The Latest from TechCrunch

People search site MyLife has flown under the radar for the most part since the site debuted from the merging of Reunion.com and Wink in early 2009. Today, the company is releasing a number of statistics about its growth over the past year.

MyLife is a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. MyLife pulls information from public records and also allows users to subscribe to the search site to connect with others, track their searches and more.

Founder and CEO Jeffrey Tinsley says the site is getting 26 million monthly unique visitors according to Omniture’s statistics. comScore actually reports that the site saw half that traffic, or 12.7 million unique visitors in October.

Tinsley says that MyLife has 41 million registered members and is adding 2.4 million U.S. monthly members monthly. The site currently lists 205 million U.S. records out of 1.2 billion people records worldwide. And in terms of revenue, Tinsely says that MyLife will see $60 million in revenue in 2010, and is expected to grow by 40 percent in 2011.

While MyLife sees Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as its competition, the site doesn’t really have any social features beyond the ability to find and message people. That being said, people search is expected to be a $10.8 billion business by 2013, according to a recent Forrestor study, so MyLife seems to have hit a possible goldminein terms of revenue.

Vzaar, an online video platform aimed at SMEs that want to publish video, has been plugging away since 2007, but seemed to go in an odd direction – aiming at eBay sellers who wanted to sex-up their auctions. Needless to say it was the low end of the market and eBay auctioneers tend not want to spend money on a dedicated video platform outside of free ones like YouTube. But after bringing in new management, new CEO Stephen McCluskey, formerly with PA consulting group, has pivoted the company towards a more upstream market and gone out looking for new funding.

Through various twists and turns on that funding road it’s now found further funding – terms undisclosed – through a slightly left-fieldsource, namely Hollywood director Oliver Stone, famous for movies on The Doors, JFK and Wall Street. He’s invested alongside existing investor Sophrosyne Ventures LLP.

If you’re a regular jailbreaker, you’ll be happy to know that iOS 4.2.1 is jailbroken already and that you can download the iOS version and roll your own install immediately. RedmondPie has a great how-to but it’s pretty simple.

Read more…

Scale Computing, a provider of midmarket clustered storage solutions, this morning announced it has secured $17 million in Series C funding in a round led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Northgate Capital and existing investors (including Benchmark Capital). This latest round of funding brings the total raised for the company to $31 million.

While the deals are great, Black Friday crowds are the worst. You have to get up at the crack of dawn, suffer madness in parking lots, only to fight with other shoppers over a limited quantity of marked down items. Today, Milo is giving you a tool that could help you avoid Black Friday crowds by checking product-inventory before you head to the mall or shopping center.

On a designated Black Friday landing page, Milo will aggregate and track Black Friday
discounts at national merchants, so shoppers can know when sale items sell out and where they remain in-stock. And Milo promises that all of these inventory listings are updated in real-time.

The Milo.com Black Friday page aggregates sale prices and availability for more than 5,000 products, ranging from electronics and toys to apparel and home goods. To
access the limited-time deals and see if a product is available with a special offer, shoppers can either browse the homepage or use the Black Friday filter, located on the sidebar of search pages.

Milo, which includes real-time inventory information for over 52,000 national retailer locations, says that you can also use the company’s newly released Android app to access Black Friday deal updates as well.

Rumors are swirling this morning about voice technology giant Nuance Communications being acquired by Apple, following remarks made by the company’s co-founder Steve Wozniak in a short video interview by TVDeck (see below, skip to the 0:40 mark). While the acquisition would make sense for Apple to make on a strategic level, there are a couple of reasons why it’s most likely not true.

First off, Wozniak probably meant Siri, the “personal assistant” Apple confirmed to have acquired back in April. Siri, a spin-out from Stanford Research Institute, uses speech recognition technology from Nuance for its voice-activated search capabilities, which may have been the root of Wozniak’s confusion. Nuance just this morning announced that it’s also powering voice search for IAC-owned Ask.com’s iPhone app.

Secondly, Nuance just released its Q4 2010 earnings yesterday, and made no mention of being (in the process of getting) bought by Apple. You would think they’d at least tell shareholders that if it were the case.

Third, the earnings press release does mention that Nuance considers Apple to be one of its “key mobile customers”, along with the likes of Amazon, AT&T, Nokia, Palm and Motorola. Maybe Wozniak meant that Apple has a strong vendor-client relationship with Nuance.

Fourth, Nuance is currently valued at over $5 billion. Apple has a war chest the size of the universe, so they could easily pick up the company if they wanted to, but I seriously doubt Apple would spend such a a sizeable chunk of its $50 billion+ in cash for a purchase of a publicly listed, profitable company which may seem sound on a strategic level, but could well prove to be a nightmare on an integration level.

Fifth, I simply don’t believe Wozniak would be in the loop if this acquisition was still in progress or signed very recently. He obviously still has strong ties with Apple, but it’s not like he’s part of senior management, nor is he a board member.

To conclude, I think Wozniak simply misspoke. Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Unless of course he didn’t, in which case I’ll have to come back and update this post :)

Mobile advertising company JiWire is announcing today that it has acquired location-based mobile shopping platform NearbyNow. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

NearbyNow allows brands to show products within in app or an ad and confirm availability of the product in the actual store. Users can also reserve the product in the store for pickup. For example, a Seventeen Magazine mobile app user sees an ad for boots online and can click through to check local inventory. If they are in-stock, the shopper reserves the boots and they are ready at the counter when she arrives. The company says that ad click-though rates are more than 20 percent and conversion-to-purchase average rates of 5.8 percent.

The advertising and shopping platform will be complementary to JiWire’s own advertising network. JiWire says that it plans to combine its existing location-based advertising platform that runs across Wi-Fi and mobile for devices such as iPads, smartphones and laptops with NearbyNow's platform to increase ways in which advertisers can reach new local customers at scale and drive in-store conversions.

NearbyNow has raised nearly $20 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and others.

We’re a service-orientated organization and as such our goal is to assist the consumer in choosing the best possible fit for their gadget-facing needs. We’re no blue sky imagineers: we’re professionals. We want you to be happy and we have an easy-to-remember motto: AWPBFDDtWBBFAAPGGFPWAS (Always Be Posting Black Friday Deals During the Week Before Black Friday And Also Post Gift Guides For People Who Are Shopping). And we’re sticking to that easy-to-remember motto through this week over at CrunchGear.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to head over to CG and view some of the deals we’ve gathered up thus far and keep your eye on things this week and through Mobile Monday (which is totally a made-up holiday.) Also, keep your eye on the Gift Guide for our takes on the best holiday gifts.

We know that email has done away with the nine to five job but does anyone ignore emails over holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving anymore? A new study by email software company Xobni suggests that going completely offline from email over the holidays may also be a thing of the past. According to the survey, 59 percent of U.S. working adults will check work email over holidays.

Of the survey respondents over half (55%) check work email at least once a day and more than one in four (28%) do so multiple times throughout the day. The data also showed that 79 percent of those that check email while on holiday stated that they have received a work-related email from a colleague or client on holidays.

So are U.S. worker happy about the onslaught of email over the holidays? According to the survey, 15 percent are "thankful" or "relieved" to have the distraction of work email over the holidays. On the other hand, 41 percent of those that receive an email from a co-worker/client while they had time off for the holidays saying they are either annoyed, frustrated or resentful after receiving these emails. The survey also found that 12 percent of respondents actually "dread" seeing work emails populate their inbox and 10 percent even feel pity for those who do send work-related emails on holidays.

Regardless of how the actually feel about work email over a holiday, 42 percent of those that check work email while they have time off for the holidays still believe that staying up-to-date on email eases their workloads once they return from break. Some respondents (19 percent percent) that receive work emails from a co-worker/client while they had time off for the holidays say they feel "thankful" or "relieved" at having the distraction.

So what about the breakdown when it comes to males vs. females? Xobni says that
employed males are significantly more likely to check work email on holidays – 67 percent – compared to just 50 percent of women. Employed middle-aged adults feel the greatest urge, with 65 percent of those aged 35-44 stating that they have checked work emails on holidays.

One in ten (10 percent) who admitted to checking email while off for a holiday stated that they did so while spending time with friends or relatives at Holiday parties/gatherings or during meals. A small amount of those (5%) that check work email while they have time off for the holidays even admitted to using work email as excuse to avoid awkward family moments and other holiday commitments.

Photo Credit/Flickr/StereroGab

MyThings, which provides personalised retargeting services, this morning announced that it has raised $6 million in their third round of funding. The financing round was led by T-Venture, Deutsche Telekom's venture capital arm, with participation of previous backers Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, Dot Corp and GP Bullhound. MyThings, founded in 2005, claims its technology is capable of increasing return conversion rates of online retailers by more than 500%. Its proprietary optimisation technology is currently being used by leading European retailers such as Price Minister, Republic, PIXMania, Etam and Orange, and its total reach is said to surpass 1 billion monthly impressions these days.

Local reviews site Qype, which lets you review any venue from restaurants and bars to gyms and childcare, has raised a new funding round amounting to a combined 6.5 million euros to throw fuel onto its mobile business. Investors include Vodafone Ventures and existing backers. Currently the largest user-generated local review site in Europe (yes, it’s ahead of Yelp), Qype has raised 3.5 million euros from Vodafone Ventures and a further 3.0 million euros from its existing three investors, Advent Venture Partners, Partech International and Wellington Partners.

The main aspect of this deal means co-branded version of Qype’s application will be pre-loaded on supported Vodafone devices, including Blackberry and Android on handsets in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Ireland. It’s likely that Qype will do best out of pre-installation on Android devices.

Excited about wrestling a bunch of other sales obsessed people this Friday over the last HDTV or Xbox or whatever you crazies with disposable income are buying these days?

Wish someone had plotted out all the Black Friday sales in your area, allowing you to use your iPhone or Android to easily find the closest way to save by spending? Well, you know the drill …

The folks at The Dealmap have done you a solid and mapped out more than 165,000 Black Friday deals at 52,000 retail locations in the US so you’ll never have to miss a post-Thanksgiving discount opportunity again.

For the first time ever, both The Dealmap Android and iPhone apps will use location awareness to help you find the Black Friday sales nearest you and if there happens to be a deal super closeby, The Dealmap will notify you of its location. Businesses can also submit their sales here, tagging them with “Black Friday.” The app unfortunately does not calculate the risk of getting trampled on by rabid sales-crazed shoppers.

When not contributing to the chaos surround traditional consumerist “holidays,” The Dealmap is the largest mobile deal aggregator with around 350,000 live deals per day. Let the sales-related injuries begin!

Do you ever want to share some photos, mockups or screengrabs with somebody else online quick and dirty? Go to DropMocks, drag and drop your images, and you are done. You get an instant image gallery that displays in CoverFlow style, along with a short URL to share it.

For instance, here is an example of a DropMocks I put together in 5 seconds by pulling some photos from my desktop. Same here with these screengrabs. You can name your gallery and save it, and that is pretty much it.

DropMocks is a side project of Glen Murphy, a UI designer for Google Chrome (both the browser and the OS). It is all done with HTML5 technologies. No Flash, just CSS and Javascript. It uploads and displays very fast. Please note, this is not for private sharing. Once you upload, anyone with the link can see your gallery.

In advertising, if you deliver better results, you will get more advertising dollars thrown your way. That appears to be what is happening with Rocket Fuel, an online ad optimization startup which is showing some promising growth. The company only launched last year, but its third quarter revenues of $5 million were ten times higher than last year’s, according to CEO George John. Its annualized revenue run-rate based on the past 30 days is $30 million ($20 million based on the past quarter), and the company is already profitable.

Advertising tech companies can become very lucrative once they hit their stride. Rocket Fuel is still tiny compared to most, but it is winning over big brands. (Eight of the top ten global brands run online ads through Rocket Fuel). Rocket Fuel takes a very simple approach to delivering better ad impressions: it tests every single ad placement and display unit, and keeps changing the campaign bases on what works.

Sounds basic enough. After all, that is exactly how most keyword search marketing campaigns are managed. But in the display world, many advertisers never try more than one ad layout. Rocket Fuel supplements its ad units with single-question surveys to gauge exactly what kind of audience it is delivering to advertisers. Instead of the ad, it displays the question. Clever.

A year ago, Rocket Fuel looked more like an ad network, buying up its own inventory to resell. But now about half of its ads are bought through realtime bidding exchanges on behalf of clients. The ad inventory on these exchanges are all commodities. It is what companies can do with that ad inventory after they get it (such as adding intelligence and better targeting capabilities) that counts.

Two years ago, Apple executive Phil Schiller apparently signed up for Twitter and started tweeting. But he didn’t tweet often, and few people followed him, probably assuming it was a fake account. But if Twitter’s verification process is to be believed, the account is real. And further, Schiller has gotten a lot more active in recent weeks on the service. And he’s active on the hot photo sharing app Instagram too!

What’s a bit odd about all of this is that Twitter had said they were suspending their account verification process while they came up with a better system. But Schiller just became verified, as 9 to 5 Mac noticed tonight. I’ve reached out to Twitter about it, but have yet to hear back. But I also reached out to Instagram when I noticed that a few of Schiller’s tweets this month were sending out Instagram pictures. Sure enough, it’s him, says co-founder Kevin Systrom.

Here’s what else is odd about this: Apple has so far been reluctant to join up with the whole Twitter phenomenon. While plenty of employees use the service for private means, no high-profile figures at the company are — or at least not publicly or actively. Apple exec Eddie Cue also apparently has an account (which Schiller follows), but it’s protected. Meanwhile, we know exec Scott Forstall has one too, but he has never tweeted with it (and he only follows one person, Conan O’Brien).

But Schiller, who is one of the most public figures at Apple, has a history of public outreach. You’ll recall that he was personally handling some of the developer backlash in August of 2009.

At first Schiller was using his Twitter account sporadically to root on the Boston College Eagles, acknowledge on some Apple milestones, and lament the end of Battlestar Galactica (nice). But the past month he’s been sharing up a storm (for him), sending links to his pictures and tweeting out iTunes links with the new iTunes/Twitter integration.

He has about 800 followers right now. Expect that to skyrocket. Meanwhile, this is a nice piece of publicity for the young Instagram service. Welcome, Phil!

I'm sitting on a flight back from New York, finally catching up on my TechCrunch reading after a busy few weeks. And – my God – it's like walking through a post-genocide landscape.

Everywhere I look lies the bloated corpse of another service, technology or thing that a TechCrunch writer has reported “killed” or otherwise declared “dead”.

For the benefit of any other TechCrunch readers who are struggling to keep up, I thought it might be useful to write a quick post aggregating all of the things that – according to us – are now officially dead. Here goes….

Point and shoot cameras

Talking to people

Publishing embargoes

Subject lines

A magazine

Email (maybe)

Cable TV

The MP3

RSS

The phone call

Email (again)

Headphone cables

US News & World Report

HireHive, SellIt And Rudder

My MacBook Pro

MG’s MacBook Pro

The CD

Twitter’s website

The mouse

The mouse again

Phew. After all that, you might think there was nothing left to kill. But you’d be wrong: here's a quick summary of some of the other things we'll be declaring dead before the year is out…

DVD players
Text messaging
Scientific calculators
The US Postal Service
Christmas cards
Spoilers on cars
Lawn ornaments
The letter “u”
Belgium
Sprayable cheese
Skype headsets
Movies starring Bradley Cooper
Hyphens
TiVo
Teenage angst
The email sign-off “XO”
Those cardboard sleeves that go around hot paper cups
Wristwatches
Recycling
Second base
Free refills
The standby button
.org
The word “stoked”
Spotify

…and probably email a couple more times.

Back in April of this year, I put up a post with a simple question: Why Doesn’t Facebook Look Like This? The post contained screenshots of a Facebook redesign that Japanese design firm iA had done for the company back in late 2006/early 2007. Facebook didn’t end up using the ideas, but there’s no denying that they looked great. In fact, looking over them again, they now look familiar. They look like New Twitter!

Well, technically, the overall concept is a bit more like Twitter for iPad (with the three-pane view). But that shares many of the same design concepts as New Twitter, so they all sort of look alike. And if you remove the first pane on the Facebook concept, you essentially have New Twitter: a two-pane experience in which the update stream folds out into the conversation stream. It’s uncanny.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Twitter borrowed anything improperly here — I’m sure this pane design concept is quite old — but it’s interesting that Twitter, a Facebook rival, now looks like this popular Facebook redesign concept that was seen the web over. Perhaps that’s why I liked both Twitter for iPad and New Twitter immediately when I saw them — as I wrote back in April, I loved this pane design concept, and wish Facebook would have gone in that direction.

Instead, Twitter did.

photo © 2010 sdc2027 | more info (via: Wylio)For the first time ever in a year, digital coupon platform Coupons.com has surpassed a billion dollars in printed coupon savings. A milestone for the company and the entire digital coupons industry, this growth further validates the burgeoning coupon and digital deals space which has been brought into the spotlight recently through the proliferation of sites like Groupon and Livingsocial.

The company also released data for their coupon distribution during first 9 months of this year. Coupons.com printed out $854 million in savings during the period between January 1st and September 30th. This represents a 57% growth over last year’s $534 million in savings, at more than 5x the 11% growth rate of newspaper coupons during the same period.

Coupons.com CEO Steven Boal explains the unprecedented growth as directly stemming from the recession, which has motivated us to seek out deals on almost everything.

"Digital coupons continue to grow in popularity with consumers and brand marketers, driven by many factors including economic pressures felt by consumers and the increasing propensity for them to look across the digital domain—on the Web, in social media, mobile environments, etcetera—for money-saving offers."

The top 10 most popular coupon categories among Coupons.com users were cereal, yogurt, refrigerated dough, snacks (in both the #4 and #8 slots), vegetables, baby needs, soup, lunch meats, and good ole cheese at #10. Savings printed in October was over $128 million, the highest amount ever recorded by a company in a single month.

Mountain View-based Coupons.com is currently the 61st largest web property in the United States and number one in the coupons/rewards category according to Nielsen. The company also is responsible for the Grocery iQ and Coupons.com apps and provides coupons for Scanbuy's Scanlife and the Pushpins mobile app.

In 2005 Accel Partners closed its $440 million Accel 9 Fund. That fund may not go down in history as the most profitable venture fund ever, but it will certainly be one to remember. Why? Facebook, for the most part. It is a stunning turnaround for a firm that many whispered was pretty much done earlier in the decade.

In 2005 Accel invested a small part of that fund – just $12.7 million – in Facebook. In exchange they got 11% of the company, and a lot of derision around Silicon Valley for paying such a ridiculously high valuation for the fledgling startup.

Fast forward to today, though, and no one’s laughing any more. The firm sold part of that investment, less than 20%, at a $35 billion valuation. That brought in half a billion dollars or so in cash, paying back the entire capital base of the fund in one transaction.

When Google went public in 2004 it was then valued at $27 billion, Making Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, with around 10% ownership each, very happy. Accel just beat that in a private sale. And the value of the remaining 8% or so of the company they own is worth around $3 billion at that valuation. All from a $12.7 million investment.

And that’s not the only winner in that fund. Fund IX also invested in Admob (sold to Google for $750 Million), Xensource (acquired by Citrix for $500 million) and Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo for $350 million). Ongoing investments from that fund include rightcove, Glam, Yume, Webroot, OpenX, Trulia and others.

And that’s just Fund IX. Fund X, a $520 million fund raised in 2007, has invested in Groupon, Diapers.com, Etsy, Cloudera, Modcloth, Atlassian Software, SunRun and Squarespace.

A slight format change for Why Is This News? this week: no guest, just the two of us discussing this week’s big technology stories from outside the valley.

Much to Sarah’s delight, China has been making news again – for good and ill. On the one hand, the government is still clamping down on dissident opinion – sending someone to jail for a 140 character retweet –  but at the same time Chinese companies are in greater demand than ever amongst American investors.

How does America reconcile its stance on human rights with its desire to profit from the world’s most lucrative emerging market? And should it have to reconcile it all? We discuss that question  and more.

Video below.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Yes, Christmas has come early again this season with the launch of Jimmy Wales’ annual appeal for Wikimedia Foundation donations. Wales’ ubiquitous banner ad is now in its seventh year and the company is shooting for $16 million dollars to keep their impressive collaborative encyclopedia afloat ad free.

And while Wikipedia tested out different banners for the 2010 launch, none came close to the effectiveness (a 3% click through rate!) of the unintentionally hilarious image of Wikipedia founder Wales gazing at you intently. The image is so beloved that someone actually created a Google Chrome extension that allows you to take the Wales banner with you wherever you go online. And so we did.

You can download the extension here.

Thanks: Zorgloob

Facebook is well on its way to becoming the most popular way that people share links, photos, and other content with their friends. For many sites it’s becoming a powerful new driver of traffic — get people to ‘Like’ your stuff, and Facebook’s network effects will expose it to dozens of their friends.

Just make sure not to do something that might make Facebook angry. Otherwise it might nuke every link to your site, choking off this river of traffic that you’ve worked so hard to build.

That’s the message Facebook sent today with its censorship of links to Lamebook, a humor site that posts lewd conversations spotted on the social network. Facebook has confirmed that it is automatically blocking all links to Lamebook and that it has also removed the company’s ‘Fan’ page. Not because the content was offensive, mind you, but because Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook.

Update: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor has written this statement, explaining that this was a mistake. Note that this story originally broke this morning and I’ve been in contact with Facebook most of the afternoon, so this clearly wasn’t just a bug:

This was a mistake on our part. In the process of dealing with a routine trademark violation issue regarding some links posted to Facebook, we blocked all mentions of the phrase “lamebook” on Facebook. We are committed to promoting free expression on Facebook. We apologize for our mistake in this case, and we are working to fix the process that led to this happening.

Bret Taylor
CTO

The move was precipitated by a legal battle between the two companies. Lamebook filed for a declaratory judgement earlier this month that would assert that it is not violating Facebook’s trademark (the two parties have apparently been in negotiations over this for some time). Unsurprisingly, Facebook followed that up with a suit alleging that Lamebook violated its trademark.

Okay, so Facebook doesn’t like Lamebook’s name. I don’t agree with Facebook’s stance, but fair enough — it isn’t the first big company that’s overzealous when it comes to protecting its trademark. But by blocking Lamebook’s content, Facebook is crossing a line.

Not only is it currently impossible to share a Lamebook link to your News Feed or a friend’s Facebook Wall — you can’t even include them as part of a direct message or email to friends (you get an error message indicating that it’s “abusive or spammy”, which isn’t even accurate). That’s completely outrageous, and it’s a warning flag that comes only a few days after Facebook announced a new hybrid email/IM/SMS product. Do you really want someone to be censoring your outbound email?

One reason why Google has done so well is that people trust it. If you sue Google, it isn’t going to threaten to delist your company from its search index. Likewise, Facebook needs to keep its distance from the content its users are sharing. No, it won’t be getting rid of its terms any time soon, which forbid content that is “hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.” But there’s a difference between blocking content as a matter of principle and doing it to deter companies from suing you. This is setting a disturbing precedent.

I reached out to Facebook to ask if there was any reason beyond the trademark claim that drove its decision to block Lamebook — maybe there’s something else going on here that would make their decision seem slightly less Orwellian. I also asked if Facebook has previously blocked content to other sites it had a legal dispute with.

A Facebook spokesman said he was unable to answer those questions. He did, however, give me the following statement, which is similar to what Facebook has said before about the issue:

We’re disappointed that after months of working with Lamebook they turned to litigation. We believe their website is an improper attempt to trade off of Facebook’s popularity and fame and we will continue to protect our brand and trademark. As I told Robin earlier, our terms prohibit posting of material or other activities on Facebook that infringe the rights of others. We reserve the right to pull down any content we believe is infringing. That includes linking to material we believe to be infringing. We also specifically prohibit use of any Facebook or confusingly similar marks (See SRR Sec. 5.1, 5.2 & 5.6 http://www.facebook.com/terms.php).

Update: It looks like Lamebook links are working again as of around 6:00 PM PST. I’ve asked Facebook if they’ve changed their decision or if this is simply a bug.

Let the Fail Whale jokes begin.

I’ve been using Google Voice on a daily basis for around a year now, and the last month has been by far the worst in terms of connectivity issues.  Right now, it looks like the service is having yet another outage — both Michael Arrington and I are having problems, and other users on Twitter are having them as well. Outbound calls ring endlessly (and sometimes get a “This Call Cannot Be Completed” error message); inbound calls don’t get through.

Update: As of 4:10 PM PST Google says the problems have been resolved. Looks like there were at least 90 minutes of downtime.

We’ve reached out to Google to find out how many people are being affected and when we can expect a fix. Update: Google has given us this statement for now: “We’re aware of a problem that’s affecting some users, and we’re working to resolve it quickly.” “

As I said, this is only the latest in a string of recent problems. There was downtime on November 2 and again on November 5. It’s really getting to a point that’s beyond acceptable, and I may soon have to start handing out my ‘real’ phone number for mission-critical tasks. People rely on their phones for their most urgent business and personal matters — if you want to be a phone company you can’t go down.

As you’re probably well aware by now, iOS 4.2 (technically, iOS 4.2.1) has been released by Apple today. The update unifies iOS across the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad for the first time. But it also comes with an annoying bug that some users are seeing.

After you update to the new OS, if you load the iPod (Music) app, you may see a message stating that your currently have “No Content” on the device. The problem is that many people do. For example, I have 7.8 gigabytes of audio on my iPhone, but after the update, none of it could be located. Luckily, there’s an easy fix.

As you can see in this Apple Discussion forum, others are having the same issue. The way to fix it is apparently to plug your iPhone back into your computer, play a song from the iPhone on your computer, and then sync. The process is very quick because it doesn’t actually have to transfer all that music again, it just makes it recognize that it’s already there. Sure enough, my content is now back.

Oddly, it looks as if this issue may only affect the iPhone 4. I updated an iPhone 3GS earlier and see all my music just fine. Likewise with the iPad.

Update: A few people have since said that the problem affects iPod touches as well.

Update 2: And yet more people are saying it’s affecting their iPhone 3GS as well. Again, my 3GS updated just fine. Weird.

[via Dwight Silverman]

TechCrunch Disrupt Audience Choice winner Badgeville announces a $2.5 million Series A round today in order to apply its badge-based game mechanics across the web.  Investors in the round include eBay COO Maynard Webb, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, Pejman Nozad and Zain Khan from Felix Investments and senior executives from Paypal, Chegg, Shopping.com, Drugstore.com and Warner Music. 

Publishers who use Badgeville can set up an account, offer defined rewards and track visitor behavior with realtime analytics. Badgeville works for any company that has a community on its site: Anyone from gaming to education, to retail and more can use the service to reward people for checking into a site, taking tests or simply browsing through products. Virtually anything can correspond to a badge reward.

Since their launch at TechCrunch Disrupt, the startup has had over 1500 companies inquire for information and has signed up dozens of partners including Comcast Sports, Philly.com, The Next Web, Blackbook and us. Founders Kris Duggan and Wedge Martin expect over $1 million dollars in bookings in 2010 (within their first four months of launching) and ascribe the influx of interest in Badgeville to the current hybird trend of “social + gaming + loyalty + analytics for the web,” a space shared by OneTrueFan and Big Door.

Says Duggan, “Everybody realizes that they want what Foursquare and Farmville have. In the future, virtually every serious web brand will have techniques from social gaming to engage users. We’re the company to do that.”

The startup plans on using the financing to increase staffing, further product engineering and supporting its large scale clients. Duggan tells me they plan on expanding their Palo Alto offices from 10 employees to 20-30 in the next 12 months and are, like everybody else, hiring.