOS field trial introduces XG-PON2 to the lexicon, shows 10Gbps capabilities

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Verizon FiOS field trial introduces XG-PON2 to the lexicon, shows…

U.S. comScore video metrix stats are out today, with the number of video viewers rebounding in the month of May. According to the web metrics company, 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month compared to 178 million in April. ComScore reports that YouTube saw record viewership in May with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time. The report also showed that 144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (which works out to 101.2 videos per viewer).

In May, U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos, with Google Sites taking the top spot with 14.6 billion videos, representing 43.1 percent of all videos viewed online. ComScore says that YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the property. Hulu came in second with 1.2 billion videos, or 3.5 percent of all online videos viewed, a slight increase from April. Microsoft Sites ranked third with 642 million (1.9 percent), followed by Vevo with 430 million (1.3 percent) and Viacom Digital with 347 million (1.0 percent).

According to the release, 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. The average Hulu viewer watched 27.0 videos, totaling 2.7 hours of video per viewer. The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.

In terms of number of viewers, nearly 183 million viewers watched an average of 186 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month (101.2 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo Sites with 46.0 million viewers (7.3 videos per viewer), and Vevo with 45.6 million viewers (9.4 videos per viewer). Vevo grew again this month, and moved up the list one position in the May ranking taking the #3 spot with 45.6 million viewers and an average of 9.4 videos per viewer.

With respect to video advertising in May, Tremor Media once again took the top spot as the number one video ad network with a potential reach of 102.8 million viewers, or 56.2 percent of the total video viewing audience. ScanScout Network ranked second with a potential reach of 99.3 million viewers (54.3 percent penetration) followed by YuMe Video Network with 87.5 million viewers (47.8 percent).

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comScore: YouTube Reaches All-Time High of 14.6 Billion Videos Viewed…

Twitterjust put up a blog post talking up its platform approach and long-term strategy. Surprisingly, the company has made some decisions that are sure to irk a couple of third-party developers and startups.

Here’s the big news: aside from Promoted Tweets, Twitter said it will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API.

That’s not so good news for TweetUp (and other Twitter-focused advertising startups like Ad.ly and Twad.ly). Particularly not the former, which just launched its live beta at TechCrunch Disrupt half an hour ago.

Here are the reasons Twitter says it decided not to allow third-parties to advertise in the stream:

First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.

Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.

It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.

Twitter adds that when its new Annotations feature launches, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available.

The company does recognize that for a few companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which some have invested resources.

It will be interesting to see how those companies will respond to the news. TweetUp, for one, says they never planned to advertise in-stream, so this won’t affect them as much as you would think at first.

Nevertheless, it shows that Twitter’s decisions on the way it moves forward with its platform and how to monetize it most efficiently should keep startups that base their entire business model on the Twitter platform on guard.

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Twitter To Prohibit Any Third Party To Advertise In-Stream

I wrote before that Wall Street has a far bigger fascination with Brazil than Silicon Valley has. But since I got back from Brazil two weeks ago, I’ve had several conversations with Silicon Valley-based investors mulling scouting trips down South. Indeed, I’ve heard that at least one company I wrote about from my last trip to Brazil is deep in some funding negotiations as we speak.

If the left side of the coast of the US is getting serious about doing business in Brazil, there’s someone they need to meet: Edivan Costa. He’s taken one of the biggest threats to Brazilian entrepreneurship, and fittingly, turned it into a startup itself.

Sure Brazil is a growing market, but it’s not easy to build a company there. The government takes one-third of revenues in taxes, and Brazil has European-like labor laws that prevent companies from flexibly hiring and firing—a big negative for a startup ecosystem. But Costa’s company SEDI is helping with one big hurdle new companies face: Bureaucracy. On average, it takes 150 days to open a business in Brazil, requiring dozens of licenses and in many cases those licenses have to be continually renewed. SEDI specializes in making that painless, and Costa has spent 18 years learning how to get the process down to 30-to-40 days—without paying any bribes. He has 90 employees in twelve branches in Brazil.

It’s one thing to start a business in an area other people are ignoring. It’s quite another to start a business out of something everyone else sees as the exact thing that’s thwarting entrepreneurship. Costa always had that entrepreneurial edge—growing up in Rio’s favelas he spent his youth collecting scrap paper and selling it to recyclers to pay for his school books. He thought he’d found his way out through every Brazilian kid’s dream—professional soccer. By the time he was 18, he was playing in the equivalent of the minor leagues in Sao Paulo, when his father fell ill and he had to move back home. He wound up splitting some office space with an attorney, doing his clerk work and eventually started offering that service to other attorneys and companies.

Costa’s story is remarkable for a guy that grew up with few advantages. He was largely uneducated, had no investors and as an Afro-Brazilian he takes issue with the idea that Brazil is free from racism. Soon after starting SEDI, he was driving a nice car with a blond girlfriend on his arm, and a guy in a convenience store asked him if he was a Samba player, a soccer player or a criminal. He says he still gets confused for a security guard in malls, because he wears a suit everywhere he goes. (That’s him in the dramatic picture above.)

But the only color that Costa’s clients care about is the red tape he helps them cut through, by keeping up to date with the myriad of changing regulations. Customers include WalMart, TelMex and Carrefour, along with a lot of other big national brands. He specializes in retail businesses with hundreds of stores spread throughout the country. SEDI did over $3 million US dollars in revenue last year, down from 2008 thanks to the financial crisis. But already in 2010, business is up 25%, Costa says. He serves about 8% of the top 500 companies in Brazil, so there’s clearly a lot of room to grow– or if he’s not careful for a competitor to eat his lunch.

SEDI is a services business that likely won’t be the next big Brazilian IPO. But it could easily enable that company to open its doors. People always say the key to Silicon Valley’s startup infrastructure is the network of professionals skilled at getting a company up and running in a matter of days. Brazil still has a long way to go to get there, clearly, but SEDI helps. This seems like a no-brainer service every emerging market needs.

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Making Lemonade out of Bureaucratic Brazilian Lemons

When bashing AT&T’s network, two cities usually come up above all others: New York City and San Francisco. AT&T has even acknowledged just how bad it is in those cities. But they’ve also said for a while that they’re working on making it better. And apparently now that work is far enough along that they’re emailing customers about it.

Over the past week, AT&T has been emailing its customers in San Francisco to let them know that the network is getting better. “We wanted you to be among the first to know! We recently enhanced the 3G network in the greater San Francisco area to provide better in-building 3G coverage, fewer dropped calls and a better overall wireless experience,” says the email.

It continues, “With better coverage on the nation’s fastest 3G network, there’s never been a better time to be an AT&T customer.” In other words, “things are getting better, please don’t leave.”

Hopefully, it’s a good sign if AT&T feels comfortable enough about its network to email its customers. Another good sign: AT&T did a great job this past week keeping its network stable during the SXSW festival (after failing badly last year). Still, AT&T has been saying for a while that they’re working on fixing the network in San Francisco, and on any given day it can be as bad as ever.

Below, find the full email being sent:

We wanted you to be among the first to know! We recently enhanced the 3G network in the greater San Francisco area to provide better in-building 3G coverage, fewer dropped calls and a better overall wireless experience.

The great news is coverage in Northern California will continue to improve as we expand capacity, optimize and add more sites in the coming months.

With better coverage on the nation’s fastest 3G network, there’s never been a better time to be an AT&T customer.

We thank you for your continued loyalty and look forward to sharing more good news soon.

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AT&T Emails SF Customers That The Network Is Getting Better (Did The…

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook.

Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.

Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave. And, it’s really starting to happen right now. It is realtime. It is social. It is mobile. And, it is about time. Literally, it is about productivity.

I’m energized by the excitement I see for a new generation of collaboration software in the enterprise to replace antiquated Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM’s Lotus Notes. I’ve enjoyed seeing my observation—that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg—reverberate around the web. But, the reality is the Facebook Imperative contained more than a funny line. It hit a nerve. We are all responding—debating—a question that is an imperative because we all need to take software to a new level, and now is the time. Microsoft and IBM have maintained the status quo on enterprise collaboration software too long, and it’s time for a change.

There are an overwhelming number of you who agree that its time to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. We are betting salesforce.com’s future on it. Approximately 40% of companies are already deploying or planning to deploy a social computing platform, a number that’s expected to rise, says Irwin Lazar of Nemeretes Research. Not everyone agrees, mostly the vendors that are milking their cash cows. But, make no mistake about it, this generation of social platforms is very different than the last.

Charles Zedlewski emerged from a long blogging hiatus to argue that Facebook is designed for entertainment—not productivity. Well, that’s not surprising given that he works for SAP, one of the companies I have previously referred to as “innovationless”—in my view they remain the Anti-Cloud. Their actions speak for themselves. Still, I’m astounded that more enterprises haven’t figured out how to tap into the real collaborative power of Facebook and Twitter, and the new social models that they have pioneered.

I consider Facebook and Twitter—and the ability to tap into my network of friends and followers—one the most productive ways I can start my day. Using these new Internet phenoms, I’ve tested new ad campaigns and elicited great customer responses, promoted my book to a large audience of people who cared, and with the help of my network, even named new products—all before I sat down for breakfast. I’m not alone; ask Vinnie Mirchandani for a sneak preview of his new book and read how Starbucks, Avon, and Pepsi are using these new social services to increase productivity in their enterprises. Or, look at how Causes, one of Facebook’s most popular apps, is having a fascinating impact on the future of philanthropy.

While my admiration for Facebook is no secret, the fact is that the Facebook Imperative—much like The Amazon Imperative of 1999—is just a metaphor. Like all metaphors, they are terrific catalysts to introduce an idea and orient people. They are rooted in inspiration, but they do not funnel down to the granular details. And, there are details that make this movement entirely new in practice. The power of this new model is to create the next level of productivity, collaboration, and learning in the enterprise. And, I see it happening now in our own company.

For years we’ve been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms.

We have deployed Salesforce Chatter internally through our own beta program, and we are now using the social models proven by Facebook and Twitter to run our company. Our new social enterprise is built atop our existing business information and applications. It’s not partitioned off from other enterprise applications, but is an integrated part of it—offering a new view of the data that is more productive and easier to use. Through enterprise sharing models, filtering and discovery tools, users have full flexibility over which people and data they follow—allowing them to fully maximize the value of their own feeds and eliminating the risk of “pollutants” some critics fear.

I have learned more about my own company in the last three weeks using Salesforce Chatter than I have in the last three years. It reminds me of the time we went live with http://ideas.salesforce.com. The awareness I have today of what is happening with our employees, our customers, our products, our customer service escalations, and even the deals we are closing is spectacular. Social computing for the enterprise is about seeing what matters to your company, what is happening with your products, and among your people. It’s about the information you need to make decisions finding you. I’m amazed at the potential of this technology. There is just no way I can explain it to you in writing, so here is an actual screen shot that I took off my desktop to give you an idea of the flow (click to enlarge):

It is time to let go of the past and start to create a compelling future for the software industry. I’m energized by the skeptics. It’s familiar. They all eventually convert to what’s important to customers, or become increasingly irrelevant. You don’t have to look any farther than last week when Steve Ballmer spoke to the University of Washington telling them Microsoft was finally “All-In” the cloud. Well, that only took a decade or two. No more software plus services, now they are 100% cloud too. Sure.

I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens.

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The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped

Monica Keller, a MySpace Group Architect who has played a key role in advancing MySpace’s initiatives in activity streams and openness, is leaving the company to join Facebook. Keller announced the news in a blog post this evening. She will be joining Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager, where she’ll be joining a team that includes David Recordon and Luke Shepard. MySpace confirmed that Keller had left the company but declined to comment further.

Keller played a key role in launching MySpace’s Real-Time Stream API, helping to design the Real Time Stream using PuSH and architecting the network’s Twitter Sync Ingest.  Keller was involved with the technical aspects of the Stream, and was also involved with the design of MySpace’s developer platform. She’s also represented MySpace on numerous conference panels.

While Keller has some nice things to say about the struggling company in her post, she clearly wasn’t pleased with the way some things were handled at MySpace:

But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore.

To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice:

It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery.

This is a loss for MySpace, but it certainly isn’t the end of their real-time and open initiatives (which have been more progressive than Facebook’s).  We hear that these are still being spearheaded by recently promoted MySpace co-president Mike Jones, and that Christina Wodtke, who recently joined the company after running the activity stream product at LinkedIn, is involved in running the team’s day-to-day operations.

Image by Adam Tinworth.

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MySpace Stream Architect Monica Keller Jumps To Facebook

Naturally, which you launch a new product with a huge amount of hype, like Google Buzz, you’re going to want to own the .com domain name for it. And Google obtained googlebuzz.com just in the nick of time, according to a document from the National Arbitration Forum.

On November 13, 2009, Google, represented by Meredith M. Pavia (presumably, a Google lawyer), filed a complaint that BuzzNews Network was using the googlebuzz.com domain in bad faith. Further, they argued that it was “confusingly similar” to Google’s trademark on the company name. This was an easy one for the forum to rule on since BuzzNews Network never responded to the complaint.

The presiding panelist also cited Google as being one of the most recognized brands in the world, and clearly that part of the name overcame any claim to “buzz” BuzzNews Network might have had. It probably didn’t help that BuzzNews bought the domain from GoDaddy in 2004 and had parked it with links ever since.

On December 23, 2009, the panelist ruled the name had to be turned over to Google. And though it doesn’t yet forward anywhere, you can bet Google will soon set up googlebuzz.com to point to the service, just as googlewave.com points to Google Wave. While Google launched the service today, it originally planned to do it at a later time, we hear. That had to be moved up for some unknown reason, so they’re lucky they got the domain when they did.

Of course, it looks like someone else just registered buzzgoogle.com and is parking it. The fight continues…

[thanks Shmuel]

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Buzzkill: Google Won Disputed Googlebuzz.com Domain A Month Ago

Ads on the iPhone, just as ads on the web, are something most users want to avoid. But some of the ad companies that are specifically targeting newer smartphone devices such as the iPhone are becoming increasingly inventive with their approach to advertising. A good example of this just launched today in the NPR app for the iPhone.

In this app, the mobile analytics and advertising company Medialets is serving up an ad for the new album, Contra, by the band Vampire Weekend. At first, the ad just peeks out at the bottom of the NPR app, but if you click to expand it, it quickly takes up the entire device. So why would you want to do this? Because it’s a video for Vampire Weekend’s new song “Cousins” — and thanks to some of the iPhone’s unique features, you can actually interact with the ad, shaking your iPhone to change how the video looks.

Sure, it’s not a huge amount of customization, but it’s much better than normal methods of advertising and it creates a sense of interaction with the ad. Naturally, you can also click the screen to show an option that will allow you to buy the album on the device.

Companies like Google and Apple, two of the most important players in mobile right now, are scooping up some of these mobile ad companies left and right these days. Clearly, they think there’s a bright future for the medium as well.

Watch the ad in action below.

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An iPhone Ad Disguised As A User-Editable Vampire Weekend Music Video

Nasdaq-listed Unica has acquired privately-held Pivotal Veracity for approximately $17.8 million in cash, the company announced this morning prior to the opening of the market.

The marketing software company picked up Pivotal Veracity, which was founded in August 2003, to ramp up its e-mail marketing software solutions in what it regards as a ‘logical extension’ of their offerings.

Pivotal Veracity markets a suite of tools designed to optimize the deliverability, reputation and effectiveness of digital communication. Its software suite enables its customers, which include companies like Cisco, Classmates.com, Digitas, Nestle and Sears, to maximize e-mail content rendering and delivery effectiveness and reduce the cost of sending emails that never reach intended recipients, including those that are filtered by ISP and third party spam filter services, or end up in personal spam folders.

Pivotal Veracity also helps customers protect their brands by minimizing the risk of being blacklisted, as well as ensuring that customers are actively protected by ISP and third party whitelists.

Unica had already integrated Pivotal Veracity’s solutions into its enterprise and on-demand offerings and says it expects to deepen that integration across both companies’ product lines and continue to sell Pivotal Veracity’s solutions on a stand-alone basis as well. Pivotal Veracity’s co-founders, Deirdre Baird and Michelle Eichner, will join Unica and guide the company’s efforts in email marketing and deliverability.

Unica says the acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to its revenue in fiscal year 2010 and should be neutral to slightly accretive to FY10 Non-GAAP EPS.

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Unica Acquires Pivotal Veracity For Approx. $17.8 Million In Cash

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus pulled all in-game offers in the wake of Scamville. At the time, he said “We recognize it is our responsibility to ensure that offers which generate a bad user experience are not shown with any of our games. Therefore, we are removing all CPA offers across zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.” That was November 8, 2009, a little over two months ago.

Today offers are officially back on Zynga. In a new blog post, Pincus says they are tightly controlling which offers are accepted. Just eight companies are included: Netflix, Discover Card, Blockbuster, HSBC Direct, Gamefly, Book of the Month Club, SnapFish and The New York Times.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with Zynga putting these offers back online, and these companies are unlikely to engage in the type of scammy behavior that started the whole Scamville saga in the first place. Not all offers are evil.

I am amused though by Pincus saying about the companies “all of which have high Better Business Bureau ratings.” A BBB rating is nothing to be proud of. Video Professor, one of the more serious scammers, maintains an A rating at the BBB.

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Zynga Tiptoes Back Into Offers

Digital music company eMusic is rumored to be up for sale, according to various reports, but that hasn’t stopped it from signing licensing deals with big music. This morning, eMusic announced that it come to an agreement with Warner Music Group and that it will soon begin selling tracks from WMG’s roster of artists to its U.S. users.

eMusic last year inked a similar deal with Sony Music Entertainment.

The agreement includes titles from WMG’s Atlantic Records, Rhino Records and Warner Bros. Records as well as from independent labels distributed through WMG’s Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) stable that are not currently sold on eMusic. The deal will make 10,000 catalog albums from artists like REM, Depeche Mode and Aretha Franklin available for downloading, but does not include newer hit records.

eMusic says it currently offers more than 7.5 million tracks, and that it has sold more than 350 million music downloads under its current ownership. The company sells monthly membership plans beginning at 24 credits for $11.99. One of its rival, FreeAllMusic, yesterday announced that it had signed an agreement with Universal Music for ad-supported downloads.

eMusic CEO Danny Stein reiterated earlier rumors about its plans to complement the company’s subscription-based music download service with streaming, telling Reuters that the company is currently in talks with label partners for new licensing deals that would allow registered users to stream songs, similar to services like CBS-owned Last.fm and LaLa (which Warner Music Group invested in and was recently acquired by Apple).

Streaming would be added in 2010, provided rights holders come to terms with the realities of new business models, Stein said. We’ve contacted the company for more information about its streaming plans, such as timing and pricing.

Interestingly, Stein didn’t dismiss rumors about a potential sale of eMusic, but told Reuters that a buyer would have to pay its owner, Dimensional Associates, for a successful 2010 and 2011 upfront in order for them to consider it.

Which sounds to me like something that you would say if you were definitely up for sale.

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eMusic Reels In Another Major Label With Warner Music Deal

Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option).

Exploiting the bug is fairly simple: while receiving an incoming call on a Droid that has its Lock screen activated, you can simply hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button to bypass the lock and jump to the homescreen. This, of course, gives access to the owner’s Email account, cookied web pages, phone directory, and everything else stored on the phone. You can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the thief would have to know your phone number or wait for someone to call your phone to exploit the bug, but that’s not particularly reassuring. The issue was first reported earlier today by The Assurer, which says that it is apparently only affecting Android version 2.0.1 on the Droid (which already represents a large chunk of Android’s userbase).

We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us the following statement:

“We are aware of the issue and we’re working to deliver a fix to Motorola Droids shortly.”

Android isn’t the first smartphone OS to fall prey to security bugs like this. In August 2008 a similar flaw with the iPhone allowed people to easily bypass the phone’s lock screen.

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Security Flaw Makes It Easy To Bypass Verizon Droid Screen Lock

The third annual Crunchies Awards last night were a smashing success, bringing together entrepreneurs, investors, startups, and other members of the tech community to honor the top in their class and enjoy an evening with friends. Thanks to everyone who attended the ceremony and the afterparty across the street at San Francisco’s City Hall, and we hope to see you all next year. We’ve got plenty of photos of the festivities, some of which we’ve embedded below. And there are many, many more photos available at the Crunchies 2009 Flickr Stream.

All photos via the Crunchies 2009 Flickr Stream, except for the top two which are by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

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The Crunchies Photo Gallery

Here’s a first. VitaminWater has just announced that its newest flavor will be called “Connect”, complete with a Facebook logo and a full paragraph description loaded with references to untagging, friend requests, and photo stalking. It’s black cherry-lime flavored, with caffeine and “eight key nutrients”. And it’s coming to stores nationwide in March.

The new flavor and label were a result of a contest VitaminWater has been conducting on its Facebook page over the last few months that invited fans to design their own flavors (check out the video below featuring Steve Nash for an intro). Here’s the message VitaminWater used to announce the news on its Facebook page. You can blame them for the lack of capitalization:

unlike the never-ending debate over whether it’s rock-paper-scissors or paper-rock-scissors, based on your votes and your designs, the latest flavor of vitaminwater has FINALLY been decided… introducing the black cherry-lime flavored vitaminwater named… connect! check out this new package- flavor & ingredients, name & label design- all inspired by you- our fans. it’s got 8 key nutrients plus caffeine. thanks for all your help- especially to the grand prize winner Sarah from Illinois and the four other finalist http://budurl.com/q27w. vitaminwater connect will be available in stores nationwide in march this year- so until then, stay hydrated- and keep your eyes here for news, updates and special offers for connect, including a possible sneak tasting opportunity. and btw… it’s rochambeau!

One amusing thing worth pointing out: the bottle’s label prominently features a fingerprint on it, which isn’t really something you’d normally associate with sharing or a safe online environment. And it will look especially odd if Facebook’s privacy fiasco ever comes to a head.

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Facebook Just Got Its Own VitaminWater Flavor: “Connect”. …

iYogi, a company that provides remote tech support directly to consumers and small businesses, has raised a Series C round to the tune of $15 million.

The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and joined by prior investors Canaan Partners, SAP Ventures, and SVB India Capital Partners. The Gurgaon, India-headquartered firm earlier raised $3.1 million and $9.5 million in two rounds in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

iYogi offers a number of tech support services like PC installation and recovery, anti-virus/spyware, data back-up and PC speed optimization. Its annual unlimited tech support plan starts at $139.99. Most of its tech support services are centered around Microsoft software, but Google and Apple products are also listed on iYogi’s website.

iYogi says it will use the additional capital to expand its team of Global Tech Experts, which are basically people who help consumers and SMBs solve their computer problems from a remote location. iYogi says that today, it has more than 100,000 annual subscribers and provides thousands of incident sessions every day on a 24/7 basis.

The company claims that it has seen a 300 percent growth in revenues and subscribers since 2008, and that it currently boasts an employee workforce of 1,200. iYogi intends to grow the number of Global Tech Experts to 3,000 worldwide in 2010.

iYogi delivers its services in partnership with companies like HP, Microsoft and Cisco and counts Amazon and Walmart among the retailers that have worked with the company to enhance customer service.

Have you ever used iYogi? Is it something you would recommend to your less tech-savvy friends and/or relatives?

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Remote Tech Support Company iYogi Gets A $15 Million Boost From DFJ,…

Today during Google’s Nexus One event, Android lead Andy Rubin revealed something that’s sure to be a relief for Android users and developers alike: you’ll eventually be able to store a vast number of applications on your phone — even large ones — the same way you can on an iPhone. The change will come with a future software update, when Android begins storing applications as encrypted files on the SD card. Rubin didn’t say how long it will be until we see the update, but it’s clear that the team is working to resolve the problem.

Up until now, developers have been hampered by the fact that every Android phone to date has had a relatively small amount of storage available for applications (a couple hundred megabytes as opposed to the iPhone’s many gigabytes). Apps are stored in the phone’s ROM rather than the phone’s removable (and cheaper) SD storage, which grants developers enhanced protection against having their apps against piracy. But it’s also proven to be a handicap.

Many of the iPhone’s most popular applications are graphics intensive, rich games. But these games often require high quality visual assets to go with them. The iPhone handles these fine — you can download massive apps over Wi-Fi or through iTunes sync. On the other hand, while the newest Android phones are certainly capable of rendering high quality graphics, their ability to handle large apps is limited by the phone’s available storage. Yes, developers can choose to download their app’s assets to the SD card after the initial install, but this isn’t a good experience for the end user.

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Android’s App Storage Limit Will Be Lifted With A Future Software…

On deviantART, the site for anyone who thinks they are an artist, member submissions are known as “deviations.” The site’s been around since 2000, attracts 33 million monthly visitors (comScore), and just recently passed its 100 millionth deviation. It is, appropriately enough, a short story about gay sex.

I could quote from it, but it is more of a deviation from good writing than anything else. I might as well just show the “Blizzard” drawing above featuring some sort of black unicorn frolicking in the snow with an arctic fox. How should I put this? There are some creations which are better left in a drawer and maybe shouldn’t be shared with the world. Seriously, would you pay $150 for a print of this drawing?

I’m sure there’s some great art on deviantART among the 100 million submissions of drawings, photos, videos, and stories, but they are hard to find among the 99.9 million pieces of mediocrity which seem to fill up the site. It’s as though every kid from your high school art class who dropped out to draw dragons is on the site, telling the other drop-outs how amazing their art is. Some of it is so bad that it’s given rise to parody blog divineART, whose slogan is, “When art becomes visual pollution!”

But, hell, what do I know? Those 33 million visitors a month are enough to classify the site as mainstream (shhh, don’t tell).

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The 100 Millionth Deviation on DeviantART Is A Gay Sex Story, But…

If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked.

It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.

Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them.

This isn’t a security issue, of course, and in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. For the full list, simply download this TXT file, but here are a couple:

- password
- testing
- naked
- stupid
- twitter
- 123456
- secret
- please
- beavis
- butthead
- internet
- hooters

What would be interesting to know is if Twitter got this list from somewhere else, or if they actually analyze which passwords were most commonly chosen by its tens of millions of users in the past, rendering them ‘too obvious’. If the latter, that means this list is probably representative of most Web services.

(Thanks to Dario Manoukian for the tip; a quick search turns up a post on The Wundercounter featuring the list too)

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370 Passwords You Shouldn’t (And Can’t) Use On Twitter

Clear Channel Radio already had mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry and Chumby devices, but today it’s adding an Android version to the line-up.

Not that there’s a lack of decent radio streaming applications on well, any platform these days, but here goes: Clear Channel Radio’s iheartradio app gives users free access to some 350 American radio stations, including a couple of artist-hosted stations from the likes of Christina Aguilera, Megadeth, Eagles and Weezer.

The app also enables you to get ‘frequently updated’ traffic reports for large markets including New York, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco and Houston.

Like its iPhone / iPod Touch sister, the iheartradio app for Android can be configured to automatically start playing a specific station upon launch, includes artwork and lyrics and also enables users to tag songs for purchase on iTunes.

To download the free app, simply log on to Android Market from your handset (Android v1.5 or higher).

Enjoy the music.

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Clear Channel Radio Debuts Android Version of iheartradio App

It’s not often that you hear about a startup still in deep stealth that has over 40 employees and backing from some of the biggest names in the valley. But that’s exactly the case for Santa Clara-based Kakai, which was founded in May by Chegg founder Osman Rashid. The company has recently closed a $7.5 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Josh Kopelman (First Round) and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen will be joining Kakai’s board. This brings Kakai’s total funding to $9.35 million, after a $1.85 million Series A earlier this year led by Rashid himself and Mike Maples.

Very little is known about Kakai at this point. It was cofounded by Rashid and engineer Babur Habib, who has spent time working on both semiconductors and software at Intel, Philips, and Exponent. The company has been rumored to have something to do with electronic readers, but all reports are vague. I did manage to dig up the following from an old job listing, which seems to be in line with those rumors:

“Kakai is a stealth-mode start-up developing an innovative Linux-based, portable consumer electronics product (details available through non-disclosure agreement).”

Rashid isn’t talking. He does say, though, that we’ll likely be hearing much more from the company come late March. He also says the 40 person company is actively hiring top technical talent.

Don’t bother looking at Kakai’s homepage for more information. It has no details, and appears to have been designed to look as drab as possible.

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Chegg Founder Raises Another $7.5 Million For Stealth Startup Kakai

Last week we wrote about a friendly challenge between super-angel Ron Conway and entrepreneur/VC Sean Parker over who could raise more money for their favorite causes.

The results are in. Conway has raised $40,600 for the UCSF Foundation. He’s beaten Parker, who raised $32,130 for Malaria No More. TechCrunch readers donated to both causes generously, including by simply going to see Avatar with us last week.

Of course the real winners are the children, some 5,000 a year, who get treatment at the UCSF Children’s hospital. And 3,200 children will receive mosquito nets that will greatly reduce their chances of getting Malaria.

You can still donate to either cause of course. Just follow the links in the second paragraph above.

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Ron Conway & Sean Parker Raise More Than $70,000 For UCSF And…

As the way consumers read books evolves, there is an opportunity for mobile technologies to connect consumers with their favorite reads. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, is collaborating with one of the most foremost publishers, Random House, to launch iPhone apps for authors.

The Random House group will launch free individual iPhone applications, powered by Mobile Roadie, for three of its bestselling authors—Steve Berry, Sophie Kinsella, and Karen Marie Monin. With this new application, fans will be able to preview books, access bonus content, interact with other fans, check upcoming author appearances, listen to audiobook clips, watch author videos and book trailers, and more.

Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference.

Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.

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Mobile Roadie And Random House Partner To Launch iPhone Apps For…

I’ve seen Avatar twice now, which is saying something when you’re talking about a nearly three hour movie that was released 36 hours ago. But we lined up on Thursday night for the first midnight showing. And then I saw it again yesterday at the TechCrunch screening in San Francisco.

What do I think? I think I’m going to go see it again this weekend at an IMAX theater. Because the movie is awesome in 3D, but I want to see it in 3D on a 50 ft by 70 ft screen. Movies will never be the same after Avatar. Like the iPhone in the mobile world, this movie disrupts an entire industry.

I didn’t know much about the movie until I read an article about it in Wired on a flight to Europe last week. A movie James Cameron has been working on since 1994, but he had to wait until technology caught up with his dream, and he invented a new kind of camera along the way.

The amazing thing about Avatar isn’t the story – it’s simply a passable tale that’s part Pocahontas, part Dances With Wolves. But it’s a story played by ten foot tall blue people with tails who fly around on miniature dragons and generally kick ass. And suddenly the special effects in every movie you’ve ever seen seem trite in comparison. Jurassic Park type special effects, which seemed so awesome in the 90s, are now laughably dated.

There’s no point in the movie where you can really tell the difference between real imagery and CGI. You become completely lost in the world of Pandora, the setting for Avatar. And if you thought Zoe Saldana was amazing in Star Trek earlier this year, wait until you see Avatar. An entire generation of teenagers are now going to have a lifelong crush on a huge blue woman with a tail named Neytiri.

The movie grossed just $27 million in its first day at the box office, which pales in comparison to Twilight Saga: New Moon ($72 million) and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($62 million). But don’t forget that Cameron’s Titanic made just $28.6 million on opening weekend. And that movie did ok in the end.

Avatar, like Titanic, is one of those movies you’ll want to see over and over. But don’t wait for the DVD. This is a movie that has to be seen in 3D. And for that you have to go to the theater. Go see it, you’ll thank me later.

See the high definition trailer here.

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Avatar Is Like The iPhone Of Movies

Google has made a change to Chrome OS to move the user login from the machine to the browser. Our guess is Google is, or will eventually use, Google Friend Connect to facilitate login.

The feature was first mentioned on October 13: “Using Chrome as our login manager has a number of potential benefits.
Explore these tradeoffs and decide what to do about the login manager.” The code was checked in on December 14: “An early version of this change is finally in. It’s not ready for daily use yet, and we haven’t gotten the network picker on there or anything yet, but at least we’ve got a baseline in there. I’m filing issues for the follow-on work.”

There are lots of potential benefits to having users log into machines via the browser. In particular it makes syncing easier and furthers the notion that you can log into any Chrome OS machine and have exactly the same experience as you would on any other machine. The fact that users can’t download any software to Chrome OS computers furthers this experience.

But it’s also clearly interesting from an identity standpoint. Facebook and Twitter are both making strong plays as the defacto online identity for hundreds of millions of Internet users. Facebook Connect in particular is becoming a very popular way for third party sites to easily add identity and login features to apps (it’s what we use on our own CrunchBase).

But people using Chrome OS devices will be logging into the Internet first and foremost with a Google account, or via Friend Connect (which currently allows signin via Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, Netlog, OpenID, etc.). By centralizing authentication once, Google can then use the same Friend Connect credentials to automatically login to sites that support it.

If Chrome OS becomes popular, it will be a very powerful weapon for Google to compete with Facebook Connect.

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Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS

Last night a bunch of us from TechCrunch went to see the midnight first showing of Avatar. Sure, we’re hosting a screening in San Francisco today at 4, but we just wanted to see it right then.

Verdict: Flawless. Epic. Awesome. I can’t wait to see it again in three hours.

We’re pleased to announce that all attendees will get a medium popcorn and medium soda free of charge, thanks to our four sponsors:

Building43 – A great resource for learning about how to leverage the web’s newest tools.

Mashery – A powerful API management service.

Kontera – Provider of in-text advertising generated based on the content around it.

SingleFeed – Helps retailers manage product listings on multiple shopping sites through one feed.

The tickets for the screening tonight are long gone, and we have a short waitlist (most of the waitlist should get in). But just for fun we’re giving away five last tickets. Want one? Just tell us a joke (we need a good laugh right now). Just type it in, link to a video, or whatever. Whoever is funniest gets the tickets. We’ll pick the winners at 2.

Here’s one of my favorite all time:

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Avatar Screening In Three Hours. Here’s Five Last Tickets

Boondoggle, a Belgian interactive agency, has cooked up a deliciously useless product called TweetNotebook that basically lets you create a physical notebook that features a random set of your Twitter messages.

No joke.

Here’s how it works: you go to the website, enter any username (make sure the owner’s tweet aren’t protected) and let the app browse through the account owner’s 3200 latest tweets and automatically select some to populate the bottom sections of your notebook pages.

While you wait for the tweets to get selected, you can enter a custom message on the cover of your notebook (max. 140 characters, of course). Once the app is done selecting, you’ll get to preview your custom 320-page notebook, tweets included, before you order. You have three color choices: white and turquoise, black and turquoise or plain white.

The cost of the überpersonalized notebook is €12 (or $12), not including the shipping costs, which obviously differ from location to location.

I wish there was an option to select your tweets manually, or have them fetched from the Favstar.fm site, although that would create unwelcome copyright issues.

All in all, @TweetNotebook is a fun concept, which reminds me of Nick Douglas’ book Twitter Wit (which I enjoyed reading).

Now let’s see if they can get some traction on Twitter.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Create A Custom Notebook, Featuring Your Tweets. Seriously.

The recently released e-book reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, has been rooted by the community of enthusiasts at nookdevs.com. The complete instructions for hacking the device and obtaining root access are detailed on the site. The Nook went on sale in late November and aims to compete with the dominant Amazon Kindle, a device which has spurred its own community of hackers and modifiers.

The Nook retails for $259, and is an Android-powered device with built in AT&T 3G service and WiFi, along with an e-ink screen that is found in most other readers. The instructions for rooting the device require that the device is opened up and that the SD card which stores the operating system be removed. The process seems a little too simple, almost as if the device was designed to be hacked. The storage is on a removable card, which can then be loaded in another machine where the process of acquiring root access to the operating system is carried out.

This will likely lead to DRM controls being bypassed, and a slew of homebrew projects being created based on the hardware – which might ironically help Barnes & Noble in its bid to unseat both the Kindle and Sony e-Reader.

Full detailed instructions and photographs are available on the site here. The entire process is straight forward and only takes around 30-45 minutes. I might actually order a Nook now.

Tip via Nenad Nikolic (@shonzilla)

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Barnes and Noble Nook e-Book Reader Rooted

File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive has raised $1.5 million in funding led by Sherpalo Ventures with Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron participating. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.

While there are a plethora of syncing and storage services available to users, Zumodrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a different twist-the service tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

ZumoDrive, which currently has 300,000 users, recently launched a new version which lets users to access their music playlists, photo albums and document folders on any device. ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage.

Zumo now plays nice with the iPhone, with an new app that lets users sync their content to their phone without having todeal with local storage capacity issues. And ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service has also been upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. ZumoDrive will use the new funding for product development.

Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.

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ZumoDrive Lands $1.5 Million For Cloud Storage And Syncing Application

Sean Parker (Founders Fund, Facebook, Plaxo, Napster) and angel investor Ron Conway are doing a little smack talking over who’ll raise the most money for charity. Conway is raising for the UCSF Foundation, and Parker is fighting Malaria through Malaria No More.

So far Parker is in the lead, with more than $15,000 raised (he’s tying it to his 30th birthday party tonight). Conway, who started later, has nearly $7,500. They’re both using Causes on Facebook, one of Parker’s companies, to raise the money.

We’re not picking sides, and both are very worthy causes. Donate early and often. And consider asking friends to donate instead of giving holiday gifts.

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Venture Capitalists Ron Conway And Sean Parker Battle For Charity