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SCVNGR, a location based game that competes with the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, has gotten plenty of attention for offering a deeper gaming experience than most of its competitiors — instead of just ‘checking in’, the game prompts users to complete various challenges, which can involve things like taking goofy photos or solving a puzzle. One thing SCVNGR hasn’t been so good at, though, is connecting with your friends (which is where Foursquare excels). Today, a few days after announcing that it has 500,000 users, SCVNGR is launching revamped versions of its mobile applications for iPhone and Android that look to fix this — and they look nicer to boot.

The first thing you’ll notice about the new apps is the fact that they look a lot like the Facebook iPhone application — after firing it up, you’ll see a grid of main options, including a center icon for Places and a Notification bar across the screen. CEO Seth Priebatsch isn’t shy about this (he points out that everyone is used to the Facebook app by now) and says that this design has a few advantages. For one, it’s now much easier to access the SCVNGR Rewards you’ve earned (which let you get discounts at participating venues). But there are some more substantial changes too.

The biggest is the addition of a new ‘Social Map’. It’s pretty straightforward — it plots where your friends have recently checked-in on a map and lets you see how long ago they were there — but it’s something that SCVNGR hasn’t offered before, and helps address the aforementioned issue with connecting with friends. The apps also include some major tweaks to the SCVNGR friend feed.

Before now, SCVNGR let you see a stream of your friends’ recent check-ins, along with any accompanying photos they might have taken — but the feed wasn’t done very well. The first problem was a matter of noise: oftentimes when people are at a venue and they check-in on SCVNGR, they’ll generate multiple stories (because they’ll complete multiple Challenges).

SCVNGR also didn’t do any kind of smart filtering to identify which stories were most relevant, nor did it attempt to cluster related stories. The new version fixes this: related stories will now be grouped, and there’s an improved version of the feed that can sort items by popularity. It’s now also possible to comment on a user’s activity, which wasn’t possible before.

Today live video streaming service Ustream launches a series of new features with the intent of making it easier for users to monetize their platform.

The sexiest new feature is a service called Open Pay Per View which allows any Ustream broadcaster to apply for their own pay per view program, charging users to view premium content through Pay Pal.

Like on Stickcam, with Ustream Open Pay Per View any Ustream user can apply directly to Ustream to create their own Pay Per View Service, allowing users like Robert Scoble or TechCrunch to earn some cash whenever they have a high profile guest, livestream an important conference or hold any other event where they might draw more eyeballs.

Ustream refers to this feature as “the democratizing of content” and it is in fact interesting as many livestream services are trying to perfect pay per view features and there are reports that YouTube might be working on it.

While Ustream Pay Per View is currently available to select users; People who are interested can start the application process here.

In launching its second feature, Ad Free Broadcasting, Ustream also joins Justin.tv and Livestream in allowing broadcasters to cut out ads entirely from their service. Users can also pay for this directly through Paypal and eliminate Ustream’s in stream ads entirely. Ad Free Broadcasting will be rolled out to all users in November.

Ustream has $87.8 million in funding lead by Softbank. The service currently has over 45 million monthly unique visits with an average of 20 to 30 minute viewing time per stream and was most recently in the news for breaking viewing records during the Chilean miner rescue.

If ever there was a time for Foursquare to give someone a badge, this is it: International Space Station Commander and NASA Astronaut Doug Wheelock has just checked-in from space using Foursquare, marking the first time a location-based app has been used from the great beyond. And yes, he’s getting a very special NASA Explorer badge to mark the occasion, along with the following congratulatory message:

“You are now 220 miles above Earth traveling at 17,500 mph and unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge! Show this badge and get a free scoop of astronaut ice cream.”

Suddenly my ‘Bender’ badge doesn’t sound quite as impressive. And if the prospect of free freeze-dried ice-cream wasn’t enough to get you space fans excited,  the occasion also marks the launch of a partnership between Foursquare and NASA.  Foursquare now features a special NASA website, and once Wheelock returns to Earth, us mere mortals will be able to earn the badge ourselves.

Soon, there will be a handful of NASA-related venues across the country — check-in at one,and you’ll be able to unlock the space shuttle badge too. NASA is also leaving foursquare tips with space-related factoids at a variety of venues.

So why is NASA doing this? NASA’s Stephanie Schierholz says that the organization is always looking to spread the word on what it’s up to, and that social media services have proven to provide great engagement for them. NASA has set up an array of online profiles that you can access from NASA.gov/connect, including a Facebook page, dozens of astronaut Twitter accounts, and more. This partnership between Foursquare and NASA was actually facilitated by design firm JESS3, which has built a number of NASA sites, including the Buzzroom project.

This comes on the heels of a special NASA partnership with competing location service Gowalla that focuses on Moon Rocks. If you check in using Gowalla at any real-world location in the US that is home to a moon rock, you’ll receive a reward (check out this map if you’re up to the challenge). NASA also coordinated the first tweet from space earlier this year.

Astronaut Wheelock is currently taking part in NASA Expedition 25. You can find his full bio right here.

We’ll have a video of the checkin shortly.

Back in May 2009, I wrote about a small social game developer called WonderHill that was looking to sidestep its competitors focused on battling mobsters and vampires by taking a very different approach: wholesome games that would appeal to the entire family. It sounded like a great idea at the time, and with a veteran team in tow that included CEO James Currier, who founded Tickle (which sold to Monster.com for over $100 million), WonderHill looked like a pretty good bet. And it was: today the company is announcing that it’s been acquired by Kabam, another rapidly growing social gaming company. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed (it’s a mix of cash and equity), but all of WonderHill’s team of 25 will be joining Kabam.

But that’s not the end of the story. You see, WonderHill’s vision of wholesome gaming proved to be very prescient — but it got nailed by Zynga with Farmville, and then a wave of other more family-friendly games caught on before WonderHill could really carve out its place. So the company pivoted to focus on a different class of gamers: those of us who aren’t satisfied by 5-minute bursts of rather trivial tasks and prefer a bit more strategy and engagement in our games. Which makes it right at home at Kabam.

Oh, you haven’t heard of Kabam? Can’t blame you — the company was known as WaterCooler up until a few months ago, and even then it’s remained pretty under the radar. But the company is growing like mad: in the last ten months it’s grown from 30 employees to over 200. And it’s got some very lofty goals, which include taking on Blizzard, one of the most celebrated game developers ever (they made World of Warcraft, Diablo, and the Starcraft series).

Kabam’s early games (when it was still called Watercooler) were really communities focused on sports and television programs, which grew to around 60 million users. Then it landed a deal to build Sports Illustrated’s fantasy football game, which proved to be quite successful, and followed that up with a soccer game called Epic Goal.

Kindoms of Camelot

Now Kabam is focused on real-time strategy games like Kingdoms of Camelot, which CEO Kevin Chou describes as a mix of Starcraft (it’s real-time) and Civilization (there’s an empire-building mechanic). There’s also social features, including an ‘alliance’ system that lets friends band together (he says around 50% of alliances are between people who are actually friends on Facebook, while the other half are for people who met online). Kingdoms of Camelot now has 6 million players monthly, some of whom are very engaged — 10% of players spend more than six hours a day playing the game.

Back to WonderHill. After deciding to pivot away from its ‘wholesome game’ strategy, the company began developing strategy games as well. Its first, called Dragons of Atlantis, launched three weeks ago and is off to a solid start. The deal between Kabam and WonderHill came together after the companies realized that they were both targeting the same, more ‘hardcore’ market that hasn’t really been served by the likes of Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom. They’re also very optimistic about the future growth in this area — there may be a huge number of casual gamers playing FarmVille right now, but Kabam thinks that many of them will eventually want to graduate on to games that are more robust.

Kabam has some ambitious plans — it intends to release a new game every month throughout 2011, and the company’s office has room for another 200 employees. It’s pretty obvious that the company has been trying to keep a low profile up until this point, but it looks like we’ll hear a lot more about them in the near future.

Dragons of Atlantis

There are a plethora of contact management apps on the market that allow you to make sense of your email and mobile contacts. In fact, if you do a search for “contact management” on the iPhone App Store; there are over 50 apps in the results. Today, directory services provider WhitePages is throwing its hat in the ring with the launch of Hiya, which includes free iPhone and web applications.

With Hiya, you can import your contacts from Gmail (and soon Yahoo, Outlook, Facebook, Hotmail, Blackberry, etc.) and the app will combine your contacts and clean up the data. Its technology will recognize nicknames, misspellings, duplicates, and more.

If you find that your contact information is still incomplete Hiya will send emails to friends, family, and colleagues to correct and fill in missing contact info that you have for them. Unsurprisingly, Hiya also leverages WhitePages' database to fill in missing contact info like postal address, cell phone, and landline data.

And once your contacts are imported and scrubbed in Hiya, you’ll have the option to sync with any of your original sources (i.e. Gmail). Another advantage of using the app is that all of your data is backed up, so if you lose your iPhone, you can easily import the data back into your phone with Hiya.

Much of the functionality included Hiya is standard to competitors offerings, including Soocial and others. But one advantage Hiya offers is the ability to sync with WhitePages and populate info from the company’s vast database of information.

Here is our hands-on video of the HP Slate 500, HP’s new business slate. For those of you still on the fence, HP has posted all of the final specs for the device as well, including the fact that it has an active digitizer as well as an Intel Z540 Atom Processor Z540 (1.86 GHz, 512 KB L2 cache, 533 MHz FSB) and 2GB of memory.

You can take a gander at the product page and see if this is the slate for you, Win7 lovers.

Video after the jump.

AT&T has just released impressive data concerning the growth of Wi-Fi connections on its U.S. network (see the inforgraphic below). In the third quarter, users made 106.9 million connections on AT&T’s U.S. Wi-Fi network, exceeding the total 85.5 million connections made during all of 2009. Third-quarter 2010 connections were more than 320 percent versus third-quarter 2009. In May, the company only saw 53 million connections established for Q2, so clearly adoption is growing by leaps and bounds.

AT&T has now seen 228.1 million connections through the first nine months of 2010, on track to break 300 million connections in this year alone. As more users flock to Wi-Fi enabled smartphones and devices, AT&T is clearly making more connections for consumers.

Angie Wiskocil, senior vice president, AT&T Wi-Fi Services said in a statement: “In addition to smartphones, we saw that more and more devices like tablets, eReaders and netbooks were becoming Wi-Fi enabled and realized that Wi-Fi would play a major part in our ability to mobilize everything for our customers. Now, our Wi-Fi services are a significant asset for AT&T and for the consumers and businesses we serve.”

The company says that collective total value of AT&T’s signed Wi-Fi customer contracts is approximately $200 million.

This quarter’s connections should continue to increase as the iPad arrives at AT&T stores. And the company will be offering the device to enterprises as well. I’m curious how many of these Wi-Fi connections involve iPhones; and whether a Verizon iPhone will change things. In this past quarter, a record 5.2 million customers activated iPhones with AT&T.

PayPal founder and early Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel has invested NZ$4 million (that’s about $3 million USD) in online accounting software company Xero to support its expansion into the US market.

Thiel, who manages a hedge fund called Clarium Capital, will also join Xero's US Advisory Board.

Xero says it began developing opportunities in the United States market in March 2009 when the company appointed Andy Lark to be the first member on the Xero US Advisory Board. Lark is Senior VP of Global Marketing for Large Enterprises at Dell.

In January 2010, Xero entered an arrangement with US based personal financial management and payments solutions firm Yodlee to provide automated daily bank account feeds into Xero's online accounting solution.

The investment in Xero will be made through Valar Ventures (website not live yet), Thiel's New Zealand investment firm – Xero is headquartered in Wellington. The Xero placement is the firm's inaugural investment.

The placement is expected to close next week and will be priced at NZ$1.4918 – the volume-weighted average share price of Xero over the thirty trading days prior to 20 October 2010.

Xero CEO Rod Drury in a statement says access to Thiel’s extensive network will provide a boost as the company plans to take on Intuit’s Quickbooks in the US small business market.

That may be so, but it’s far from the only startup with those plans – Outright.com, Less Accounting, Kashoo and Free Agent leap to mind.

Rock-solid research (ok, not really) shows that you’re all liars (ok, not really).

A UK insurance company called Direct Line asked an agency called Opinium Research to carry out a study on dishonesty on social networking sites for its latest ‘Straight Talking Report’.

The research firm polled just over 2,000 British adults on the Web from 3rd -7th June 2010, and discovered a shocking truth: that people are not always honest when they’re able to hide behind a screen name and an avatar rather than talk face-to-face.

I know, I know.

Take a minute to calm down, breathe in and out, and continue as soon as you’re ready.

The ‘Straight Talking Report’ found that people are more likely to be dishonest when talking on social networking sites such as Twitter, than they would be when talking to someone in meat space. According to the research, just one in five people (20%) profess to being more truthful on Twitter or text, compared to a third (31%) who state that they are more frank when speaking to someone in real life.

Furthermore, men are said to be less likely to be honest via text messages than women (17% of men compared to 21% of women). Or women are more likely to lie when polled, of course.

Another nugget: women are less likely to be truthful in person than men, with 12% more men claiming to be honest face-to-face than women.

I warned you it would be a shocker.

I’ll leave you with psychologist Glenn Wilson, who delivered the obligatory quote meant to add some pseudo-scientific credibility to the mix:

“Modern technologies, such as smartphones, social networking and instant messaging have been hailed as innovations in the way people interact, removing obstacles to conversation and allowing for openness of discourse.

However, we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.”

An astute observation indeed – and I’m not even lying.

Hewlett-Packard this morning announced that it has now completed the acquisition of security and compliance management company ArcSight for $43.50 per share, or an enterprise value of $1.5 billion. ArcSight helps protect enterprises and government agencies against cyber threats and other risks by providing complete visibility and insights into their IT infrastructure across all users, networks, datacenters and applications.

Om Malik, well-respected journalist and founder of technology news blog network Giga Omni Media and its flagship blog GigaOm, broke the news about us being acquired by AOL about a month ago now.

We’re getting back at them today, even if just a little: looks like the publishing company just raised another $2.5 million according to an SEC filing, bringing the total of capital raised by Giga Omni Media to a healthy $8.33 million.

Update: GigaOm writes “Okay, We Got More Money”. You can get more details about the state of the company, future plans and its latest hires over there.

The most recent financing round amounted to $4.5m and was closed over two years ago.

The fresh capital injection comes from Alloy Ventures and True Ventures (the Silicon Valley early-stage venture firm where Malik is partner).

It comes at a time when GigaOm just lost senior writer and editor-at-large for NewTeeVee Liz Gannes to rival AllThingsD.

We’ve reached out to Om for comment on the financing round and what the company plans to do with the money. More acquisitions of smaller blogs, perhaps?

First thing you’ll notice about this picture is how utterly relaxed the Barack Obama T-shirt sporting young man holding an iPad seems to be, compared to just about everyone in his immediate neighborhood. Second thing you’ll notice is that he appears to be pointing to his iPad, while calmly observing the President of the United States as the latter approaches him.

On his iPad, this young man – we’ll just call him Sylvester Cann IV from now on, because that’s his name – fired up Adobe’s Ideas app and used it to pen a request for President Obama.

It reads: “Mr. President, sign my iPad”.

Which, despite of the lack of the word “please” in said request, presumably due to spacing issues, is exactly what President Obama did, as you can tell from the screenshot and video embedded below.

Sylvester Cann IV tells us:

At a rally in Seattle, WA at the University of Washington, the President used the touchscreen on my iPad to give me his autograph. Secret service was leery about the idea, but they warmed up to the idea and the President thought it was cool.

He looked slightly surprised, but proceeded to use his finger to scribble on the iPad using the Adobe Ideas app.

I have a video of the event as well. This HAS to be the first time an iPad has received a Presidential autograph.

Cann also put up a mini-site for the occasion, aptly titling it “I figured, why not ask?”.

Thanks for sharing, Sylvester!

PS: coincidentally, President Obama met with Apple CEO Steve Jobs yesterday down in San Francisco. I’m thinking Obama’s first question to the man was probably why the iPad seemed to run Adobe’s Ideas app perfectly fine while it doesn’t handle Flash websites.

Yesterday, the WSJ reported that Google was planning to launch a music service in India to help users search for legal online streams and downloads and fight digital piracy, which reportedly runs rampant in the nation.

We’ve just gotten word that the service is now available at Google.co.in/music.

Update: official Google India blog post is up.

Currently only covering songs in Hindi, the music search engine promises that users can search for and instantly listen to thousands of full songs, which are delivered by Google’s partners in India (in.com, saavn and saregama).

Anyone can use the search engine, even outside India. Search results can be streamed instantly and free of charge in a pop-up Web player, and you can filter results based on singers, actors and release dates. There’s no option to purchase music directly.

Whether the initiative will effectively curb digital music piracy in India remains to be seen.

A year ago, Google launched a music search engine in the United States in partnership with MySpace/ iLike and Lala (the latter was shut down by Apple post-acquisition).

The main difference is that in the US, Google only plays previews for songs and not full tracks.

Another music search initiative from Google is live in China (see details here).

Finally, let’s not forget Google is also working on a genuine digital music store / locker service, which will likely be called Google Music.

(Thanks to Abhijeet Mukherjee for the heads up)

If we’re reading correctly, this patent filed in March is multiplayer gaming network Zynga’s application for the control of non-redeemable virtual currency and/or poker chips bought with real currency in virtual games, a.k.a US Patent Application #20100227675 for “Virtual Playing Chips in a Multiuser Online Game Network.”

While at first glance it seems like the patent’s strictures only pertain to poker chips, it explicitly references Zynga games Zynga Poker and Farmville in its “Examples of Embodiments” section, which delinates both “Non-Redeemable Virtual Currency” and “Non-Redeemable Virtual Poker Chips” as inventions that Zynga is claiming the rights to.

I am by no means a patent analyst, but tell me if this claim doesn’t read this way to you:

“A method, comprising:receiving, at a server, a purchase order for virtual currency from a player, wherein the purchase order was made with legal currency, and wherein the virtual currency is usable within the context of a computer-implemented game;crediting an account of the player with virtual currency, wherein the virtual currency is not redeemable for legal currency;receiving a second purchase order for a virtual object within the context of the computer-implemented game from the player, wherein the second purchase order was made with virtual currency; anddebiting the account of the player based on the second purchase order.”

So from what it looks like, Zynga is trying to patent the the ability to buy virtual currency that can’t be traded for actual currency or “what happens in virtual stays in virtual.”

And, like a virtual Federal Reserve, the patent reveals that the company plans to enact fraud prevention systems in order to prevent users from paying other users cash for virtual currency within its games.

If this is what it looks like on the surface, it’s huge, as it seems like Zynga is attempting to patent a system that a) already exists in its terms of service and b) it has already pressed charges on.

In any case, its a pretty ballsy move on Zynga’s part, as the virtual currency market is poised to hit 1.6 billion in revenue this year.

Perhaps this is why Zynga has recently posted job openings for IP enforcement lawyers?

Full text of the Zynga patent, below.

Microsoft is adding another piece to the gaming puzzle with the forthcoming debut of an on-demand Web store for PC games dubbed Games For Windows Marketplace.

Launching November 15, Microsoft says the Games for Windows Marketplace will offer PC gamers a “robust lineup of games” (about 100 titles at its debut, see a limited list below) and recurring specials such as Deal of the Week.

It mentions a few publishers on the landing page of the upcoming store, namely Microsoft Game Studios, 2K Games, Capcom, Rockstar and Warner Brothers. In the press release, it also names Square Enix and promises to retail new indie titles in addition to big-name games.

Microsoft promises that the store will be optimized for speed, allowing for rapid obtaining and gameplay with fewer clicks to actual purchase and download. Gamers will be able to search for and download games on a PC, anytime, and redownload games they purchased at some point in the past if need be.

From the looks of it, you’ll need a (free) Xbox LIVE gamertag, Zune tag or Windows Live ID to purchase titles on the Games for Windows Marketplace. The new store also supports Microsoft Points as well as credit card purchasing, both of which are big pluses.

The store will also feature promotions on select games every time they visit the Marketplace, combined with the “Deal of The Week” and other recurring and seasonal offers.

To get a taste of what to expect: right now, the Deal of the Week on Gamesforwindows.com is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for $3.75 (or 75% off).

Here’s a list of games that will be available (from the press release):

- “Fable: The Lost Chapters”
- “Grand Theft Auto III”
- “Lego Universe”
- “CarneyVale”
- “Dead Rising 2″
- “Lost Planet 2″
- “Max Payne”
- “Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition”
- “Flight Simulator”
- “Gears of War”
- “Halo”
- “Zoo Tycoon”
- “Fable III”
- “Age of Empires Online”
- “Microsoft Flight”

Last night, right around this time, my colleague MG Siegler argued that Apple basically killed off the CD with yesterday’s launch of another optical drive-less Mac Book Air and the introduction of a Mac App Store to follow the original App Store and the iTunes Store in the simplifying and/or dumbing down of the computing experience for a generation of users.

Fine.

There’s a pretty solid counter-argument for the fact there will always be a demand for CDs and optical drives in the PC world, despite the maximum capacity for a flash drive being currently 256 GB versus the cap of about 17.08 GB on a DVD-R. Optical disks also make more economic sense at the moment, as consumer pricing for a more reasonable 8 GB flash drive is around $18 versus about 60 cents for the same size double layer DVD-R.

And some of you have brought up the pretty valid point that, if anything, Apple dealt a heavy blow to the optical disk when it launched the iPod in 2001 and then for all intents and purposes finished off the CD once and for all when it opened the iTunes Music store in 2003.

But, because I’m wacky, I’m just going to go ahead and say that if there was any definitive tipping point into this new post-CD era it was when Apple symbolically erased the CD off the iTunes 10 logo last month, transforming it into the less dated but much blander icon above.

And while the new iTunes logo was pretty much panned all around, put yourself in Steve Jobs’ shoes for a moment — It’s pretty damn hard to make a flash drive look sexy, even if it is the future.

It’s hard to find a man more bullish on social than Bing Gordon.

The Kleiner Perkins partner will be spearheading the firm’s new sFund and, like John Doerr, fully believes that the era of social is just beginning. Just how much will social balloon in the short term? Gordon sees exponential-like growth, expecting the social space to grow 10 to 25x in the next five years.

“We think that social is going to be so big, the social category, I think it could be, the category growth in social could grow 10 to 25 times in 5 years and every company that’s out there has venture upside no matter how big they are right now…We want the freedom to get the venture style returns… but do it with the most interesting people.”

Sounds like KPCB— and its rat pack of hot-shot web companies (Facebook, Amazon, Zynga, etc.)— will need a bigger boat.

On Thursday, we got a chance to catch up with Gordon after the sFund announcement at Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto. Over the course of our discussion, Gordon walked us through his thinking behind the fund, why Sandhill Road disagreed with his thesis and why their target investment range is 100 K to 100 million.

Interested in a slice of the $250 million pie? Gordon also told us the kind of conversation he’s looking for when he meets with entrepreneurs from the social field:

“What are you passionate about and how are you going to get to scale? When you’re on the social graph get to scale means take advantage of person-to-person pass along marketing…show us something where if your friends pictures are there it’s cooler and inventive. And then let’s get into discussion: social is still changing so fast, let’s learn together.”

See video above.

Bonus footage: As we learned on Thursday morning, the sFund’s first investment is a $5 million bet on CafeBots. There is not a lot of information available on this stealth startup, but it will apparently focus on the curation of the social layer, or FRM, friend relationship management. We talked to co-founder and CEO Yoav Shoham, to get a taste — or at least a vague idea — of what users can expect later this year when CafeBots goes live.

Offers.com, a site that aggregates online coupons, discount codes, and other deals from around the web, has closed a $7 million funding round from Susquehanna Growth Equity, LLLP. This is the company’s first round of funding — up until now, it’s been funded by founder and CEO Steve Schaffer.

Unlike the many daily deal sites like Groupon that we’ve heard about recently, Offers.com is focused on more traditional sales. Visit the site, and you’ll see a list of major retailers and services that are offering discounts (you can also browse listings of offers sorted by genre). The site has been live in the US since February 2009, and it’s recently launched versions in Canada and the UK.

One of the site’s core features is a ‘Locker’, which launched a year ago: you tell the site which offers, stores, and categories you’re interested in, and it will give you a feed of recently added deals. Another differentiator for Offers.com is the fact that it employs an editorial staff of over twenty, who write content for the site. The company is now up to 40 employees in total, with plans to grow to 60 over the next year.

Offers.com launched last year, and is published by performance marketing firm Vertive, which was founded back in 2003.  The company earns money through affiliate programs.

There are myriad competitors in this space including RetailMeNot, Savings.com, CoolSavings, and Coupon Cabin.

Today in “Old media versus the Internet,” the Wall Street Journal is reporting that major studios ABC (owned by Disney), CBS (part of CBS Corp) and NBC (owned by GE) have joined Hulu in blocking Google TV from accessing the available television episodes on their websites.

Various timeworn concerns such as lack of a viable business model for content owners, content being cannibalized by the Internet as well as Google’s as of yet unknown position on piracy led to each individual network’s decision to opt out.

A Google spokesperson told the WSJ:

“Google TV enables access to all the Web content you already get today on your phone and PC, but it is ultimately the content owners’ choice to restrict their fans from accessing their content on the platform.”

Heh.

MTV, Fox and HBO are still available on Google TV, which surfs the Internet and allows you to view web content on your television through compatible devices, although Fox has not yet decided whether it will keep working with the service. Shows from other sub-networks like the CW and Lifetime are also still accessible, despite those networks being controlled by some of the parent companies listed above.

Looks like Google TV is the most recent battlefield in the three way war between Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It’ll be interesting to see who (if anyone) wins.

Earlier today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers unveiled their latest massive fund: the sFund. This $250 million fund has one mission: to find the best startups in the social space out there and fund them. But Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr has a better way of putting it: “I’m thinking of it like it’s a quarter-billion dollar party.”

Fair enough.

I sat down with Doerr after the announcement and subsequent press conference with partners Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon, to talk a bit about the new fund. Doerr noted that the fund itself bubbled up from an idea he put out there at our own TechCrunch Disrupt conference this past May: the “Third Wave“. That is, Doerr believes that the “First Wave” was in the early 1980s with the microchip and the PC. The “Second Wave” was in the mid-1990s when the web came along. Now it’s time for this Third Wave: social, mobile, the cloud, and commerce all coming together.

Prior to this sFund, Kleiner Perkins launched the iFund (and subsequently doubled-down on it), the mobile part of this equation. More specifically, that fund was aimed at the iPhone and later the iPad. But Doerr is quick to note that the intention is not to tell entrepreneurs what to do with these funds. That’s why this sFund is not called the “fFund” or the “fbFund” (obviously, for Facebook), he says.

I also asked about Android. Might we see an “aFund”? Again, Doerr sort of danced around this question by saying again that the goal is just to help entrepreneurs here, not to tell them what they should be working on. The implication there is that as long as the startup is focused on social, Kleiner Perkins doesn’t care which platform they’re working on.

At the same time, Doerr notes that the key to all of this is mobile. “The Internet is moving mobile. And that’s where all the action is,” he says as we discuss our shared love for the iPad.

Another thing he wants to make very clear: “We’re just getting started. This is the early innings, if you will, of social and I can’t wait to see how far it goes over the next decade.” Play ball.

Below, find the video of my talk with Doerr.

It’s been a long, hard road but it looks like some of the big boys are finally figuring out tablets. To wit: the new HP Slate 500, a business-only tablet designed for retail, hospitality, medicine and anything else that isn’t all about having fun. Let me explain.

The Slate 500 is a very nice tablet. In fact I’d say the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the 500 are close cousins in terms of style and usability. The iPad may be the gold standard, but someone needs to think of the legacy applications! That’s what the 500 is here for.

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In classic iFixit fashion, the latest Apple laptop has been torn to pieces a mere day after its release event. How exciting! Now we get to find out how Apple managed to cram so much of 2007′s technology into that gorgeous case.

Unsurprisingly, Apple has made the new MacBook Air nigh-impossible to service on your own. Not only is the interior secured by five-sided Torx T5 screws, but most of the parts are so customized (not to say obscure) that you’d be unable to find them in even the most extensive part store.

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“I wouldn't say we’re reacting to HTML5. We see whatever people are using to express themselves. … We're going to make great tooling for HTML5. We're going to make the best tools in the world for HTML5.”

– Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, at the Web 2.0 Summit this May.

Adobe, which has been at the focal point of what seems like the never ending Apple induced saga surrounding Flash plugins vs. HTML5 <video> tags, announces its entry into the HTML5 space today, just in time for the new initially Flash-less MacBook Air.

In addition to its Flash products, Adobe offering up a widget that enables the creation of HTML5 videos using the Kaltura HTML5 media library, which allows browsers that don’t have HTML5 support to fall back on Flash.

From the Adobe blog:

“The limited browser support for the HTML5 tag has forced web designers to scramble for a solution that would work across platforms as well as browsers.

To help customers overcome these challenges, Adobe has released an easy-to-use, totally CSS-customizable solution that shifts gracefully from the HTML5 tag to the Flash Player when the tag is not supported. The shift takes place regardless of the screen—from phone to monitor to TV.”

The widget is available both through and independent of Adobe developer tool Dreamweaver and can be accessed in one two of ways, either through the Adobe Widget Browser if you have Adobe Air installed or through Dreamweaver itself via its “Customize Widget” function.

It seems like with this most recent product step, Adobe is making a noble attempt at straddle both sides of the fence, as well as trying to ensure that it has a future supporting web video and media in light of Apple’s ongoing anti-Flash efforts.

Image via: Randy Humphries

It’s not surprising how much San Francisco Web companies are in the middle of this Proposition 19 debate. Prop 19 would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in California, and advocates hope if it passes the trend would spread nationally.

It’s a cause straight to the heart of the increasingly libertarian streak of Silicon Valley. But beyond that, you’ve got companies like WeedMaps hoping this is the next billion dollar market — not only for the farmers and the dispensaries but for Web and mobile apps. A rare– forgive the pun– greenfield opportunity in our over-developed world.

And while everyone is trying to use the Web to push their issues this election season, when the tech community is behind an issue, they just do it better. (See: Obama) It’s similar to the steller “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” spoof PSAs from the “No on Proposition 8″ campaign last year.

Witness this adorable video for Prop 19 below, much more compelling than Paul Carr’s favorite “MEG MEG MEG!” video, which somehow makes me just feel sorry for her. As discussed earlier this week, there’s no sure-fire way to make a successful viral video. But making something this awesomely cute is a good bet. Of course, winning at the polls is another matter. [Video Below]

This guest post was written by David Hyman, a self-proclaimed music junkie and CEO and founder of MOG, a startup that offers both a premium music service and a portal of music content. Before starting MOG, David served as CEO of Gracenote, the world's largest music database and music-identification service, which sold to Sony for $260 million in 2008. Previously, he was SVP of Marketing at MTV Interactive, and he co-founded Addicted to Noise, the webzine that pioneered multimedia music reporting and around-the-clock music news. In 2008, he founded Musica Tecnomica, a regular gathering of music-focused innovators in San Francisco.

Dalton Caldwell, founder/ex-CEO of imeem, recently gave a presentation at the Y Combinator Startup School on the impossibility of creating success in digital music. I'd like to provide an alternate point of view and make it clear that, like in any business, "making it" requires know-how, hard work, diligence and passion. Having significantly contributed to the successes of four companies that have guided themselves through the muck including Addicted to Noise, Sonicnet, Gracenote, and now MOG, my perspective is quite opposite from that of Dalton's and I see great opportunity for those playing in the space.

Dalton's takeaway from his experience appears to be that the entire music market can’t work, perhaps because imeem did not work. Yes, digital music seems to be a game that every 20-something wants to try and play, and it's almost as if creating a digital music product is a rite of passage for millions of young buck programmers. It’s unfortunate that because it’s a sexy space, and because there are tons of entrants into the field, all of the noise creates an impression that winning can’t be done. It certainly can.

Like being a paid musician, an actor, a rocket scientist, or a media mogul, success and whatever you do requires years of commitment and unbridled passion. For those that put in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, the rewards can be significant. Rewards realized by countless success stories: from Winamp and Spinner, to Last.fm, Pandora, Gracenote, iTunes, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr and all the popular blogging platforms, YouTube, VEVO, ringtone companies, lyrics sites, music-oriented games (Guitar Hero, Tap Tap Revenge, etc.) and many, many more.

To Dalton's point, providing music content is a smaller-margin business. But, the addressable market is massive. Music consumption is at an all-time high and is most likely the second biggest leisure activity in the world behind watching television. It’s an industry in massive flux. Those with models that work can reap massive rewards through its tumultuous evolution. There are countless phenomenal businesses built on providing services and products on a massive scale with a small margin.

It’s hard work getting deals done with the labels. They have limited business development resources and can’t make thousands of bets. Contrary to what Dalton conveyed, the labels don’t require you to do deals that make no economic sense. For example, MOG is very happy with the realistic minimum guarantees that were set, all of which we’ve hit. You have to come to the labels with a great idea, a great product and a model that works.

MOG started out providing tools to music bloggers. We successfully morphed that into the fastest growing music network, providing ad sale resources to over 1,300 blogs and music sites, reaching over 35 million monthly uniques (see comScore). We are a fast-growing, solid business. We recently launched a cloud-based online and mobile music subscription service, heralded by press and users.  It’s a low margin business, yes, partially offset with improved margins from our ad business, but a great business on its own.  Our model does not have unknown variable costs. We have built a team that can execute with great cost efficiencies, and are prepared to take our business globally.

Historically, subscription businesses were hindered by lack of ubiquitous access. But mark my words, with open-platform smart phones, 3G (and soon LTE), digital services quickly coming to television (wait until you see all the TVs coming with MOG inside), and most importantly, IP-based services in the car — often tied to established billing relationships consumers already have with carriers and others — it’s the future of music (along with free radio).

As for Congress getting involved with statutory rates, it's my opinion that these rates and not letting the free market dictate how this area evolves will be the death of the music industry. Can you imagine, Congress coming up with how much a label (and ultimately an artist) can make by placing caps on the industry? I assure you that would be the industry's quickest decline, as it would become impossible for labels to make bets on new talent.

It's a massive global market and there will be a handful or more of players. Dalton says to stay out because it’s saturated. People told us to stay out for the same reason. But, we believed in our core we could build a better mousetrap and we did. And who knows, perhaps so could you! It’s a damn big market coming. It won’t happen overnight. But it’s inevitably coming.

So, to those of you who love music, and can’t think of spending your life doing anything else, diligence, unbridled passion, commitment, and common sense can not only provide a lifetime tied to music, but a healthy reward. Like my father always said to me, “You don’t get something for nuthin’, kid.”