It’s only a day after one of the big three social game developers, Playfish, announced a $400 million acquisition.

And today we’ve confirmed that another one, Playdom, has done its own massive deal: $43 million on a $260 million pre-money valuation. New Enterprise Associates, Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners invested in the round.

This is Playdom’s first outside round of funding.

Unlike Zynga and Playfish, who focus on Facebook, Playdom’s is the big player on MySpace. Their Mob Wars game has 14 million or so users there, and the company is likely pulling in $60 million or more in reveune. A couple of weeks ago we compared the big three social gaming companies as a prelude to our Scamville posts.

Playdom has 28 million monthly game users. 60% of traffic is from MySpace v. 40% from Facebook. They have twelve MySpace apps and 6 Facebook Apps.

Playdom is enemy no. 1 to Zynga, and has been accused by Zynga of stealing employees and the company’s intellectual property. Of course, no one’s hands are clean in this business.

70% of Playdom’s revenue comes from direct payments, the company says, 10% is advertising and 20% is offers. For offers, they work with usual suspects. But they have banned the spammier stuff, like mobile subscriptions.

One thing’s for sure. Zynga has more users of its games than Playfish and Playdom combined, and they tend to monetize far better, too (at least until last weekend). It’s not unreasonable to imply a $1 billion valuation to Zynga based on these comps. They’ll be looking to the public markets, though, for their exit.

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For marketers, social networks offer a goldmine of data about topics and brands. But there’s actually too much data to easily parse for most companies to get at the most valuable data. That’s why IDG has built Social Scout, a new service powered by Networked Insights.

The idea is to be able to filter through some of the noise associated with social media. This in turn helps b2b marketers learn what people are saying about brands rather than just that they’re talking about them. “It’s significant that they’ve [IDG] chosen an analytical listening tool over a monitoring tool,” says Dan Neely, CEO of Networked Insights.

Neely goes on to note that a company the size of IDG could have chosen any firm to help them in this work, but clearly they felt Networked Insights offered something unique. The company also counts other big brands such as P&G, Kraft, Fox, McDonalds, Walgreens, and Cisco among its customers.

And it’s not just about filtering the social data, it’s also that Networked Insights tech provides realtime data, so there’s no need to wait for curated reports to come in. The technology behind this apparently uses both text modeling and pattern recognition to filter messages this quickly.

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Today is another sobering day for the tech and media world. Current TV has confirmed that 80 people are being let go, leaving the company with 300 employees worldwide. We heard multiple reports of significant layoffs at Current TV earlier in the day. One source, whose spouse works at Current TV, warns of a “major bloodbath today at CurrentTV, across all departments,” with cuts hitting “most of the people in the LA production office, as stuff is being outsourced.”

Current Media’s COO, Joanna Drake Earl told me over the phone that the layoffs are due to a shifting of programming strategy and are not a cost-cutting measure. Current is shifting away from in-house production and towards out sourcing segments, which will be done via acquisitions, co-productions, and the use of outside studios. Layoffs took place in Current’s San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and New York offices, but the cuts were mostly made in the production and programming areas. Earl added that this year is set to be Current’s most profitable year since its launch. See the entire statement issued by Current below.

A year ago to date, the media company, which was co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, eliminated 60 positions. The media company also recently canceled its $100 million IPO that was originally announced in January 2008. Current said in a statement that market conditions and the recession forced the company to abandon the IPO. And this summer, Current Media got a new CEO, Mark Rosenthal, who replaced Hyatt. Rosenthal was the former president and COO of MTV networks and was also vice chairman and president of media platforms at SpotRunner.

Current made headlines this year after two of its reporters were detained by North Korea in a relatively high-profile incident (the reporters were eventually released after former President Bill Clinton intervened).

Cable channel Current TV is broadcast internationally to 59 million homes with markets in regions including the United States, Italy, and the UK. Current also has a strong web presence, tapping into popular social media services like Digg and Twitter for special events like the 2008 presidential election.

The Guardian Media Group announced news of layoffs this morning and yesterday brought news of other tech layoffs, with Adobe cutting 9 percent of its staff. This week also brought announcements of from Electronic Arts and Sprint. We’ve added Current’s layoff to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker.

Here’s the entirety of the email that was sent to us by a representative for Current:

Current Media has made changes to its organization, most notably in the area of television programming. Current will be shifting away from short-form programming and daily in-house production and towards proven 30-60 minute formats from a multitude of sources, including acquisitions, co-productions, outside studios, as well as Current developed and produced content.

With this change, Current made the difficult yet necessary decision to eliminate certain daily, weekly, and non-regularly scheduled programs, including “Current Tonight,” “Current Takeover” and “Current Exposed.”

As a result of these cancelations, and the shift away from a reliance on daily in-house production, Current Media eliminated 80 positions worldwide associated with the affected programs and related support personnel in the company.

This re-organization was not the result of a need to cut costs. Current Media will have its most profitable year. This financial stability will allow the company to re-allocate resources in order to put further emphasis on areas of the business believed to best position Current Media for continued long-term growth. Part of this investment will be the immediate creation of new executive positions, and teams in program development, licensing and acquisitions, talent management, research, marketing, affiliate relations and advertising sales.

As part of the re-organization, Current Media will be consolidating television production and programming development activities together under one roof in Los Angeles with new facilities at LA Center Studios.

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Ever since Microsoft launched its Bing search engine last May, there’s been buzz that it’s been talking with Wolfram Alpha to license some of its search data. In August, I was able to confirm that a deal had indeed been struck between the two. Today, Bing is finally rolling out its first integration with Wolfram Alpha for searches around diet and nutrition.

Whenever you do a nutrition or diet-related search on Bing, it will serve up structured data from Wolfram. For instance, a search for any food item will bring up a nutrition tab and summarize nutrition facts about that kind of food, including the total fat in a single serving, along with the percentage of the recommended daily allowance that represents and other nutritional data. The results will be marked as “computed buy Wolfram Alpha.” Wolfram will also power a body mass index (BMI) calculator which lets you enter your height and weight, and calculates your BMI.

In that August post, I speculated:

Perhaps Bing’s deal with Wolfram is to license some of its data to create a specific science category search or a Q&A portion of the site.

Whatever it is, if it turns out to be popular, Bing might end up licensing more data for more categories of search. In the end, Wolfram could have more luck licensing its data to other search engines than bringing people to its site, despite the surge in “fall traffic” Stephen Wolfram is still hoping for.

There has been no discernible surge in fall traffic at Wolfram’s main site. Striking licensing deals with Bing could prove much more lucrative since Bing has much more search traffic and does a better job presenting complex data in an intuitive way. This deal makes Microsoft one of the first commercial licensees of Wolfram’s API.

Bing is also releasing two other improvements today. When you hover over a search result, it will bring in more information into the pop-up preview pane, including deep links to the most clicked-on pages in that site and a search box which lets you search the site without leaving Bing. If the result is a Facebook profile page, it will show the person’s picture, their network, and allow you to send a message or friend request.

The second improvement is a weather results page which brings together all sports of weather data whenever you search for a place or weather. Much of the data is what you can already find on MSN Weather—multi-day forecasts, satellite maps, and monthly averages—but it gathered on the fly in a new Weather Results page on Bing. You get the feeling that, just like it did yesterday with videos, this may be another content category Microsoft will eventually move entirely from MSN to Bing.

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The New York Times Company is considering the launch of a brand new online news reader that would let people experience the consumption of NYTimes.com content in an entirely new and fairly innovative way. The publisher has reached out to members of its Insight Lab to get some rudimentary feedback on the new reader prototype and to help settle the naming issue.

Insight Labs members can test out the new prototype on a live website, which means you can, too. All you need to do is head over to this web page and you’ll be able to play around with the ‘newview’ as well.

One of the names the NYT is considering for the new online reader is Article Skimmer, which is the same name that was given to a prototype product the publisher threw out there some time ago. But the new reader linked above boasts more features than the Article Skimmer that’s currently featured on First Look, which is basically a showcase for new NYTimes.com features and services.

This could be a sign that the company considers graduating the Article Skimmer experiment to a full-fledged mass product and giving it a new name for the occasion. Some other names it is suggesting in the survey: Grid View, Times View, Easy View, Broadsheet and Easy Reader.

(click for larger size)

Here’s how the NYT describes the new reader prototype:

NYTimes.com is launching a new online feature that offers the experience of reading a newspaper spread out on a table, allowing readers to more easily browse through headlines and discover stories deep within a section. Each section of the Web site is organized in an easy-to-read grid displaying the headlines and short summaries of each story. Full articles are one click away and keyboard short cuts provide easy navigation from section to section. Readers can select from among eight different skins to display content in the way that best meets their interests and needs.

Some of the themes (or skins) are fascinating. One called ‘Flows’ displays headlines, a short summary and the author of the article in a single, continuous stream of text, while another (’Blackout’) reminds me a lot of the TweetDeck design (see screenshot on top).

Evidently, there’s some place reserved for advertising units inside news content.

The keyboard shortcuts – which are mostly meant for navigation – are fairly useful, although not all of them worked flawlessly in my limited testing in both Firefox and Chrome. What’s more interesting is the fact that you can customize the content in your reader much more easily than on the regular NYtimes.com website, giving you the opportunity to filter what you see based on section, blogs, and topic. Surprisingly, there’s no option to display only articles from a specific writer.

Your thoughts on the new reader prototype?

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It appears that both Yahoo and Microsoft are duking it out to help power the technology for India’s Unique Identification project. Spearheaded by Indian tech czar and Infosys co-chairman Nanden Nilekani, the project aims to assign every Indian citizen with a unique identification number that will identify him or her, similar to a U.S. social security number.

This is no small task considering India’s population of 1.2 billion citizens. It will involve a powerful technology to assign the numbers and a vast database to organize each unique ID. That’s where Microsoft and Yahoo come in.

Earlier this year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed a strong interest in participating in the project, meeting Nilekani and assuring him that Microsoft would be able to assign the IDs swiftly.

This week Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz lobbied India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to use Yahoo for the project, but Bartz says that there’s no commercial interest in the deal and Yahoo would help power the project on a non-profit basis. Bartz added that Yahoo would be the optimal choice because Yahoo has a major presence in India. The company claims that three out of four Indians access the Internet through Yahoo.

While Yahoo is vastly popular in India thanks to sites like Yahoo Cricket that appeal to the population, its hold may be slipping. Gmail recently overtook Yahoo Mail as the most trafficked email site and Yahoo was forced to shut down its Indian social network SpotM a few months ago, as Google’s Orkut and Facebook emerge as the dominant social networks in India.

It’s unclear if Microsoft has the same “non-profit” stance as Yahoo, but obviously both companies want a piece of a highly ambitious project that could be implemented in other emerging countries. And it looks like IBM is also throwing its hat into the ring as well, so it should be interesting to see which tech giant wins out.

Photo credit/Flickr/Voobie

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Yahoo seems downright incapable of keeping its best people motivated enough to stay on in Sunnyvale.

The latest person to jump ship is Utkarsh Srivastava, who has resigned from his position as Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research to join micro-sharing sensation Twitter. Louis Gray caught wind of the new hire at Twitter early, keeping tabs on the company’s own Twitter list of employees.

Now Srivastava has confirmed the news by means of, evidently, a tweet.

Srivastava, a Ph.D graduate in Computer Science from Stanford University, did brief research stints at Microsoft and IBM before joining the Yahoo! Research team now more than 3 years ago.

During his tenure at the Internet giant, he became one of the original designers and developers of Pig, a high-level language for data processing over Hadoop. He is also one of the lead architects and developers of PNUTS, Yahoo!’s internal large-scale key-value store.

Like Gray said, a ton of data flows in and out of Twitter on a daily basis, and it’s precisely that gigantic data set that gives Twitter a competitive advantage and turns it into a potential moneymaker (it’s what interests investors so much). Hence, it makes all the sense in the world for the company to recruit data management specialists, although it’s not clear if Srivastava was hired to streamline current Twitter projects or rather to develop new ones.

Time will tell, 140 characters at a time.

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Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia's group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft's transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant's overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles.

[Germany] Munich-based metaio, a developer of visual interaction software products, is today launching a consumer-oriented iPhone application (iTunes link) and complementary website that combines the fun and usefulness of augmented reality with social networking. The application, dubbed junaio, is billed by the company as the 'world's first augmented reality platform' but bears some resemblance to what other European startups like Layar and Wikitude have been putting out there lately.

TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr took to New York’s public radio station WNYC yesterday to discuss the pros and cons of citizen journalism in the context of breaking news. Carr was joined by host Brian Lehrer and journalist and academic Jeff Jarvis, a longtime advocate of citizen journalism.

You may recall Paul’s controversial post last weekend which discussed the solider at Fort Hood who tweeted from inside the base during Thursday’s massacre—including posting a Twitpic of a victim and inaccurate reports of the events that took place. Carr delved into the ethical issues regarding this example of citizen journalism gone bad and its greater implications. His column sparked a tsunami of further debate and commentary about both the good and evil of uses of social media.

Carr and Jarvis battled heatedly over the journalistic virtue of witnesses reporting their real-time observations of news and whether the woman in question could be considered a “citizen journalist.” Jarvis came out swinging and it took Carr a while to start jabbing back, probably because the live interview was at an ungodly 6 AM in California, an hour which put our late-night thinker at a distinct and groggy disadvantage. But after a few swipes from Jarvis, Carr finally woke up and rallied. We think Carr won this one, but take a listen and tell us your thoughts!

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I’m in Vegas. PubCon Las Vegas will kick off later today and unleash an almost unhealthy amount of information on the topics of Internet marketing and social media. In preparation for the next week, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a site “social”. What does it really mean to create a “social media friendly” Web site? And what are the small things SMB owners can do to give themselves a head start?

Here are a few things that jumped out at me. Feel free to add some of your ideas in the comments.

Be Dynamic

Socially friendly sites are dynamic. That’s what attracts people and draws them in. They don’t want a static site that’s the same each time they visit. They want to engage with sites that are constantly changing. That are fresh. This why doing things like adding a blog, using widgets, and finding ways to bring what you’re doing offsite back on, are so important. Dynamic Web sites attract more links, they encourage users to keep visiting and they give people a reason to engage with you on a more consistent basis. These are all things the search engines are looking at and they’re very important to the success of your site. Make sure you’re adding dynamic content to your site. What makes up dynamic content? Check the blog tomorrow!

Encourage Sharing

Tell me when this sounds familiar:

• You go to comment on a blog but can’t figure out how.
• You want to share a great post on Twitter but don’t feel like shortening the URL yourself.
• You’d like to bookmark a post on Delicious but don’t want to look silly if you use the wrong tags.
• You’d like to email the post to a friend but there’s no option to let you do that.

If you want people to share your content (which you do), make it easy for them to do that. They’re not going to jump through hoops, but if you leave the breadcrumb trail for them, they’ll probably follow it. Be smart by finding ways to integrate Twitter into your site, remove obstacles to comment forms, and removing social barriers wherever you can. If you’re on WordPress, familiarize yourself with essential WP plugins to that will make your site more user- and social media-friendly. A lot of it’s already out there for you.

Support Your Supporters

Thanks to social media, people want to be rewarded for supporting you. They want to know that you heard them, that you read their comment, and that you noticed their passing you around to their friends. There are lots of different ways to show support to the people who support you either by linking, retweeting, commenting, or passing around your content. You can do it onsite by using plugins to recognize the most frequent commenters, creating member boards where users can rack up points for contributing or picking customers to highlight in your blog or newsletter each month. You can also support them offsite by doing things like sending emails to say thanks, offering freebies or giving out discount codes to people who perform a certain action.

Say Yes to Mashups

Resist the urge to ironclad your content. I know it’s hard, but the more open you are, the most connected your users are going to feel toward you. Instead of freaking out when someone uploads one of your commercials to YouTube, challenge them to do something cool with it. Host a contest for the best commercial mashup. Let them take your photos and Photoshop them in cool and unusual ways. Challenge them to use your jingle and make a video around it. Have them take your product out in the real world and video tape their experience with it. The more you can bring them into your community, the more loyalty they’re going to feel towards it. Don’t just make it easy for them to share your content, make it easy for them to take it and mess it up a little.

Connect Communities

Get involved in your own community, but remember that it’s not always about you. Get to know your community members and learn about what makes THEM happy. What are they working on? What are they doing? When you know, get involved in what they’re doing and offer help where you can. Find outside communities related to yours and get involved. You’ll drive people back to yours but you’ll also show that you’re not just about yourself. By conversing with other communities, you create more buzz and recognition for your own.

What are some ways you’re making your own site more social and user-friendly?

From Small Business Trends

5 Ways To Make Your Site More Social

Israeli facial recognition tech startup Face.com made quite a splash when it launched Photo Finder, its first Facebook app, back in March. It soon followed suit with a new app called Photo Tagger, a tool that is capable of finding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums even if they remained untagged by users.

The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.

Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.

You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.

This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.

Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.

For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.

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Tis’ the season for holiday shopping and many of the tech giants are already staking their claim in the e-commerce industry. Google recently launched Google Commerce, its hosted search offering for online retailers. Today, IBM is announcing a significant upgrade to WebSphere Commerce, Big Blue’s software platform framework for e-commerce.

WebSphere Commerce is a integrated software package that handles online storefronts, merchandising, operational reports, shopping cart technology, search, payments, analytics and also provides developer tools. It operates the front and back end of e-commerce operations for Sears, Vineyard Vines, Staples and other retailers.

The new version of the software now helps e-retailers create mobile-optimized sites that match the look and feel of retailer’s web sites. The software can create online stores accessible via mobile phones that let consumers browse, conduct side-by-side product comparisons, view store locations, check inventory availability and complete the purchase.

Shoppers can even place orders online and pick up their merchandise at the closest store – which can be automatically mapped out for them on their mobile phone. Retailers will also be able to deliver personalized brand campaigns, coupons and promotions to a customer’s mobile device through text messages or e-mail.

IBM highlights emerging markets, like China and India, as optimal regions where advanced e-commerce mobile sites will be popular among consumers. Big Blue says that because broadband access remains difficult in many areas, hand-held devices are often the only means of access to the Web.

Thew new version of Websphere Commerce leverages social networks by bringing brand and product discussions that are taking place on external sites back to the retailer’s site. For example, a consumer’s product review or blog post with a link back to the retailers’ site can automatically be sent to Facebook or other social networking sites. IBM is also adding the capability of consumers to share ratings and reviews that include rich media content, like photo, video or audio files.

IBM’s new software also provides intuitive marketing tools that will evaluate customer buying behaviors and respond by delivering targeted promotions or other content. For example, if an online buyer abandons a sale before checkout, a coupon or other incentive could be immediately forwarded to the shopper’s mobile device to help revive the transaction.

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A couple of weeks ago, Mozilla Labs presented a prototype of Raindrop, a new experimental open-source e-mail and digital communication platform that aimed to make your inbox personal again.

It’s been quiet at the Raindrop blog since the announcement, but people who are interested in the whole thing are advised to keep track of the Raindrop Design blog, where Canadian designer and Mozilla employee Andy Chung posts updates on concepts for layout and structure of the Raindrop project.

Last night, Chung posted about some very initial ideas for how Raindrop could function as a mobile application, which GigaOm correctly identified as one of the most fertile grounds for this type of platform to thrive.

Note that these are early concepts, so it’s just a way for Mozilla Labs to throw something out there and then iterate based on feedback from the designer and developer community. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how Raindrop could potentially look like on mobile screens.

What you see (from Flickr): a homepage with a summary and menu, what the ‘inflow’ of messages would look like on mobile, a rudimentary Twitter client, a mailing list messages inbox and finally a screen featuring notifications from around the web.

(Thanks for the tip, Orli)

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Market share is probably the easiest and most often used point of comparison between competing products. It makes sense: If something has a large share of the market, it’s probably doing well. But that doesn’t always mean that it’s doing better than something with less market share, especially from a business perspective.

I bring this up because today brought some very interesting numbers from the research firm, Strategy Analytics. According to them, Apple has surpassed Nokia as the most profitable phone maker in the world. I’ll throw some numbers at you in a second to show why this is really incredible, but the key takeaway is that this is why, at the end of the day, Apple wins.

While the press and rivals obsess over market share, Apple quietly comes in and makes an insane amount of money. It’s the same in the computer industry. Small market share, huge amount of money. The most important thing for all of these are companies is the bottom line. Apple wins that battle.

According to the report, Apple made $1.6 billion in operating profit off of the iPhone in Q3. Nokia, meanwhile, made $1.1 billion. Let’s put this in perspective. Recent numbers suggest Nokia controls roughly 35% of the worldwide handset market. Apple? About 2.5%.

Not 25%. Two point five percent.

Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, just about everyone has been clamoring for more variety in Apple’s offering. People wanted iPhone minis, they wanted CDMA iPhones, etc. But Apple stuck to its guns and has basically sold one phone, which it could manufacture efficiently, when rivals like Nokia are busy peddling dozens. Sure, there are a few variations on the iPhone (included memory, and now the 3G/3GS), but basically, it’s one phone that is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars of more profit than the market leader.

To people who follow Apple closely, this should be absolutely no surprise. It’s the same thing it does in the computer industry. Despite having a much smaller market share than its rivals, it makes more money than most of them. The key, of course, is that Apple maintains its high profit margins, while the competitors shuffle to battle each other for market share.

That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t care about market share for either its computers or the iPhone, it undoubtedly does. But it’s a secondary goal to running a successful business. A business which is now absolutely thriving in an awful worldwide economic environment.

If Apple wanted to boost its computer market share, it could do so in a heartbeat simply by slashing into its margins and chopping hundreds of dollars off its machines. That’s why those “I’m A PC” shopping commercials this summer were humorous. They’re attacking Apple for not competing in segments (low cost PCs) that it has absolutely no desire to compete in. Would those commercials be effective if Apple chose to sell a $500 MacBook? No, because Lauren probably would have bought it (remember, her first stop was the Apple store).

Most consumers obviously shouldn’t like the idea that a company is purposely charging more for its product to keep its margins high. But Apple has a winning proposition for that because it builds machines of such high quality that to many users it seems like they should cost more than they actually do. Or as Apple COO Tim Cook put it in a earnings call over the summer, “Our goal is not to build the most computers. It’s to build the best.” When you do that, apparently you can keep your margins high and in turn, make insane profits.

The iPhone is a bit different because Apple has a partner that it has convinced to pay it an insane amount of money for each device sold and then subsidize the cost of it for consumers. Remember that when the iPhone first came out it was $600. That’s the price Apple clearly felt comfortable setting for it to maintain what it thought was a good margin.

That price, of course, was ridiculous (though, admittedly, myself and plenty of others paid it). A few months later, Apple realized this too, and slashed a couple hundred dollars off the price, thus slashing it margins. But then they figured out a better way. Previously, they had been getting a cut of every monthly AT&T iPhone contract. But with the iPhone 3G, Apple decided to give all that money to AT&T in exchange for one upfront payment, and the promise that AT&T would subsidize the cost of the phone down to $199 (and $299). Jackpot.

So basically, Apple is now making a huge margin on every iPhone sold, while AT&T more or less picks up the tab. (Don’t feel too bad for them, they still make plenty on those monthly contracts.) Now you see why Apple doesn’t mind that exclusive agreement even while us consumers bitch to no end? There are 1.6 billion reasons why they like that deal (okay, probably some smaller percentage of that, but still).

And because Apple makes all of this money, they have money to pour into making that next great product. A product that will likely be high quality — and sell with a high margin. Hopefully some of that $34 billion in cash (with no debt) is being poured into finalizing the tablet as we speak.

This influx of profit also allows Apple to take the plunge into new markets, like it did with the iPhone. Earlier today, blogger John Gruber recalled what former Palm CEO Ed Colligan said when he heard that computers makers like Apple could enter the phone market:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Not only did they walk in, they walked in, changed the landscape, and have what now appears to be the best business model industry-wide.

Just as with the computer industry, while all its rivals were busy jockeying for market share, Apple secured the high ground and figured out the best way to bathe in profits.

[images: Touchstone Pictures and flickr/jaci xiii]

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Google has been ordered by a Brazilian court to pay Formula One racing driver Rubens Barrichello $500,000 in damages for the presence of fake online profiles of the driver on its social network Orkut, which is hugely popular in the man’s home country.

The civil case, which was filed in July 2006, related to hundreds of fake profiles for Barrichello that were created on Orkut, some of which depicted him as a toy turtle – I kid you not.

Earlier this week, Brazilian media published the outcome of the Sao Paulo court’s ruling, which ordered Google to compensate Barrichello half a million dollars in damages upfront and a daily fine of $590 until all the profile pages relating to the F1 driver were removed from the social network. Note: different media report different amounts.

Google told local reporters that it will always remove illegal content from Orkut but does not feel responsible for all other content that appears on there, and they don’t expect to have to police negative commentary about celebrities. Google can still appeal the case in higher court.

This isn’t the first time Google finds itself in Brazilian courts over Orkut.

On August 22, 2006, a Brazilian Federal Judge ordered Google to release Orkut user’s information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be using the social network to sell drugs and to be involved in child pornography. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information was turned over to the Brazilian government. Google back then stated that it would not release the information, on the grounds that the requested information is on Google servers in the U.S. and not in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to its national laws.

For what it’s worth, multi-millionaire Barrichello was looking for ‘respect rather than money’, and that he would be donating the money awarded to him in court to his non-profit organization Barrichello Kanaan Foundation. On Monday, the F1 driver tweeted a quote from Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (which I suspect was freely translated from his famous quote “There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self”).

My guess is he simply doesn’t like turtles.

(Via F1Planet)

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Well, it’s not the mythical Google Drive, but it’s close. For a price. And assuming you only want to store pictures and emails.

Google tonight announced that it was drastically slashing prices while at the same time offering more storage pricing options for users of its services. Specifically, while Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service.

But what’s really pretty incredible is that Google has an option for you to buy up to 16 terabytes, yes, terabytes, of storage from them. As Google notes, that enough to store 8 million very high resolution photos. Considering that most consumers probably still have south of 500 gigabytes of storage in their home, that’s pretty massive.

Of course, you’ll pay for it: 16 TB will set you back $4,096 a year. But if you do something that requires you to store 16 TB of photos, you can probably afford that. And there are varying storage levels at different price points leading up to that. 8 TB is $2,048 a year, 4 TB is $1,024, and so forth.

These all represent significant price decreases from Google’s previous offerings, but it still would be cheaper to buy your own external drives. So why not do that? Well, Google offers the same levels of backup security that it ensures on all of its data currently. Plus, you won’t have to have dozens of drives sitting around. And since the data is all in the cloud, you’d be able to access it from anywhere, which Google highlights in its post.

But there’s something key to remember: Google is only officially offering this storage for use with Gmail and Picasa. It’s not a complete online backup/storage system, which is what Google Drive (or Gdrive) has long been rumored to be. Of course, there are programs and workarounds that will more or less let you use it for that purpose, but Google is not yet sanctioning the use of its storage as your official cloud drive.

Under Google’s system, 1 TB of storage will cost $256 a year and 400 GB is $100 a year. I don’t know about you, but if Apple offered something similar that would let me backup all my iTunes music and movies and allowed me to access them from anywhere, I would do it.

[photo: flickr/vsz]

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The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing new. Yet, it seems that more and more advertisers are realizing that the significance of SEO to their business has risen as they have essentially hit a ceiling with their SEM activities. As the SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing 2008 report puts it: “Despite increasing ad spend and year-to-year growth in the value of search engine marketing, we are likely nearing a pricing plateau as advertisers near their maximum efficacy.”

A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based RankAbove wants to assist large websites—ones that range from 1000 pages to as far as several million—to get the most out of their SEO juice. In many ways, RankAbove is the flipside of hotshot Kenshoo, which aims at the same target market but with an SEM solution.

Launched into beta, Drive provides a complete SEO management interface, handling everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. The product begins by downloading and parsing the entire website on its servers, generating a complete analysis which is repeated upon site updates. Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling are used to determine how SEO changes will affect site pages—remember these can be in the millions—and keywords, which can reach up to the tens of thousands.

The site which is automatically divided into sections by Drive, can now be inspected for all SEO issues, with granularity reaching all the way down to single pages and individual page elements. Drive also analyzes competitor sites in order to determine the difficulty of ranking for each keyword. There is no limit on the amount of keywords and Drive will even perform automated tail keyword discovery. Testing the impact of new keywords and other SEO tweaks and fixes on the site takes minutes—an obvious plus compared to pushing it out to production and waiting for the ‘Google Dance’.

I’ve asked RankAbove to run an analysis on TechCrunch.com. Here are a few SEO basic issues it identified:

• TechCrunch rarely uses the <h1> tag. This affects proper keyword insertion in the page header tags that lets the search engines know the more relevant keywords for a particular page.
• Company Index pages all have the same title. Duplicate title issues prevent search engines from understanding which is the main page.
• Images could use better <alt> tagging. This impedes screenshots, pictures, and company logos to come up in image search results and will cause them to rank poorly for relevant searches.

Unlike most startups that begin their business from scratch, RankAbove been running an SEO consultancy business for several years. This has had multiple benefits: First, the team was able to gain product/market-fit insights from real customers. Second, the company is in a position where it can now leverage existing relationships with agencies and online retailers to establish design and beta customers, one of which is 1-800-Flowers. Finally, a major upside is that the SEO consultancy business has allowed RankAbove to self-fund development, placing it in a better negotiation position with investors. I’m told by CEO Mayer Reich, that the company is in negotiation with several investors to complete a Round A in the neighborhood of $1.5M.

I’ve been following RankAbove’s progress from the initial days of development and it’s one of the Israeli startups I’m most bullish about. Who knows, it might just be the next Kenshoo.

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The types of marketing offers (we refer to them more descriptively as scams) that have plagued ecommerce sites like Intelius are now facing U.S. government scrutiny. These scams are kissing cousins to the Scamville social gaming offers that we’ve written about recently.

Next week the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will hold a full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers. This expands on a committee investigation into the marketing practices of a number of firms that supply these offers to partners.

They could sell tickets to this thing. I’d pay good money to be there.

Last week sixteen companies that conduct sales over the Internet were sent letters requesting information about their relationships with the three marketing companies being investigated by the panel – Vertrue, Webloyalty and Affinion.

The companies that received letters: 1-800-FLOWERS.com, AirTran Holdings Inc. (AAI), Classmates Online Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. ( CAL), FTD, Fandango Inc., Hotwire Inc., Intelius Inc., MovieTickets.com Inc., Orbitz, Pizza Hut, priceline.com, Redcats USA, Shutterfly Inc. (SFLY), US Airways Group Inc. (LCC) and Vistaprint USA Inc.

Adaptive Marketing, which works with Intelius, is a subsidiary of Vertrue. We outlined how these offers mislead consumers into agreeing to unwanted credit card subscriptions here.

Immediately after an ecommerce transaction takes place, buyers are presented with an offer to take a survey and/or get a partial rebate on their purchase. If they click yes, their credit card information is transferred to the ecommerce company and the user begins a difficult-to-terminate subscription to a worthless service.

Ecommerce sites that use these types of offers can get CPMs for the ads ranging from $2,000 – $2,500, say experts we’ve spoken with, and they make up a material percentage of revenue.

Update: Here’s what these offers look like. Users are tricked into clicking yes and get nothing of value in return.

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Earlier this evening we broke the news on the upcoming launch of City Of Eternals, the first Flash MMOG from Ohai.

I have the rough footage above of in game play, and will add a proper screencast shortly (update – better video has now been added at top). This is a World of Warcraft style MMOG that’s free to play and Flash based. It’s also integrated with Facebook Connect to allow easy signup and, more importantly, you can play with your friends and see the real identity of other players.

Ohai is letting 500 TechCrunch readers in now, just email techcrunch@cityofeternals.com, and the first 500 people will get an invitation via email. You’ll also get 100 Ohais, the in game currency.

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Back in June, we wrote about Birdfeed, an iPhone Twitter application that finally brought the speed and simplicity to rival what many consider to be the top client, Tweetie. It’s a great app that offers a different look and feel from Tweetie (and especially now Tweetie 2), which some users prefer. And it’s about to gain a key feature which could further differentiate it: Geolocation.

Now, to be clear, as we previewed last month, the upcoming version of Tweetie, 2.1, will also support Twitter’s new geolocation feature. But the new version of Birdfeed, 1.2, does it in a way that highlights it much more. And in fact, when Twitter geolocation support finally does roll out (it’s due very soon, we hear), Birdfeed has a good shot to be the go-to app for it at launch.

So what’s so good about it? Well, unlike Tweetie 2.1, which forces you to click into a menu system to get at the geolocation feature, Birdfeed puts it front and center at the top of every tweet composition screen. If you opt-in to using the feature (and it’s important to note that Twitter geolocation is opt-in), you can choose to either tweet with your location sent out each time, or use it on a tweet-by-tweet basis. If you choose the latter, you’ll see a bar along the top that reads, “Add a location to this tweet”. Clicking on that with start a “Determining location” function, and in a few seconds, you’ll have your location pinned to the top of that tweet under which you’ll write the actual tweet. Simple.

Currently, there isn’t any granular support to pick and choose how much or little detail of your location to show (what city you’re in versus what block you’re on, for example), but I suspect that may be something coming from Twitter’s end once geolocation launches.

On tweets sent out with this geolocation data, you’ll see a hyperlinked location beneath the timestamp on the tweet’s landing page. Oddly, there is no obvious way to tell which tweets are geotagged and which are not from the main stream, currently. If you click on this location on the tweet screen, you’ll be taken to that location on a map and show a marker with that Twitter user’s name and their tweet on top of a Google Map.

Birdfeed 1.2 was submitted to the App Store for approval 2 days ago, developer Buzz Andersen tells us. He remains committed to improving the application going forward, but notes that it has been slow going because he has other projects he’s currently working on as well. Still, Birdfeed is just as solid as it was several months ago and now with great geolocation implementation, could well see a spike in usage from the LBS lovers. Watch for it in the App Store sometime in the next couple of weeks.

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We first wrote about Flash MMOG startup Ohai back in January. There wasn’t anything to look at, but the company had raised $6 million in funding and had assembled a small but impressive group of gaming technology executives.

Now they’re ready to launch their first game, City Of Eternals. The timing is perfect – the vampire themed game will attract the Twilight-crazy crowd of teenage girls and the boys that follow them around.

Move aside, Vampire Wars. City of Eternals is a real game.

This is a game that’s easy to begin playing. You log in via Facebook Connect or Twitter and you’re playing. No account creation. No need to even tell you you’re male or female – it already knows.

And since every player is logging in via Facebook or Twitter, there is also a real human being to look at behind the avatar. You can click on the player icon and see a picture and the first name of the player, and message them if their privacy rules allow it.

That will let users build real friendships, says founder and CEO Susan Wu. And those friendships are one thing that Ohai hopes will keep people playing over the long term. They want their users to engage with the game like World Of Warcraft aficionados do – every day for years and years.

So far it’s working. 10,000 private beta testers have been playing for two months now, and are averaging ten logins and 65 minutes of playing per day. “People are in love with the game,” said Wu.

Game play is a hybrid between familiar client-based MMOGs and more recent social games on facebook like Vampire Wars and FarmVille. Players perform missions and fight to gain experience and other assets, and they can buy virtual goods to make the game more fun. This is a strictly cash economy, says Wu. No ScamVille offers will be put in front of users.

Another feature of the game is that it’s embeddable anywhere since it’s built on Flash. You can play it on the City of Eternals website, or the soon to launch Facebook app page, or we could embed it here on TechCrunch. When you play you’ll have the same experience. And you’re friends will be right there with you.

They even have an iPhone version that they are testing internally, says VP Engineering Don Neufeld. It won’t be exactly the same experience as the Flash version, but people will be able to play the game and interact with friends.

The game is built on a backend platform that the company will reuse for future titles. They use their own API to move data to the front end user interface, so developers could theoretically build versions of the game for Silverlight, Android, etc.

Up next we’ll have a video and 500 invitation to give away so you can start playing immediately. In the meantime, here are some screenshots:

Update: video and invitations to the service.

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PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf has left his long-held position at Yahoo, according to his Twitter account. Lerdorf joined Yahoo in 2002 and has worked for the company as an engineer since. Lerdorf is most notable for creating the original PHP engine, and for being a notable open source developer, speaker and author. Lerdorf developed PHP in 1995 after building up a collection of C macros that he was using in web application development. The original meaning of the acronym is ‘Personal HomePage’, and the language and environment are still the most popular in use on the web today.

PHP was developed further and commercialized by Zend, but Lerdorf has maintained an ongoing involvement with the open source project. Lerdorf has worked at a number of companies since first developing PHP, but has spent a large part of his professional career with Yahoo and he had a strong association with the company. Lerdorf is one of a number of star engineers and developers who have left Yahoo in recent times, and the stable of notable and high-profile engineers at the company has whittled out.

Lerdorf has been more recently noted for his blog posts, such as his outline on his philosophy to developing PHP applications: The no-framework PHP framework.

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As we’ve been putting together our Realtime CrunchUp for November 20, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: there are dozens of startups out there all preparing to launch amazing new realtime products. We’d like to give them all a spot on stage to give the audience a demo, but we can’t because we also have to make room for a full agenda interviews, panels, and roundtables. We’ve lined up great speakers from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Foursquare, Seesmic, Brizzly, Threadsy, Accel, Charles River Ventures, and more. We’ve even got the Hollywood agent behind Britney Spears’ digital strategy (see below).

So here’s what we are going to do. At the event, we will pick two entrepreneurs from the audience to give on-the-spot demos. If you think you’ve got what it takes to deliver a Realtime Pitch at the CrunchUp, when you buy your ticket opt in to the Realtime Pitch. Be prepared because you might be called onstage. That’s real audience participation.

We wouldn’t try this sort of thing with just any crowd, but judging from the caliber of the attendees last time, any one of them could have been on stage. Well, nearly any one of them (which is why we’ve set up the opt-in). If you’ve already bought a ticket and want to opt in, log into Eventbrite and change your preferences or email us and we’ll do it for you.

It’s always a good idea to keep everyone on their toes at these events. There will be plenty to discuss as we dig deep into specific real-time catalysts, such as mobility, geolocation, communications collaboration, stream filtering, media streams, and investment strategies. Please join us and members of our Realtime Board

Friday, November 20, 2009
Main Agenda: 9 am – 5:45 pm
After Party with StartUp Demo Tables: 5:45 – 7:30 pm

InterContinental Hotel
Grand Ballroom, 3rd floor
888 Howard Street, San Francisco CA

GET CRUNCHUP TICKETS NOW, courtesy of Eventbrite
$395 all-inclusive pass through midnight pst, Monday, November 16
$495 through November 20, subject to availability

SPONSORSHIPS
The CrunchUp also provides an amazing sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozzo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

PRESS
Bloggers and journalists can request a press pass by contacting Daniel Brusilovsky.

CRUNCHUP AGENDA

9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise.

Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox
Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal
Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur
Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal
CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss
Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng
Facebook, director of Platform Bret Taylor
Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen
Angel Investor Ron Conway

11:00 – 11:15 AM Break

11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

Hot Potato (event streams, launch)
Seesmic (a special surprise)
Rippol (video streams, public launch)
Stealth Startup (RT news streams)
Stealth Startup (RT image search)
Realtime Pitch From The Audience*

12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch

2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow’s Killer Apps (Demos)

PlyMedia (new product launch)
StatusNet (DIY microblogging, launch)
Tweetmeme (new product launch)
Stealth Startup (live video streams)
Stealth Startup (RT social address book)
Realtime Pitch From the Audience*

2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles?
DailyBooth, co-founder Ryan Amos
Ad.ly, CEO Sean Rad
Hollywood agent, Robin Bechtel (digital strategist for Britney Spears, Warner Bros. Records)
more (TBA)

3:30 – 3:45 Break

3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now
Foursquare, CEO Dennis Crowley
Twitter, director of platform Ryan Sarver
Google, Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
SimpleGeo, founder Matt Galligan
Hot Potato, founder Justin Shaffer
Mixer Labs, CEO Elad Gil

4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus
A discussion with Paul Buchheit (Facebook/Friendfeed/Gmail) and Rob Goldman, CEO Threadsy

5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In?

Angel investor, Ron Conway
Microsoft, corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development, Dan’l Lewin
Charles River Ventures, VC George Zachary
Accel Partners, VC Andrew Braccia
Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor

5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party

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Home-based businesses employ more people in the United States than venture-capital backed companies.

This surprising fact — along with a number of other myth-busting facts — comes from a new report titled  “Homepreneurs:  A Vital Economic Force.”  The report is culled from the recent Network Solutions Small Business Success Index (SBSI) survey, commissioned by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, along with some other federally-available data.

Successful homepreneurs are viable home-based businesses that provide at least 50% of their overall household income.  Roughly 6.6 million home-based businesses fit the homepreneur description, yet according to the report, these businesses are:

“… the Rodney Dangerfields of the small business world, rarely regarded as significant players in the U.S. economy.  Instead, the common perception is that home-based businesses are merely hobbies or side businesses contributing little to the business owner’s income or the overall economy.”

Steve King — one of the Small Business Trends Experts and principal at Emergent Research — authored the report.   And what he points out about these “homepreneurs” is sure to challenge long-held biases.

“Homepreneurs are operating significant businesses that are as successful as non-home based businesses,” states Emergent’s report. “Even more noteworthy, their home-based businesses are important contributors to employment and the overall U.S. economy.”

Steve commented to me:

“I was very surprised to see that the home-based business sector employs more people than venture-capital backed companies.  I was also surprised to see that home-based businesses scored as well on the Network Solutions Small Business Success Index as firms located outside the home. It turns out size and physical location aren’t predictors of competitiveness or success.”

The Small Business Success Index measures small business competitiveness on a scale from 1-100 along six key functional dimensions: capital access, marketing and innovation, work force, customer service, computer technology and compliance. Home-based businesses in the study scored within one point of non-home-based businesses in all six categories.

Here are some other myths this report puts to rest:

Myth: Home-based entrepreneurs are part-timers.

• Reality: The vast majority—75% — work full-time in their businesses.

Myth: Home-based businesses are short-lived.

• Reality: Nearly half of the homepreneurs in the survey had been in business for more than 15 years.  Just 20%  had been in business for less than five years.

Myth: Home-based entrepreneurs are solo entrepreneurs.

• Reality: Half of all homepreneurs have employees. The average number is two (including the owner), but 39%  have between two and five , and 10% have more than five.  Based on these numbers, Emergent Research estimates home-based businesses employ some 13.2 million Americans when you include their owners.

Myth: Home-based business owners don’t make much money.

• Reality: There are some 6.6 million home-based businesses that generate at least 50% of the owner’s total household income. Home-based businesses also account for about 34% of all small businesses that provide more than half of the owner’s household income.  As for dollar figures, 35% of home-based businesses generate more than $125,000 in revenue; 8% make more than $500,000 annually.

“Due to everything from advances in technology to demographic and economic shifts, the number of homepreneurs is likely to surge over the next few years,” the study concludes. That makes now a better time than ever to fully understand the impact of these businesses on our economy.

To read the full study and find out more about home-based entrepreneurs, visit the Network Solutions Small Business Success Index site.  Or, download the PDF report on homepreneurs here.

From Small Business Trends

Home-Based Businesses Employ More People Than Venture Backed Companies

Don’t you sometimes wish you had a map of every place you’ve ever been? Well, if the concept of such detailed self-tracking doesn’t creep you out, you can now do that with Google Latitude, the mobile app that lets you broadcast your location to your friends.

Google Latitude just turned on Location History as a new feature in Google Latitude. Whenever Google Latitude is on, it records your location, and you can go back to see where you’ve been. To mitigate some of the obvious privacy issues this brings up, only you can see your location history, not your friends. And you can delete any location from your history, like that Dunkin Donuts you tried to stick up last night when you had the munchies.

Another new feature is location alerts. You can now get an alert anytime a friend of yours who allows you to see their location on Google Latitude is nearby. To cut down on constant alerts every time you go to the office or home, it tries to learn where you go every day, and only gives you an alert when you are in a place it deems to be “unusual.” In order for the alerts to work, your location history needs to be enabled, so the two features go hand in hand.

Geo streams such as the ones produced by Google Latitude are becoming increasingly common. In fact, we are devoting an entire panel to Geo Stream sat eour Realtime CrunchUp on November 20. Steve Lee, the group product manager for Google Latitude, will be on that panel.

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Well, the spirit of giving arrived a little early this year! For my birthday last month, Google announced it was partnering to offer free Wi-Fi on all Virgin America flights until January 15th. Great, thanks Google, now I have to check the feeds even while flying at 500MPH. But I guess that just wasn't enough kindness to satisfy the Goog. They've just announced that they're going to be extending the free Wi-Fi to 47 entire airports. And not only that, but there's a raft of giveaways, charity matching, and other nonsense in the bargain as well. I'm starting to think that it's not "Don't be evil" so much as "Give away enough stuff that people forget about the evil." Maybe that's disingenuous. In fact, I'm sure it is. Oh well, 'tis the season for moral ambiguity.