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Just watch this video, and beware that it’s slightly NSFW, depending on where you W.

(Huge kudos to James Yu for making this video using xtranormal and sharing it with us.)

Our favorite lines:

Guy: Are you a f*cking idiot? What is your strategy for marketing your website?

Woman: I will send a link to TechCrunch. Then, they will pick it up. After that, I will roll in money.

Guy: Oh my God. You just made my brain hemorrhage. I feel myself dying. Are you happy now? Getting featured on TechCrunch does not equal product success. Getting sustainable traffic and revenues is.

Funny because it’s true. But please don’t stop starting Web startups and sending us links.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll roll in money afterwards, but if your Web startup is viral and game-changing enough, we just might do a post about it.

Back in September we wrote about Memolane, a semi-stealthy startup that had raised $2 million to help “rediscover your social life on the Internet”, but wouldn’t give us much details as to what they were actually up to. Today, the company is ready for its public debut.

Right now, your online presence is scattered across a lot of sites. This has been true for years, and it’s a problem that’s also spawned plenty of startups, including Friendfeed. Memolane is the latest from this breed of startups, but it’s taking an approach that’s a bit different from most social aggregators: it’s all about telling stories. The site will display your online history in an interactive timeline, and it will also let you collaborate with friends to tell a story using your tweets, photos, videos, music, and more. The best way to really experience the site is to browse a timeline: check this one out.

Unfortunately the site is still in an invite-only beta, so you won’t be able to sign up just yet.  When you do though, getting set up on Memolane is pretty straightforward — after creating an account, you’ll be prompted to connect to various services across the web, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. These services are all accessed via OAuth, so Memolane isn’t holding on to your passwords.

Once you’ve hooked up your accounts, Memolane will pull in all of your content and generate a comprehensive (and very slick-looking) timeline. Content that was submitted on the same day is displayed vertically, and you can skim through time by scrolling horizontally. There’s also a timeline at the very bottom of the page that will let you jump months or years back in time (it reminds me a bit of Apple’s Time Machine interface). Memolane builds this timeline instantly, and most of the time it won’t store your personal data on its server (it does store tweets, but everything else is fetched via the appropriate service’s API).

But Memolane isn’t just about looking at your own content. The site also lets you create stories by hand-picking certain pieces of content from multiple accounts and piecing them together. Say, for example, you went to Yosemite with a handful of friends. Memolane would let you invite each of these friends to a shared story timeline; once they’ve been invited, they can add tweets, music they’ve listened to, video recordings, and other content  related to the trip from their personal Memolane timelines. Then you can send these stories to family and friends, who don’t need to have an account to view them.

Memolane is hardly the first startup that can visualize your shared content on a timeline – also see Dipity, iStreamer, and others. But founder Eric Lagier says that it has some key differences — namely the fact that Memolane is based on HTML5, while the biggest competitor, Dipity, is Flash. And he stresses that the site is all about keeping things simple.

Memolane first originated as part of a Startup Weekend event in April, where Eric Lagier conceived of the idea and rounded up a team of other attendees to build a prototype. From there, things picked up fast — Lagier quit his job and sought funding. The company’s investors represent a Skype reunion of sorts: they include Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, as well as August Capital’s Howard Hartenbaum (who was the first investor in Skype). And Memolane founder Eric Lagier ran Skype’s mobile products during the company’s early days.

I’m always wary when marketers use the word “style.” Homestyle biscuits are rarely as flaky and buttery as grandma’s were and family-style meals at Italian restaurants ignore the fact that I am usually there eating an entire lasagna alone. So what am I supposed to think about the Blackberry Style? That it is in the style of a Blackberry? Or that it adds a little style and panache to the Blackberry line? I’d say both of these are true, but I’d also say that the odd flip-up screen is a bit too much for die-hard Blackberry users.

Read more…

SwipeGood is launching today as a service that allows you to do a litte bit of good every time you buy. The idea is similar Bank Of America’s Keep The Change program but adds a charitable twist.

Once you enroll your credit/debit card with SwipeGood, every purchase you make gets rounded up to the nearest dollar. So for a $50.50 purchase of groceries, $0.50 will be given to charity. At the end of the month, SwipeGood will send your total donation amount to the charity or cause of your choice. During its beta period, SwipeGood has seen that on average, people donate $20 per month the service. 

To participate in SwipeGood, consumers have to enroll their credit card and the service will track your purchases, similar to the way Blippy works. While the service only integrates with American Express for now, SwipeGood plans to allow users to add credit cards from Citibank, Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America in the future.

As long as you are comfortable sharing your purchase history with SwipeGood, the service sounds like a great way to donate to charity. Of course, credit card companies and banks could turn this feature on fairly easily as well.

A new study published by Harris Interactive and mobile VoIP company Rebtel reveals some interesting statistics regarding measured U.S. consumer sentiment on international calling services and providers.

One of more surprising stats from the report compared the use of international calling and VoIP services by men and women. Of those who make international phone calls, men are more likely than women to do so via their computer through software based services like Skype (31% vs. 19% respectively). The survey also reports that men are more likely than women to say that if they were going to change the way they make international phone calls they would switch to use their mobile phone VoIP service/application (10% vs. 2% respectively).

Men are also more likely than women to make video calls (16% vs. 11% respectively). Of men and women who do make video calls, men are also more likely than women to be willing to pay a monthly fee to be able to do so (42% vs. 24% respectively).

From adults surveyed who make international calls, the majority do so using a landline (51%), either a traditional landline service provider (42%) and/or a VoIP service such as Vonage (12%). Another 44% make international phone calls via their mobile phones, through carrier calling rates (25%), special long distance packages (20%), and/or a VoIP service/application (9%). Another 25% of those who make international phone calls do so using their computer through software based services like Skype, while 20% use calling cards and 4% use something else.

Harris says that one in four U.S. adults make international calls and of those who spend money to make such calls, the average spend is approximately $34 every month. With an estimated 235 million U.S. adults, this works out to roughly 58.8 million Americans shelling out nearly $1.98 billion on international calls outside of the U.S. monthly and $23.8 billion annually.

Hispanic respondents led the way in international calls with 36% saying they make them, whereas only 26% of the Black/African American respondents said they make calls internationally. That data is not particularly surprising, but it does show that there is an opportunity to develop international calling apps for this demographic.

Sean Siler, IPv6 Program Manager at Microsoft, is leaving the software company, reports Seattlepi.com. Who? Sean Siler, that’s who!

He’s the guy who starred in some of Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” commercials, which were obviously created in response to Apple’s anti-Microsoft “Get a Mac” advertising campaigns.

Sorry, Apple fanatics, he’ll still be a PC and has mucho love for the Redmond software giant, he tells Seattlepi.com.

Today is his last day – here’s the email he sent to his coworkers (again, via Seattlepi.com):

I was cutting grass in the summer of 1987 when my friend told me that DOS 3.3 just came in at our local computer store. I barely got the lawnmower in the garage before we took off. On the way there, I told myself that I had to work for Microsoft one day. Any company that could get me that wound up was the place I wanted to work. …

I hate leaving Microsoft after working so hard to get here, but a family situation has forced me to move to the East Coast. My current position doesn’t allow this, and I haven’t been able to find another role. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I have a lot of memories from my time at Microsoft, but the “I’m a PC” commercial is the highlight. I really feel proud that I was able to be a visible part of the company’s fight against Apple.

And here’s Siler in 1 of 3 commercials he appeared in:

One out of five people bring their laptops into the kitchen to access recipes and the iPad has emerged as as a great tool for cooks to access recipes on the go. Via both the browser and apps, the device can serve as virtual and portable cookbook that’s easy to read (as opposed to accessing recipes off of an iPhone or Android). And with protective screens covering the device, the iPad can be easily protected from any spills. Today, cooking and recipe community Allrecipes is debuting its free iPad app, which is a must download for any home cook.

You can search for recipes by course, ingredient, cooking method and cooking time, plus the app features advanced search for dietary restrictions, such as vegetarian, dairy-free, low-sodium, gluten-free and more. Other features include the ability to save searches and access to seasonal recipes collections (i.e. Thanksgiving recipes).

One of the most compelling features of the app is ability to turn on “cook mode” for a recipe. The functionality basically turns any recipe into an interactive step-by-step page with highlighted directions, an ingredient list, and kitchen timer. And the app turns on “knuckle mode,” which will allows you to swipe with your knuckles in case your fingers are soiled from cooking.

Within the app, you can upgrade to the Pro version (which costs $4.99), which allows you to create and share shopping lists, sync your online Allrecipes.com Recipe Box and more.

Allrecipes has a history of creating innovative cooking apps. Its Dinner Spinner app has been downloaded 4.8 million times. And the website receives 1.2 million unique visits every day.

Here’s a head scratcher, at first glance at least: Lamebook, a hilarious advertising-supported site that lets Facebook users submit funny status updates, pictures and “other gems” originating from the social network, is apparently suing Facebook over trademark infringement.

Lamebook was launched in April of 2009 by two Austin, Texas based graphic designers (Jonathan Standefer and Matthew Genitempo), and was obviously ‘inspired’ by Facebook’s branding when it comes to its name, logo and color scheme.

So here’s what’s going on here. The complaint is for a declaratory judgement, which means Facebook threatened to sue Lamebook over trademark infringement, and now the tiny company is suing them first in order to get a preemptive decision from the court that there is, in fact, no wrongdoing. Most probably, Lamebook is doing this to keep the lawsuit in Texas.

According to the complaint, Facebook counsel first contacted Lamebook back in March 2010, asking them to cease and desist using the Lamebook mark and change the name and look of its website. They repeated this request several times over the next few months and are now threatening to take the small company to court to get their way.

Basically, Lamebook’s counterargument is that its site is a clear parody to Facebook and as such does not infringe or dilute the Facebook mark, and enjoys protection under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

None of this is terribly surprising. Remember, Facebook earlier went after Teachbook and Placebook for having the word ‘book’ in their names, rather agressively – I suggested some other companies they could bully or sue next, but actually failed to mention Lamebook.

I’ve reached out to both Facebook and Lamebook about the tensions but neither responded immediately. We’ll update when we learn more.

(Thanks to Kyle from Priorsmart for the help)

You can find the complaint hereunder:

And here’s some funniness from Lamebook:

Dave McClure‘s 500 Startups fund has just made its fourth investment in Asia. Tokyo-based Exchange Corporation, which runs a peer-to-peer lending service called AQUSH in Japan, has raised an undisclosed sum from the Silicon Valley-based fund.

Much like Zopa in the UK, AQUSH connects people with extra money with those who want to borrow money. The site allows lenders to set their desired investment amount and interest rates from 4% to 15% for 5 classes of borrower credit risk, as denoted by AQUSH itself. Loan applicants are screened by AQUSH based on their credit histories, financial situation and FICO scores.

The service launched in December last year, with Exchange CEO Russell Cummer saying AQUSH has received more than 1.1 billion Yen (US$14.3 million) in loan applications so far (with an approval rate of less than 20%). The average size of AQUSH loans stands at more than 445,000 Yen (US$5,750) per borrower.

AQUSH and their new investor are looking at a huge market: the startup’s goal is to unlock some of the more than $7 trillion of retail cash and bank deposits by offering individual investors access to the $300 billion Japanese consumer loan market.

The Asia-based companies 500 Startups invested in before AQUSH include translation service myGengo (Japan/previous coverage), user-generated video editing/subtitling site ViiKii (South Korea/Singapore), and cloud computing service provider ChinaNetCloud (previous coverage).

Occasionally, we get emails from people about a startup or service shutting down (usually because they were users and received an email notification about the impending death of said company or product). We don’t always write a post about those, because, well, the majority of startups in this world happen to die trying to make a difference.

That said, we got multiple ones today, so here’s a rundown of three recent deadpool entries:

#1 – HireHive

HireHive, a Y Combinator-backed startup that let companies create lightweight video questionnaires to screen job candidates, is calling it quits.

The word:

The short: We’re shutting down HireHive, and we’ll be launching a new, different service soon. We’ve turned off new signups as of today, but you can continue to use the service for free until Jan. 4, 2011, at which point we’ll be taking the servers offline.

The long: We’re working hard on a new product which we’re super excited about. There are only so many hours in the day, and we don’t think we can give both HireHive and our new project the attention they deserve. The last thing we want to do is let HireHive languish, or worse, not be able to give you the support you need. So we’re going cold turkey on HireHive and focusing exclusively on our new product.

#2 – SellIt

SellIt, a service from Phoenix-based startup Cartfly, was unceremoniously discontinued. The primary reason according to the company: “some of our partners made drastic changes to their API that would have made the majority of users unable to utilize their accounts without considerable development work” (read: Ning screwed them).

The word:

Thank you for using Sellit. We've greatly enjoyed building it, and working with you to improve it over the last few months. However, due to recent market changes we have decided to put our time and efforts elsewhere and have discontinued our services.

#3 – Rudder

Yet another ill-fated personal financial management tool hits the dust as Rudder will be shut down shortly. The fact that the startup inadvertently exposed other people’s bank account info to some of its users last year probably didn’t help much.

The word:

Thank you for using Rudder. Over the last 2 years, we've thoroughly enjoyed building Rudder.com and especially enjoyed incorporating the feedback received from our users.

However, after working hard to make this product as useful as possible in helping consumers manage and plan their finances, we are sad to announce that we will be closing down Rudder. Rudder as a business has simply become unsustainable and we have had to make the hard decision to shut down.

Any other deadpool entries (or candidates) we should know about?

Hey, I’m biased. About a lot of things, actually. But MC Hammer is a friend of mine. He did a 45 minute show during TechCrunch Disrupt that turned into a big acquisition celebration as well, for example. So, consider that full disclosure. He’s a rock star and he’s a gentleman. And he’s also pretty bad ass, too.

So when Jay-Z trashed him in a song recently, saying “And Hammer went broke so you know I’m more focused/I lost 30 mil so I spent another 30/Cause unlike Hammer 30 million can’t hurt me.”

Hammer’s response? A new song called Better Run Run, featuring some of the same dancers he had at our concert. And a Jay-Z lookalike that runs away from Hammer during the whole video. Then Jay-Z gets “baptized” at the end of the video.

That song, and video, is tearing it up on. 639,000 views on YouTube alone after a couple of days, and Hammer says there have been well over a million views across various hip hop sites.

And further proof that 90′s style east-west hip hop wars have become significantly less gangster as all these guys get older: Jay-Z sheepishly responds with this: “Hammer took it the wrong way.”

No shootouts in Vegas for these two, I guess.

Conversocial is a real-time social media management system allowing companies to run marketing and customer support through Facebook Pages and Twitter. Today it launches an enterprise package focusing on large consumer and media brands which will let its customers manage large numbers of Pages and Twitter accounts, with individual user permissions, allowing customer support teams and moderators to work alongside marketing and PR departments. One of the first big customers is UK TV broadcaster ITV, which is in the process of rolling out Conversocial across all of their Facebook properties.

Our post earlier tonight about Google shutting down Facebook’s access to Gmail data exports makes me think two things. First, I’m not sure there’s much data that Facebook doesn’t already have with it’s 600 million users (although 1.3 billion people visit Google sites a week, so they’re not exactly slumming). And second, the data protectionist era has now begun in earnest.

Trade restrictions, tariffs, etc., called protectionism, is always a double edged sword. It has the short term benefit of helping domestic companies stay competitive and profitable, and that also protects jobs. On the downside the consumer is hit with higher prices on whatever industry is being protected. And protected industries tend to lag behind competitively, so when/if the restrictions are lifted they are in a very bad situation.

But here’s the very worst part of protectionism. If you start it, you can expect the other side to start it too. That’s when you get what’s called a trade war, and lots of potential economic gain evaporates.

I’m seeing all the signs of a “data war” beginning now. It’s not among nations, though. The players are the big Internet companies who have lots of user data today, and want more (all of it) tomorrow.

For a long while the webmail companies have generally been lenient about exporting user data via an API to other applications. It’s what the user wants, and most everyone is reciprocal. Or, they’re too small to matter yet. This is a “free data trade” type situation with the best economic consequences.

Well, everyone but Facebook. They’ve just pretty much refused to let users export social graph data, even though they import it like crazy from every source they can get their hands on.

This is a game theory situation. One party isn’t playing ball, but it’s reaping the benefits of open data policies by all its big competitors. That forces competitors to protect their data as well (Google’s done it in a surgical way to avoid fallout with other non-Facebook companies). But once this ball starts rolling, and it has, it’s pretty hard to stop it.

Expect it to get worse from here.

Ultimately that’s very bad for the companies involved, but it’s also bad for consumers who now have fewer choices with what to do with their…err..Google’s data. In other words, we all lose.

The war between Google and Facebook is heating up: Google just made one small tweak to its Terms of Service that will have a big impact on the world's biggest social network. From now on, any service that accesses Google's Contacts API — which makes it easy to import your list of friends' and coworkers' email addresses into another service — will need to offer reciprocity. Facebook doesn't, so it's going to lose access to this key piece of the social graph.

So what does that mean in layman's terms? When you initially sign up for Facebook, you're run through a series of prompts asking you to enter your Google account information so that Facebook can import the email addresses of your contacts. This is a very powerful feature because it helps new users instantly connect with dozens of their friends. And Google is turning it off, because it thinks Facebook isn't playing fair.

You see, Facebook has never allowed users to export the contact information of their friends. This has been a gripe against the social network for years, because there’s never been an easy way to pick up and leave Facebook with your own data in tow. But what, you say? Didn’t Facebook just launch a new feature that lets you download your information?

Yes and no. The feature lets you download content you’ve uploaded — photos, wall posts, videos, events, and messages. But the export feature leaves out the most valuable set of data: your contacts. Yes, Facebook will give you a list of their names, but it doesn't attach any contact information: you don't get their email address, phone numbers, or anything else another service could use to rebuild your social graph somewhere else.

Here’s the relevant addition of the Terms of Service for the Contacts API:

5.8. Google supports data portability. By accessing Content through the Contacts Data API or Portable Contacts API for use in your service or application, you are agreeing to enable your users to export their contacts data to other services or applications of their choice in a way that’s substantially as fast and easy as exporting such data from Google Contacts, subject to applicable laws.

A Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

Google is committed to making it easy for users to get their data into and out of Google products. That is why we have a data liberation engineering team dedicated to building import and export tools for users. We are not alone. Many other sites allow users to import and export their information, including contacts, quickly and easily. But sites that do not, such as Facebook, leave users in a data dead end.

So we have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren't aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook they are effectively trapped. Google users will still be free to export their contacts from our products to their computers in an open, machine-readable format–and once they have done that they can then import those contacts into any service they choose. However, we will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites.

It's important that when we automate the transfer of contacts to another service, users have some certainty that the new service meets a baseline standard of data portability. We hope that reciprocity will be an important step towards creating a world of true data liberation–and that this move will encourage other websites to allow users to automate the export of their contacts as well.

Facebook has claimed in the past that there are sensitive issues around exporting contact information. But that hasn’t stopped it from pulling in whatever data it can. And it has also forged deals with both Hotmail and Yahoo that will let those services access its contact data. Google didn’t do a partnership with Facebook, so it doesn’t get the goods.

This one-way flow of contact data isn’t only impacting Google, either. Earlier this year Twitter launched a new feature that would allow users to see which of their Facebook friends were also on Twitter. After some initial confusion over what was going on, Facebook simply blocked that functionality (apparently over claims of too much API usage), which was pretty ridiculous. Months later, the feature is still disabled.

Which brings us back to why Google is doing this. Facebook has become a major threat to Google because of its exclusive ownership of the social graph (even if it allows other sites to access it via Connect, all roads go through Facebook). It doesn’t make sense for Google to die by its own sword, so it’s going to take the press hit that comes from this change so that it has better footing in the battle over social.

And yes, there will be a backlash. Google has long benefitted in the press from its promises and promotion of openness. This is a move toward being more closed, though Google is positioning it as a strategy to help make the web more open in the long-term. That may ultimately prove true, but the underlying motivation is clear — this is all about competing with Facebook. And it sets an ugly precedent: if Google feels threatened, it will tweak its degree of openness accordingly. It certainly wouldn’t be the first company to do so, but its shield of ‘Open’ is getting some deep cracks. That said, Google does still let users download their contact data (which Facebook doesn’t do at all), so it’s hardly locking users in here. It’s just making the process to get your Google data onto Facebook more involved.

So what does Google want from Facebook? Their definition of reciprocity requires that any service accessing its Contacts API offer an API of its own with similar functionality. This means it wants an API that it can access programmatically, without requiring the user to download and then re-upload a spreadsheet of contact data. Sources close to Google tell us that this policy will be policed on a case-by-case basis. In other words, it's highly unlikely that Google is going to go around verifying that every startup to access its Contacts API also has an export API of its own — they’re just going to go after the big offenders.

This won’t spell Facebook’s doom — not even close. Facebook can pull in data from other email providers like Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail, and it already has a massive amount of information that’s been imported via existing users. It also acquired a company called Octazen that, from what we’ve heard, is an elite team of professional data scrapers and contact importers.  Now that it has contact information from 500 million users, my hunch is that Facebook can simply ask for your Gmail email address and connect you to dozens of contacts without even needing to access Google’s API.

And, if it really came down to it, Facebook has one other way to get Google’s contact data. Google is going to still allow users to download their contacts in a spreadsheet — Facebook could simply ask users to upload that file.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and are waiting to hear back.

Update: See Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest

Sometimes the guys in our office like to get in stupid fights about phones. Yeah I know they do it on the blog, but they also do it in private as well times 1000. It is essentially the song that never ends, with Mike Arrington and Jason Kincaid erring on the side of Android and MG well, sigh.

Here’s Arrington’s take on one such fight that happened today:

“Earlier this evening in the office Jason Kincaid and I, both Android users, asked MG yet again why he won’t admit the iPhone flaws. He said ‘As soon as there’s a better phone, I’ll buy that one instead.’ I pointed out that the iPhone doesn’t actually make calls with any reliability, and he said, seriously ‘It doesn’t need to. I use the phone mostly for apps and browsing, not calls.’

My response – if it actually made calls, perhaps that wouldn’t be true. He then threw something at me and stormed out of the office. True story.”

While I’m sure it exists, I’ve never seen a girl get in a pissing match over a phone. But apparently our phone choices have become a huge part of our identity no matter what our gender, hence the above comic.

And while I would not throw down for my iPhone 4, I have to say that the comic is pretty accurate, especially the dinosaur part.

Thanks: Csectioncomics

We’ve gotten word that niche ad network Betawave has as of today run out of money to continue operations. Betawave integrated ads and products for a portfolio of sites primarily in the gaming, mom and teen verticals.

Some publishers have not been paid in 6 months and were only hanging on to see if Betawave would merge with Realgirlsmedia, a deal which apparently fell though according to a source. Betawave confirmed to TechCrunch that they are now in discussions to sell the business with the following statement.

“We had a great run, we are really proud of our people. We were severely affected by the economic downturn last year, which left us in a very difficult position this year.  We managed to make it through most of the year, but weren’t able to achieve profitability.

Some of our assets and our intellectual property will be acquired by third parties and we think many of our employees will get picked up as well.  In the end, we know we made an impact by the number of different companies espousing many of our philosophies.”

We last wrote about Betawave back when they were child-oriented media company GoFish and had just raised 22.5 million in financing. I’m being told that most of that money went to paying off debt.

Location-based startup Mentaway did not get funded by YCombinator but it did get our attention (as mentioning whiskey shots in a pitch email is wont to do) . One upping the Facebook app “Where I’ve Been.” Mentaway automatically compiles checkins from Foursquare, Twitter, Flickr and Posterous and turns them into pins on a personalized travel map.

The Brazilian startup is able to show every leg of a trip or multiple on a Google map with added photos and texts. All you need to do is just set up your Mentaway profile and keep using the services you’re used to.

“This is not another social network you need to feed,” says founder Gisele Muller referring to the best part about Mentaway. Muller and co-founder Eduardo Sasso set out with the goal of making things easier for both professional travel bloggers and people who have a love of travel and technology, and have achieved it with some success.

While the service does have glitches (Muller says they’re working on known UI issues) it does do its basic duty of synching up all user checkins, tweets, and photo uploads from GPS enabled smart phones. You can even link your Instagram account with Flickr and set it up Mentaway to defacto support Instagram.

Mentaway plans on integrating Facebook, Gowalla and Tumblr next and intends to monetize through a ‘Freemium’ model. Muller tells us that basic use will be advertiser supported and premium accounts will eventually offer more features and increased privacy control.

The travel space is huge with TripAdvisor, TripIt, Kayak all competing for eyeballs, a fact that bodes really well for small startup Mentaway. Interested TechCrunch readers can sign up for the beta here with the promo code “9z3e.”

Hold up. Google TV isn’t totally a lost cause and it’s all because of the generosity of Comcast. Fancast, or xfinity as Comcast would like it now to be called, streams just about everything to Google TV: ABC, NBC, Fox, all but CBS shows seem to work just fine. The ironic part is that the content seems to be provided by Hulu itself judging by the logo above all the videos. But let’s keep this on the DL, m’kay? We don’t need the fat cats finding out about this little trick.

There are a few downsides to Fancast, but the benefits easily counter them. It also shows just how shallow the search depth of the Google TV search happens to be. Clearly Google TV has some growing up to do.

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Seems like France is kind of full of dating sites. And that's probably not so surprising given that the country is often considered one of the most romantic. Hopefully everyone has now heard of Meetic, the French online dating giant listed on the Euronext stock exchange since 2005 who scooped-up Match.com's European division last year. And then there's a couple newcomers that are making headlines, like SmartDate (who scored €2 million earlier this year so that you can date the friends of your Facebook friends) and AttractiveWorld (the name says it all, you have to be "accepted" to join the online community). And then there's Adoptaguy. Let me just preface this with the company's tagline: "Ladies, find great deals at the supermarket of love." Yes, it's cheesy and who knows, that's probably why it works. Essentially, what sets Adoptaguy apart from a lot of the other sites is that it reverses traditional roles. With a rather humorous e-commerce-like vibe, women go through the site and select the men they like by puting them in their shopping carts - and only those selected few will be able to interact with their "buyers".

RediLearning, a Florida startup that delivers continuing education coursework online to nurses, therapists and other senior care health workers closed a $1.75 million round of funding from angel investors, SEC filings revealed today.

The chief executive and co-founder of RediLearning, Michael Hemlepp, said that the company would use the capital to “Create additional content and features for our proprietary learning management system, and hire at least ten more employees over the next year.” The company has 20 full-time employees today. Its courses are Flash-based, currently.

Investors in RediLearning hail from the fields of health care IT and finance, and have funded several other early stage startups, the CEO said (though the investors declined to be named). RediLearning’s customers are major chains and operators of nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health, hospice and rehabilitation centers that have employees in all fifty states.

Hemlepp said his customers use RediLearning primarily because “It organizes all of the regulations that they have to deal with to maintain compliance, and makes sure all of the appropriate, accredited training coursework is assigned to the appropriate staff member. The system then automatically reports back to human resources, which really helps these companies play defense, or stay within the regulations.” The senior health care market is highly regulated nationally and differs state to state.

The average RediLearning customer, the company claims, will save two-thirds of the money they’d otherwise spend on regulated healthcare compliance training. These training costs typically represent the largest line item after payroll and benefits for senior health care companies.

The saga continues. After informing us in September that the IAC-owned Bloglines was to be shut down permanently, Ask.com (the IAC property that operates Bloglines) has resurrected the troubled RSS feeder, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. IAC has licensed the property to an unlikely new patron: MerchantCircle, an online marketing network for small business owners. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but we do know that the deal was sort of in the family—IAC invested in MerchantCircle back in 2007. We are told Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service until December 1 of this year, after which the service will be transitioned to MerchantCircle.

IAC and Ask.com put Bloglines out of its misery after a tumultuous history. Bought by IAC’s Ask.com in February 2005 for around $10 million, the site has been in trouble, facing competition from Google Reader and a shift away RSS to realtime news streams.

While we heard IAC was looking for ways to either refurbish, or sell Bloglines, it looks like they finally got around to the latter. But MerchantCircle is a surprising candidate considering that it is not a media property.

MerchantCircle, which has been quietly snapping up companies, provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists 1.4 million small businesses. The startup has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200. And the company could be eyeing an IPO in the coming year.

Ben Smith, co-founder of MerchantCircle, says he has big plans for Bloglines. The technology will be integrated into MerchantCircle to allow business owners to create RSS feeds on local news around their town, or city as well as their specific trade (i.e. feeds around plumbing, law, or construction). Smith says the platform will also be able to bring in feeds of local daily deals and coupons.

For all you loyal Bloglines users (the site has 2.7 million users), don’t fret. MerchantCircle will be keeping the former standalone service in place for non-MerchantCircle users, at the RSS platform’s present URL and Smith assures the the transition will be seamless for previous users (i.e. same log-ins and UI). One notable feature that will be missing is the Clippings feature, and users won’t be able to merge their saved clippings to the new platform. MerchantCircle will also offer Bloglines users customized local RSS feeds that users can opt into for hyper local news and deals. Smith adds that Bloglines has been tweaked slightly for a “richer, faster experience.”

Doug Leeds ,President of Ask.com says Ask was approached by a number of companies who were interested in giving new life to Bloglines but in the end MerchantCircle makes sense a new parent because they are “corporate cousins.”

Here’s the full email IAC will be sending to Bloglines users tomorrow:

As you may have heard, Ask.com has entered into an agreement with MerchantCircle who has agreed to keep Bloglines up and running. Stay tuned over the coming months as MerchantCircle works to improve the Bloglines service by creating a richer and more local user experience.

In the near term, your news feeds and access to the service (with your same password) are still available. You can read more detail about MerchantCircle and its plans for the service at the MerchantCircle blog.

For now, here's what we want you to know:

Timing: Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service as is until December 1, 2010. After December 1, 2010, the service will transition wholly to MerchantCircle. During the month of December, you will be able to easily port your feeds over to the MerchantCircle-powered service. It's an easy process, and we'll provide you with complete instructions well in advance.

Logging-In: You will keep your same password as before.

Current Bloglines features: Your Bloglines subscriptions will seamlessly transition to the MerchantCircle service, however, the Clippings Tab will no longer be available and you will not be able to transport saved articles to the new service. We're very sorry for any inconvenience this will cause – the infrastructure requirements and costs are simply too great to justify maintaining

Twitter is the preferred channel for quick banter for over 175 million users around the world including our political leaders. Over half of the heads of states and governments of the G20 meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12 have an official Twitter account (http://twitter.com/Davos/G20).

Some like @BarackObama have 5.5 million followers, while others such as the French Presidency only have 6,600. All other G20 leaders are somewhere in between and yes, you've guessed it, none of them tweet personally.

What's interesting though is not who has the most followers, but rather who follows who.

Grand master in the art of political tweets @BarackObama ranks fifth in the world and mutually follows his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev @KremlinRussia_E who sent his first tweet in late June. The Russian president is very active, especially Twitpicing, and now has over 160,000 followers on his English and Russian accounts combined.

The @KremlinRussia_E and the @WhiteHouse both follow UK Prime Minister David Cameron @Number10gov. These three could actually conduct a direct and secret Twitter diplomacy in 140 characters literally spelling 'the end of those red phones that have been sitting around for so long' as Barack Obama recently joked.

However, only London and Moscow follow Canada’s @PMHarper who @BarackObama and the @WhiteHouse seem to ignore. But it gets worse! None of the big four follow the other G20 members on Twitter. Neither is following @DilmaBR, the new president of Brazil, nor @JuliaGillard, the Prime Minister of Australia or the presidents of Korea @BluehouseKorea, France @Elysée, Mexico @FelipeCalderon, South Africa @PresidencyZA or Turkey @cbAbdullahGul.

At the Franco-British summit last Tuesday @Number10gov started to follow the @Elysée Palace which had not immediately reciprocated. In fact the French Presidency is following no one and therefore Nicolas Sarkozy cannot have a private conversation with his peers on Twitter.

And finally, for the record: while the Russian and Mexican presidents tweeted public congratulations to the new Brazilian president on her recent election win, neither had the foresight to actually follow her. Only exception: Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez @ChavezCandanga who talked to Dilma Rousseff on the phone and immediately started following her.

During the G20 summit in Seoul follow the official Twitter channel http://twitter.com/g20seoulsummit or read the 140 character diplomacy on the World Economic Forum's G20 Twitter list: http://twitter.com/Davos/G20.

Matthias Lüfkens (@Luefkens) is Head of Social Networks at the World Economic Forum, He is an occasional contributor to the Swiss-French magazine Bilan (www.bilan.ch) and blogs in French at http://lufkens.wordpress.com/.

Posted without comment.

[by Rathergood via Laughing Squid]

Stribe launched at our TechCrunch50 event last year as a way to easily add a social networking layer to any site. (A few months later, they won the LeWeb startup competition.) By July of this year, they were open for all to try out and use. But for some massive networks of sites, that wasn’t good enough. They needed an API. So Stribe built one.

Specifically, Guild Launch, an online community for massively multiplayer online games, needed a way to connect the more than 50,000 websites under their umbrella. So Stribe came up with a REST API that connects to Guild Launch’s databases and allows users to connect to any of the sites with a single sign on.

The result is that the entire Guild Launch community can talk to one another no matter which site they’re actually on. That community counts more than 2 million people as members.

And since they made the API, Stribe figured it would be worth it to open it up to all. So they’re doing that. "We are very excited to open our API and demonstrate how a gaming platform managing millions of users can take advantage of Stribe,” Stribe co-founder Kamel Zeroual says.

He also notes that they’re looking to get involved in the virtual goods market with their service.

It ducking sucks when you’re texting really fast, all excited about the Giants winning NLCS game 6, and your iPhone’s spelling auto correct turns homerun hitter Juan Uribe’s last name into “urine.” We’ve all been there.

Because iPhone spellcheck failure is such a widespread phenomenon, some genius has created an entire site devoted to compiling ridiculous auto correct suggestions, called appropriately “Damn You Auto Correct.”

Hilarity aside, for those of you sick of typing in your girlfriend’s name (Christine) only to get another more inappropriate c-word, here’s instructions for using Safari to make your unruly iPhone to type what you want, damn it.

Thanks: @ieure