Apple just announced that its tablet device, the iPad, will be available in the U.S. on April 3. See announcement below. When Apple unveiled the device a few months ago, we were told it would be available by March. Rumors began to swirl recently that shipment of the devices was delayed until April. According to the release, the Wi-Fi models of the iPad will be available starting April 3, with the Wi-Fi and 3G models rolled out by late April. Starting on March 12, U.S. customers can pre-order the device either online or at their local Apple retail store. The device will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Pricing has remained the same, with the basic Wi-Fi enabled model starting at $499. Pricing is as follows: $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. Apple is launching with 12 apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the 150,000 apps on the App Store. The supposed Kindle-killer will debut with an iBooks app, which will be available for free download from the App Store in the US on April 3. Apple’s partnered witha number of publishers including the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster. Apple® today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store (www.apple.com) or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store. “iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.” Starting at just $499, iPad lets users browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds–thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook–and delivers battery life of up to 10 hours.* iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch(TM) interface makes surfing the web an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer. You can read and send email on iPad’s large screen and almost full-size “soft” keyboard or import photos from a Mac®, PC or digital camera, see them organized as albums, and enjoy and share them using iPad’s elegant slideshows. iPad makes it easy to watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD, or flip through the pages of an ebook you downloaded from Apple’s new iBookstore while listening to your music collection. The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 150,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers are already creating exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics. The new iBooks app for iPad includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile product. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster. The iTunes® Store gives iPad users access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 films including over 2,500 in stunning high definition. All the apps and content you download on iPad from the App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore will be automatically synced to your iTunes library the next time you connect with your computer. Pricing & Availability iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. International pricing will be announced in April. iPad will ship in additional countries later this year. The iBooks app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3, with additional countries added later this year. *Battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors. Actual results vary. Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone. CrunchBase Information iPad Information provided by CrunchBase

In 2006 I was horrified by Jigsaw , a website that encouraged users to upload people’s contact information (often from business cards) for money – $1 per contact. Other people then bought that contact information. Even if you found out about Jigsaw there was no way to get the information removed. Hand out your business card to the wrong person and you could suddenly find yourself in vendor cold call hell. From my original post: “Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people…[by] making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw’s actions aren’t easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails – it’s very unlikely they’ll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.” Jigsaw has changed its model since 2006. People can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information. Fast forward to today. Jigsaw continues to thrive, because there are lots of people out there who desperately want contact information for sales and business development purposes. Revenue is rumored to be around $30 million/ year. Is Jigsaw still evil? The company softened it’s approach to data by removing the cash incentive and giving people a way to remove data. But more importantly, the world has changed a lot since 2006. Facebook has been the catalyst for much of the change. Back in 2006 people still had a notion of privacy online, particularly around contact information. Today those walls are crumbling. People share information today without blinking that they never would have considered sharing in the past. Things that bother us today probably won’t matter much this time next year. But while sites like Facebook encourage us to share personal information with the whole world, and services like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare get us to voluntarily share even our location publicly, at least users still have a choice; it’s their decision. And most people still don’t want to give up their privacy. Jigsaw doesn’t give people that choice. And they’re sharing contact information, giving people direct access to your email and phone number. As I said nearly four years ago, that pushes the costs of their business, which is people having to deal with unwanted contact from vendors, to third parties. We have to have control over the distribution of this information. As long as it’s legal (in the U.S. at least) there will be companies that disregard morality and pursue profits. So for now, Jigsaw isn’t really evil. They’re just amoral. The first purpose of our government is to protect the rights of its people. Data privacy rights should really be no different than property rights. Jigsaw can’t come and put up posters on my house advertising their service. The same logic suggests they shouldn’t be in the business of selling my contact information, either. Since Jigsaw won’t get off my lawn, it’s time for the government to make them. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

If you’ve ever tried searching the web for financial advice, you probably know just how much junk there is out there. Sure, there may be a few diamonds in the rough, but oftentimes the best results go to the finance ‘experts’ who are good at SEO – not the ones who know what they’re talking about. Investimonials is a new site launching this week that’s looking to offer an unbiased view of the variety of financial brokers, services, videos, and books out there. And to do that, it’s turning to the site’s community to submit their own reviews (it’s essentially a TripAdvisor for financial goods). The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes , a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics). Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet. Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader , which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated). Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well. Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The UK is coming under increasing fire for its out-of-control libel laws. And the consequences of the laws are clear – journalists/bloggers are shying away from writing anything controversial when it involves someone who lives in the UK. Or, increasingly, someone who may be willing to litigate in the UK despite not living there. Most recently the NY TImes wrote about the issue , describing how science journalists, worried about being sued, are afraid of calling out bogus medical procedures: The problem the libel laws create is not so much that critical stories can’t be written, but that they won’t be. As the conversations I had this summer show, for many journalists and their employers the potential for a libel case is a powerful deterrent to criticism: the pieces aren’t worth the hassle. Singh has commented that “if I successfully defend my article, I will have had to have put my career on hold for probably two years, and it will cost me perhaps £25,000 [about $41,500] because I am unlikely to recover all my costs. And if I lose my case, then it will cost me roughly £500,000 [$800,000]. Fighting and winning is bad enough; fighting and losing is catastrophic.” Most writers won’t take the risk. And who can blame them? We have first hand experience fighting UK libel laws. Until now we’ve kept the fight on the back burner on our CrunchNotes blog. But recent developments are so absurd I’m moving the discussion here. We were sued in the UK earlier this year by Sam Sethi, a man who started a company called Blognation. The post that was the subject of the lawsuit, and which gives a lot of background on his antics, is here . In a nutshell, he’s a very, very bad guy. So bad in fact that he has been banned from being an owner or executive in any UK company until 2015 (he’s ignored that court order, and the UK doesn’t seem inclined to enforce it). And most of his previous employees have gone on record talking about how he committed fraud and other crimes (see “our second response” here , as well as here and here ). So we chronicled the activities of a convicted fraudster, who has been accused of new crimes by employees. And our reward was a lawsuit that our attorneys told us not to fight, because a “win” would mean months or years in court and legal costs that could exceed £500,000. Instead, we declined to participate in the circus, and a default judgement was awarded against us. So what’s next? Well, my attorneys have advised me to stay away from the UK for a few years, which is difficult because I spent part of my childhood there, and worked in London earlier this decade. So all those friends have to visit me now. But luckily UK libel judgements are generally not enforceable in the U.S., so our core business is safe from this lunatic. And by the way, Sethi, in one of his manic fits, has reached out to apologize to me. He sent the first email below to Paul Carr, who has covered this story and its absurdity in the past, and it appears as if he is genuinely remorseful. But his actual apology email to me, also below, lacks any of that remorse. And of course there’s no mention of dismissing the lawsuit. We weren’t going to publish either email until we saw Sethi’s promised public apology, but six weeks later it still hasn’t appeared, and now the UK banning order has come to light despite Sethi denying its existence. Yet more lies . If the UK wants to continue to suppress free speech by facilitating more nonsense like this, they certainly have the right and ability to do so. But maybe it’s time for them to take a new look at those libel laws. A personal dispute between two tech bloggers is one thing. But stopping the public from knowing about useless and possibly dangerous medical practices is another. The Theoretical Apology: Hi Paul I want to quickly thank you for your open letter, not that I enjoyed it but It really made me step back and think what am doing? When multiple friends tell you that you have crossed so many moral lines in writing those emails, it finally made me realise what a dick I have been for the past few years blaming other people actions for the downfall and failure of blognation when the ultimate blame lies with me. Thus I would like to initially write Mike a private email [xxxxxxx@gmail.com] personally apologising for my appalling behaviour and then I plan to write an open letter of apology on my blog. So could you please confirm that the email addr above is Mike’s and please accept my apologies for my act(s) of stupidity that drove our friendship to the point of breaking. I hope you can start to forgive me and I know it may take many years before you could once again call me a friend but this is my first step in reconciliation. Thanks in advance The Non-Apology: Hello Mike Well I’ve procrastinated long enough about sending you this email but given the number of private emails that I’ve had published on Techcrunch, I guess it’s not surprising I’m mindful to be cautious. That said I’m ever hopeful that this email will remain confidential between us. Therefore after careful consideration and advise from friends I would like to offer you my personal apology for my churlish behaviour in the past eighteen months and especially in regard to blognation and hope that we can now bring an end to this war of words. It struck me as I wrote this email that it was about two years ago that we meet in London to discuss starting TCUK. It was obvious that London’s Startups needed a voice and I am pleased Mike B is doing such a good job in pushing out that voice across Europe. I was going to write a war and peace email covering all the things that happened in the past two years both good and bad but frankly it’s water under the bridge and nothing I can say or do will change the past now. The damage has already been done. However one thing I will always regret was trying to hide the funding delay from the editors simply because you might have published the fact. Sadly I was unaware xxxxx was still giving you leaked information, I just knew confidential docs were being leaked somehow. At the end of the day, it matters not what xxxxx did or what you might have done, I was wrong to do so and no one else was responsible for my decisions. In this age of trust and transparency I should have simply told the editors of the delay and dealt with the fallout openly and honestly. Regarding the termsheet I have to admit I was deeply upset that you chose to publish it even after we spoke but as Paul Carr said recently that was just business and a chance to bury a potential competitor. Even after that I was still blindly considering trying to keep blognation going against all the odds with a new funding offer but realised that I had lost the trust of the editors and the various troll comments on TC hurt especially from people I knew. As you know to your own cost the mob can be vicious when it decides to turn on you but when people you consider friends do so it hurts even more so. But it was the death of Marc that finally made me realise this had to stop. I was accused of his death, theft from you and forgery and much more. None of which were true but people believed it. With hindsight I wish I had never started blognation. So I would like to reiterate I am sorry for the hurt and blame I levelled at you. In addition I have already apologised privately to the vast majority of the editors (not all) for my actions. So what happens next I have no idea. My reputation is in pieces and in the eyes of many I am no longer considered a trusted agent (ala chris brogan). So for now I am taking timeout to spend more time with my family and friends and review thinds once again. So all it leaves me to say for now is good luck Mike with Techcrunch. Sam Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

So that was day one of Techcrunch 50. The best tech conference in the universe, that pays my wages. And what did I learn today? Today I learned that the Rocky soundtrack makes any technical hitch a million times more dramatic. I learned that Yossi Vardi believes that any disaster can be solved with a show of hands or a forced round of applause. I learned that, where other entrepreneurs quote Sun Tzu, Calanis prefers the wise words of Disney’s Ratatouille. I learned that when Arrington and Calacanis squabble, they sound like a gayer version of Starler and Waldorf. But most importantly of all, I learned that there’s no way any of us are going to make it through a second long day without downing some serious booze. And so, with that in mind, I’m delighted to announce the rules of the Techcrunch 50 Day Two Drinking Game. The rules are simple – we start tomorrow at 9am (Pacific). Get up early, grab yourself a case of beer and then either sit in the room or, if you had better things to do with three grand, tune into the live stream and follow these simple instructions… Take a sip when… – Someone uses the word “freemium” or describes something as a “chicken-egg problem”. – Someone makes a borderline misogynistic remark to the only female judge: (e.g. “That fashion company really made Marissa perk up”) – Someone claims that their aim is to change the world. – Someone claims that their aim isn’t to change the world. – Someone says “that’s a great question” in response to a judge, when they clearly want to say “go fuck yourself”. Take a swig when… – Someone actually tells a judge to go fuck themself. – The wifi works so well that it breaks someone’s pitch. – Yossi Vardi forces everyone to give an awkward round of applause for absolutely no reason. – Someone makes a joke about Michael Arrington in their pitch. (And take a second swig when that joke inevitably falls flat) – It becomes clear to everyone that the success of a particular company would result in the world becoming a terrible, terrible place. Drain your whole drink when… – Two founders walk on to the stage wearing identical shirts. – Someone sings during their pitch, or a lady starts to dance. – Jason Calacanis alludes to his personal wealth, mentions Tesla or quotes a Disney movie when giving advice to a startup. – Someone tries to bribe the entire room with cupcakes. Drain your drink and chug an entire fresh one when… – Someone tries to bribe the entire room with a car. Good luck everyone. And – hey – let’s try to be wasted by noon! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco