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Bob Compton and I finally have something to agree about.

The Washington, D.C.–based venture capitalist produced a provocative documentary, 2 Million Minutes, which tracked six students—two each in the U.S., India, and China—during their senior year of high school. It showed the Indian and Chinese students slogging to learn mathematics and science, and the Americans partying and playing video games. Bob concluded that the Indians and Chinese will eat our children's lunch since they are better educated. I was featured in the documentary and agreed that Indian and Chinese children do indeed work much harder than American children; that they are brought up to believe that education is everything and will make the difference between success and starvation; and that most of their childhood is spent memorizing books on advanced subjects. I argued, however, that things aren’t nearly as dire for U.S. competitiveness as they might appear to be in the documentary. My team's research into global engineering education showed that more than 95% of Indians and Chinese do not receive a good education, and even those that do receive one take much longer to develop crucial real-world skills than do Americans. Yes, U.S. teens work part-time, socialize, and party. But the independence and social skills they develop give them a big advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They innovate from the get-go.

As I explained in this article, India has succeeded at building an innovation and R&D capability despite its weak education system: its private industry reeducates its engineering graduates. Chinese industry doesn't have equivalent workforce-development practices, so the country lags in R&D outsourcing and innovation. China has achieved marvels by upgrading its infrastructure; uplifting hundreds of millions out of poverty; and building world-class universities and state-of-the-art research facilities. But its state enterprises—which dominate industry—are still bureaucratic, corrupt, and run autocratically by Communist Party members. Multinationals hype the R&D they are performing in China, but in reality, the majority of the work they do there is the localization of their technologies, not the design of innovative new products. And, despite the impressive numbers, the papers published by Chinese academics and the patents filed by its researchers are not worth the paper they are printed on—they are mostly plagiarized or irrelevant.

But things are rapidly changing in China. Its people are becoming highly entrepreneurial. And, as Sarah Lacy has written, some are beginning to go beyond copying western technologies; they are beginning to innovate. Compton documented the entrepreneurship trend accurately in a new film, titled Win In China: China’s Entrepreneurial Explosion. This shows China's rapid transition to a capitalist economy—with its entrepreneurs leading the charge.

I witnessed the same trends during my trip to Beijing this week. I went there to teach a class hosted by UC-Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (at which I am a lecturer). I taught about 50 students and met dozens of local tech entrepreneurs. The students were no different from those I teach at UC-Berkeley and Duke: equally intelligent, open minded, innovative, and motivated to change the world. The entrepreneurs were also surprisingly like the entrepreneurs I meet in Silicon Valley—ambitious, fearless, and determined to build world-class companies. One big difference I noted from what I've witnessed during my previous trips to China, over the past 5 years, is that they are more accepting of failure and readily admit that they have been copying American technologies: anything they read about on TechCrunch. But most of them talked about using their experience to build new generations of products directed at the Chinese market. They had no interest in building products for the West. They were also a lot more confident and mature than earlier generations.

So Bob and I completely agree on the significance of the Chinese entrepreneurial revolution.  And we don't disagree any more about what our children have to worry about: when it comes to global competitiveness, the Chinese (and the Indians) will eat our children's lunch. More innovation is good, no matter where it happens, but America is going to face tough competition from the rising powers in the East. We had better encourage our kids to improve their skills, learn about global markets, and prepare for a time when they will be copying Chinese and Indian technologies.

P.S. The week of November 15 is Global Entrepreneurship Week. Started by Kauffman Foundation to encourage the type of game-changing entrepreneurship that China has witnessed, this has grown into a global movement which involves 10 million people in 100 countries with 40,000 events. I encourage you to get involved.

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Good morning, my little sausages. Today we have a wonderful giveaway from Fuze Meeting HD by Callwave, an iPad (of their choosing, probably a 32GB Wi-Fi model) to the reader with the best “strange meeting” story. First, let’s see what Fuze is about.

Fuze Meeting, is the future of ‘meetings in a pinch.’ Unlike other mobile meeting offerings, Fuze Meeting is the first web conferencing service that allows you to run a meeting from your iPad, with the ease of the tablet’s touch, pinch and point technologies. Fuze Meeting for the iPad aims to make your next online meeting as much fun as, well, playing with your iPad.

Next, let’s try to win.

Read more…

Editor’s note: Guest author Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer.

Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

RIM was born in my home town, at my alma mater, so it’s depressing watching their empire rot and crumble before the Android / iPhone onslaught. I had high hopes for their new tablet, a potential game-changer—but alas, they’ve hamstrung it before it’s even been released. Here’s what they should have done with it:

1) Embrace Android (phones)

RIM proudly announced that while their PlayBook can’t connect to cell networks, it can tether to a compatible BlackBerry via Bluetooth. They might as well have installed a ”For BlackBerry Owners Only” startup screen. Way to pre-alienate most of the market, guys.

Instead they should have stressed that they can also connect via Wi-Fi to Android 2.2 phones, and announced an Android app that syncs data between Androids and PlayBooks. They can’t support the iPhone, Apple would never allow it, but Android’s wide open.

“But Android is the competition!” No, Android tablets are. Tablets and phones are entirely different entities. RIM’s tech people understand that: it’s why the PlayBook runs a brand-new OS built by QNX, a company they bought earlier this year, rather than a new iteration of the archaic BlackBerry OS. Which is no bad thing—QNX is well-regarded, and time-tested. (I fondly remember being reprimanded for hacking into my high school’s QNX system many years ago.)

Until RIM drops that millstone called the BlackBerry OS, or replaces it with a QNX-based version, Android and Apple will eat their phones for lunch. Meanwhile, they need to accept that the PlayBook should complement rather than compete with Android phones.

2) WebWorks or AIR: Pick One.

I’m an app developer. Pity me. I have to know Java, Eclipse, Objective-C, XCode, and both the Android and iOS SDKs.  I could use a cross-compiler like PhoneGap, but they’re clunky and slow to implement new features. If Windows Phone 7 takes off, I need to master another language, environment, and platform—and while BlackBerry apps are written in Java, it’s an older version than Android’s, and the SDK is completely different.

I liked Palm, but I was delighted to see it die, and Nokia’s decay into irrelevance is a relief. Nothing against them; I just don’t want the hassle. App developers don’t want choice, we want consistency.

So what does RIM give us? Choice. First they offer free PlayBooks to developers who build PlayBook apps with Adobe’s AIR. Then they say you can build both PlayBook and BlackBerry 6 apps with BlackBerry WebWorks. Rather than split their development and support resources between two different platforms, they should have chosen one and ran with it. These “choices” will only confuse and irritate the app makers who will determine their fate.

3) Change the name. And the target market.

PlayBook? Really? You’re Research In Motion. You’re business, baby. Your tech level may be a little antiquated, but you’re secure, you get stuff done, and the new tablet brings you back up to speed. You should be targeting corporate videoconferencing and hospital patient data and business travelers. That’s why you’ve got BlackBerry tethering, right?

Instead you called it the PlayBook and can’t stop talking about how it runs Flash, both of which will make CIOs everywhere raise skeptical eyebrows. You’re trying to be all things to all users, including consumers—but Android tablets run Flash too, and they’ll be available for Christmas; the iPad boasts a bigger screen, superior apps, and the Apple halo; and worst of all, the PlayBook will probably launch right in the teeth of the iPad 2 hype machine. RIM should conquer the business-tablet space first. Instead, they already look like also-rans before they even have their running shoes on.

It’s a shame. I wish RIM well, and their new tablet looks like a potentially superb device. But they’re squandering that potential before it even has a chance to succeed.

JAKARTA– You’ve probably heard about the swell of Internet users coming from Indonesia. It’s already the second largest market for Facebook, after the United States. It’s “only” the fifth largest market for Twitter, but it’s number one in terms of the ratio of people online to Twitter adoption. And Google trends ranks Indonesia as the top Foursquare country– two slots above the United States.

Six months ago all of this was newsy and surprising. Since then, Indonesia’s love affair with social media has only been growing. But as love affairs go, it’s a staggeringly unrequited one.

I’m attending the SparkxUp awards in Jakarta yesterday and today, a first-time, flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants startup competition that was besieged with more than 400 entrepreneur applicants. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all sponsoring, and TechCrunch is a media sponsor. Executives from Yahoo and Google both did keynotes. Zynga is here too to meet the Indonesian consumer face-to-face and try to figure this out-of-nowhere Web force out. We toured some smokey Internet cafes late last night together, where I snapped the above photo.

But Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare–  the companies that may be gaining the most love and traffic from Indonesia– are nowhere to be found, and according to locals, their executives haven’t made a single official appearance on the ground….ever. Maybe they came here and just didn’t call anyone, but I’ve asked the question in dozens of individual meetings at a 100-person event earlier in the week. No one has reported seeing as much as a business card from any of these companies. If they’ve come to check out Indonesia, they did it without talking to anyone in Jakarta’s Web scene.

Oh, wait. There was that one time an executive from Facebook was scheduled to do a keynote. The entire Web scene was in a fever pitch to attend. And then he cancelled at the last minute– reportedly to go to Brazil instead. He hasn’t rescheduled. In fact, this morning I met with Izak Jenie, the director of content strategy for Nexian, the number two handset company in Indonesia. They sell about five million handsets a year; most of them are scaled-down, full-keyboard smartphones that sell for between $60-$80– a steal compared to the $400 Blackberry. He says he recently met with Google about putting a search box on every phone, but Facebook? Well, Facebook won’t even return his calls and emails.

Wow. Really?

Ok, let me get this straight. These three companies taken together have raised just over $1 billion in venture capital and have more than a thousand employees, and not one of them can be bothered to make a single fact-finding, goodwill trip to what’s arguably their hottest, fasting growing market in the world? Not even send an intern flying coach? Meanwhile Zynga is here now, Google is opening local operations in the first quarter, and Yahoo is a regular in the start-up scene, already completing one acquisition.

It’s shaping up to be the Valley and China in the Web 1.0 days all over again: The implicit arrogant assumption on the Valley’s part that either these people will just keep using our products because they can’t build competitive ones on their own, or we can’t profit of them so we just don’t care.

Wake up, guys. Emerging markets aren’t just about offense anymore, they’re about defense. This isn’t the age of eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon when you could expand in the US first, and worry about the rest later, nor is this an age of Friendster where a big Southeast Asian Web presence is worth little more than a sandwich. As Fred Wilson (you know, a Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga investor…) recently said to GigaOm, “If you look at Facebook, Twitter, Google– 75% to 80% of their users are outside the US, so globalization of Web services at scale is something I’m really interested in…So globalization is probably the number one thing I’ve been thinking about.” Understanding your users isn’t a nice-to-have luxury; it’s a must-have or someone will beat you.

Let me give you a primer on the Indonesian user: Half of Indonesia’s 240 million person population is under the age of 29. They are Web obsessed, and unlike the rest of Southeast Asia they have a huge domestic market. They are hungry, they are scrappy, they are smart and they are building their own Web companies. They love using  Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare– for now. But, frankly, the attitude is starting to piss many of the most Web savvy ones off. And every entrepreneur knows what pissed off Web users do: They start competitive companies. At the conference yesterday several people challenged the usual bragging that Indonesia is Facebook’s second largest market, saying “Why do we need to use Facebook? Why can’t everyone else use an Indonesian site?” Sure it’s just the Web elite saying it now, but the drumbeat is starting.

I know Indonesia isn’t a priority when you’re growing at the speed of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Indeed, it’s a brutally hard market to monetize with a nascent advertising market and little ecommerce to speak of. Only about 3% of the population even has credit cards. And it’s not always a comfortable market to be in: The traffic is horrible, I went through four SIM cards before finding one that worked, and I’ve had little luck getting a consistent Web connection this week.  And I doubt many of you speak Bahasa. But you’re not going to understand this customer any better sitting in the Valley.  (I don’t speak Bahasa either, for the record, but after 40 weeks in emerging markets I could beat you all at charades.)

You can’t have it both ways, Web 2.0 elite. You can’t brag in local presentations about how global your reach is and not visit one of your largest markets. You can’t trumpet that it’s a brave new Web world with two billion global users and only cater to the first billion.

Google technical writer Noirin Shirley wrote a post on her personal blog earlier this evening entitled “A hell of a time,” purportedly detailing her experiences last night at ApacheCon in Atlanta. Shirley recounts a drunken post-conference party she organized in her hotel room and describes a rather disturbing (if true) interaction with Twitter engineer Florian Leibert:

“He brought me in to the snug, and sat up on a stool. He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn't interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don't think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling.”

With such incendiary subject matter it is no surprise that the post rose to the top of Hacker News in a matter of hours. What’s even more interesting is that the accusations have reverberated on Quora and Twitter with people @ replying both Leibert and Shirley with Shirley’s post.

“It's not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It's not the first time it's happened to me at a tech conference. But it is the first time I've spoken out about it in this way, because I'm tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it.”

It is notable that the allegations of wrongdoing now have a realtime venue to play out, primarily because the players in the drama have tech community prominence and are both on Twitter. Neither Leibert or Shirley have tweeted anything since Shirley sent out her blog post about the incident.

I have contacted Leibert for his side of the story and will update this post when he responds. Shirley makes no indication she has filed any formal complaint.

The Geological Society Of America (also known as the Geosociety) completed the installation of a solar power generating rooftop at their Boulder, Colorado headquarters yesterday. The project was funded by Xcel Energy and the City of Boulder, and installed by Bella Energy.

Good thing they bought into renewables already. The price of solar photovoltaic panels could rise steeply if the Geosociety’s predictions about mineral trade wars come true.

The group of 17 minerals in the rare earth category go into everything from missile guidance systems and mobile phones, to flat screen TVs, lasers and new energy technology. Pending scarcity— driven by increases in global demand, and China’s near-monopoly on the minerals market— could lead to prices that eat into industry margins, slow down clean tech projects worldwide, and to diplomatic clashes between supplier nations (China) and buyer nations (U.S., Germany and Japan).

Rare earth minerals are essential to build photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, fuel cells and vehicle batteries. As widely reported, including by the Geosociety, BBC and the New York Times, some 97% of the global supply of rare earth minerals now comes from China.

Canada, Australia and the U.S. used to have more global market share, and rare earth minerals mines but the relative value of the currency, and relaxed-to-poor environmental regulation of mines in China made sourcing there favorable for buyers.

A trade war is imminent, James Burnell of the Colorado Geological Survey explained in the Geosociety report:

“China is preparing to build 330 giga-watts worth of wind generators. That will require about 59,000 tons of neodymium to make high-strength magnets — more than that country’s annual output of neodymium. China supplies the world with a lot of those rare earth elements, like neodymium, and will have little or none to export if it moves ahead with its wind power plans…So the source for the West is problematical.”

Earlier this month, during the East Asia Summit, Chinese officials told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Beijing aims to be a reliable minerals supplier and would not impose bans on exports of industrial minerals for political purposes. Sec. Clinton reportedly expressed gratitude, but requested further details on China’s export policies and new assurances.

Today, Reuters reported, 35 global business and trade associations— including the Consumer Electronics Association and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and other major consumers of rare earth minerals— called on the Group of 20 (G-20) summit of the world’s 20 largest economies to address scarcity and trade war concerns at their forthcoming meeting, Nov. 11-12 in Seoul.

Officials from Japan and Germany have already complained that their automotive, and clean tech industries have been adversely impacted by China’s tightening of mineral exports. China has denied the implications of market manipulation and political motivations to reign in mineral exports. The country’s officials said China was trying to control some of the negative environmental impacts of mining, instead.

Well, Steve Ballmer certainly had a productive week.

Over the past three days, the Microsoft CEO has sold 49.3 million shares of his company stock, Reuters reports. With the share price hovering around $27, the sale has made him about $1.3 billion. Not bad for three days.

And he’s not done yet. Ballmer apparently intends to sell as much as 75 million of his shares in total by the end of the year. At the current prices, that would earn him about $2 billion, all told.

Microsoft and Ballmer are both quick to say that people shouldn’t read too much into the massive stock sale. He called the move a “personal financial matter,” in a statement. But that won’t stop most from doing just that. As The Next Web wonders, why is Ballmer selling these shares right now with two buzz-worthy products, Kinect and Windows Phone, just hitting the market in time for the holiday shopping season? Does he not think they’ll help propel the company’s stock price?

Truth is, despite their huge financial success, not much has helped moved the company’s stock price over the past decade. In November of 2000, the share price was in the $30s. The highest it has gotten in that span is just about $37-a-share almost exactly three years ago. The price has gone as low as $15-a-share, but that was during the most recent economic collapse. Microsoft did split the stock in February of 2003.

Compare that stock performance to rival Apple, which has gone from around $7-a-share a decade ago, to $317-a-share today.

Others will wonder if this means Ballmer is on his way out as CEO. Again, despite the bottom-line success, there have been no shortage of calls for his ouster, partially because of the success rivals like Apple and Google have had during his tenure. ”I am excited about our new products and the potential for our technology to change people’s lives, and I remain fully committed to Microsoft and its success,” was Ballmer’s statement on the matter.

But one important thing to consider is the up-in-the-air issue of the capital gains tax. The likelihood is that it’s going to stay largely the same but go up a bit next year, but it could go far higher as the Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year. And when you’re talking gains in the billions of dollars range, that’s a lot of money Ballmer could lose if he’s not smart about his investments.

This news also comes just a month after it was revealed that Ballmer earned only 50 percent of his yearly bonus in Microsoft’s last fiscal year. Despite huge numbers for the year, Microsoft performance in mobile and tablets — or lack thereof — knocked his million-plus bonus down to about $670,000. But that’s chump change compared to what we’re talking about here, obviously.

And despite the massive sale, Ballmer will remain the second largest shareholder in the company behind only Bill Gates. He currently owns a little over 4 percent of Microsoft, compared to Gates’ 7 percent. That means on paper, Ballmer has been worth about $10 billion. And now he’s converting a nice chunk of that to cheddar. Ballmer. Baller.

[photo: flickr/orcnid]

Longboard Media is celebrating its two year anniversary and has revealed some amazing growth numbers, crystalizing its position as the largest ad network in the ecommerce space.

Co-founded in November 2008 by former eBay and Shopping.com employees Scott Engler and Jim Barkow, Longboard manages ad inventory for thefind.com, shop.com, overstock.com, buzzillions.com and become.com.

Like a Glam Media for ecommerce, the vertical ad group has been profitable for a year now, growing from $1.3 million in revenue in its first year to $8-9 million in projected 2010 revenue. Says Engler, "When we started Longboard, our goals for the first 2 years were to execute on our model to dominate our vertical and to growth a self sustaining business. We are very proud to be in the position we are."

Currently ranking #1 in shopping vertical audience, Longboard Media has also grown from 5 million monthly Comscore users in 2008 to more than 48 million monthly users in a span of two years, beating both Google Product Search and Yahoo Shopping by 50%. It ranks alongside Walmart.com at  #6 in retail audience overall.

While self-funded, the startup also has some pretty notable advisors including former Digg Revenue officer Chas Edwards, Brightroll CEO Tod Sacredoti, Catalystsf’s John Durham and Threadsy’s Rob Goldman.

Taking advantage of this upward movement, Longboard plans to launch more products in 2011 and is focusing primarily on mobile.

Jelli, a startup that’s a mix between Pandora and Digg (with old-school terrestrial radio stations thrown in), has gone mobile: the company has just launched a native iPhone application. Now, this wouldn’t be especially interesting news (who doesn’t have an iPhone app these days?), but it fills in one major gap in Jelli’s functionality. Because while the service has been around for a while, there’s never been a good way to use Jelli on the go — and, as the folks over at Pandora can tell you, that mobile experience is key when it comes to streaming music. You can download the new iPhone app right here.

For those that haven’t used it, Jelli gives users the ability to listen to — and help control — crowdsourced radio stations. Users get to choose from a library of songs available on a given station (if you’re listening to a pop station you probably aren’t going to see Metallica as an option, but there will be hundreds of other choices). Songs are displayed in a list based on the order they’re going to play, but users can quickly adjust the order by voting (Digg-style) or employing special powerups.

Every day users are given a handful of ‘rockets’ and ‘bombs’: use a Rocket on a song that’s toward the bottom of the playlist and it will shoot toward the top; use a bomb and you’ll knock off a song that was going to play soon. These sound effects are actually part of the radio broadcast (if enough people don’t like a song you’ll hear it “explode” mid-stream and the next song will start playing).

The service was initially online-only, but it’s now branching out to strike deals with terrestrial radio stations, which still have 239 million listeners a week in the United States (you may not listen to ‘old school’ radio any more, but plenty of people still do).  The company is up to over 20 station partnerships, with more in the works.

Now, Jelli doesn’t take over these radio stations entirely — instead, it offers them a server box that they hook up to their radio tower for a few hours (or more) per day. That server box is linked to the web, which lets listeners vote on which songs they want to hear next. For the radio station, the whole thing is pretty hands off, which is one reason why it’s appealing.

Obviously it’s been possible to listen to these terrestrial radio stations without Jelli’s iPhone app (you could just hit the FM button in your car) but until now you’d only be able to interact with Jelli’s voting system via a computer. And that presents a problem, because people primarily listen to radio while they’re on the go. The iPhone app fixes this; it lets users vote up songs that they want to listen to, both for terrestrial stations that are using Jelli and online-only streaming radio stations that run 24/7.

Jelli still has a long road ahead, both of dealing with existing radio stations, and, eventually, launching standalone Jelli broadcasts of its own (it’s talking about having terrestrial, 24/7 Jelli stations one day). The company has raised a total of $7 million, including a $5 million round earlier this year.

Chicago-based mobile app development startup Red Foundry has raised $1.1 million in Series A funding from OCA Ventures and I2A Fund. Red Foundry, which is in private beta, develops a SaaS that allows users with limited technology experience to create and manage iOS apps. We have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers with the code “TechCrunch” here.

Red Foundry’s software allows users to create professional-looking iPhone and iPad apps that include menus, RSS feeds, images, videos, maps and more. Apps have built in sharing options like Twitter, Facebook, email, and comments and include a built-in storage and delivery solution.

The platform allows you to visualize test apps, handle remote content updates without requiring app resubmission, and features a one-click submission to the App Store. And Red Foundry handles all the logistics with the App Store approval process.

Beyond just being able to create and publish apps, Red Foundry also includes analytics, which allows activity reporting by timeframe, geography, loyalty, device, app version, and more. And the software features the ability to deliver push notifications to apps targeted by location, social activities and more.

Of course, the mobile app development space is chock full of competitors including Mobile Roadie, iSites, and AppMakr.

But Red Foundry is hoping to differentiate itself by moving away from the consulting business, meaning the startup’s software automates the development the apps and Red Foundry doesn’t actually participate in the creation process. And the startup says that its platform is so easy to use that users with no development experience can create and manage apps. The company is currently close to signing deals to license the software to several big-name media companies.

Everybody loves free stuff. And, believe it or not, plenty of businesses love giving it away — freebies can help raise awareness of a company and increase customer loyalty. Thing is, it isn’t always so easy for a business to give something away — at least, not in a manner that’s going to result in much exposure. Listia, the startup that specializes in helping connect users with free stuff, wants to help.  Today, the company is launching a new ‘raffle’ feature that will allow businesses to sign up, decide what they want to give away, and use Listia to actually run the contest.

But why would a business pay for this? After all, throwing up a landing page with an email submission form isn’t terribly difficult. Listia has a few reasons: first, their contest pages include integration with Facebook and Twitter, making it easy for users to tell their friends about a raffle. And Listia is prominently featuring business give-aways throughout the rest of the site, which means businesses will have an audience of thousands right off the bat.

We should note that these raffles differ from Listia’s auctions, which are the startup’s main feature. Listia auctions invite people to use free points to bid on items other users are giving away for free. You can earn these points by interacting on the site (and giving away free stuff of your own), or you can buy some points yourself. The system ensures that the person who gets the item being given away actually wants it, and isn’t just shrugging their shoulders and saying “sure, why not”.

Listia’s raffle feature — the one that’s launching today — doesn’t have this mechanic: you enter your name and email address and a winner is chosen at random. But it does still benefit from the existing system: users are incentivized to share a business’s raffle on Twitter and Facebook, because they earn Listia points when they do so (which they can in turn use on auctions).

Listia is offering the raffle feature free for now, with plans to charge businesses for it down the road. Listia will be benefitting in another way: anyone who wants to enter a raffle has to create a Listia account (which is easy to do, but it’s still valuable for the startup).

Listia says it now has over 200,000 registered users (though they won’t say how many are currently active). The site recently had its 1 millionth auction, and has been growing 15-20% per month.

You can see the first Listia raffle, which is being offered by fellow YC-alum WePay right here.

Yesterday, we posted about horrible latency issues many Gmail users have been experiencing over the past couple of weeks. When I reached out to Google about the issue a few days ago, they told me that they weren’t aware of anything wrong, but would look into it. Well, those of us who noticed it aren’t crazy. Sure enough, there was an issue, and Google says they have now fixed it.

Google reached out to us today with the following statement:

We recently experienced an issue in one of our datacenters which increased latency for a small percentage of Gmail users (approximately 2%). Issues like this can cause temporary slowness for small fractions of users from time to time. Speed is of utmost importance to us, and we are always working both to prevent these kinds of issues and resolve them as soon as possible.

That sounds about right since, as we said, everyone wasn’t noticing the issue but plenty of users were, and it was only happening some of the time. 2 percent of Gmail’s user base still is about 4 million people.

And before I even got this message from Google, I did notice Gmail running significantly more smoothly this morning. I asked some others on Twitter if they noticed an improvement as well, and it was more of a mixed bag — but plenty who were having problems said they’re now resolved.

As a somewhat humorous sidenote, Google also confirmed that they recently added 2 pixels to the line height of the inbox view of Gmail. This was something I had asked them last week and I think they thought I was crazy. Again, I wasn’t, a UX designer made the change.

photo © 2008 Gloson Teh | more info(via: Wylio) Let’s say you’re a cat blogger who has just come across some breaking cat news, and you’re racing against the clock to beat the other cat publications to it but need a photo. By the time you search Flickr Creative Commons for something copyright friendly, resize it in Photoshop and attribute back to the original photographer, you’ve been beaten to the the post.

Wylio, a startup out of Dayton, Tennessee, has a solution for you. Wylio basically boils down the 20 or so steps it takes to find suitable blog photos into 1) Search Flickr Creative Commons through Wylio 2) Resize/position and 3) Copy and paste the Wylio code, which includes an attribution to the original photographer, into the post.

Wylio founder Dan Evans tells TechCrunch that the startup plans on adding more features like customizing the color of the Flickr photo credits, tracking photo use as well as building the option for user accounts in near future.

Wylio, which has been up an running in its present form for about a couple weeks, is looking for seed funding in order to expand what is currently a nifty blogger time saver into a full blown service.

It was only three days ago that Google Voice had some serious issues making outbound calls for some users — you’d place a call, and it would ring endlessly without ever actually reaching your contact.

And now, it looks like the service is having more problems. For at least 20 minutes, some users (including me) have been unable to reach voice.google.com — the service’s main hub, where you can send text messages and keep track of your conversations. I’ve also been unable to make outbound calls and some inbound calls from my phone, though the GMail/Google Voice integration still works fine (as it did during the problems earlier this week). A test text message a friend sent hasn’t reached my phone, either.

Update: Voice.google.com and my calls are all working as of 2:25 —we’ll update once we confirm that the issues have been resolved for everyone.
Update 2: Google confirms that all issues have been resolved as of 2:35PM PST. Looks like there were around 45-50 minutes of downtime.

I’m really hoping this isn’t the start of a trend. No, Google Voice is not a carrier, but it stands as a middleman between your carrier and your phones, and people aren’t going to put up with the service for long if reliability becomes an issue. As Michael wrote back when the service was still GrandCentral, if you want to be a phone company, you can’t go dead.

We’re hearing that this not affecting everyone, but it’s unclear how many people are affected — judging by how many are tweeting about this, it isn’t just a minor blip.

Google has given us this statement;

“We’re aware of an issue that’s affecting some percentage of Google Voice users and we’re working hard to resolve it.”

This is a guest post from Shaherose Charania, founder and chief executive of Women 2.0, a social venture that aims to increase the number of female founders of technology startups. Ms. Charania previously served as the director of product management at bothJAJAH (acquired by Telefonica/O2) and Talenthouse, and as a managing partner at Opinno.

Women 2.0 is not an organization just for women— we created the name when some colleagues and I went to the Web 2.0 Expo conference in 2006 and asked, “Where are the women in the web 2.0 movement?” We didn’t see them represented there. Women 2.0 is more about diversity, inclusion, technology and startups that are likely to create jobs and wealth, and otherwise improve our lives and work. We have a clear goal of advancing high-growth businesses and innovation in technology.

Last night, as part of our Women 2.0 Startup Competition Pitch 2010, we heard pitches from an eclectic group of tech startups with female founders. Women were definitely represented. The event— which was organized end to end by my co-founder Angie Chang— took place at Twilio’s headquarters in San Francisco. Finalists demoed everything from mobile payments, language learning and expense tracking apps, to a tween social network and waste to industrial products technology.

Teams that qualify for our competition include at least one female co-founder. She doesn’t have to be the chief executive, but that is what we saw in more than 80% of the teams this year. Competitors must also be in a beta stage with their technology. We excluded startups that had already obtained more than $2 million in funding.

The competition drew 130 qualified applicants this year. Business ideas poured in from around the world. We had applicants from New Zealand, Turkey, Korea, Germany, Canada, Russia, Israel, Brazil, the U.K. and of course the U.S. Given the volume of strong applications we received, we decided to give out three industry awards for web, mobile, and cleantech pitches.

Our judges were investor and tech all-stars: Cindi Choi (SunPower), Cynthia Ringo (DBL Investors), David Weekly (PB Works), Gautam Gupta (General Catalyst Partners), Janice Roberts (Mayfield Fund), Julia Hartz (Eventbrite), Maria Kermath (AT&T Interactive), Naval Ravikant (Angelist) and Rachel Pike (Draper Fisher Jurvetson).

The cleantech category winners (photo, left) won a meeting with angel investor and social innovator, Esther Dyson. Judges picked Biolumber. Cofounder Kristin Kaune explained that her company takes plastic headed for the landfills and makes it into “lumber” that is as light as wood, and as strong as steel. Biolumber could reduce landfill waste significantly, I think.

Our web prize went to a company called Apply In The Sky, co-founded by Emily Chiu and Chiara Piccinotti (photo, below right). They are trying to make the process of applying for business school easier on the applicants, they said. The team earned a meeting with Mike Maples Floodgate co-founder, serial entrepreneur and investor.

I think Apply In The Sky is in a space that needs serious help. No company that I’ve seen is tackling the application process for b-schools, specifically. They’ve designed a nice, lightweight application for a very intense process. I think they’ll succeed with strong outreach to future MBA students.

PrePay Nation took our mobile industry prize. The company provides a payment service for users of basic feature phones. They take advantage of existing transaction technology that works to track minutes or allow you to buy more on these phones. Rather than reinventing the wheel, they’re using a top up approach that helps people transfer money to each other, or deliver micro-payments without the expenses and complexities of a wire transfer or money order.

Women 2.0′s Pitch director Aihui Ong told me she thinks PrePay Nation has a huge market opportunity with American immigrants who are predominantly users of basic feature phones. An investor who judged the mobile track, Gautam Gupta from General Catalyst Partners, told me Prepay Nation seemed promising to him because the company leverages several trends in the mobile ecosystem to provide their unique remittance service.

The company’s cofounder Jessica Bishop (in photo below) says PrePay Nation in 2011 should grow its business in North America, while expanding into the Middle East, Europe and Australia, and developing further integrations with mobile operators.

I was personally excited to see Women 2.0 teams thinking in a geographically broad way about their market opportunities, and including team members from other parts of the world. Many teams had intergenerational founders, with men and women alike. You would not expect that from reading the constant press on the collegiate genesis of Facebook. But there is another technology startup reality. Women 2.0 startups are not like Facebook, but I mean that in a good way.

Women from all over the world, and all ages are starting tech companies, and they don’t exclude men. It’s not just consumer web or healthcare, but every industry— we are thrilled to be among the first to see and review their technologies, and generally support their growth.

In the past three years of Women 2.0 Pitch Nights, we had to go home after celebrating to prepare meeting agendas or product requirements for our “day jobs” at Silicon Valley startups. This year was a different experience for me and my co-founders. Today, we’re happy to announce that The Kauffman Foundation is giving Women 2.0 a $50,000 sponsorship for our next six months of programs and events. The foundation normally funds non-profits, but we operate as a for-profit, for-good entity which makes us especially grateful for their support.

With the funding, we’re getting ready for our 2010 Founder Labs. It’s Women 2.0′s pre-incubator program for aspiring entrepreneurs who aren’t ready to quit their day jobs. Once they’ve created a minimum viable product over five weeks at Founder Labs, we hope they will, however, strike out on their own.

Shaherose Charania portrait via Pokin Yeung

Winning teams at Women 2.0 images via Julie Blaustein

Another major magazine will stop printing its editions and move completely online. U.S. News & World Report, the USA Today of weekly news magazines, will no longer be found on subscriber’s mailboxes after its December issue. According to an employee memo obtained by Poynter Online’s Romeneso blog, subscribers will no longer get print issues.

Instead, U.S. News & World Report will focus all of its efforts on its Website, and on occasional print issues sold at newsstands for its annual lists and guides, including Best Colleges. Those tend to sell well. But the main thrust going forward will be on the Web and digital products. From the memo:

All of us at U.S. News Media Group have been aggressively responding to the changing habits in the media marketplace, and these latest moves will accelerate our ability to grow our online businesses and position ourselves to take advantage of the emerging platforms for distributing information such as the iPad and Android tablets.

U.S. News joins hundreds of other magazines in the magazine deadpool.

Google is working with Samsung on a new Android phone that will have a “clean install” of Android, and the release was at least initially planned to coincide with the launch of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

The fact that the device will have a clean version of Android is why people are excited, and calling it the “Nexus Two.” The Nexus One was a clean install Android device that Google sold directly to customers. The additional layers of software carriers and handset manufacturers put on their phones are generally a mess, in our opinion, and detract from the user experience.

One thing that we’re certain about is that the Samsung press event on Monday, November 8 isn’t (and never was) a launch of the Nexus Two, despite rumors that it was. Those rumors weren’t all that ridiculous, though. Samsung will be unveiling a new Android phone on Monday, it’s just not this phone.

The phone was set to be launched imminently, perhaps on November 11. But we’ve heard that during dogfooding a serious hardware issue was discovered and that the phone will be delayed while that issue is fixed. We don’t know how serious the issue is, or how long it might take to remedy.

The phone, though, is a beauty, we’ve heard, as is Gingerbread.

About one month into his role as RecycleBank’s new CEO, Jonathan Hsu is rattling off some ambitious numbers: An IPO by 2013, plans to grow his staff from 150 to over a thousand by 2012, and to reach nine-figures in annual revenues in that same year. That’s a herculean task for any company but especially one that plays in the labor and capital intensive world of recycling.

And yet, sitting in his new office in New York’s West Village, Hsu seems utterly confident, framing each prediction with a when-not-if mentality.

The well-funded RecycleBank— which has raised more than $70 million from VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners— is a recycling rewards program that works with municipalities and large corporate sponsors, like P&G and Kashi, to install local programs in US and UK cities.

Under RecycleBank’s program, a household signs up for an account online and receives a special bin or “smart cart” for their recyclable waste that is equipped with a unique RFID-tag. When the hauler arrives to remove the waste, the cart is weighed and the household’s account is credited with points based on that weight. Those points can be redeemed online for rewards or savings with more than 1,000 local and national businesses.

Since its inception in 2005, RecycleBank has installed itself in more than 300 cities in the US and UK, with 3 million-plus households under contract. According to Hsu, revenues have been tripling every year, for the last two years, and the company is very close to profitability.

Hsu, who was formerly the CEO of 24/7 Real Media (an online marketing firm firm acquired by WPP for $649 million in 2007), was brought on to get the firm solidly in the black and to use his marketing background to help the company achieve tremendous— some might say unrealistic— growth offline and online.

“One of the things I will bring to bear in this company is the ability to grow to a mass market scale so that RecycleBank can be the first green mass market brand,” Hsu says. “This company will IPO in the next several years.”

So what is Hsu’s battle plan to get RecycleBank ready for a 2013 IPO— an IPO that he says will value the company in the multi-billion dollar range?

Hsu has three priorities: a new revamped online portal that leverages social tools, increased corporate sponsorships and a major push to get RecycleBank in new cities.

According to the CEO, he wants to work with municipalities to create hundreds of hyperlocal online destinations, to connect the users within RecycleBank communities. These new sites will feature social chat, gaming, a bulletin board for neighborhood announcements and a schedule of local activities. Calling it “Facebook with a purpose,” he says he doesn’t “want to reinvent the wheel of how people communicate but we want to leverage those tools successfully.”

Currently, RecycleBank makes the bulk of its revenues from its deals with municipalities— local governments pay the company a fee for diverting waste from landfills. The company also gets money through corporate sponsorships, but it only has a few dozen of these partnerships today. Over the next few years, RecycleBank plans to dramatically expand its portfolio of lucrative sponsorships, and Hsu predicts, eventually the amount of dollars coming in via sponsorships will significantly outweigh the amount from municipalities.

However, if RecycleBank wants to become a truly, global green, mass market brand, it will need to find a way to crack the markets outside of the US and UK. For example, given China’s rapid urban development and 1.3 billion strong population, it is a rising power player that is creating significant economic growth— and by extension, mountains of waste. It may be relatively easy to deploy millions of “smart cans” to households in highly developed countries, but it will be interesting to see how the RecycleBank program fares in the world’s major developing regions.

Hsu says he wants to tackle the larger international picture but it will be a challenge to do it directly (at least in the near term), because of their ambitions at home and in the UK. At least for the next few years, he wants to stay focused on expansion in these markets, and perhaps, link up with international partners to address other regions. The arms-length approach will likely blunt RecycleBank’s effectiveness in new markets, but it’s a start.

Hsu has a long way to go before he proves himself to his staff and RecycleBank’s investors— and he’s giving himself a short runway to do so— but he says he’s happy to have at least impressed one very important critic: his three-year old daughter.

“I really cherished my time at 24/7 Media…but it was hard for me to describe to my daughters what exactly I did. So I would show them a website, like Weather.com and show them the banner ads that they see on the top and sides and say to them abstractly, “Daddy’s company helps show those ads.” And they would nod to me, and they loved me because they’re my daughters but at the end of the day they didn’t really understand. Today when I tell my daugther…I show her the recycling bin and the trashbag and she can see how my company can move from the waste bucket to the sustainability bucket, she understands. She understands that daddy helps put less garbage on the street.”

See our video with Hsu above.

Wrightspeed, a maker of fuel efficient, electric drive systems, has raised a $5 million Series A round from an unnamed private investor. According to the company’s press release, co-founder and EVP of Infinera, David Welch, will also join the company’s board.

The company’s founder and CEO is Ian Wright, one of the co-founders of Tesla. Although Wright was an important figure in Tesla’s early days, he left long before the IPO to found Wrightspeed. Wrightspeed doesn’t want to be the next electric automaker, instead, the company wants to build the best hybrid electric drive systems for high-performance cars and medium to large-sized trucks.

In other words, the company has no use for the minivan market— at least not today— its equipment is designed for extreme race cars or hefty, long haul trucks, racking up hundreds of miles per day. The goal, according to Wright, is to sell “technology [that] will displace at least 3,000 gallons of fuel per year per high usage vehicle.”

The San Jose-based company’s marquee product is the Wrightspeed Digital DriveSystem (DDS). The platform, according to the company’s website, includes “the battery system, electric motors and drive electronics, generator control system, vehicle dynamics control, user interface and the software control plane.” The DDS’s electric motors can reach 250 hp and are  built to be lightweight at roughly 40 pounds. In order to enhance flexibility, the system also uses motors modularly, so it can conform to what a vehicle needs.

Despite the United States’ position as an Internet powerhouse, the state of broadband in this country compared to some other places around the world is pretty pitiful — both in speed and reach. Google is trying to do their part to fix the speed issue with their 1 Gbps fiber optic network tests. And Verizon is on the case as well — with a 10 Gbps network.

Now, to be clear, the video above is just a test. We’re unlikely to see these kinds of speeds in our homes any time soon. But this is a field test, not a test done in some lab.

And it’s awesome. 10 Gbps both is both the download and upload speed. Watch towards the end of the video when a 2.3 gigabyte movie is transfered in 4 seconds.

I had the rare pleasure of driving a brand new Chevy Volt up the Eastern seaboard yesterday, a four hour trip from DC to New York in the driving rain of a dying nor’easter. Organized by beleaguered carmaker GM, the drive was an attempt to reach out to tech geeks and bloggers to drive what amounts to the most high-tech car I’ve ever driven. According to a GM spokesperson, the car’s programming alone is more complex than the code in a F16 fighter jet.

How was the ride? Well, first let’s talk a little about the car.

The Chevy Volt is an all-electric vehicle with an M. Night Shyamalan twist. The car contains a huge, T-shaped battery that recharges in 10-12 hours, depending on the voltage, and a small 1.4L 80hp internal combustion engine – sorry, generator – that powers the car and charges the battery when you deplete the original charge. The wheels are powered by a high-torque electric motor that is alternatively power either from the battery or the generator. If you drive, say, 30 miles a day there is a very good chance your engine will never kick on, thereby saving you a tankful of gas. If you need to go far you can use the gas generator to push you another 300 miles or so. In this way it is an EV without the problems in range.

Read more…

i/o Ventures backed Skyara launches today as a marketplace for exciting things to do. Founded by Jonathan Wu, Dennis Liu and Steven Ou, the site provides people who can offer new experiences like a culinary tour, personalized yoga or a beer tasting with a platform to do so, hooking them up AirBnB-style with people who seek new experiences like foodies or yoga fanatics.

Key Skyara features include packaging, scheduling, booking and payments services and well as a Digg-like voting features and Skyara Requests, i.e. if a specific experience isn’t available on Skyara, consumers can request it and see if any vendor can customize their offerings.

The founders say that they’re trying to create a new experience market similar to how Etsy created a new market for DIY craft fans, targeting people who ask, "What is there to do?" during the weekends The site currently has between 50-100 experiences available in the Bay Area and plans to monetize by charging experience vendors a 12% transaction fee.

Future plans include expansion into other markets like New York and Hawaii. Says Wu, “Our goal is to get all of the screen tanned entrepreneurs and business folks out of the house and trying exciting new things. We want Skyara experiences to become a part of everyone's weekend schedule.”

Skyara is also offering a $5 off promotional code to the first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up with the referral code TECHCRUNCH. And for those interested, AirBnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk has offered lunch as a Skyara experience (starting at $10) in solidarity.

This is too funny not to post. The screen grab above comes from Qwiki, the visual search engine which came away with the top prize at our last TechCrunch Disrupt. Qwiki is still in private alpha , but it essentially assembles a visual narrative for millions of topics by pulling together images and text, which is read out loud by a friendly, female robo-voice.

When you search for “AOL” in Qwiki, it prominently features the slide above showing AOL’s precipitous decline in subscribers from 2001 to 2009. It is amazing how a picture can say it all, even if it is outdated. That slide pretty much sums up the perception of many people out there when you mention AOL. And algorithms too—Qwiki relies completely on its algorithms to select images.

Of course, AOL is trying to shake that past and move boldly into the future. Hell, it bought us, didn’t it? And, I must say, we are very happy with our new corporate overlords. In the past 30 days alone, referring traffic from AOL is up 7,948,666.67% (that is the actual number). May we have another?

Truth be told, the Qwiki entry on AOL could use some better images. Here is a better one to start with:

While doing the post about WordPress implementing Twitter’s Blackbird Pie tool, I noticed something interesting. The tool brings back something Twitter had long since left for dead: the old school Retweet!

When you insert a Tweet URL into a WordPress.com blog post now, it will automatically generate a nice-looking Tweet in that post, complete with working links. But it also adds a “Retweet” link below the Tweet. Clicking this takes you to Twitter.com where a tweet is automatically populated for you along the lines of: “RT @USERNAME TWEET HERE”.

The Retweet is a feature that was created by users of Twitter back in the old days of the service. It is basically just a way to quote a Tweet, but using the syntax “RT” to let others know that it’s a Tweet from someone else. Twitter eventually realized that with so many people using it, they’d have to create some way to make it easier for all users (mainly new ones) to use. So they created the new Retweet, which doesn’t use the “RT” syntax, but instead takes the actual Tweet and places it back in the timeline of users who follow the person doing the Retweeting.

A lot of users didn’t like this new-style Retweet at first, and bitched up a storm about it. The main issue was that the new way doesn’t allow you to add an commentary to the Tweet you’re Retweeting. Twitter more or less said “too bad” and moved on. Now the new way is pretty much the accepted norm, but a number of third-party services still allow you to use the old way.

And now Twitter is sort of bringing it back themselves with this tool (update below). And it seems like they have to — that’s pretty much the only way to do it without getting sites to install some sort of plugin that would allow for the new-style Retweet on Twitter.com.

Welcome back, old school Retweet!

Update: Twitter has reached out to say that WordPress is responsible for the Retweet implementation, so they’re not officially bringing back the old school Retweet. Still, if this feature takes off, it could be back on Twitter in a major way.

Back in May, Twitter unveiled a small tool called Blackbird Pie. Essentially, it was a way to the process of using a Tweet in a blog post easier. Rather than having to take a screenshot of the Tweet, you could just copy the URL into Blackbird Pie and out would pop some dynamically generated code for embedding the Tweet in your post, complete with working links. It was an interesting idea, sadly, no one uses it. But a key WordPress integration today should change that.

As they note on their own blog, WordPress has just enabled Blackbird Pie for all WordPress.com blogs. It works in posts and in comments too. All you have to do to bring a Tweet in is copy the URL for it and put it somewhere in your post on its own line. Says the company:

To embed a tweet in your blog, all you need to do is visit the tweet on Twitter.com that you would like to use, copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into your post on a line by itself. WordPress.com will do the rest and your link will be converted to a full tweet once we pull the relevant data (there may be a short delay).

That should be a very useful new feature. And self-hosted WordPress blogs can use the Blackbird Pie plugin to enable the same thing.

What’s sort of interesting about this feature is the Twitter policy which states you’re not allowed to use other peoples’ Tweets without their permission. The company has said that’s meant to stop advertisers from pulling Tweets and using them for their own means, but the wording still clearly says that you can’t do it. This tool not only enables that, it encourages it.

An example Tweet of mine is above. As you can see, all the links work, which is awesome. And it even pulls my actual Twitter background! Compare it to the screenshot version below.

More: Twitter Brings Back The Old School Retweet With The Blackbird Pie Tool!