I attended WISH 2009 [JP] on Friday, a newly launched web industry event offering fourteen Japanese startups the chance to demo their wares onstage to a panel of judges and an audience of 400 people. The event was held in Tokyo and organized by online marketing company Agile Media Network (Japan’s answer to Federated Media).

A service called Joker Racer emerged as the big winner of the evening, but the other presentations weren’t too shabby either, with some of them earning special jury awards from various Japanese media. A good number of the fourteen services are available in English (or will be soon). Here’s a rundown on all of the companies that presented at WISH 2009:

Joker Racer (Winner: Grand Prix and Agile Media Network Award)
Joker Racer lets you remote-control model cars via your browser window, from anywhere in the world and in real-time. The Linux-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled model cars are equipped with GPS, a mini Linux server and a web cam mounted on top of them. It will even be possible to control the cars with the iPhone.

You can already register on the site but have to be patient until the official launch on August 26 when you want to take a spin. More videos can be viewed here.

Cerevo [JP] (Winner: Impress Award)
Cerevo presented an early version of a digital camera designed completely in-house that’s supposed to play with a photo sharing service the company is working on concurrently. The Wi-Fi-enabled “Cerevo cam” automatically uploads pictures to company servers without users needing to do anything. Pictures can then easily shared with friends (via cell phone email, for example) or uploaded to Flickr, Twitter and other sites. Expect both the Japanese and international version to launch probably later this year (read more about Cerevo here).

Action*Pad [JP] (Winner: CNET Japan Award)
Action*Pad is designed to be a simple to-do list that can be accessed by a group of people over the web (both fixed and mobile). Users just need to type in the URL and a password (registration isn’t necessary) to start getting things done. The service hasn’t officially launched yet.

Dressphile [JP] (Winner: Nikkei BP Award)
Dressphile is a combination of an offline and online business. Shopping addicts suffering from a lack of space in their apartments can either send in excess clothing or have it picked up. Dressphile will then store the clothes in its own storage facility at a monthly rate of $3 per item.

The company also offers a cleaning service and online database of your clothes, which are each pictured in a grid view. Dressphile is considering to let users choose to open these personal “online closets” to other people to sell off unneeded clothes that way.

Lang-8 (Winner: IT Media Award)
Lang-8 is a language exchange site with a social networking slant that’s been established in 2007. Available in 14 different languages, Lang-8 focuses on improving the writing skills in the language you study. Blog entries written in a foreign language can be viewed and checked by native speakers of that language. Read more about Lang-8 here.

xtel (Winner: Gizmodo Japan Award)
xtel is the name of a development support system for “ubiquitous contents” provided by Keio University in Tokyo. A total of four modules were presented: MOXA (a small I/O board), Talktic (compiler library for the development of applications on MOXA), Entity Collaborator (Java-based network to create network applications) and LIFE (server solution).

Tons of cool stuff the university created can be found in this bilingual PDF.

CONIT iPhone Content Payment System
CONIT presented a content payment system for the iPhone that should be of interest to many of the iPhone developers out there. The company has developed a solution that reduces costs for those developers offering subscriptions and and in-app purchases with their apps (new and existing ones). The system eliminates the need for setting up a content server. More in the English presentation embedded below.

Yonda4 [JP]
Yonda4 is a service that keeps track of books and comics you’ve read using Twitter. Just type the title of the book and add “@yonda4” to the tweet (it’s also possible to squeeze in a mini review). You can then access the Yonda4 website to see a list of your books and find users who have a similar taste. Android users can scan the barcode of a book and tweet its title instantly with Yonda4’s Android app.

Kokuban.in [JP]
Kokuban.in is a Flash-based “social drawing” service that lets users create images on a virtual blackboard with a mouse, “recording” the process from start to finish. The service launched last year, and there are now hundreds of thousands of animated clips on the site. CEO Yoshinori Munehara mainly talked about a new system that’s supposed to keep “impolite” comments on kokuban.in under control.

User Insight [JP]
User Insight is a web marketing tool that analyzes user behavior on a given site and visualizes the data collected with a heat map. The tool is supposed to answer the question what type of user (sex, age etc.) shows interests in which pages and which parts of those pages are clicked at the most. User Insight will go live next month, with versions in English and Chinese currently being in development.

Sony Bank’s “Jinseitsuuchou/Bankbook Of Your Life” [JP]
Sony Bank (an online bank operated by a Sony Japan subsidiary) presented a personal finance management system called Jinseitsuuchou, which roughly means “bankbook of your life” in Japanese. Just like the many other online finance trackers out there, the Sony tool helps users keep track of their personal expenses and budgets.

30min. [JP]
30min. is a location-based city guide portal that scrapes information on restaurants, shops and other service providers from the blogosphere. Based on where you are, 30min. delivers information on locations accessible within 30 minutes, enhanced by statements taken from blogs (currently, a whopping 8,000 blogs written by individuals are indexed). There’s also a free 30min. iPhone app [JP, iTunes link].

Nissan Carwings [JP]
A Nissan representative summarized the Web-related strengths of Carwings, Nissan’s (still) Japan-only and high-spec car navigation system: Display and text-to-speech conversion of RSS feeds, integration of Google Calendar, display of Google Maps information, integration of gas price comparison portal gogo.gs [JP] etc.

Link Knowledge [JP]
Link Knowledge is what appears to be a pretty powerful SaaS solution with a focus on CRM and SFA (sales force automation). The key idea is to scan information from business cards and feed it into a database, which can be accessed by Link Knowledge clients, i.e. direct marketers or sales people, to systematically identify potential customers.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries.  But now, xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first place.

U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the first decline in five years.  The decline was 3% on average, thanks to increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Much of the world’s economic growth—hence, jobs—is in emerging markets, the schools are far cheaper and in many cases competitive academically, and then there’s the H-1B issue. If America won’t allow a PhD just trained in our top schools to work here and contribute to the economy—why come here and take on the student loans to begin with?

Make no mistake: This is a huge blow for the United States, and particularly Silicon Valley. It’s killing diversity in graduate schools at a time future business leaders most need to understand other countries, especially Asian ones. Xenophobic, anonymous cowards may leave as much bile in the comments as they want: The reality is one out of every four tech companies is started by an immigrant. In the tech industry, immigrants have created more high paying jobs than they’ve “stolen.”

And nearly every CEO will tell you how much added cost and hassle there is in hiring a foreign-born worker—they do it because they physically can not find enough appropriately skilled workers in the U.S. (Below is an interview I did with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman about this very subject a few months ago, and he wrote a guest post on TechCrunch discussing the issue as well.)

Indeed, a recent study by the Bay Area Council, the Campaign for College Opportunity and IHELP showed that we’d need a 90% upswing in people graduating with degrees in science, technology, math or engineering to keep up with all the new jobs being created in that discipline.  What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness and there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things. Money and talent are fungible assets that flowed to the U.S.—and specifically the Valley—because that is where they were supported and rewarded.

Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and India saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech; that everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.

(Flickr image by Stephen Pierzchala)

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

If this were a column about religious affairs, I would undoubtedly focus this week on the shocking news that Beelzebub himself has joined a coalition opposing child abuse in the Catholic church.

I’d remark upon the sheer chutzpah of El Diablo, and his glaring hypocrisy in funding a law school to investigate his sworn enemy’s practices. An investigation which, thanks to his involvement, now reeks of self-interest. Self-interest and sulphur.

But this isn’t a column about religious affairs, so I’m not going to discuss that. Instead, as this is a column (broadly) about technology, I’ll confine myself to the entirely unrelated news that Microsoft is joining a coalition to oppose Google’s settlement with the US publishing industry over Book Search. I’ll also touch on the totally unanalogous fact that they’re funding a New York Law School investigation into their biggest rival’s anti-competitive behaviour.

Avid TechCrunch readers would be forgiven for having missed this latest development in the Google Book Search saga. After all, in recent weeks this once-fiercely bipartisan publication has thrust itself headlong into an orgy of Google adulation - a veritable golden shower of fanboyism - apparently triggered by Arrington’s discovery that his Android phone is a bit better than the iPhone.

Nary a day goes by without the Dear Leader splurging more praise over his precious new handset and the undeniably paradigm-shifting fact that it allows him to use Google Voice. In that context, writing a negative story about anything happening in Mountain View might be considered at best inadvisable, at worst sacrilegious.

But as usual I’m not afraid to be the voice in the wilderness. To risk ostracism by asking the questions that need asking: namely, doesn’t Microsoft actually have a point? I mean, where the hell does Google get off criticising Apple for anti-competitive practices when they’re about to be investigated by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing?

Some background, if you need it. Back in 2005, the US book industry - as represented mainly by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - launched a class-action suit against Google over the Search God’s plans to scan the world’s books and make them searchable through Google Books.

Late last year, after millions of dollars in lawyers fees had changed hands, a settlement was agreed between the parties. Much of it was uncontroversial - a win-win, even: Google would pay a token $60 scanning fee to authors of in-copyright (US) works in return for being allowed to display short extracts of the books as part of their search results. For out-of-print books, users could also pay to download digital copies of the entire work, with a reasonably decent commission being paid to the publisher or author for each download. For in-print books, users would be referred to online retailers or libraries to buy or rent. So far, so fair.

But one aspect of the settlement wasn’t so uncontroversial, and that was the issue of so-called ‘orphan works’ - books which are still in copyright but where the identity of the copyright owner is, for one reason or another, unclear. As part of the settlement, the book industry agreed that, with certain restrictions, Google could scan orphan works without being held liable for breach of copyright claims if the rights owner subsequently came forward. In return Google agreed to create an independent (and open to all) rights registry letting authors of orphaned stake their copyright claim.

At first glance, the deal over orphaned works seems as reasonable as the rest of the settlement - these are books for which no-one is being paid and which otherwise would be hidden away in libraries and second hand bookstores. But still Google’s competitors are crying foul.

The Internet Archive is particularly annoyed, arguing that they too are scanning millions of books for the public good, but without any blanket copyright protection for orphaned works. And so, through a group they call Open Content Alliance, they hope to pressure the Department of Justice to extend the terms of the settlement to everyone, not just Google.

For the other companies joining the Alliance - including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon - there are more obvious and nakedly commercial reasons to oppose the settlement. But that doesn’t make their objections less valid. Back in April, Erick Schonfeld wrote a passionate - and compelling - argument for the immunity to apply to everyone so that Google wouldn’t have a monopoly position where they could effectively charge whatever they like for downloading digital copies of orphaned works.

So, yeah, Google love-in be damned - let’s ask the tough quesions. If Google really does care about making the world’s information free, surely bringing rivals into the orphaned works party is the very least they can do? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’?

Yeah.

No.

Erick may be dead right in demanding the orphans be freed, but the Open Content Alliance is dead wrong in both their method and motives for making that happen. Let’s take a quick look at some of the loudest Alliance members, shall we?

First there’s Microsoft - the kings of the anti-trust violation, the monarchs of monopoly. This is a company that gave the Internet Archive ten million dollars to scan books, only to pull the plug when they realised that they couldn’t make any money from their own book search service. The truth is, Microsoft couldn’t give a damn about making information free - remember Encarta? -but they’ll stop at nothing to prevent Google from succeeding where they failed. If Google Genocide launched tomorrow, you can be sure there’d be a lawyer from Redmond whining to a judge that they should be allowed a piece of the action.

At least Amazon wears its biases on its sleeve - in March, Google signed a deal with Sony to put 500,000 public domain titles, scanned by the former, on to the latter’s e-reader device. At a stroke, Sony’s library of ebooks overtook Amazon’s (then) 250,000-strong database. And unlike Sony, which uses the open ePub standard for its titles, Amazon still insists on using its own ridiculous proprietary format. If they really were serious about making books more widely available, they could start by fixing the crappy PDF support for the Kindle.

And then there’s Yahoo. Poor old bandwagon-jumping Yahoo. Nothing to see here; let’s move on.

And yet if you look past the most vocal members of the Alliance, there are countless member organisations with bags of credibility, including thousands of libraries and universities. And there’s the Internet Archive itself, and their legal expert, Gary Reback. Both boast solid credentials - the Internet Archive has worked tirelessly, and non-commercially, to digitise out-of-copyright books, while Reback is probably the valley’s most high-profile anti-monopoly activist.

(If Reback’s name sounds familiar it’s because in the 90s he was instrumental in persuading the DoJ to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations - and also because in a recent interview with Michael Arrington he said that, he doesn’t think Microsoft should have been split in two because the investigation itself was enough to make the company change its ways. Apparently in Reback welcoming Microsoft into the Alliance, the enemy of his enemy is now his friend.)

All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?

The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.

If I were the Alliance’s legal advisor, I’d recommend that they leave the anti-trust nonsense to Google’s conflicted rivals and instead focus their efforts on lobbying for a change to the US Copyright Act. Google has already said that they would support a change in the law to shore up the status of their searchable rights registry and to protect all users of unregistered orphan works from breach of copyright claims.

The Alliance should be working with Google to make that change happen - and that includes Amazon who really has no business siding with a bunch of sour-grapes-fuelled anti-trust cheerleaders.

Beyond that, if I were advising the Alliance, I’d tell them to shut up about extending the settlement to all comers. Google has spent millions of dollars being forced into the deal they now have with publishers and it’s frankly ludicrous to expect them to share those hard-fought spoils with their biggest competitors.

Google Books may be a commercial enterprise, and it may be establishing a position where it can dictate terms to authors and publishers. But it also happens to be the best book search product the world has ever seen. Really, it’s incredible. And if the likes of Amazon and the Internet Archive started working with it rather than against it, it could also be the answer to rewarding book authors in a digital age, tidying up the mess of orphaned works, making books accessible to a new generation of readers and - hell - shifting a few million more e-books and e-book readers. And with a change in the law to allow everyone to exploit orphaned works, many of the anti-trust issues that Reback hates so much would vanish too. That really would be a win-win.

But of course I’m not anyone’s legal advisor; I’m just a guy who writes a technology column for money. And, as I may have mentioned before, an author. And a former co-founder of a publishing company. I mean, really this isn’t my field. I’m just glad that once again Google is in the right, and their rivals are in the wrong. The TechCrunch/Google circle jerk can continue for another week.

Awesome. Someone pass me the Gool-aid.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were threatening to leave the service immediately, turning them into yes, FFugees.

Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first.

Of note:

• FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details.
• Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub. He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information.
• Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal.
• While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago, Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here.
• With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works.
• That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely.
• Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook.
• Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product.
• He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post.) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more.
• Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on.
• He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well.
• Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now.
• There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well.
• On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.)
• Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon.

Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do).  Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most  from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.

Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like  — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage.

Please note that this is a list of services that you can use over the net without the need to download anything to your computer. This is why I’m not listing any P2P software: i.e., Spotify, as well the fact that most of us can’t really test it or use it for all that matter. This is also only the first half of this guide; part two will include more web music players (including MySpace Music, Streamzy, and others) as well as music search engines and services that make it easy to share songs on Twitter and other social sites.

Music Recommendations:

Pandora is a service that can be used only in a specific locale, this one being within the U.S. Luckily, I had the chance to test the service when it was first released and became available to everyone. Launched way back in July 2005, the project had been in the initial testing phases for five years prior to launch date. Pandora recommends music to you by matching similar musical attributes. All you really need to do is choose an artist or a band you like, and Pandora will do the rest. Pandora delivers high quality 128Kbps audio streams, offering recommendations similar to the artists you have chosen. Pandora’s player looks like a radio, you can open up to 100 stations and navigate through them quickly. Registering for Pandora will provide you with a free account (advertising-supported). Free Pandora accounts will play up to  40 hours of music for free per month, you also have the option to pay 99 cents for unlimited listening hours for the rest of that month, or pay $36 to upgrade Pandora for one year. If you want to download music from Pandora, you can do it through iTunes or Amazon. You can see our past Pandora coverage here.

With almost 3 million unique visitors a day, Last.fm is one of the most powerful social music communities on the Web today. Like Pandora, the service allows you to enjoy music that you like, but unlike Pandora, Last.fm analyses what you and your friends listen to and like, and then suggests more music based on that analysis. When you recommend music to a friend or you tag it, or you write about it, or simply just listen to it - you shift the song’s importance on the site, and will in turn get recommended to more people. Based on the music you’ve already listened to, Last.fm will recommend new music you might like, as well as suggest other users with a similar music taste to yours, which you might be interested in friending, and you can also easily communicate with them. If you live outside the U.S., U.K. or Germany, you can listen with a free 30-track trial or subscribe for a low price of $3/month for unlimited radio streaming. (Launched in 2002!)

This is how BlogMusik, looked in 2006, and this is how Deezer (formerly BlogMusik) looks today - pretty impressive change, don’t you think? The French-based service is one of the largest and happens to also be a very successful music recommendation search engine. Once registered here, you can create your personal profile and reach the Deezer community. You can create playlists, send messages to your contacts, leave comments, add artists and albums to your favorites, and more. But here’s what I like the most - The SmartRadio, which is an intelligent radio that automatically generates 3 hours(!) of continuous listening based on one artist - completely free. Priceless! You can see our past coverage of Deezer here.

I think the first Adobe AIR application that I ever tried was Finetune. Finetune provides you with the most interesting new playlists of related music from your choice of artists. Besides the site’s community where you can browse, listen to music, create a profile, connect with other users and more, Finefune also has some cool feautures to complete their suite, and each tool gives you an extraordinary music experience. Take for example the Finetune Wii project (which can be played also over the web), it’s a great sight and sound for the eyes and ears. Just enter an artist’s name and Finetune will create a playlist with similar music that will play for hours. Best of all it’s free, and you also get an iPhone, Facebook and a Desktop app that all sync with your music playlist, no matter where you play it from. You can see our past coverage of FineTune here.

Also worth mentioning in this same topic group are, of course: Ilike.com (acquired by Myspace), and music.strands.tv

Independent Music:

Amie Street is a home for musicians. The service allows music fans to discover new and independent music. Visitors at the site can search for new music based on genre, region, or recommendations. Fans can also search for music according to its price -  Amie Street is actually the only marketplace where listeners determine the price of the music. How does it work? Every song is originally priced free or very inexpensive and increases in price, up to 98 cents, as more and more users purchase it. Musicians then get 70% of the revenue from each sale. Additionally, Amie Street matches you with music that you might like, for example: I couldn’t locate Coldplay on the site, but I got more than 70 results that sound similar to the band. Obviously, this exposes me to music that I’ve never heard before, which is always a welcomed experience. You can see our past coverage of Amie Street here.

Why is Jamendo one of my favorite music services? It offers the largest catalog of music under Creative Commons licenses - worldwide. And, not only are all of the albums free to download, there’s also a large chance you won’t know any of the artists. If you already have an open mind about music, surely it won’t stop you from listening to some new albums, right? The best way to find music at this site is to search by the genre tags. Found something that you like? You can review, comment, rate, share and as I’ve said download it for free.  The service is available in seven languages, and has an iPhone app that you can download for free. Business model? Yes they have one too.

SoundCloud is by far the best looking music application there is today. It offers a great interface, a great user-experience and above these all, great music! SoundCloud lets music professionals receive, send and distribute their music. The service allows professionals (and non-professionals) to exchange, and follow music and musicians at the site. It’s a full community where people can easily communicate with each other based on shared tastes, but it is also a place where musicians can store and showcase their music using high quality standards. With the free account, you can only upload 5 tracks maximum per month, but if you are an industry fanatic and you find this plan to be somewhat lacking, you can check the pro page for packages that are more suitable to your needs. See our past coverage here.

TheSixtyOne allows artists to upload their songs and lets thousands of listeners decide whether they like it or not. The most popular songs hit the front page. Think about it as a Digg for music, the more people heart a song, the higher it goes. The site connects musicians and fans, giving them all the tools to communicate with each other. For artists, it’s good place to promote their work. For anyone else, it’s a wonderful place to discover and support new music.

Create & Listen to Playlist:

I’ve never been very much of a Project Playlist fan, but I have to say it’s a good service. Ultimately, it’s a community based on playlists. You don’t have to register to be able to listen to the music, but once you do, you can start building your playlist and enjoy more features such as the Playlist IM, which is a chat system similar to Facebook where you can connect your ‘playlist’ friends or even friends from AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, etc. What else? You can write blog entries, upload photos, privately connect with other members, browse thousands of other music playlists, comment, share, and much more. My guess is that people use this site mostly to share their playlist on their blog/site or social network. Playlist allows you to grab a playlist code and embed it anywhere you want. One thing that bugs me though is that the member’s search feature is missing. Today, when everything is so connected to your identity, this is a must have feature. On the other hand, I was impressed to see they saved my playlist from 2006…

Jiwa.fm allows you to create personalize playlist and share it in the Jiwa.fm community or with friends & family. As a member, you are able to share, exchange, and explore music. You can also expand your tastes with the SmartRadio tool. I found this service to be unique in a way because no matter what you are doing at the site, it won’t prevent you from listening to your playlist, it just plays in the background. Amazingly, when you click on an artist from within a mixed artists playlist, it will automatically create an album playlist of that artist. You might find the site to be a bit cluttered at first time, but once you get it, it works like a charm - highly recommended.

At Jogli, you don’t really need to create a playlist - they create it for you. Think about it as a giant web-based CD store where you can search for an artist, see all of his/her albums, and then listen to them exactly as listed in original CD  Let’s take Michael Jackson for example: Here you can find all his discography, and listen to his CDs one by one. Clicking on the button ‘Play Radio’ will open a radio station generated from music you might like from similar artists. As a registered member, you are able to save playlists, write reviews, and more. You can also import your playlists to Last.fm or iTunes to make it a video playlist. Check out our past coverage of Jogli here.

MixTube would have been better and easier if they allowed you to search for Youtube videos on their site to create a playlist. But no, you have to supply them with a Youtube URL, which means, you’ll have to go directly to Youtube, search for a song, then copy-paste that song URL back into MixTube. Thus, I found it to be frustrating. But looking at the bright side, you can always search for someone else’s playlist, and save yourself time and agony. One word about the Youtube music integration - lots of services use it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you much control of your playlist, and what plays today, may not play tomorrow..

Lala is another great music store/playlist maker that we’ve covered extensively since the site relaunched last year. It allows users to listen to any song they want one time. If you want to listen to a song more than that, you buy a 10 cent ‘web song’ that lets you stream the song from the cloud as many times as you want (you can also purchase a full download of the song as you would from iTunes or Amazon). The site has a great integrated music player and a variety of pre-made playlists built by other users.

Worth mentioning: Imeem, and Maestro.fm

Music Visualization:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Musicovery has a strong following of avid users. The site is an interactive and personalized webradio enabling its users to generate in a few clicks a musical program adapted to the various listening situations and their preferences. Their unique mood matrix proposes a relationship between music and mood in an ergonomic and attractive manner. I’ve submitted this item about the service to Digg in 2006 and it’s good to see the site still works . But things have changed. You have limited navigation if you’re not a pro user ($15/3 months or $48/12 months), but once you are - the sky is the limit. In any case, this service will blow you away.

CitySounds.fm is perhaps just a mashup site, but it’s a good one! CitySounds.fm collects music from SoundCloud and pictures from Flickr to create a wonderful music experience from a single page. You can listen to the latest music from cities all around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list is constantly changing as new music is being created.

Web-Radio:

Very similar to Last.fm in concept, Jango allows you to create your own custom radio stations and share them with friends. Just type in what you want to hear - and your station will immediately play the music you want along with similar favorites of other Jango users who share your tastes. You can customize your stations further by adding more artists and rating songs. Each artist get a page, containing the web-radio, the music playlist, biographies, events list, comments from members at the site, and fan list for easy communication. The service claims to be legal and says it pays royalties due to all labels/artists every time a song is played. Moreover, Jango runs a program called Jango Airplay. This program gives emerging artists an unprecedented opportunity to be proactively exposed to the millions of visitors at the site. See our past coverage of Jango here.

RadioBeta is an efficient way to locate radio stations in your area or around the globe. You can search stations by geography, genre, band, language or tags. You can listen without signing up, or you can log in and create your personal dashboard with favorite stations that  you can then listen to on a daily basis. We mostly hear radio on the go, but now you can easily track your favorite radio stations on the web. All the radio stations are public so you aren’t asked to pay anything to use the site.

OK, TheRadio is also one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Entering an artist or a genre gets you custom channel, but if you go over the channel listing, you will find much more interesting suggestions. I don’t know about you but I actually like when someone else picks the music as long is it in the range of my request. Anyway, TheRadio does a great job on finding music that I like - it simply works.

Aupeo fits in the Recommendation list as well as this category. The service lets you experience music in a fours different ways: by Stations, Artist, Mood, and Personal. The Stations area is pretty limited if you don’t have a pro account, but you can still get the feel of it. In the Artist zone, you enter your favorite name and choose from a variety stations suggested. The coolest way is the Mode area, which plays music based on your chosen mode. These stations are created by music experts, says Aupeo.  The Personal station streams music based on your music behavior at the site. Overall, very intensive and powerful!

Worth mentioning: Tun3r, Mugasha, and  Play.fm

That’s it for Part 1 of this music guide. If you have any other suggestions related to these groups, you are more than welcome to add them in the comments. In the next part of this post, I’ll offer the best options for Music search engines, Music web-players, Twitter-Music craziness, and more. Stay tuned!

Image by RossinaBossioB on Flickr.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It turns out there is more to the story behind the sudden demise of Tipjoy. The micro-payments service was trying to sell itself, according to a source with direct knowledge of the attempted transaction, and even got an all-stock offer from Facebook nominally worth around $5 million. The deal fell through when Facebook walked away.

But Facebook didn’t walk away completely empty-handed. It managed to hire Tipjoy co-founder and CTO Ivan Kirigin instead. After the acquisition negotiations fell apart, Facebook reached out to hire Kirigin. They made him an offer, and he accepted. It is not clear what he will be working on, but Facebook Payments would be a good guess.

Some investors weren’t too thrilled because Tipjoy was still in discussions with other potential acquirers (including Twitter and PayPal). But once Kirigin was out of the picture, the other interest evaporated, say our sources.

All of this brings up a real dilemma for small-app startups. If all Facebook or Twitter has to do is hire one or two key people instead of buy the whole company, then it will be hard to capture much value in the long run.

As for Facebook, building its own social payments platform makes a lot of sense. Kirigin and his co-founder (and wife) Abbey, spell that out in Tipjoy’s farewell post:

We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. . . . we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments - then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

Now Kirigin can try to prove that social payments can succeed within one of those larger platforms, Facebook, even though Tipjoy was better known as a Twitter (and blogging) phenomenon.

TipJoy did not respond to repeated attempts to contact them on this post.

Update: Abby Kirigin emails:

Erick’s accusation that Ivan took a job at Facebook while “Tipjoy was still in discussions with other potential acquirers (including Twitter and PayPal)” is absolutely absurd and totally untrue.

Of all people, it is Ivan and I who would have most loved to see Tipjoy acquired and our investors paid. That anyone can even insinuate that that is not the case shocks me.

-Abby Kirigin
co-founder, tipjoy.com

Perhaps the TipJoy founders should discuss this issue with their investors, who disagree, in a more private forum.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

When it comes to winning in the App Store, one PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple's App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client's applications. Yeah, that 5-star iTunes app review you saw for the once top-5 paid app Enigmo? It might not be written by a real user, but rather by Pangea Software's PR firm. Reverb isn't the first to try and game the user review process, but they are definitely one of the most blatant cases. Reverb Communications is an extremely successful PR firm that claims to have "first party" and "personal" relationships with Apple. Aside from representing Pangea Software, one of the more successful App developers for the iPhone (they made Enigmo, which was featured during the Apple WWDC Keynote 2008), they also represent Harmonix (the Guitar Hero and Rock Band guys), MTV Games, and a host of iPhone game developers. Additionally, they've managed to do an impressive job at courting the press: clients have had iPhone apps featured in just about every major media outlet known to man, including Forbes, MTV, G4TV, NBC (in fact, all the examples were for one developer: Publisher X, which Reverb happens to own). Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 Billion of product under their watch.

Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

In a way we are all virtual stock holders in Twitter. We all have a vested interest in its success. Facebook is soon to monopolize the social stream to the same extent that Google has done with search. That is not good for anyone, including Facebook. I have had many discussions with people in recent weeks about the face-off between twitter and Facebook and also about the high probability of Twitter cutting a deal with Google. When I was asked by Erick Schonfeld at the Real Tiime Stream Crunchup (Video) event about my opinion on Twitter giving Google their firehose feed, I responded that they could do that if they don’t plan to sell their company in the future. In other words, it is my humble opinion that if Twitter was a publicly traded stock its value would drop by 75% the second that deal was announced and for good reason.

Twitter is important. How often does a company come along that really changes consumer behavior? That creates a new form of media consumption and connectivity? For all the thousands of startups covered on Techcrunch only a few have a profound impact on the arc of internet history. Twitter has earned its spot in that pantheon and now it remains to be seen if it can play a bigger role in how to monetize the stream and in the process build a real business.

At this moment in time, Twitter has such a stronghold on this new form of real-time consumption that it has the potential to dominate the category. But its window of opportunity is closing fast as Facebook and others hurl themselves at that prize. The experience of real-time communication and search, that sense you get of unfolding streams of relevant information to your interests and queries flowing in a digital river has arrived with Twitter coursing first through the rapids. But now that we have arrived at this new medium, what next? Does Twitter become an example of a utility that is emulated by others that already have a monetization engine, leaving Twitter to ultimately drift to a respected place in Wikipedia like Netscape? Or does it continue to push the boundaries and create a sustainable and growing business that will allow it to continue to ride the whitewater?

If twitter is to confine itself to being a communications medium, or even worse, a news distribution engine, it will surely perish. By analogy, Google as a business is not a search engine but an advertising business that is printing money at unprecedented rates. Google does this by owning the equivalent of distribution in the digital age.  Its just that the meaning of the word “distribution” in the digital age has shifted. Google, as the entry point for such a vast audience, effectively owns the distribution on the Internet as a business leader and brand. Its lead continues to grow as the audience grows.

Google’s economics lay in the economy of intent. The intent of users to purchase a product or service when they use Google’s search is what drives its money presses. The context of the users’ actions and interests map to an intention which advertisers are eager to pay for. The ability to automate the placement of advertising next to relevant content and map consumer queries to useful advertising stands at the heart of Google’s success.

This is something that has been notoriously missing on communication platforms. See AIM as an example. What was once an omnipresent juggernaut of a product is inching towards being a footnote in internet history. One that has always struggled to monetize its vast audience. The same is true for other communications platforms such as Hotmail and Gmail. They have become strategic traffic drivers in companies with a broader monetization engine. Look further into innovative news aggregation platforms such as Digg, Google News, and Techmeme and you see that it’s pretty tough to generate significant revenues in news, certainly not Google-scale revenues.  Even for pillars of the industry such as the New York Times, big online profits are elusive.  So there are not many prospects for building a sustainable multi-billion dollar business for Twitter either as a communications platform or a news discovery engine.

The way to make Twitter into a sustainable business is to tap into the economy of intent. God knows Twitter has that potential, but it has a narrow window of opportunity in which to execute. The business promise is to create a new type of useful advertising for people that is consumed in the context of a new form of discovery—one that for the moment is unique to Twitter but, alas, not for long.  If Twitter doesn’t pick up the pace at this moment in time and take the path leading to building a business, it will begin to destroy its value. By doing a deal that will give Google unfettered access to real-time results from Twitter in Google search, Twitter will effectively be giving up the fight and losing the war. For if consumers can get the same experience that is currently unique to Twitter on Google, why would they need to go to Twitter to search?  If they don’t bring their intentions to Twitter search, then Twitter is not participating in the Economy of Intent and as such will diminish its value to the single-digit millions.

At the risk of stating the obvious let me throw out some constructs. There has been much speculation about how Twitter will make money. From #pastryto #diabetes, the world of Twitter is self-organizing in a highly effective folksonomy that is vibrant and useful. Today, Twitter users are left to their own devices when it comes to unearthing these gems in the stream. As Twitter further develops its discovery(taxonomy) and search engine, the valuable content streams will be unearthed. Think of the simple impact of auto-complete in the search box to # tags. This is but one simple move which could start to drive traffic to focused streams of information, which could also map to useful advertising, just like on Google. Start with creating a marketplace for advertisers around the #tags, then search queries, and see how valuable the experience Twitter created really is. Throw in the recent evolution in geo-tagging and you add another layer of usefulness. Typing in “amazing restaurant” when you are in Soho should show a fresh stream of nearby locations, recommendations, and warnings. As Twitter make these changes, users will start focusing more on discovery, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Users will alter their behavior to capture the search queries. The notions of surfacing more advanced trends and audience recirculation present further opportunities. There is so much that can be done in this domain once Twitter has the critical mass of audience and data.

Twitter has a unique opportunity to innovate and create new forms of useful advertising that will truly help both users and advertisers. This was the key to Google’s success and is the key to Twitter’s future. It takes time for advertising to become useful as it requires a significant liquidity of ads. Twitter has to start soon to build up that liquidity in time for the face-off competition for the advertisers. They need for buyers to know they are the go-to place for in-stream advertising. Google is at a big disadvantage at this junction in time. One only needs to set a Google alert to see how latent their Twitter discovery is (I have seen alerts come in for tweets that are 3 days old). Google has not made it a secret that the strategic importance of the real-time web registers with them.

For Twitter to give away the farm (its firehose of Tweets) at this stage is tantamount to suicide and can only be defined as a form of creative laziness. Twitter, you got this far don’t get too comfortable with all that money in the bank. Get off your asses and push, you owe it to history. There are so many things you could be doing short of giving up and serving yourself up on a silver platter. If you must do it, if you do sell your data or yourself to Google – make ‘em pay, they can afford it. If you give away your data to the majors, they wont need to buy you anyway and if you don’t create a solid way to make money, you can’t survive on your own.

Make your own path, and you’ve got it made.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

It’s been just under a year since Yammer, the ‘Twitter for businesses’, launched at TechCrunch 50 and won the conference’s top prize. Since then the service has seen steady growth, with over 40,000 networks signed up for the service. It’s also become an absolutely essential tool inside the TechCrunch office, which is why I grew alarmed when I noticed that the service is currently down. But a quick visit to the site’s blog reveals that this was planned downtime, and for good reason: when Yammer comes back up, it will feature a host of impressive features in what may be the service’s biggest update since launch. We got in touch with CEO David Sacks, who outlined what we can expect when the service comes back later tonight.

Some of the new features include:

• Revamped iPhone App — The big new feature here is Push notifications, which will allow you to get updated whenever you get a message without having to burn through SMS messages. The app also integrates a camera mode for taking photos, improved text entry (you can auto-save drafts and type in landscape mode), and improved performance. The app is currently pending approval in the app store, so we may have to wait a few more days to download it.
  
  
  
• Likes — Yammer is adopting the feature popularized by Friendfeed and later “borrowed” by Facebook. However, Likes in Yammer aren’t just virtual pats on the back — every time you Like something, it will be shared with everyone in your network, which means that Liked messages grow virally.
  
  
  
• Threads — You’ll now be able to view messages in a threaded view, in a manner that looks very similar to Facebook, or you can revert back to the Twitter-like stream Yammer has used until now. The stream works fine for small groups, but it can become unwieldly when multiple conversations are going on at once, which makes the threaded view a welcome addition. For now this will be limited to the web version, but the desktop client will support it in the next few weeks.



• Improved Search — Search has been improved to include a number of advanced options, including limiting searches to a specific user or to coworkers in a certain group.

Other improvements include more security options (you can make passwords automatically expire after a certain time period), a ‘broadcast’ mode for network admins that lets them send a message throughout an entire network, and an improved interface.

All in all this is a great update for Yammer, which continues to improve on an already-solid product. Last month Yammer unveiled a rebuilt client for Adobe AIR, which was also a big improvement over the old app. That said, I could do without AIR’s quirks — I wish Yammer offered some native clients.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Apple has responded to the FCC’s request for information around its rejection of various Google and third party iPhone applications for the iPhone.

In short, Apple denies that they rejected the Google Voice application, but they go into great detail about how the Google Voice application hurts “the iPhone’s distinctive user experience.” All of those statements are either untrue, or misleading, or both.

The first part of Apple’s argument, that they never rejected the application, is “a total lie,” according to many sources with knowledge of the Google Voice application process.

The second part of Apple’s argument, that the Google Voice application hurts the iPhone’s distinctive user experience, is seriously misleading. I know this because I’ve become intimately familiar with the Google Voice service and applications over the last few months. See here, here, here and here, for example. I haven’t used the Google Voice app for the iPhone specifically, because it never launched. But I have been briefed by the Google team on two separate occasions on how the app would work over the last couple of months. Also, I’ve demo’d the Blackberry version of the app, and now use the Android version of the app.

Here’s the key language from Apple’s letter, with my comments:

Apple: “Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.”

Reality: One third party Google Voice app developer disclosed to us in July that Apple SVP Phil Schiller told them that Google’s own app would be or already was rejected. Google also confirmed this to us later. There is overwhelming evidence that Apple did in fact reject the application.

Apple: “The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail. Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone.”

Reality: This strongly suggests that the Google Voice app replaces much of the core Apple iPhone OS function. This certainly isn’t accurate, and we believe the statement is misleading. More details below, but in general the iPhone app is a very light touch and doesn’t interfere with any native iPhone apps at all.

Apple: “For example, on an iPhone, the “Phone” icon that is always shown at the bottom of the Home Screen launches Apple’s mobile telephone application, providing access to Favorites, Recents, Contacts, a Keypad, and Visual Voicemail. The Google Voice application replaces Apple’s Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple’s Visual Voicemail.”

Reality: Not true and misleading. The Google Voice application has its own voicemail function, which also transcribes messages. But it only works for incoming Google Voice calls, not calls to the iPhone. The Google Voice app in no way “replaces” Apple’s voicemail function.

Apple: “Similarly, SMS text messages are managed through the Google hub—replacing the iPhone’s text messaging feature.”

Reality: Not true and misleading. The Google Voice app doesn’t replace or in any way interfere wtih the iPhone’s text messaging feature. If someone sends a text message to your Google Voice number, the Google Voice app shows it. If it is sent directly to the iPhone phone number, nothing is different.

Apple: “In addition, the iPhone user’s entire Contacts database is transferred to Google’s servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways. These factors present several new issues and questions to us that we are still pondering at this time.”

Reality: Complete fabrication, way beyond misleading. The Google Voice app can access the iPhone’s contacts database, like thousands of other iPhone apps. But the Google Voice app never syncs the contacts database to their own servers. There is no option for users to do this. However, Apple offers the ability to sync iPhone contacts with Google via iTunes. So not only is Apple’s statement untrue, but they also provide this exact feature themselves via their own service.

So how did Google answer the same question in their own separate letter to the FCC, also made publicly available today? We don’t know, because Google requested that the answer be redacted. But my guess is that the answer, which the FCC has and can compare to Apple’s response, tells a significantly different (approximately the exact opposite) story:

Our sources at Google tell us in no uncertain terms that Apple rejected the application. And we have an independent third party app developer who tells us that an Apple Exec also told them back in July that the Google Voice Application was rejected.

In other words, there is strong evidence that Apple is, well, lying.

Which also is the easiest way to explain Apple’s long rambling letter to the FCC. Why go into so much detail about the problems with the Google Voice application, and then say that it was never rejected? If the app does actually replace all of those core apple phone, contact and SMS features, why not reject it out of hand? I don’t believe anyone would say Apple made the wrong decision if that laundry list of nonsense had any truth to it (we have an answer to that, below).

Multiple sources at Google tell us that in informal discussions with Apple over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features. The Google Voice App takes things one step further, by giving users an incentive to abandon their iPhone phone number and use their Google Voice phone number instead (transcription of voicemails is reason enough alone). Apple was afraid, say our sources, that Google was gaining too much power on the iPhone, and that’s why they rejected the application.

Apple seemed to be fine telling Google and others that the real reason they wouldn’t accept the Google Voice app on the iPhone was a fear of being turned into little more than a hardware manufacturer over time as users spent more and more time on Google Voice and less time on the competing native iPhone apps. Or simply letting people believe that AT&T was behind the rejection. Until the FCC got involved, that is. Then Apple denied the rejections and directed the FCCs attention to misleading or simply untrue factual statements about the App.

Of course, now both Google and AT&T are required to tell their side of the story to the FCC, too. And those stories aren’t adding up.

What Happens Next?

Here’s what we believe Apple is preparing to do next. Their statement that they haven’t rejected the app, along with the long laundry list of complaints (none of which are true) tells us that they’re backtracking, and fast. Sometime soon, we guess, Apple will simply accept the Google Voice application. They have to - any serious investigation into the app by the FCC will show that the complaints around the app are unfounded and that it does none of the things Apple accuses it of doing. So Apple will save face by simply asking Google to ensure that the App doesn’t take over native phone, sms and other functions, and doesn’t sync the contacts to Google’s servers. Google will comply (they already have), and Apple will graciously accept the application.

But we’ll all know exactly where Apple stands - jealously guarding control of their users and trying to block Google and other third party developers at every turn from getting their superior applications in front those users.

This isn’t about protecting users, it’s about controlling them. And that’s not what Apple should be about. Put the users first, Steve, and don’t lie to us. We’re not that dumb.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

One person was killed, 15 others injured and a premier resort in the outskirts of Kolkata was set on fire on Sunday following a clash that broke out after a football match on a ground next to the resort.

How do we thank our heroes – men and women who spend their lives keeping you and me safe? A family in Amritsar is struggling to survive after their only earner, a BSF jawan's accident almost a decade back. The promised help is yet to come and its absence could cost his two young girls their education.

A police station in Haldwani was set on fire on Sunday, hours after a local BJP leader was shot dead in the city, allegedly by a BSP leader. The mob also beat the Head Constable to death, injured some others, set vehicles ablaze and blocked traffic.

In one of the worst Naxal attacks in recent times in Bihar, five policemen were ambushed and killed by 40 Maoists. The policemen were killed when heavily armed Maoists attacked a police patrol, barely 500 metres from the local police station. Maoist looted their weapons before escaping.

After a terrible week, the news for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) isn’t getting any better. Jaswant Singh, who was expelled on Wednesday, met former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Sunday – a signal that Vajpayee has perhaps distanced himself from his party's stand on Jaswant Singh.

In Shimla, the party denied the existence of the report. But on Sunday, Swapan Dasgupta -- a senior journalist close to the BJP -- questioned that the flutter over the report is worrying.

Israel on Sunday said it would not conduct separate investigation into the Mumbai terror attacks in which some of its nationals were also killed. "Indian agencies have been doing the job and hearing in the case against lone arrested Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab is also on," Consul General of Israel in Mumbai Orna Sagiv said after a function in Vadodara.

More than half of the country is dealing with a crippling drought, and farmers are fast losing hope of any relief. Jharkhand was one of the first states to declare a drought, across all its districts, but from a state so stricken by calamity, also comes a story of hope in these times. Here’s the story of a humble villager whose initiative is helping a set of farmers to overcome the tragedy.

Going against the tradition of presenting eye-catching tableaus, grand decorations and lighting, Ganesh mandals in Pune have decided to have a sombre Ganeshotsav this year, all to prevent swine flu from spreading.

At a time when the country seems to be battling the crisis arising out of a drought situation, there are some areas that have a different problem. Darbhanga in Bihar is facing the problem of flooding. The water has overrun the national highway that connects Darbhanga to Jayanagar near Nepal at two places.

PMO says Manmohan Singh will not intervene in the gas war.

The annual budget was largely derided by corporate India this year.

China has thrust itself in all spheres of economic activity in the continent.

Anil Ambani has accused the government of favouring Mukesh.

Centre replies to Anil Ambani's allegations that it sided with RIL.

Pvt family MoU not to impinge on govt's right to approve price, fix usage of gas.

Asim Dasgupta, Chairman of the Empowered Committee on State Finance Ministry on Tax Reforms has said that goods and services tax (GST) rates are likely to be finalised by the first week of September. GST rates, he said, will be revenue positive for most states.

CNBCTV18 spoke to Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar on the drought impact on food stocks. Pawar said while paddy and sugarcane crops were affected, the government had made efforts to up production of wheat and rice. \"The government of India today has a stock of next 13 months of wheat and rice.\"

In January 2008 Ranbaxy acquired Hyderabadbased Zenotech labs, 6 months later Ranbaxy itself got acquired by Japanese pharmaceutical major Daiichi. That prompted Daiichi to make an open offer for Zenotech as well. But Zenotech is not happy with the price. It says it\'s shareholders are entitled to more?

The country’s water situation is grim and several parts of the country are deprived of drinking water due to the monsoon, said Dr RK Pachauri of TERI. He added the country’s poor water resource management added to the drought woes.

Federer defeated world number two Andy Murray to reach the final.

He received his medal from Marlene Dortch, granddaughter of Jesse Owens.

He has already bettered his 100 and 200 metres world records.

This is the second time the duo entered this semi-finals.

Federer and Murray will meet for the ninth time.

World No. 2 Serena Williams brushed aside qualifier Lucie Safarova.

Michael Hussey's hundred proved in vain as Australia were bowled out for 348 in the last session.

Mark Richardson accused Murali of breaching the 15-degree flexing rule.

Eminent cricket experts and Indian stars discuss the challenges facing the game.

Andrew Symonds says the rigid team rules still rankle him.

CHIRU ENTRANCE VIDEO IN MAGADHEERA (Direct Link) www.kekaarupu.blogspot.com

http://rapidshare.com/files/262211727/magadheera_www.kekaarupu.blogspot.com.rar

The Praja Rajyam Party (PRP) has urged the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) to direct the authorities concerned to take immediate measures to check the spread of water-borne diseases in the State.

A delegation of PRP leaders today met SHRC chairperson Justice B Subhashan Reddy and described the prevailing situation in the State as a health crisis.

They said that in the agency areas of Visakhapatnam district 16 tribal deaths had been reported in the last 45 days on account of anthrax. Government records themselves showed that there were 55 cases of anthrax, but adequate measures had yet to be taken, the PRP alleged.

Referring to the Bholakpur incident, the PRP leaders noted that “primitive’’ diseases like cholera had broken out even in the State capital. Several other parts of the city had been affected and the situation was also alarming in Adilabad, Vizianagaram, Srikakulam, Medak, Warangal and Ananthapur. The PRP delegation blamed the government for sheer negligence in checking contamination and in replacing outdated water and sewerage pipes.

Instead of swinging into action, the ministers concerned had gone to the extent of dismissing the crisis as a “routine affair’’ and a political ploy by the Opposition and the media.

PRP leaders P Upendra, C Ramachandraiah and others were part of the delegation which met the SHRC chairperson.

PRP plea to Govt: The State Government should take measures immediately to contain the spread of cholera and gastroenteritis which have assumed epidemic proportions, the Praja Rajyam has demanded.

Speaking to the media here today, party general secretary Vinay Kumar said the government had failed to supply clean drinking water to rural people.

A team of doctors, who included himself, had visited Mandamarri in Adilabad district and found the gastroenteritis patients in a deplorable condition, he said.

Vinay Kumar said that the 10- bed primary health centre was not equipped to serve about 300 patients in the town. As the PHC lacked the essential medicines, his party had supplied medicines and IV fluids worth Rs 1 lakh there, he said.

More AP 2009 Elections Results Live News
1.http://www.chiru.in
2.http://www.apelections2009.in/
3.http:www.a2zindianews.com
4.http://anjax.com/

Online 2009 Elections Voting

Shobha, Prakashraj deny rumours of their marriage Shobha Rani, chief of mega star Chiranjeevi led Praja Rajyam's women's wing Mahila Rajyam, has vehemently denied media reports that she has recently married actor Prakashraj in Chennai in the presence of PRP leaders, stating that whole issue is a false story created by the media. She claims that the photos published on the Internet are fake. Prakashraj too has denied marrying Shobha Rani, saying his divorce petition is still pending in court. 'It is far from true. I know Prakashraj. I met him at a shooting when I went there to meet a director I knew. He is just an acquaintance. I too have received the pictures of my so-called wedding with Prakashraj and they are fake,' Shobha Rani says, adding that she is involved in public life and has no time for such flings. Shobha Rani was separated from her husband Ranganayakulu after she lodged a police complaint alleging he had been harassing her physically and mentally with demands for dowry. The Sanjeeva Reddy Nagar police registered a case against him in April 2008, but could not arrest him for one full year as he had was absconding. In April 2009, they took him into custody when he returned to his home in Yellareddyguda. He is now on out on bail. Earlier, Prakashraj had filed an application for divorce from his wife Lalitha Kumari at the family court in Chennai. The star couple had been the popular pair of South India and has three children. The court is yet to announce their divorce. Check out: Latest Movie Trailers Download Wallpapers Download Posters

Praja Rajyam president Chiranjeevi has said that information technology, bio-technology and pharma sectors would receive a boost when his party comes to power.

He is understood to have told this to Peter Burleigh, the United States Charge d’Affaires when the latter made a courtesy call on him at his residence here on Tuesday. When Mr. Chiranjeevi asked him about the slowdown and the US policy of outsourcing and a possible reduction in business relations between the two nations, Mr. Burleigh is said to have told him that India would continue to have its place of importance in the key areas of IT and outsourcing.

Praja Rajyam general secretaries Allu Aravind and K.V. Rao were also present when Mr. Burleigh and Deputy Chief of the US Mission in India, Steven J. White called on Mr. Chiranjeevi.

More AP 2009 Elections Results Live News
1.http://www.chiru.in
2.http://www.apelections2009.in/
3.http:www.a2zindianews.com
4.http://anjax.com/

Online 2009 Elections Voting

HYDERABAD: Prajarajyam party president K Chiranjeevi would soon embark on an elaborate exercise to interact with mandal-level and village-level PRP leaders over the next 10 days.

Though the schedule has not been finalized, messages have been sent to all contestants to shortlist at least 20 names in their respective constituencies who sincerely took the party to the masses. These 20 leaders would have direct interaction with the party president and they in turn would be asked to identify 50 leaders at the mandal-level and village-level, who would have an opportunity to meet the party president and share their experiences over dinner.

Party sources said that the dinner diplomacy was being planned to keep the cadres’ morale high till the day of counting, May 16. Strangely, Chiranjeevi would be doing an exercise which his arch political rival and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu completed well before the conduct of elections in the state.

Meanwhile, the PRP president was on a high on Monday with more than satisfactory feedback from contestants in East Godavari, West Godavari and Visakhapatnam. The review meetings held to assess the party’s performance in East Godavari and West Godavari ended on a buoyant note with party leaders exuding confidence that the party would win 28 out of the 34 assembly seats.

Contestants who attended the meeting claimed that women and first-time voters in both the Godavari districts came out in large numbers to cast a `decisive vote’. The polling percentage in both the Godavari districts was as high as 81.5 per cent. The PRP president has reviewed the party’s performance in 22 districts and the last one on the list is Krishna district, which would be reviewed on Tuesday.

In response to a query, contestants from West Godavari said that they would strive for the victory of any candidate from Palacole, in case the party president decided to retain the Tirupati assembly seat.

In another development, the party demanded the state government to announce and ex gratia of Rs 1 lakh to 38 people, mostly poor farmers, who died of sun stroke across the state in the past 48 hours.

More AP 2009 Elections Results Live News
1.http://www.chiru.in
2.http://www.apelections2009.in/
3.http:www.a2zindianews.com
4.http://anjax.com/

Online 2009 Elections Voting

HYDERABAD: In a noble gesture, the Praja Rajyam Party (PRP) extended monetary support of Rs 17 lakh and saved the life of a seven-year-old boy who was suffering from liver disease.

PRP leaders D Sravankumar and Katyayani disclosed this to the media at the party office here Sunday.

According to them, as G Leala, a resident of Anakapalli, had married her brother- in-law, the two children born to her had congenital liver disease. While the first son, Mohan Sai, died last year, the second one was suffering from liver disease and needed a transplant.

The doctors stated that the transplant needed about Rs 22 lakh and the family was unable to pool up such a huge amount, they informed. The issue was brought to the notice of Chiranjeevi and he asked all the party leaders to donate money liberally, the PRP leaders said.

Meanwhile, party leader and Chiranjeevi’s brother Nagendrababu spoke to the management of a hospital and convincedPRP’s aid saves 7-yr-old’s life them to perform the transplant surgery for Rs 17 lakh, they said.

As many leaders contributed their part and party general secretary Allu Aravind contributed his part through the Chiranjeevi Charitable Trust, the surgery became possible, said.

The surgery was performed on March 10 successfully as the boy’s mother donated a part of her liver, they informed.

Moved by the party’s gesture, Leala named her son Chiranjeevi and the kid wanted to see the PRP president as the Chief Minister.

More AP 2009 Elections Results Live News
1.http://www.chiru.in
2.http://www.apelections2009.in/
3.http:www.a2zindianews.com
4.http://anjax.com/

Online 2009 Elections Voting

PRP chief Chiranjeevi expressed confidence that his party would bag a minimum of 160 Assembly seats and play a key role in forming the Union government.Chiranjeevi said the party would hold talks at the top-level only after the numbers are revealed. “We are certain of PRP’s importance at the national level. We will take up all necessary steps once the results are out.

Asked if he had ever considered himself as the Prime Minister, the Praja Rajyam president smiled and said it was too early to say that.

To a question about the possible constituents of the proposed Fourth Front, he said they were having discussions with several parties and that very soon it would all be revealed.

“Let us wait for May 16 and the specific verdict of people for the different political parties,” he said.

More AP 2009 Elections Results Live News
1.http://www.chiru.in
2.http://www.apelections2009.in/
3.http:www.a2zindianews.com
4.http://anjax.com/

Online 2009 Elections Voting

Welcoming the Supreme Court directions on appointment of psychologists in colleges to check ragging, the Praja Rajyam Party today said some more steps were also needed to curb the menace.
Speaking to mediapersons here today, party leader and general secretary of the Yuva Rajyam, D Sravankumar said the roots of ragging were elsewhere and there was a need to study the issue thoroughly.
Most of the students lacked social awareness and their personalities were under-developed. If the PRP was voted to power, it would make efforts to develop the overall personality of students so that they would behave in a mature way. The students would also be encouraged to participate in activities like the National Service Scheme and National Cadet Corps. An anti-ragging council on the lines of consumer courts would be set up at the district level

More AP 2009 Elections Results Live News
1.http://www.chiru.in
2.http://www.apelections2009.in/
3.http:www.a2zindianews.com
4.http://anjax.com/

Online 2009 Elections Voting

Rating: 0 Posted By: uricmu
Views: 47 Replies: 0

Amazon has once again shifted around the pricing on its 50 k-cup packs and introduced new flavours.

To save 15% (and get the prices below), you use subscribe and save bringing the price down to ~$17 plus minus a few cents, or about 34 cents a cup
Subscribe and save is actually convenient, you can set it for six months in the future, and then go the next day after your order shipped at cancel it manually from your "My account".

$16.02 - Coffee People Medium Extra Bold, Donut Shop K-Cups for Keurig Brewer [This flavour is very popular]
http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-People-Brewers-Frustration-Free-Pac...

$16.02 - Coffee People Wake Up Call K-Cups for Keurig Brewers (Pack of 50)
http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-People-Brewers-Frustration-Free-Pac...

$17.02 - Timothy's World Coffee Midnight Magic K-Cups for Keurig Brewers (Pack of 50)
http://www.amazon.com/Timothys-World-Coffee-Midnight-Brewers/dp/...

$17.02 - Timothy's World Coffee Decaf Columbian K-Cups for Keurig Brewers (Pack of 50). [This is a surprisingly flavourful decaf]
http://www.amazon.com/Timothys-World-Coffee-Breakfast-Brewers/dp...

$17.02 - Timothy's World Coffee Breakfast Blend K-Cups for Keurig Brewers (Pack of 50)
http://www.amazon.com/Timothys-World-Coffee-Breakfast-Brewers/dp...

$17.02 Timothy's World Coffee Rainforest Extra Bold Espresso K-Cups for Keurig Brewers (Pack of 50)
http://www.amazon.com/Timothys-World-Coffee-Rainforest-Espresso/...

If you don't have a Keurig machine, costco still has the best deal, since their platinum brewer comes with tons of samples.

---

Rating: 0 Posted By: gamerboy123
Views: 108 Replies: 1

Saw this on my twitter update part of their weekly sale and thought I would put it up. They have other games too in their weekly sale like Dissidia ($34.95) and Madden 10 ($49.95) but those two felt like the best deals.

buynextgen home page

They have free shipping and I think they don't have any taxes unless in florida. I ordered from them couple of times before and you can read about the site from here or the other deal sites as people have bought from them before and received their games. Although they are little slow with the free shipping so upgraded shipping might be better if you want the games quick.

---

Rating: -4 Posted By: cameron2003
Views: 593 Replies: 1

Ink and Stay Package
This package has been created for free‐spirited Venice Beach visitors with high pain tolerances. There is no better place to get inked than Venice Beach and no better place to stay than Hotel Erwin.

$100 voucher for a tattoo from Hotel Erwin's acclaimed, in‐house tattoo and graffiti artist Norm

Lubriderm lotion and ice‐pack for healing

Bottle of tequila to numb the pain

$500 bonus if you get a tattoo that says "I HEART HOTEL ERWIN"

Temporary tattoos (for those of you who chicken out in the tattoo parlor)
Offer valid through December 30, 2009.
Rates starting from $399.00 per night Minimum advance booking: 7 days Restrictions may apply
BOOK NOW

http://hotelerwin.com/ (click on packages) http://www.jdvhotels.com/pdf/hotels/Erwin_SpecialHotelPackages.p...

The $500 is in the form of a AMEX gift card according to this: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_13146855?nclick_check=1

---

Rating: 1 Posted By: MISTERCHEAP
Views: 409 Replies: 1

1. Buy two HP Ink Carts and get $10 Extra bucks back! you don't have to purchase both on the same receipt. (add on page 6 of circular for confirmation min price of each ink cart must be $19.99)

2. Use 2 of the $5 off $25's for completing the health survey JAXFL post on $5 off $25--can do more than one to get xtra coupons in two seperate transactions

3. Save $10 up front on ink and $10 on the back end with extra bucks (limit 2 offers per card)

4. you can use your $10 extra bux from the first two ink carts to pay for the third or fourth ink cart if you are maxing out on on the offer

offer ends 8/29

---

Rating: 4 Posted By: FatWalletTopDeals
Views: 428 Replies: 2

Playstation 3 80GB Bundle

Not only do you get a 80GB Playstation 3 for $296.88 + $8.07 shipping (in-store shipping is free) for a grand total of $304.95, but you also get a good game (MLB 09 The Show - a $39 value) and a good movie (Quantum of Solace - a $20 value) on Blu-Ray no less. The Playstation 3 alone is at least $26 off, and that doesn't even include the bonus Blu-Ray and video game. The bundle also includes one Dual Shock controller.

---

Rating: 0 Posted By: pjiang
Views: 585 Replies: 4

Another deal on Zyrtec from RiteAid (Previous making $9 on two 45ct).

Zyrtec 30ct 24-hr $18.99 - $5 (RA coupon right bottom on Pg1 of 8/23~30 weekly circular) - $4 Zyrtec Manufacturer coupon = $9.99.
Buy 3 at different transactions.

After registering 3 receipts once, you will receive

• Single Check Rebate #97 J&J Purchase $50 for a $25 rebate (exp 8/29) - Link
  
• RA ZYRTEC REWARDS $10 on every $50 purchase (exp 2/27/10) - Link
  

($18.99 - $5 - $4) x3 - $25 - $10
= $9.99 x3 -$35
= $29.97 - $35
= -$5.03

* $5 off $25 RiteAid coupon (Link) just in case you will purchase something more
* $4 manufacturer coupon 1) Sunday paper (say today 8/23), 2) Coupon website, 3) CVS $3.99 Zyrtec 3ct (travel size stuffs section) package inside

** If you purchased 2 45ct, you will not receive a second $25 (limit 1) but $10 (limit 3) only

---

Rating: 0 Posted By: mamamoss
Views: 381 Replies: 0

last call items

Use code: LASTCALL for an extra 35% off listed sale price
$5 shipping on orders of $89+ --- Use code: SHIPTODAY

---

Rating: -2 Posted By: bettyboop98
Views: 464 Replies: 2

* Dell Mini Netbooks (refurbished), including Mini 10 and Mini 10v, use code R0M2Q2M1VKGQ4B.
* Inspiron Desktops (refurbished), including 545, 545s, or 546s, use code HW$P67RB2NMGS8.

---

Rating: 3 Posted By: pecanpie
Views: 964 Replies: 5

prices may show higher than $10, but are reduced to $10 at checkout.

Vanity Fair
Cosmopolitan
GQ
House Beautiful (2 yr)
Runner's World
Glamour
Esquire (2 yr)
Self
Lucky
Good Housekeeping (2 yr)
Car and Driver
Elle Decor
Elle
Coastal Living
Allure
Road & Track
Dog Fancy
Family Cicle
Bicycling
Golf Magazine
Cat Fancy
Metropolitan Home
ReadyMade
Hobby Farm Home
This Deal from Fatwallet
Guitar Player
Details (2 yr)
Young Rider
People en Espanol
Horse Illustrated
Ladies Home Journal
Islands
American Baby
Cookie
Harper's Bazaar (2 yr)
Veranda
Bird Talk
Cycle World
Aquarium Fish International
This Deal from Fatwallet
Running Times
Revolver
Fitness
Flying
Dog World
Tennis Magazine
Midwest Living
Freshwater and Marine Aquarium
Reptiles
Hobby Farms
Snowboarding
Old House Journal
Skateboarding
Wildbird
Motocross
Ski
Sports Illustrated Kids (6 month)
This Deal from Fatwallet
American Cowboy
Country's Best Log Homes
Florida Travel and LIfe
Spa magazine
Skiing
Hispanic
Ride BMX
Surf
Yachting
Waterski
Motorboating
Siempre Mujer
Orange Coast
Ministry Today
Essence

---

Rating: 0 Posted By: pecanpie
Views: 231 Replies: 0

variety pack of 24

all single flavors are only 18 packs and cost more.

---