The Latest from TechCrunch

It looks like Intel has just bought Toronto-based digital signage company CognoVision. According to a report on the Daily Dooh, the acquisition price is around $17 million. We reached co-founder and director of business development Haroon Mirza on the phone who refused to comment on the report.

So why would Intel want CognoVision? The company’s digital signage offerings go beyond just providing compelling displays for marketing purposes. CognoVision’s computer vision technology provides customers with analytics and intelligence around customer interaction with displays, including data on the number of people who look at displays; how long people look for; the number of people who walk by; how long people stay near displays; and anonymous semographics of the display’s audience (gender and age bracket).

Intel and CognoVision actually have an existing relationship. Cognovision has partnered with Intel to show how processors are used in Digital Signage applications.

If Intel did pay $17 million for CognoVision, that price is a drop in the bucket for the company. Intel recently acquired smartphone chipmaker Infineon for $1.4 billion and McAfee for nearly $8 billion.

Foursquare and Facebook Places are popularizing the location check-in. Instagram and PicPlz are perfecting the photo check-in. Is the product check-in next? Billy Chasen, the founder of barcode-scanning app Stickybits, thinks so. He’s spent the past few months pivoting his startup to focus more on brands and turn product check-ins into rewards. A major update of Stickybits is in the App Store (iTunes link), and an Android update will be ready before the end of the year. Its website also has a new design.

When Stickybits first launched at South-by-Southwest last March, it was positioned as a way to append their thoughts to physical objects by associating barcodes with comments, photos, or videos. The next time somebody scanned that barcode they would see your message. And if a product didn’t have a barcode, you could add one with a Stickybit sticker.

It was interesting, but it never quite took off. People weren’t quite sure what they were supposed to do. The new app gives them a reason to scan objects because now they might unlock a reward. The first promotion will be with Ben & Jerry’s. The first 500 people to scan two pints of its Fair Trade ice cream will get a free Ben & Jerry’s T-shirt. Other product-scan promotions are in the works from Don Q Rum, Elmer's Glue, Fiji Water, Harper Collins, Pepsi, Universal Music, Weiden & Kennedy, the Washington Capitals, and Wonderful Pistachios.

The app still works like it used to, but by and large people were scanning products anyway. Each product has its own product wall (here’s Pepsi’s) filled with all the comments, photos, and videos left by Stickybits users. The new app adds a leaderboard, rewards & challenges button, and suggests tags to add to each post (“review,” “tip,” “question,” “random”). And, of course, you can share each scan with your friends on Facebook or Twitter like before. For brands, there are analytics and campaign management tools.

The key to getting users will be how good the promotions are. They need to be compelling enough for people to download the free app and start using it. But companies can become very creative. If you could win free lift tickets by scanning a snowboarding jacket or an autographed book, would you take the time to scan it? Stickybits supports four different kinds of product check-ins: a straight giveaway, location-based coupons (you need to scan the product at a particular store or place), group deals (the reward is unlocked only if you convince a certain number of friends to also scan the product, and combo rewards (you need to scan multiple products).

Brands and retailers love the idea of product check-ins because they think it will get consumers to actually pick up their products in stores. Other startups tackling this market are Shopkick from the retailer’s side (Best Buy is installing its system in stores) and Disrupt startup SnapDragon. Stickybits works directly with brands, and helps them bypass retailers to make direct connections with consumers. Getting regular people to use these apps, though, remains the big challenge.

Apple has posted a cryptic message on its Web site, teasing the world about an "exciting" iTunes announcement that’s coming tomorrow. What could it be? I saw that someone had suggested The Beatles were finally coming to iTunes, but really, who cares? If you want The Beatles on your iPhone you can grab the newly remastered albums that came out last year, "rip, mix, burn," then off you go. Not very exciting, no. What could be exciting, though, is a streaming music service. In an instant, Apple would have killed the MP3 once and for all. You hear that? That’s the sound of the RIAA thanking Apple over and over again.

Read more…

You know Apple means business when they replace the entire front page of Apple.com with a giant teaser announcement flogging something that will happen tomorrow at 10AM Eastern, 7AM Pacific. What could it be? Streaming? The shuttering of Ping?

Gigaboxx, the UK mobile music download platform targeting artists and record companies who want to set up shop to sell direct to fans, has dumped its monthly subscription charge to make the bulk of its B2B service free. This actually makes a lot of sense since the startup gets a kick back for every track sold, so why charge for the razors? Furthermore, Gigaboxx says that it's seen 1,000 new sign-ups since it quietly switched to free last week. As we reported when the service was first outed in April at TechCrunch Europe's GeeknRolla, it has a particular emphasis on live events – hence the mobile component – offering artists a "suite of marketing tools", including their own store URL, QR codes and a SMS reply service that they can feature in promotional material and share on social networks.

Microsoft this morning announced several new efforts to gain some ground in the booming social/casual gaming market. The company will be debuting an all-new version of MSN Games (see preview here), bring new social games to instant messaging client Windows Live Messenger and expand Bing Games internationally.

Last but not least, Microsoft has struck a partnership with social games publisher CrowdStar to bring some of its most popular titles to Microsoft’s various casual games properties.

Kevin Unangst, senior global director of PC and mobile gaming at Microsoft, says:

“MSN Games, Windows Live Messenger and Bing reach millions of consumers every month, and we’re connecting all those players — and their social circles — for the first time with a great games experience at the center.”

Launching later this afternoon, the latest addition to the company’s casual games portfolio is a preview of the new MSN Games, which lets Internet users play games online and challenge their Facebook and Windows Live friends to beat their high scores in a centralized environment. The new MSN Games site will sport a new design and also feature “real-time entertainment news” from MSN Entertainment.

With this week’s releases, Microsoft is tying its casual games properties together in a bid to establish a unified games experience across MSN Games, Windows Live Messenger and Bing. All three games properties are connected by a new social feature called Microsoft Game Hub, which essentially aims to add “more of your personality and friends” to your favorite casual games (based on your Facebook and/or Windows Live profile).

This is what it will look like:

Note that this hasn’t anything to do with the similarly named Windows Phone’s Games hub, at least not as far as I can tell based on today’s announcements.

Microsoft hopes the announcements will resonate with game developers and publishers alike.

Alex Tinsman, a manager with Xbox Product Marketing, said:

"The Microsoft Game Hub is really breaking new ground because that one wrapper instantly makes everything immediately socia."What that means to publishers is that they write it once, and then publish to any location.”

In addition to the above initiatives, Microsoft announced that Bing Games is henceforth available for users outside the United States in other English-speaking markets such as Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Already, Bing Games has seen more than 55 million game sessions played to date directly in the browser, the company adds.

Bing will also be the first of Microsoft’s casual games platforms to feature CrowdStar titles, which will join the Bing portfolio in mid-December. The Facebook games maker says it is currently seeing about 50 million monthly active users.

Microsoft points out that Windows Live Messenger remains one of the world’s most popular IM networks, with more than 9 billion messages sent every day. Today, the company is infusing those IM chats with the social features of the new Microsoft Game Hub and a portfolio of titles from publishers like iWin, PopCap, Arkadium, GameHouse and others.

The new games tab in Messenger will be available later today in the US, UK, France, Canada, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Microsoft says more markets will be added later this year, and that while the games tab UI will be localized in all of these markets, the games themselves will only be in English.

At launch, more than 35 games will be connected and playable across MSN Games, Windows Live Messenger and Bing, including iFresh Games’ “Cubis 2″ and PopCap’s “Plants vs. Zombies”.

Microsoft adds that it will round out its portfolio with more publishers and a “carefully-chosen selection of popular and critically acclaimed games from console, handheld, mobile and online platforms” in the future.

As a reminder, we reported back in July that Google is plotting the launch of Google Games and has invested over $100 million in social games juggernaut Zynga (which also has a partnership with Yahoo in place).

It’s safe to conclude we can expect this market to heat up some more as the Web giants continue to intensify their casual gaming efforts.

As we enter the holiday shopping season, Google is ramping up its product search efforts. As we know from research data, more than 46 percent of in-store purchases are influenced by online research. The online-research for offline purchases market is huge ($917 billion to be exact), and Google wants to be the go-to destination for holiday shopper this year.

Google is expanding its Blue Dot Specials feature (which launched earlier this year on mobile search) by offering more data on whether a product is available in a nearby brick and mortar store. Google has partnered with over 70 retail brands, including Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma, as well as software manufacturers like JDA, Epicor and Oracle, to show shoppers whether a product is available in a nearby store or location. This data will be available in search under the “nearby stores link.”

To help shoppers find product on the go, Google is improving its mobile shopping app (which the search giant says has 2.5 million downloads) with new search filters like "price" and "brand.” The app also includes previously features such as Local Availability, voice search and barcode scanning.

And Google has added new discovery tools for online shoppers and searchers called popular products and aisles. The popular products feature shows you the most viewed products in your search category. So if you searched for a coffee makers, Popular Products would show you what coffee makers are being viewed the most within Google Product search. Aisles is a lot like what it sounds like; it essentially puts products into sub-categories. So within a search for a coffee maker, you can search for specific machines within the drip coffee makers aisle.

In terms of product search and shopping, it looks like this is a big week for the search giant. Google is expected to debut a new fashion and shopping site called Boutiques this week and Google Product search has now been revamped for a better experience for shoppers.

One important factor to note in Google’s product search is that the company is taking a big bet on the online search to offline buying experience for the holiday season. The Forrester data cited above was collected and published earlier this year, so I’m curious if that trend continues to grow over the next few months. E-commerce sales continue to rise, so it should be interesting to see if the online to offline shopping trend is effected by this.

In some isolated cases such as the infamous Tiger Woods-mistress texts, SMS messages are not meant to be shared. But more often than not, SMS messages with friends can actually be fairly entertaining. Launched by Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and Patrick Moberg, Bnter is a simple way for people to share text messages with their friends in a profile on the web. The startup had previously rolled out its web application a few weeks ago, but is taking its text sharing mobile with the launch of a free iPhone app today.

The app’s functionality is similar to Bnter’s web app, and allow users to post their text messages to a personal profile as well as to Facebook and Twitter. You simply copy and paste your text messages into the posts on Bnter (Leto adds that they are currently developing a more efficient way to embed text messages into the app).

You can then share the conversations with your friends and users can follow other friends to see their text updates (you can find friends via Facebook Connect and Twitter). And you can comment on others text message exchanges. You can also tag texts by subject matter and user, which allows you to categorize your conversations and search for similar conversations by tags.

Leto says the mobile app enhances Bnter’s service even further because it allows users to post their text message conversations on the go. Bnter, which Leto says is a simple form of self-expression, has raised seed funding from a number of high-profile investors including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher).

Celeno Communications, an Israel-based provider of semiconductors for multimedia WiFi home networking applications, this morning announced that it has secured a $12 million funding round, which included a strategic investment by international cable operator Liberty Global. The company's previous backers, including Cisco, Greylock Partners, Miven Venture Partners, and Pitango Venture Capital, also participated in the round. The investment by Liberty Global Ventures comes only months after the broadbant giant opted for Celeno's WiFi technology to power its multimedia home gateway.

ConnectEDU, a Boston-based developer of Web-based college and career planning services and platforms, this morning announced that it has successfully closed a $7 million financing round led by Allen & Co and with participation of the company’s initial group of investors.

In conjunction with the funding announcement, the company has revealed that Margaret Spellings has joined ConnectEDU’s board of directors. Spellings is the former Secretary of Education under the administration of President George W. Bush.

With the freshly raised capital, ConnectEDU says it plans to establish regional service centers across the U.S. to support the roll-out of statewide initiatives and serve existing high school, college and employer partners. The company adds that it will also invest further in CoursEval, its recently acquired data-driven evaluation and assessment system, as well as SuperAPP, its online college admissions form completion system.

ConnectEDU says SuperAPP is currently available in hundreds of high schools, including several major urban districts such as Baltimore Public Schools, Detroit Public Schools and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. ConnectEDU also recently inked deals with Miami-Dade School District, as well as the States of Massachusetts, Michigan and Texas to develop statewide college and career planning portals.

In the past year, ConnectEDU claims its Connect! community has grown to include 5 million high school and college-aged students, 2,500 high schools, 450 colleges, and nearly 50 employers.

Enterprise software giant EMC has just acquired Isilon Systems for $2.25 billion in cash or appoximately $33.85 per share. The deal was rumored to be in the works but now it's official. Isilon is know for its "Scale-out NAS" storage systems, which offer customers a highly scalable, low-cost storage infrastructure for managing "Big Data." Clients who need Isilon's data storage capabilities include those in life sciences (e.g. gene sequencing), media and entertainment (e.g. online streaming), and oil and gas (e.g. seismic interpretation).

Tungle, a scheduling and calendar sharing tool, is adding its first premium, paid feature today—branded channels. Tungle.me, which we’ve previously written about here, offers users a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with a number of calendar applications, including Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal.

Users now have the option of upgrading to a premium account to receive the ability to brand public pages and email invitations with their logo and corporate colors, as well as input up to 10 suggested locations in their meeting invitations.

This is the first paid offering for the startup; Tungle.me has been completely free for users. The Personalization feature is $4.99 a month, or $49.99 per year. The company says it will continue to add more premium features but will keep the basic application free.

Since Tungle’s launch in 2009, the company’s scheduling offering is now being used at 800 Universities around the world, by 40% of Fortune 1000 companies, and users from over 150 countries.

Checkout Tungle’s manifesto on the “calendar of the future” here.

Coraid, a developer of Ethernet SAN storage solutions, this morning announced that it has closed a $25 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. All of Coraid's Series A ($10 million) backers, including Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners, participated in this round. The reason why it's interesting that Menlo Ventures led this sizeable financing round (sorry, Om) is because they were also the largest investor in data storage company 3PAR, which was recently acquired by HP for $2.35 billion.

Earlier this month, we broke the news that funny blog Lamebook was seeking judicial declaration that the operation and maintenance of its website and the use of the name ‘lamebook’ do not infringe or dilute the trademark rights of Facebook.

In response to the complaint, Facebook deemed it “unfortunate” that Lamebook had turned to litigation after “months of working with Lamebook to amicably resolve what we believe is an improper attempt to build a brand that trades off Facebook's popularity and fame”.

Unsurprisingly, it only took Facebook a couple more days to file suit against Lamebook.

The lawsuit was filed November 8 in federal court in San Jose, California and follows a letter that the social networking giant’s lawyers sent Lamebook in July, describing their infringement claims. Lamebook claims its site, which was launched by two graphic designers in April 2009, is legally protected by the First Amendment, but Facebook contends that it isn’t because it doesn't "provide any critique or comment of Facebook itself”.

Lamebook, meanwhile, is actively soliciting donations from visitors for its ‘Legal Fund’:

We really love running Lamebook.

Aside from the laughs, it represents an opportunity to work on an incredibly fun project with our buddies that makes a lot of people happy and still allows us to make rent at the end of the month. So while we're definitely not getting rich off of this, it still represents our livelihood. Beyond that, it represents a way for us and lots of fans to express ourselves and poke some fun at the world's most popular social network.

Problem is, Facebook didn't get the joke. They've decided to pick on the little guys: small business owners who seem to be no match for a multi-billion dollar behemoth. But this is one website that's not going down without a fight.

I really hope Lamebook prevails in this particular case, mainly because I think it’s silly for Facebook to start pretending that they own the rights to anything on the Web that happens to have a name that ends with ‘book’ (see Teachbook and Placebook).

And because I would really, really like my daily Lamebook fix to keep coming.

iGlue, which wants to "wikify the web", has officially launched its semantic content organizer and search application. Three years in the making before being unveiled at TechCrunch Europe's GeeknRolla event in London last April, iGlue creates an additional information layer over web pages by using natural language technology to understand its content. The browser plug-in or bookmarklet recognises names of relevant entities in text, such as people, geographical locations, institutions etc. and then when a user rolls their mouse over those entities, displays related information, images and videos. However, where iGlue perhaps comes into its own is that users can contribute to this structured data via the plug-in's annotation tool by entering their own entries and data, potentially turning any website into a Wikipedia-like resource, hence the "wikify the web" description used by the company.

Fashion bloggers are busily spreading the news that many of them have received an invitation from Google to attend an event in New York City next Wednesday evening. ‘High Tech Fuses With High Fashion’, the invitation reads.

The invitation doesn’t include any other clues as to what the event is all about, but journalist and “fashionalyst” Patty Huntington this morning pointed out that a tweet from an anonymous NY fashion PR revealed part of what’s coming late last week.

The tweet read: “Breaking news: google is launching an ecommerce site with shop in shops by major designers #google #theyrgonnabepissed #geturshopon”.

According to Huntington, Google will be entering the online fashion retail arena, helped by the technology and know-how it gained with the acquisition of visual search technology company Like.com last August.

Huntington adds that the fashion ecommerce site will be called Boutiques.com (the domain name is owned by Like.com but the website is password-protected):

Well frockwriter can fill in a few blanks. Our sources say that the new Google fashion initiative is called Boutiques.com and boasts not only online boutiques selling merchandise offered by various designers and retailers, but a large number of curated “boutiques” selling the looks worn by celebrities and other influencers.

This is line with earlier reports (WSJ) that Google is poised to upgrade its shopping site Google Product Search (once called Froogle) to compete more fiercely with the likes of Amazon and eBay.

Update: Google Product Search just got a major revamp.

If the rumors check out, the launch of a fashion-specific comparison shopping site pits Google squarely against eBay first and foremost.

The latter has steadily been ramping up its fashion offerings lately: the company released an iPhone app for the vertical, a one-stop-shop for all things fashion on its marketplace dubbed eBay Fashion and a flash sales site that sells designer clothes at discounted prices called FashionVault. eBay also launched a site that showcases street style of eBay shoppers, called LookBook.

Undoubtedly, we’ll learn more about Google’s fashionable plans next Wednesday.

(Via Gizmodo)

RealMatch, which operates a distributed recruitment ad network, has secured $4.7 million in second-round funding from Carmel Ventures and previous investor Baytech Venture Capital. The investment will be used to boost sales and marketing efforts in the US.

In conjunction with the financing round, RealMatch has appointed Marcel Legrand, a former SVP at Monster.com, as its new chief executive officer.

Founded in 2007, RealMatch runs an online ad network for employment in partnerships with some 1,200 partner job sites. The company has developed adaptive matching technology (dubbed Real-Time Job Matching) that it says allows it significantly increase positive results in matching job seekers to potential employers.

Employer can post jobs across RealMatch’s distributed partner network free of charge.

Once the results are in, the advertiser can review the group of matching applicants and resumes for a period of 7 days to adequately evaluate candidates. If they’re pleased, they can purchase the results of the online recruitment effort for a fee. Hence, RealMatch refers to its model as ‘pay-per-performance’.

Marcel Legrand, who will serve as RealMatch’s new CEO, comes from Monster.com where he served in various senior positions including SVP Product Development and SVP Strategy
and Corporate Development.

Buzzy stealthy startup Path, which was founded by ex-Facebooker Dave Morin and Shawn Fanning, finally launched its mobile app tonight. It is a private photo sharing iPhone app similar to Instagram or PicPlz, except that it makes sharing photos more difficult than it needs to be.

Path is designed to share photos with only your closest 50 friends, primarily through the app itself. You can’t Tweet out links to your photos or share them on Facebook. It is very much for personal photos and private moments, the kind of pictures you share with family and very close friends. The problem with Path is that for many people, those family members or friends don’t necessarily have an iPhone. They can still see the pictures on the Web, but you really need the app to place photos back into other people’s streams.

In other words, the Shutterfly network (the people with whom you share your wedding and vacation photos) are probably not going to be using this app. Instead you are going to find the same people you share things with on Twitter and elsewhere. This is already happening to me in the hour or so since I’ve downloaded the app.

I am going to make another prediction. The types of photos people are going to share on Path by and large are going to be the same as the photos you see already in more public photo-sharing apps: meals, drinks, friends, kids, cats, dogs, and the random dross of daily life. Knowing that it is “private” and “safe” is not going to change much of anything.

There are times, of course, when you don’t want to share a photo widely with the world. But those are the exceptions. A better privacy model would be to make photos public by default and allow for a private mode with certain photos to be shared only with select individuals or a core inner circle. Public sharing allows for more serendipitous connections. But then Path would be just like every other mobile photo-sharing app. I’ll give it credit for going its own way.

Path doesn’t seem interested in making anything other than visual connections. You can’t even comment on someone else’s photo. It is oddly passive for a social app. You put up photos, see other people’s photos, and that’s it. No discussion allowed.

Over the last few months there’s been plenty of buzz and speculation about Path, a hitherto “stealthish” company that was founded by long time Facebook employee Dave Morin, along with Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau. The company has raised funding from a very impressive list of investors that includes Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Keith Rabois, Ashton Kutcher, and a laundry list of Facebook alumni. And tonight, it’s ready for its big debut. You can grab the free app on the App Store right here.

So what is Path? In short, it’s a private photo sharing network — think Instagram, but without the filters and with a privacy model that takes away any anxiety associated with sharing photos with people you don’t know. It’s based around email addresses and phone numbers, rather than a public database of users. And compared to other popular social applications, Path is going against the grain: there’s no follow system and the friend system is also quite different from what you’re used to on Facebook.

Path is using a system where you specify who exactly you want to share your photos with. After firing up the app, you’ll be asked to select contacts from your phone’s address book — tap a few, and from then on, those contacts will see your shared photo items in their feed automatically (they don’t have to accept anything, but they can block or temporarily ‘mute’ you if they don’t want to see your content). Path wants the entire experience to be personal enough that you won’t feel nervous about sharing your photos, so it’s limiting the maximum number of friends to 50.

And note that there isn’t a request system to speak of — it’s up to you to take the initiative to share photos with the people you care about. Of course, you can still pester your friends in real life should they forget to share their content with you.

Path is taking a unique approach to a few other areas of photo sharing. The first is a feature called ‘Seen’. If I share a photo with my friends, I’ll be able to see which of them has actually seen my photo. Yes, that sounds a little weird, but remember that the idea is that these photos are being shared with close personal friends. Morin says that this helps skip the initial “Hey did you see that photo?” question that’s common when friends talk about content shared on social networks — this way you can just jump right into a conversation about the content.

The application is also omitting comments and captioning for now, in favor of tags. After posting an image, you’ll be asked to associate tag it with the people in the photo (pretty standard), its location (again, standard), and finally with a Thing the photo is associated with. This Thing component can be anything that’s associated with what you were doing. Taking a photo of your graduation dinner? The Thing would be Graduation. Eating dinner at a thai restaurant? The thing could be the dish you ordered.

Path’s restrictive friending system is going to hamper its virality to some extent (the app won’t spam your whole address book of friends with an invite). But Morin contends that it will still spread between circles of friends. And there still is some virality — when you add a friend to your Path who isn’t on the service yet, they’ll get an invitation in their email inbox.

I think Path could find a solid niche — there are certainly plenty of photos that I’m not comfortable posting on Twitter (usually because they’re boring if you don’t know the people in the photos). And Path would be perfect for that. But it’s going to have to rely more on word-of-mouth than any of its competitors — you won’t be seeing any tweets to photo on Path, for example — which may make growth tricky.

With the rise of Foursquare, the “check-in” has become fairly commonplace. With the launch of Places, Facebook will only make it more so. It shouldn’t be surprising that we’re seeing dozens of other startups spring up to do check-ins for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. Media check-ins were a pretty obvious extension. But now we’re seeing a number of companies pop up that are doing check-ins for websites. A couple of these, Badgeville and OneTrueFan, launched in September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Now they’re about to get some very big competition: Meebo.

Specifically, on Tuesday, Meebo is launching a new browser extension, the Meebo MiniBar, in alpha. This extension, which will be available for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, will allow people to check-in to the websites they’re browsing on the fly. And this extension is just the first step. Once it’s fully up and running, Meebo plans to add the functionality to their popular toolbar. A toolbar which spans some 8,000 partner websites and reaches 180 million unique users a month already.

So why is Meebo getting into this game? “I kind of think sharing is a little bit tapped out,” Meebo Co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg told us when we sat down with him last week to get a preview of the new feature. He notes that plenty of people are getting hesitant to share things on Facebook and Twitter because they’re afraid someone else already has and they’ll be considered uncool or out of date. There’s a real anxiety there. So instead, he hopes this Meebo MiniBar (and eventually the Meebo Bar itself) removes this sharing stigma. You should be able to show off what you’re really reading around on the web and not worry if someone else has already shared it.

Sternberg also notes that user testing has told them that a lot of people are interested to know what websites their friends are actually visiting. “My friends know about cooler websites than I do,” is how he puts it. And he says that Twitter today seems to be more about rap stars, while Facebook is for your actual friends, but not necessarily for content discovery amongst your friends.

Having said that, obviously the Meebo MiniBar will have options to share your check-ins to Twitter and Facebook. But Sternberg is quick to say that this won’t be on by default. Instead, the more interesting discovery mechanism may exist in the extension itself, as there is a Feed button that shows you when friends discover and check-in to new sites.

When you check-in to a site with the Meebo MiniBar, you’ll check into the site itself, not a specific page (even if you’re on one). So if you were to check-in while reading this article, for example, you would check-in to TechCrunch. You will be able to add a specific page though by clicking the “Attach this page” button after you check-in. But that’s optional. As is commenting.

This basic approach seems like a smart play. It reminds me a bit of MyBlogLog before their acquisition by Yahoo. Of course on big difference is that the Meebo MiniBar won’t show that you’ve visited a site unless you explicitly check-in.

By checking-in to sites you love enough, you can also earn VIP status. But Sternberg wants to make it clear that this isn’t about creating a game mechanic — there is no mayor system, like on Foursquare or some of the site check-in rivals mentioned above. This VIP system is just a way to show your affinity towards certain sites you actually visit. And eventually, this VIP status could be used by the site itself to rewards its most loyal readers.

But those type of partner discussions and potential APIs are down the road. For now, Meebo just wants to get an alpha version of the product out there, and that’s why they made the MiniBar. Sternberg notes that it’s one of the few extensions that doesn’t install any software on your system — everything loaded comes from Meebo.com itself. Their work with the Meebo Bar has allowed them to create this type of micro-footprint tool. And Sternberg says that the experience will still be instantaneous. You visit a site, you hit the check-in button, and you’re done.

And this MiniBar still offers much of the functionality of the larger bar. For example, you can chat with your online friends from across the web in it.

Another new feature Meebo is launching to facilitate all of this are Meebo profile pages. This keeps track of your check-in activity across the web. This also allows you to visit other websites and see what other users have been there.

Again, look for the extension to launch on Tuesday. And be sure to check-in to TechCrunch.

Since 2007 Google Street View, in an effort to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" has visually captured the human experience gamut from pranks, to nudity, to crimes to death. While it’s had its share of issues, the Google Maps project is one of the greatest juxtapositions of technology and imagery our culture has produced.

In homage to this, artist Jon Rafman has collected screen captures from Google Street View blogs and his own discoveries and posted them on the amazing The Nine Eyes Of Google Street View Tumblr. Rafman describes the inspiration behind the two year old project.

“The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer.”

In his collection, Rafman expresses the spontaneity and range (anything from Polar Bears to prostitutes) that makes the objective Street View images so intriguing. The grittiness of the subject matter captured by Google’s nine directional cameras is even more poignant when viewed in relation to other photos from all over the world.

This technology isn’t intended to be art, which makes it even more compelling.

Some of my favorite images, above and below.

\

Via David Karp/HN.

For a long time after the launch of the iPhone, despite thousands of apps for just about everything you can imagine, there was no killer RSS reader app. That changed when the 2.0 version of Reeder arrived earlier this year. It’s so good that I often prefer using it to reading feeds in Google Reader, long my go-to RSS reader. And the iPad version is even better. And now it’s about ready to launch in beta for the Mac.

While the blog Macstories did a preview back in September when the software was in early alpha, it has come a long way since then. And developer Silvio Rizzi has given me permission to do a short preview of what you can expect when the beta hits (sometime in the next couple of weeks, he hopes). I’ve been using the app for months now, and it’s finally feeling rock-solid. And it has completely replaced Google Reader for me.

Of course, users of Reeder on the other platforms will know that it is built on top of Google Reader. You log in with your Google credentials and all of your feeds (and starred items) are transfered over. But Reeder makes the experience look roughly a million times better.

The app uses a 3-pane view similar to the iPad version of the app. In the left pane, you’ll find your feed folders — but they don’t look like folders, they look like bundled icons. Hitting the arrow in the lower left square on this bundle will drop down individual feed items. Or you can click on the bundle to read all of the items in there. (You can also drag this left panel out to make it larger, and this will give you a more traditional folder/drop-down view.)

The second pane contains the feed of stories by a particular site (or bundled folder of sites). This area shows you the title of the post as well as a short preview of the content. There’s also a check-box at the bottom to mark all items as read (or you simply hit “A”).

The third (right) pane is where the content is actually shown. Again, with all the proper Mac styling, it just looks a lot nicer than Google Reader does in the browser. And here you can easily do things like star, share, make a note (tied to Google Reader), send to Instapaper (or Delicious, Pinboard, etc), and post to Twitter. The last bit opens a nice little tweet box that allows you to easily insert the title of what you’re reading and/or a link. This third pane can also be used to view the items as they appear on the web itself — and it’s actually a pretty nice way to browse. Or you can hit the “B” button and open any item in Chrome.

There are at least a couple dozen other subtle great things about the app. For example, the dock icon can be made to show you the unread count on the side of its filing box (instead of an ugly red badge that almost all other apps use).

And because it uses Google Reader as the backend, everything stays in sync between your various devices. And with Reeder for Mac, all read items can be kept locally on your machine so you can easily reference them later. The one thing missing, sadly, is search. You’ll have to open Google Reader for that.

Rizzi notes that he’s just working on feed subscription management now and then the app should be good to go. When it is, you’ll likely be able to find it here. I’ll be interested to see if Rizzi also makes the final version available in the Mac App Store. It seems like a natural fit.

Will this beautiful app be enough to save the doomed RSS reader method of consuming news? Long-term, no. But it does make it a great-looking corpse.

Today was supposed to be the day that 4Chan took down Tumblr. Instead, it looks like 4Chan itself is down. Could Tumblr be behind it?

As you can see, 4Chan is down for everyone, not just me. And it has been that way for at least the past 15 minutes. The timing is interesting since it was supposed to be 5 PM ET when the 4Chan DDoS attack was to begin — that was roughly 15 minutes ago. It is possible that Tumblr users, which had been planning a counterattack for tomorrow, moved it up to today to break 4Chan?

Tumblr, by the way, is still very up.

More to come, I’m sure.

Update: It seems quite a few people are seeing various Tumblr sites down as well (though it’s still up for others).

Update 2: And the 4Chan boards are up, but appear full of Tumblr users and a ton of things are 404ing.

Update 3: Says Tumblr founder David Karp:

As always, we’re aggressively suspending any accounts encouraging DoS attacks or other illegal behavior.

Karp also noted that the hacked downtime image I had posted above was fake, so I removed it.

[via Anthony De Rosa]

Last month, the world raised a quizzical eyebrow towards a new advertising campaign for Stolichnaya vodka, starring two Biz Stones, hanging out with each other in a bar. This month it's the turn of Foursquare's Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, posing in chunky knitwear  (and with only the merest hint of homoeroticism) to promote Gap.

To say the thinking behind the ads is muddled is to use comical understatement. As I write these words, millions of Gap shoppers and Stoli drinkers are staring blankly at the over-airbrushed, bizarrely ill-conceived advertisements, thinking "yeah, I've heard of Twitter but who the hell is that dude? And what's a Foursquare? Is it a Facebook thing?"

In fact, if I were a cynical man I might draw a few appropriately cynical conclusions from corporate America’s new-found obsession with tech entrepreneurs whom 99.9999% of the population couldn't pick out of a police line-up.

I might, for example, suggest that the commercials are what happens when some the world's biggest brands realise that they know jack-all about the media habits of their target customers and so, rather than admitting defeat, simply throw a burlap sack of money at a dick-headed gaggle of 20 year old sub-junior creative directors who form their entire concept of what constitutes ‘celebrity’ from the pages of Gawker and their friends' Facebook walls. I might also bandy around phrases like "cringeworthy", "embarrassingly ill-conceived" and "should be lined up against the stark white walls of their painfully minimalistic Madison Avenue offices and shot twice at close range".

Fortunately, though, I'm not a cynical man. And as such I'm able to appreciate the true brilliance of the commercials. I mean, sure, maybe only fifty people in Silicon Valley and Manhattan will understand the ads… will appreciate why a photo of Biz Stone, getting slowly drunk with only himself for company is actually a brilliantly arch comment on the media's obsession with Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. Or will comprehend why choosing the founders of Foursquare to model clothing from the official uniform supplier to unemployed hipster wannabes is a piece of pitch-perfect commercial satire, worthy of Adbusters.

…but, while the number of people who truly grok the ads might be small, those fifty people also happen to have a frightening level of disposable income, along with the commensurate level of youthful naivete required to blow it all on mid-range vodka and woolen beanies. After all, the cash they just raised to build their awesome new "Groupon for Q&As" platform isn't going to spend itself.

With the banks in ruin and Bernie Madoff in jail, these kids are America's new highest-spending demographic and the further advertisers can dig into the Internet's navel to find spokesmodels, the more likely these new-new-new rich kids are to respond. With that in mind, look out for the following Silicon-Valley-themed product endorsements this holiday season…

• Tesla's Elon Musk for Geico: Given the billionaire's propensity for crashing high-powered sports cars before he’s got around to insuring them, who better than Musk to remind you that 15 minutes can save you 15% on your car insurance?

• Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for Nikon Binoculars: Cavalier attitude to the privacy of strangers? Him too! Nikon binoculars: because involuntary sharing is caring.

• Tumblr's David Karp for Trader Joe’s: Tumblr: for when, amazingly, you're too painfully white, tedious, middle class and hipstery for Twitter. Trader Joe’s: for when, amazingly, you're too painfully white, tedious, middle class and hipstery for Whole Foods.

• Groupon's Andrew Mason for Maxim and Kleenex: Because nothing says "I'm just not that into you" like paying for your date with a Groupon, and nothing says "I am incapable of maintaining an adult relationship" like a subscription to Maxim and a box of Kleenex.

• Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales for Fox News: "Well, it's says here that Obama was born in Kenya and the moon is made of apple pie. We report, you decide."

• Aol's Tim Armstrong for Old Spice: Because your grandfather used to use it, and now it's on Twitter.

• Amazon's Jeff Bezos for PetSmart / Hershey’s: Because strangers who bought "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct" also bought a van-load of puppies and candy.