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Last month I wrote about a new scam that’s performing extremely well among the Scamville crowd – a free poster that’s tied to a $30/month ongoing credit card subscription.

There’s no disclosure of the ongoing credit card subscription anywhere on any of the checkout pages except in the terms and conditions via a link. People think they are just getting a poster for free, with a $.99 shipping charge. If you call the customer service phone number to cancel you are put on hold indefinitely (I was on hold 20 minutes before hanging up). And just to really put a cherry on top, you never even get the free poster (I didn’t, and a lot of people complain about that).

Actually, not sending you the poster is part of the scam. Once they’re billing you they don’t want you to ever think about them again. Sending you a poster just reminds you to check your credit card statement, where you’ll see a charge for $30.

Tatto Media’s CEO denied knowledge of the scam when I spoke to him last month. He also said that he removed the offer, and in fact the page showing the offer was removed.

And now of course, as the press cycle wound down, it’s back. And Tatto is pitching the scam to affiliates again. Here’s an email they sent just today:

Subject: incent offer
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:09:42 -0500
From: Tyler
To:

Hey,

Long time no talk..hope you've been well. I wanted to let you know that we have an internal incent offer that has been doing really well on other GPT sites so I thought I'd let you know, in case you haven't already tried it. The offer is Wozo.com, and I'm not sure if someone named Andrew already hit you up to run direct but it would be the same running through me. It's a credit card offer that has no promo restrictions (cash incent and content lock are just fine on these). Payout is $18 cpa…let me know if you're interested or you have other questions.

Best,

Tyler
Account Manager

I’ve emailed Tatto’s CEO once again to hear what bullshit he’s spinning today. Will update if I hear back.

I’ve said this before and want to say it again. These scams may make some of you think “buyer beware,” but these companies are able to constantly tweak the offers to ensure maximum conversion and profit. And it all eventually flows to “legitimate” companies that we talk about every day – Google, Facebook, Zynga and others. The only way to stop it is to continue to pour sunlight on it, and for pressure to be put on companies on the top of the food chain to ban it.

Buying a digital book for your iPad is a very odd experience. If you fire up iTunes, you can find music, movies, apps, even audiobooks, but there is no category for digital books. You need to first download the iBooks app, and then buy books within that app. So it is like a marketplace within a marketplace that also happens to be a reader. The Kindle app also works that way. It is confusing.

But if you go into the App Store, you can find a whole category of iPad apps which are books. Many of them are interactive and tend to be children’s books like Green Eggs And Ham ($3.99) or Miss Spider’s Tea Party ($7.99). Increasingly, more and more books will end up in the App Store for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is simply because apps are more interesting.

If a book publisher wants to add any features beyond what is available in iBooks, including adding informational apps, links to the outside Web or sharing excerpts with friends on Twitter and Facebook, they are better off publishing the book as an app. Startups like Rethink Books (which I covered yesterday) are developing software platforms for publishers to do just that—turning books into social apps.

Right now, books remain somewhat hidden in iTunes. There is no clear book category up top, other than audiobooks, among the main media types. You have to dive into the iBooks app or find book apps in the App Store. But if Apple is serious about making the iPad a book reading device, it should make it a little easier to find all the books that can be read on it in one place.

When I first wrote about Dropcam I was fairly excited. Why? Because I had been looking for a simple DVR/security system for my home so I could see if the FedEx guy was at the door. Dropcam appeared, disappeared, and then was launched a few months ago. In the interim I started using a Linksys wireless cam and Vitamin D and that has worked extremely well and then Logitech came out with their Alert system which took security to a whole other level. Dropcam, it seemed, was left in the dust.

Now that I’ve tried the new Dropcam Echo, however, I find that it works well enough and the price, $279 with unlimited monitoring via the web or the attendant iPhone app, is acceptable if a little steep.

Read more…

Using web applications to drive traffic to brick and mortar shopping stores is a strategy that seems to be paying off for retailers. In March, Forrester reported that the "online research, offline buying" consumer market represents $917 billion in consumer spending, which was 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales at that time. As more and more developers build applications for this market, there is a demand for product inventory and store location data. Enter Retailigence, a stealth startup incubated in the Founders Institute that applies the Localeze-model to in-store product inventory and listings.

In conjunction with the startup’s public launch, Retailigence is also announced that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Quest Venture Partners, Dave McClure, ZIG Capital, Global Brain Corporation and other angel investors.

Essentially, Retailigence is an open API for developers that want to use brick and mortar store locations and product listings and availability. The startup has connectors to retailers backend systems, point of sale platforms and inventory, and pulls this data into a database in the cloud. Currently, Retailigence is able to pull in data from Target, BestBuy, RadioShack, ToysRUs, The Home Depot and a number of other retailers. It total, its data base includes more than 3 million products from over 50,000 stores,

Currently, 30 to 40 developers are using Retailigence’s API. The startup says the one of the world’s largest newspaper publishers (they declined to name the publisher) is using the API to tag images of products and provide users with the ability to click on the images to find the product’s availability in the store’s nearest location. Another use case for the API could be in a GPS device that can call up product listings and availability at nearby stores.

There’s no doubt that Retailigence’s database could be incredibly useful or both retailers (to attract foot traffic into their stores) and for developers. Milo has been operating a consumer-facing site for some time, and Google recently followed with their Blue Dot product.

Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories.

A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball tam in the U.S. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet’s content algorithms. “The posts are completely auto-generated,” says founder Robbie Allen. “The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.”

StatSheet started out as basically a stats database for sports junkies. It stores 500 million different stats across most of the major sports. Now, it is taking all of those stats and creating news stories out of them. It has about 20 different types of articles that it generates, from season previews to game recaps. StatSheet might analyze 10,000 data points and 4,000 possible phrases to generate a single story.

The results surprisingly readable, if a bit dry. Here is one typical lead, which was generated from stats from a game last March to pre-populate the site.:

Michigan State has ended the regular season with a good deal of momentum. On March 7th at home, the Spartans beat the Wolverines, 64-48. It was all Michigan State from the start, going into halftime up 32-14. Michigan never got close.

Some facts for this matchup: The Michigan State RPI ranking was a good deal higher than Michigan (#26 to #130). The Spartans home court advantage is distinct, and the Wolverines had no momentum and had lost 3 out of 5. The Spartans have already seen the Wolverines this year, and this win gives us a regular season sweep.

It’s not exactly riveting sports journalism, but if all you want are the facts, it does the job. I’d still much rather read a sports blogger on SB Nation, or an ESPN article, if it’s available. But compared to some of the content mill stuff, this isn’t half-bad. Each of the 345 team sites will also have their own Twitter account (which is a revival of StatTweets), Facbook Fan Page, and mobile apps to make it even easier to keep up with scores and games.

Apple just announced that it is joining Oracle’s OpenJDK project to open source the Java technology for Mac OS X. OpenJDK is a free and open source implementation of the Java programming language.

According to the release, Apple will “contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client.” OpenJDK will open source Apple's Java technology to developers.

Apple also stated that Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will be available from Oracle.

Apple joins IBM, who also joined OpenJDK a month ago.

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, said in a statement: We're delighted to be working with Oracle to insure that there continues to be a great version of Java on the Mac..The best way for our users to always have the most up to date and secure version of Java will be to get it directly from Oracle."

Chances are I’m late to the party, given how many Facebook ‘likes’ and retweets this project seems to have garnered already, but I hadn’t yet seen it yet so here goes:

Some folks over at frog design have hacked together A World Of Tweets, a Web-based app that visualizes geo-located tweets from around the globe.

The project, which was started by two frog design employees as a personal experiment with Twitter’s Streaming API and the HTML5 canvas tag, is all about “playing with geography and bits of information”. It’s also pretty cool to look at.

The app shows visitors where people are tweeting /from, in realtime, in the past hour. The more tweets come from a specific region, the “hotter” it becomes.

From frog design’s blog post:

Integrating technology and design, the application was developed in HTML5 deploying the Twitter Streaming API and the Yahoo! Placemaker service to merge geotagged tweets on one single map, processing more than 1.4 million tweets in just 8 days.

Due to the growth of automated geo-tagging via mobile devices, the exceptional tweet locations range from the Sahara Desert to Polar Circle diving to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

You can visualize tweets in the form of a heatmap, with ‘smoky clouds’ and either in map or satellite view. If you have 3D red cyan glasses, you can even dive into the “3D stereo view”.

At the time of this writing, they’re close to processing more than 2 million tweets from 200 countries (they started processing on November 1).

Nifty indeeed.

Less than a week after its global launch, MiniTycoon Casino, is now the number one mobile social game on the iPhone ahead of the real social games including Empire City, TapZoo, Restaurant Story and Farmville. This is SGN’s first pure social game on the iPhone and iPod Touch. No doubt as a result of its social features, it’s also now the number one casino game, although you don’t bet real money but instead purchase virtual goods to pimp out your place, Soprano like.

I caught up with CEO and founder Shervin Pishevar at the Monaco Media Forum to discuss the news, video below.

Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, it’s available free in the App Store here.

Back in February we wrote about Facebook’s secret Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.

This isn’t a big surprise — the event invites Facebook sent out hinted strongly that the news would have something to do with its Inbox, sparking plenty of speculation that the event could be related to Titan. Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.

Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well.  It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.

Oh, and assuming our sources prove accurate, this explains the timing of the Google/Facebook slap fight over contact information.

We’ll keep digging for more details and will have full coverage on Monday.

Image by Spencereholtaway

After a series of on-again, off-again talks, Newsweek is merging with The Daily Beast, the IAC-owned online news site run by Tina Brown. The new joint venture will take the ungainly name of the Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Last August, the Washington Post Company sold Newsweek for $1, plus the assumption of $40 million in debt, to stereo tycoon Sydney Harman.

Now Barry Diller is getting his hands on Newsweek and mashing it together with his high-profile media play, the Daily Beast. It sounds as though the two publications will remain separate for now, with Tina Brown becoming the editor in chief of Newsweek as well. That makes sense. Who wants to read the Daily Beast in print? It is like the TMZ of news.

Combining the two news brands would be a disaster. Just look at what each publication stands for. Newsweek is a storied publication whose tag line is, “What Matters Most.” The Daily Beast’s, meanwhile, is. “Read This Skip That.” Some of the headlines on the Daily Beast right now are: “Mel Forced To Pay Oksana 60K In Child Support,” “Inside The Mind Of A Monster,” and a photo slide show of “Controversial Poses: Naked, Pregnant, And Gorgeous.” Newsweek’s headlines are more along the lines of “In Iraq, a Government At Last.”

The plan seems to be to combine the newsrooms and the ad sales, but keep the properties independent. The magazine will be a place for longer narratives and investigative pieces. The web will be for breaking news. Brown writes:

And for Newsweek, The Daily Beast is a thriving frontline of breaking news and commentary that will raise the profile of the magazine's bylines and quicken the pace of a great magazine's revival.

Newsweek is a valuable brand, and Brown is capable editor who once ran the New Yorker. But why make a bet on a dying, debt-laden print magazines now? And online it might make more economic sense to combine the two sites and gain broader reach. (Update: IAC confirms the two sites will likely be combined under the Daily Beast). Comscore estimates that the Daily Beast is pulling in 2.9 million unique visitors a month, while Newsweek.com is attracting 5.4 million. But those are two very different audiences looking for different things.

Also, that name, the Newsweek Daily Beast. It just hurts my eyes.

It isn’t exactly difficult to find stories detailing how tough it can be to work with Apple and Steve Jobs — the web is rife with accounts from former Apple employees, developers, and partners providing a small glimpse of how things tick inside 1 Infinite Loop. But for some reason, these stories never get old. Tonight, there’s a new tale to add to the annals of Apple history that comes from CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, which he’s called The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote.

In his post, Sivers recounts how he received an offer from Apple to include CD Baby’s entire library of 100,000 indie albums as part of the launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003. Sivers jumped at the chance — at the time it was extremely difficult to get major distribution for indie artists, so this would be a major win for them. He even agreed to go through the labor-intensive (and costly) process of reencoding and tagging these CDs using Apple’s own software, despite the fact that CD Baby already had them in its database:

I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry – you need to use this software – there is no other way.

Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that’s what Apple needs, OK.

Of course, that process cost quite a lot of time and money, so CD Baby made an offer to artists that they could pay $40 to appear on the iTunes store. Five thousand of them agreed, paying a cumulative total of $200,000, and CD Baby managed to get them on other competing music stores. But the Apple went radio silent, and Sivers grew worried that he may have to return the money to the participating artists. It wasn’t until Jobs’ keynote presentation that Sivers knew what had happened.

Jobs, talking about the iTunes store during the keynote: "This number could have easily been much higher, if we wanted to let in every song. But we realize record companies do a great service. They edit! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40? Well we don’t want to let that stuff on our site! So we’ve had to edit it. And these are 400,000 quality songs."

Whoa! Wow. Steve Jobs just dissed me hard!

I’m the only one charging $40. That was me he’s referring to.

I’ll steer you to Siver’s post for the conclusion of the story, which you can find here (spoiler: things worked out fine). It’s really a fascinating look at the way things work in Cupertino. And perhaps should stand as a warning for anyone in a business where they don’t have full control over how their promises play out.

From “Leave Britney Alone” to “Chocolate Rain,” let’s face it, we love these things. I know I’m not the only one here who’s had that Bed Intruder “Hide your kids, hide your wife” verse stuck in my head for as long as I can remember (“He’s climbing in your windows …”). And I’m not even going to get into  “Baby Monkey on a Pig.”

Richard Dawkins’ definition of a meme in The Selfish Gene is "a unit of cultural transmission.” Like genes and diseases, the prevailing characteristic of memes is that they tend to replicate, just add humans.

Anything can be a meme, but there are certain characteristics that make information units more likely to go viral (namely funniness).

The Internet, where replication is as easy as hitting “Like” or “Retweet,” is one big meme pool.  Internet hipsters (people who spend a lot of time online – cough) now judge each other by whether they posted it before whatever it is it hit Buzzfeed.

Much like hardy genes confer biological advantage, being aware of memes now confers a feeling of superiority amongst those in the know. Hence the above video, which was basically engineered to propagate itself.

Side note: This is like almost every conversation I’ve ever had with anyone. Ever.

Thanks Jeremy Toeman.

Yes, it’s time for another local deals site. But this one is a bit different from the countless Groupon competitors, because it’s targeting a very specific market: college students. It’s called DealQuad, and it’s working directly with college newspapers to match students with good deals (and help the newspapers stay afloat in the process). Since launching last month, the company has landed deals with school papers at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. It’s also recently closed an angel round with participation from Paige Craig, Randy Kaplan, and celebrity interactive agency Charlie.

So how does targeting this student market put DealQuad in any better position than the countless other Groupon competitors? CEO Jeffrey Appelbaum says that there are a few advantages. First, the student newspapers DealQuad works with already have distribution across the student body both online and in their print editions, which helps clear the first hurdle of getting eyeballs on each deal. They also tend to have relationships with the local businesses around schools, which have staff who can help set up deals (which means that DealQuad doesn’t have to establish a huge salesforce the way Groupon has).

The deals themselves are pretty familiar. Students are directed to a branded DealQuad portal from their newspaper’s website or ads in the print edition. They’re asked for their email when they first get to this site, which lets DealQuad send them information about new deals on a regular basis (at this point it’s twice a week, but the company plans to scale this up to the industry-standard daily email). As with Groupon, in order for a deal to take effect it has to reach a ‘tipping point’, which gives students an incentive to get their friends to sign up. A chunk of the revenue generated by each deal (35-50%) goes back to DealQuad and the paper. Appelbaum wouldn’t say how this is split between DealQuad and the newspaper but says that it’s in the paper’s favor.

Again, pretty standard. There is one interesting twist though: deals have a second, higher tipping point that’s related to fundraising. Whenever you sign up for a deal, you can associate yourself with a group (this could be a fraternity, club, or charity organization). Then, once this second tipping point is activated, there’s a bit of a competition: the group with the most participants in the deal actually gets a small cut of the revenue generated by that deal.

DealQuad is not the first startup that’s looking to apply the Groupon model to college students — we recently wrote about a site called CampusDibs that also does this. The difference, at least so far, appears to lie in the sort of deals the companies are offering. DealQuad’s deals are primarily focused around local businesses, while CampusDibs deals appear to focus more on widely available products that appeal to the youth demographic.

In another unique twist, the DealQuad team is also trying to educate the students working for their newspaper partners. The company holds regular interactive webinars to explain the group buying process and why the model works, with input from Chief Strategy Officer Randy Hlavac, who has been a marketing professor as Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism for 18 years.

Of course, college students aren’t really known for having a ton of disposable income. But Appelbaum says this plays in the company’s favor — students are always looking to save a buck, and since DealQuad is offering local deals at places they’re nearby and possibly shopping at anyway, this could be a good way to help them save money.

It’s a chaotic week for Instagram. First it becomes the darling of the app world, then its investors Andreessen-Horowitz decide to double-down on competitor Picplz instead, effectively making the company an orphan. Of course it’s one sexy little orphan half of Sand Hill Road would just love to adopt. (Insert Amazon joke here.) Cue swirling rumors that Instagram is in the process of putting together a series A and even weirder rumors that the company is selling to Facebook. We’ve called Instagram, people close to Instagram and the top five likely suspects that would be doing the deal or have knowledge of that deal and every single one has told us both rumors seem made up out of whole cloth, and that while the company has had the normal “Ok, we’ll call you when we’re ready” conversations around the Valley, no deal is imminent.

“We’re not selling to Facebook, we are not selling to anyone and we are announcing that to our users because they have been worried,” Instagram CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom says. “Of course at some point we’re going to be raising a round, but I haven’t even created a pitch deck. I haven’t signed a term sheet. We’re sitting in the office programming all day. We’re just not at the stage where we need to raise a series A.”

Indeed, the rumors seem to have caused more problems in the short term for the hot, young company. Several investors I spoke with who’d been promised a hearing when Instagram was ready to raise money woke up today to stories saying the deal was already underway. According to a few sources, Instagram has had to do some damage control telling investors as late as this afternoon that indeed, there is no deal on the table and they still promise to give the irked VCs a hearing when they’re ready.

So where did the rumors come from? It’s possible they came from a misunderstanding, a VC hoping to get the company moving or from someone connected to Instagram, hoping to spin the orphan-story in a new positive direction. The first seems the most likely. I don’t think it’s the last one. This isn’t a company that needs to bait the press with false rumors to get a good deal. At the end of the day it’s all a moot point. In today’s venture world, any startup this hot can raise money by snapping their fingers. Not that they needed it, but the story probably served to get more bidders in the deal, which will no doubt push the valuation higher than companies are already getting in these inflated times. The story may not be true, but it may well turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stories like these are a hard call to even write, because at some point, we all know the company will raise money. That’s how startups work. But given that we haven’t found a single source to confirm it on or off the record it feels worth noting.

Remember Socializr, the party planning and event management site founded by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams? The site launched in 2006 as the Evite 2.0, but was unfortunately was forced to lay off all of its staff last Fall. It looks like there’s a good end to the story, as start to finish party planning site Punchbowl is announcing this evening that it has acquired Socializr. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Socializr, which raised $2.25 million in total, is similar in function to Punchbowl and coordinated party planning and invitations for consumers. Last year, the startup launched Event Connect, which allowed users to aggregate and respond to all of their events from sites like Facebook, Meetup, MySpace, and Evite in one place.

Matt Douglas, Punchbowl’s founder and CEO, says that his company is acquiring all of the assets, underlying technology, and domains associated with Socializr (he declined to reveal how many active users Socializr currently has). Douglas says that eventually all users will merge together in Punchbowl. He adds that Abrams will not be joining Punchbowl, but that he will “maintain a close relationship” with the party planning startup.

Punchbowl seems to be growing strong, the startup has grown to one million registered users and rebranded from MyPunchbowl. The platform allows users to create beautiful online invitations and track RSVPs. The platform also provides tools that let you find supplies, organize an after party and even set a date, via an algorithm that recommends the best date for your party. The site also allows you to set up gift registries, save-the-dates, message boards, integrate Google Maps' to display the location, and share comments, photos, and videos. Basically, Punchbowl helps you plan and organize an event from start to finish.

This isn’t the first acquisition for Punchbowl; the startup acquired local vendor listings site I’m In last November.

I used to think that Android fanboys worked themselves into the biggest tizzy when you suggest their favorite device of the week may not be the absolute bee’s knees. I was wrong. Flash fanboys are much worse. They’re worse not only because they go absolutely ape-shit if you disrespect their platform, but also because at the end of the day at least Android fans have a leg to stand on. At least their object of love is ultimately pretty good and has a bright future. Flash? Yeah…

Adobe’s CTO paints a rosy picture of the platform. But that’s his job. The reality is what many of us see with our own eyes: Flash is a massive pain point in our day to day computing. If it’s not crashing our browsers left and right, it’s causing our computers to cook our thighs (or worse). If it’s not draining our batteries 33 percent faster, it’s opening gaping security holes.

Let’s look at just the most recent headlines. Yesterday, Apple released the latest OS X update, 10.6.5. A huge portion of the update was dedicated to security updates. Of those, a full 42 percent were security patches related to Flash.  Should anyone be surprised that Apple has decided to no longer bundle it with OS X?

Meanwhile, Flash is now fully baked into Google’s Chrome browser. If you read the update notes or bug reports on the various channels, you’ll see that a massive number are related to Flash.

What about Flash on other devices? It’s the killer feature of the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, right? Wrong. Even the most glowing reviews of the new tablet rip its Flash support.

Meanwhile, on the smartphone side of things, Adobe just released an update for Flash for Android likely ahead of the 2.3 roll-out. Does it fix any of the performance issues? Nope. I’m using it right now. Playback is still jittery as hell.

So you’ll forgive me if when Kevin Lynch announces all these great-sounding things about Flash that are just around the corner, I’m highly skeptical. How long have we been promised Flash on mobile devices? 5 years? It’s still not where it needs to be. Hell, it’s not where it needs to be on the desktop.

The fact of the matter is that if everything was peachy keen in the state of Flash, Adobe wouldn’t have anything to worry about. Apple could go on the offensive against them, but it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would change. But things are changing. And Adobe is scared to death.

But all of these reports across various sectors must be wrong. Flash is just great. People are screaming about how wonderful it is. It’s a pure coincidence that they all happen to be Flash developers.

[img via stock.ly]

Bill Tai is one those VCs who has a million great war stories– whether it’s about starting companies or death-defying kiteboarding stunts. That’s right, I said kiteboarding stunts. I know it’s a fad with a lot of Google executives and VCs these days, but Tai is actually a paid, sponsored athlete. He’s going to be the International Kiteboarding Association’s ambassador to 2016 Olympics in Rio, in fact.

But more to the point for TechCrunch readers, Tai is a serial entrepreneur who has funded iAsiaWorks, which went public on Nasdaq, and sold two other companies, IPinfusion and Tradebeam. Unlike a lot of newer VCs, Tai has a lot of experience with Nasdaq. He has served on the board of seven companies that have gone public, and invested in eight more that have.

Tai stood out during the dot com bubble for calling it a bubble, keeping a cool head as the legendary venture firm, IVP, split into three firms: Versant Ventures, IVP and Redpoint Ventures. Tai joined Charles River Ventures in the early 2000s and helped build the firm’s West Coast presence, funding deals as varied as Maxthon, one of the largest browser in China, nanotech company Nantero and Scribd.

Tai holds things close to the vest, but in my experience he’ll answer a direct question honestly and he’s seen it all. So send in your questions now to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com. As always, the show will post on Friday afternoon.

In September I wrote about Google’s “extraordinary” efforts to stop employees, particularly engineers, from resigning to join pre-IPO startups like LinkedIn, Twitter and especially Facebook. In one case we confirmed an engineer making around $150,000 turned down a 15% raise plus $500,000 in restricted stock and left for Facebook anyway.

That’s all chump change now. We’ve confirmed today that a staff engineer at Google being heavily romanced by Facebook was offered a jaw dropping $3.5 million in restricted stock by Google (this means Google is handing over stock worth $3.5 million based on its value today, and that stock will vest over time). He quite wisely accepted Google’s counter offer. Facebook lost this one.

From our previous post in September:

Sources close to Google told us that about 80% of people stay when they're offered a counter to a Facebook offer. But some still leave. Part of that may be that Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there's no reason their stock won't hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that's $100 million in stock. Now it's a party.

Google isn't making these kind of counter offers to everyone, but it's not a one off, either. It seems to me that every Google engineer at least should be taking a personal day to go collect a Facebook offer. Even if it's just to get a counter offer from their current employer.

However effective these counter offers are, they sure aren’t good for morale internally at Google. Unless, of course, you’re one of the ones winning the lottery.

Exclusive – Houzz, the impossibly named online home for home design enthusiasts (because they need their own special place on the Web, too), has raised a $2 million Series A round of funding from a number of notable investors. In conjunction with the financing announcement, the company has just pushed a completely new version of its iPad app onto the virtual App Store shelves (you can get it here, free of charge).

All kidding aside, Houzz appears to be a decent idea that’s been executed well.

In essence, Houzz is a photo database and community site specifically targeting home design fanatics, whether they’re enthusiastic about it from a professional or personal perspective.

Already, Houzz claims to serve the largest collection of interior and exterior design photos currently available on the Web, with more than 60,000 high-quality photos contributed by more than 10,000 design professionals.

It’s the Flickr tailored to the home design freaks, if you will.

Users can collect their favorite photos and sort them by location, room type and style and also upload photos of their own homes and gardens. In addition, registered users can use Houzz to locate design professionals in their areas and exchange information and tips on home design with other members.

A big part of the site’s appeal – if you fall within the company’s target audience, of course – are the ideabooks, which are (quite accurately) described by Houzz as the online version of cutting pages out of design magazines and stuffing them in a folder, only much easier to search, save, and share. The startup says more than 130,000 ideabooks have been created by users to date, and that new ideabooks are added every minute.

Houzz, which was founded by an entrepreneurial husband-and-wife team (Alon Cohen and Adi Tatarko), has also just secured $2 million early-stage financing from a slew of notable backers.

The angel investor roster includes people like Oren Zeev, who has invested in companies like Audible and Chegg; Donald Katz, founder & CEO of Audible.com; Gary Ginsberg, Executive VP of Time Warner Inc.; Jeff Fluhr, co-founder of StubHub.com (and CEO until its sale to eBay) and Amos Wilnai, founder of MMC Networks.

In light of today’s rumored 20% Yahoo staff layoffs, this infographic representation of the portal’s death spiral is as painful as the comments we are inevitably going to get for posting it.

And while much cruder than and not as philosophical as Paul Graham’s must-read essay “What Happened to Yahoo!,” it does get the point across. For those of you too busy to scan through either Graham’s post pretty much sums up Yahoo’s trajectory in this one sentence,“But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.”

Image: Scores

From Associated Content’s William Browning, in response to Google’s super-patriotic Veterans Day doodle…

“In the past Google personified its doodle with red, white and blue letters but the addition of an Islamic crescent moon-looking “e” hasall the Internet abuzz.Tweets via Twitter have included a broad range of hostile opinions about ‘Old Glory’ appearing with the shadow of a stylized Islamic crescent moon–especially on Veterans Day. The Google doodle is definitely stirring up fears of fanning the flames of anti-Islamic sentiments in America. Was that what Google intended?”

No, William Browning, the only person “stirring up fears of fanning the flames of anti-Islamic sentiments in America” here is you, you grade A linkbaiting scumwit.

Also: “Tweets via Twitter”?

Honestly, Yahoo!, this is the future of online journalism? You should be ashamed of yourselves.

(Original story h/t: Gawker)

Yahoo is preparing to lay off 20% of total staff, we’ve heard from two independent sources, and managers have been asked to begin to make the tough decisions on who stays and who goes. This news comes just days after Google announced a 10% pay raise and $1,000 spot bonus for all employees. This is a story we’ve been tracking down for weeks.

At the end of 2009 Yahoo had nearly 14,000 employees, and they currently have 14,100 employees. There have been layoffs in this last year, as well as new hiring, but a 20% hit suggests 2,500 people or more will shortly be out of a job. As we reported in September, the company will likely be hiring additional employees in Bangalore and other locations to handle some development and operational jobs being cut in the U.S.

We contacted Yahoo for comment. They responded “we do not comment on rumor or speculation.” Also no word on whether CEO Carol Bartz might be willing to take a pay cut to a more palatable, say $10 million/year. That $30 million would allow Yahoo to keep 300 employees on at a more than respectable $100k/year.

Update: Yahoo says via a statement that we’re being “misleading and inaccurate.” "Yahoo! is always evaluating expenses to align with the company's financial goals. However, a 20% reduction in Yahoo's workforce across the board is misleading and inaccurate." I’m sticking by this story based on our sources, and all have confirmed that managers are being asked to target 20%. Perhaps they’re finding wiggle room in the total percentage, or what employee groups are affected (U.S. v. international, etc.) Also, given how widespread this information is within Yahoo’s ranks, I don’t see the point of denying the plans.

In a pivot away from the “voice of the crowd” philosophy central to Digg’s early culture, the social news site has launched a human curated feature called “Breaking News” which spotlights top stories selected by Digg staff.

As of today you can find Breaking News in red widgets labeled “Breaking News” to the right of the Upcoming, My News, and Top News sections on the new Digg.  Breaking News stories are also designated by flame icons.

This is yet another large news aggregator experimenting with human editors,  Google News and Techmeme being the most visibile news sites to make the jump into human curation thus far.  And similar to Google’s “Editors’ Picks” the widget will highlight stories deemed important but not replace the core news surfacing features of the site. Says Digg Product Lead Keval Desai, “There is no change to how the stories are submitted. Digging and burying are not done by Digg employees.”

So what criteria will the editors be using to deem a story Breaking News? Says Desai, “The widget will showcase stories that are submitted by Digg users that are currently hot, i.e. gaining in velocity on Digg as well as what’s going on across the Internet and what’s gaining in popularity in terms of news memes.”

It’s commonly acknowledged that aggregators like Reddit, Hacker News and even Digg have had at least some administrative supervision (like TOS enforcements). Digg itself faced accusations of manually intervening on behalf of certain publishers in early October. Desai says this is the first time any Digg staff will put a concerted effort into picking stories for editorial reasons.

This is a great idea, but it might be two years too late. Says Power Digger Andy Sorcini a.k.a Mr. Babyman on whether the feature will at least revive some interest in the new Digg, “I think it’s a smart move for Digg to meta-curate their already curated content. Especially in the wake of the drop of traffic from the switch to V4, they need all the help with content surfacing they can get.”

Not all attempts at human curated news have been successful however. Breaking News resembles what Jason Calacanis attempted with Digg clone Propeller, which ultimately failed despite its novel editorial oversight features in part because it confused people accustomed to the classic Netscape.com. While human editing does make a news engine more competitive with Twitter and younger upstarts like BuzzFeed and Spotery, it is not a panacea and comes with its own set of headaches.

Says Sorcini, “The only concern I would have is, It’d be nice to have some sort of transparency on their selection process, so users know there’s no slant (for example, favoring a advertising partner, such as BP).” And so it begins.

Books are becoming electronic like every other form of print media, but they still lag in their social skills. A startup called Rethink Books wants to incorporate sharing features into every electronic book and turn them into social books. I caught up with founders Jason Ilian and Jason Johnson today at the TedxEast conference in New York City, where they presented a demo f their yet-to-be-released product. I caught up with them in the hallway and got a quick demo which I captured on video.

What CEO Ilian is showing is an iPad app, but this app could work on other devices, including e-readers. You see the familiar bookshelf with your books, but you can also connect with your friends on Twitter and Facebook and within the Social Books app itself to see what books are on their bookshelves. As you read a book, you can highlight and create notes, as well as see the highlights and notes of your friends (in different colors). Excerpts could be shared via Twitter or Facebook with a link back to an excerpt page, along with a link to buy the book. There is an activity stream view, where you can see all the comments and recent reading activities of the people you follow.

We’ve seen some of these concepts before. Digital comic book app Graphic.ly comes to mind.. And even the Kindle allows some sharing via Facebook and Twitter. But nobody has really turbocharged sharing for electronic books yet.

Rethink Books isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem, but at least they are approaching it in the right way. The company is approaching publishers who want to put out electronic book titles as individual apps, and Rethink is hoping to power the social sharing features of those books. If Apple and Amazon decide to open up their electronic book marketplaces, they could create a book reader for the their digital books as well.

It seems unlikely that Amazon or Apple would ever do that because they want to control their respective digital book markets and offer a consistent experience. In a way, these social books remind me a little of Shelfari, the social reading service Amazon bought two years ago. But why isn’t that built into the Kindle by now? Maybe opening up digital bookstores to outside innovation isn’t such a bad idea,

A few months ago, we got a glimpse of Tunerfish, Comcast’s attempt at social video discovery, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. Incubated by the Plaxo team, Tunerfish made its real world debut in June; featuring a deal with HBO. And in August, Tunerfish released its first iPhone app, allowing users to interact with TV shows on the go. Today, the service is adding a number of new features, and releasing an updated version of its iPhone app and a new logo.

Tunerfish allows people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice in real time. Much like Twitter does for tweets, Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends (in the last hour, 24 hours, etc.), which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with. The site also encourages people to check-in to shows on both its web-based app and iPhone app, much like you would in Foursquare or Gowalla.

The UI of Tunerfish has been updated to provider a sleeker, more user-friendly interface, making it easier to share, to comment, and to start or join a conversation. Previously, the only way to sign up for Tunerfish was via your Facebook or Twitter account but now you can register and sign-in via the conventional email/password combination.

Tunerfish’s iPhone app has been updated with pull-to-refresh updates and an option to share the awards you earn from the service with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

So how is Tunerfish doing five months out? TV check-ins via Tunerfish in October were up 500% compared with July. But the site has only seen 60,000 check-ins in October, compared to the millions of check-ins per month that GetGlue, a competitor, is currently seeing per month. But Tunerfish’s John McCrea says that “with any new social app, it is the month-over-month growth that one wants to see.”