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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 below of in game play, and will add a proper screencast shortly. 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.

Watch the video and get an invite below:

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.

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.

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 anagram is ‘Personal HomePage’, and the language and environment are still the most popular in use on the web today.

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.

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.

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.

Here’s a bit of App Store drama for you: Antares Audio Tech, the company that built the underlying technology licensed for the popular “I am T-Pain” iPhone App, has unleashed their lawyers on Steamboat Mountain Designs, an indie developer and maker of the now-removed iPhone app, “AutoTuner.”

Why? Well, it turns out that the term “Auto-Tune” — which due to the recent spike in usage in pop music has come to be misused almost as often as the term “photoshop” — is trademarked by Antares. In a cease and desist letter, Antares claims that “Steamboat’s use of ‘AutoTuner’ is virtually identical to Antares’ AUTO-TUNE(R) mark, simply adding an ‘r’ at the end of the mark and removing a hyphen, and is used in connection with a software program that is directly competitive and functionally identical to Antares’ AUTO-TUNE(R) product.”

Capitalizing on the Bing brand, Microsoft is consolidating MSN Video into Bing Videos. If you go to video.msn.com it redirects to Bing Video. The new video search destination lets you both search for videos on the Web and watch them within the Bing player. Bing Video brings in videos from YouTube, Hulu, ABC and more, and directly hosts 900 TV shows.

When you search for a show like True Blood, you get Bing’s familiar guided navigation on the left, which lets you narrow down your search by season, episodes, trailers, length, and format.

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.

Here’s how Google describes Go in its blog post:

Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast.

Yes, Twitter is in the process of rolling out its new Retweet functionality to a more users, the service confirmed today. Based on the number of tips we’ve received, and the number of TechCrunch staff members who now see the functionality, it would seem that today’s roll-out is pretty large.

So what’s the verdict? Some people love it, some people hate it. It is definitely a significant change to the way people are accustomed to using Twitter, so it will undoubtedly take some time for most users to get used to. Some may call this “Facebook Syndrome” (users always complain when Facebook changes something, even if it’s for the better), I call it “human nature” (people generally dislike change).

Prosper.com, a popular peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the U.S., has received a $1 million infusion from Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One, via his venture capital firm QED Investors. This brings the company’s total funding to over $41 million from Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Benchmark Capital, among other investors.

Prosper pioneered the idea of concept of people-to-people lending in the U.S with its launch in 2006. Unfortunately, the startup hit a rough patch last year when the SEC stopped all lending on the platform because the company didn’t register as a seller of securities. With the new climate of heightened regulatory oversight in light of the financial meltdown, the SEC is being more judicious about overseeing financial institutions.

Today Saul Klein, chairman and co-founder of Seedcamp, the pan-European programme for early stage startups, blogged a long post about Seedcamp’s structure and history. But over the last few weeks I’ve been meeting Saul to tease out, over long conversations, where Seedcamp is at and where it’s going.

The debate is an important one, in part because Seedcamp, as the only Pan-european YCombinator-style organisation, now has a position that is largely unmatched at this level. That is at once a great thing for Europe – afterall, there was nothing else like it before, and Europe really needed a pan-European Seed fund which could also educate young startups. It’s also a potential challenge both for Seedcamp to explain how it operates – after all, despite its laudable openness to date, let’s not forget it’s a business – and for those that want to sit outside the burgeoning Seedcamp ecosystem.