Scottsdale, Arizona based iqzone has a solution for those seeking to sell items on the go: cell phone submitted classified listings.

Iqzone’s “Snap Send Sell” feature allows users to take a photo or video clip of any product or service, text a description and send as a Multimedia (MMS) message to iqzone. Iqzone then categorizes and adds the listing on iqzone.com as well as 3rd party services including Edgeio. Buyers can connect with sellers in real-time by setting mobile or RSS alerts for items they are interested in. They can also share ads with their Facebook Friends and search iqzone using their mobile phone or the web.

The company says that the product is the future of classified advertising. It’s certainly a different application and fits well into the “what will they think of next” category. Whilst the one-to-many distribution of classified listings has some appeal, I can’t help but think that it’s a solution looking for a problem. Others may think differently.

Sherman Oaks company fix8 brings the world of computer generated animation to the webcam with software being pitched as “User-Generated Reality”.

fix8 combines video, animation and instant messaging that allows users to create their own partial or full custom avatars that mimic human movement.

At the heart of fix8 is H.E.A.R.T. (Human Expression Analysis and Rendering Technology), which digitizes human expressions, gestures, and movements via webcam, enabling users to create, interact, and share their creations across the web, TV, and soon mobile phones.

fix8 is easy to use and offers limitless creative options. fix8 users can broadcast their video creations over instant messaging services including MSN, Yahoo and Skype or save and post creations to YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook.

It would be easy to trivialize fix8, yet this sort of technology would have cost millions to implement 10, 15 or even 20 years ago. The ability to turn cheap webcams into a hub of animation creation can and will spur a whole new wave of user generated creativity and content. fix8 is a little application with a wow factor to it, I’d even go as far as calling it pretty cool, even if I couldn’t get my webcam to play with Vista so I could trial it.

For a full demonstration view the video on the fix8 index page. A sample is provided below.

RealNetworks have annonuced a new version of RealPlayer that includes one-click video ripping.

The free downloadable video player will allows users to save and organize video files in all major formats including Flash, QuickTime, RealMedia and Window Media and will support video ripping from sites such as YouTube, Google, Yahoo!, Brightcove, AOL and The New York Times.

The ability to rip online videos is not new. A number of programs are already available that provide a similar service yet this is the first time this level of functionailty has been offered in a high user base product.

The new RealPlayer will not download or record video that is DRM infected but will download everything else, placing it somewhere between headache and law suit for a bevy of content creators. Every content creator will now be challenged by the real possibility that if their product is DRM free, it’s likely to be ripped from the original source site and even burned to CD.

I may be exagerating the problem, and a true anti-DRM advocate would argue that consumers should be free to use content how and where they see fit. Yet content creators can impose copyright restrictions without the use of DRM and should be able to control the context of how and when a video is played back; the offer of free viewing does not automatically extend to an offer of free and unlimited use, take free to air TV or Radio as an example.

The new version of RealPlayer will be released in June. Sorry Mac users, no Real enabled ripping for you until later in the year, Windows only at this stage with support for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

(video via Beet.tv)

Finally – users will be able to see music videos on YouTube.

Ok, well, now at least it’s more legal. EMI Music just announced they have reached terms with Google’s YouTube both to distribute music videos from EMI artists on YouTube and to enable consumers to leverage the EMI music library in their own YouTube video creations.

Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group, said the deal “meets EMI’s objectives to offer consumers the best possible entertainment experiences, to create new ways to connect our artists to fans and to enter into innovative business models that will generate revenues for our business and our creators.”

EMI will use YouTube’s content identification and reporting system to track and monetize its content and compensate artists. The tools also give EMI Music the ability to request the removal of EMI’s copyrighted content from YouTube.

Google has now secured music-license rights with the world’s four largest music labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Group.

In April EMI announced a deal with Apple to start selling its artist content without copyright protection on iTunes.

Of course, just about every music video you care to see is already on YouTube. There’s even a search engine that only indexes YouTube music videos, almost all of which are posted in violation of copyright laws.

Lumosity is a brain fitness program from Lumos Labs which is designed to improve cognitive function through a series of web-based games and exercises.

In developing Lumosity, Lumos Labs worked closely with leading neuroscientists from Stanford and UCSF to design and experimentally test the program. In a randomized, controlled study, the exercises were shown to have statistically significant effects in improving memory and attention.

Brain games are wildly popular in Japan and Europe, the Ninentendo DS Brain Age has sold millions of copies. The delivery of similar functionality online is the logical next step and although they might not be the most engaging games, that’s not the goal here.

Details of the research and methodology behind Lumosity can be viewd here.

The same team that created a site on Yahoo about war zones is behind the new People of the Web, a Yahoo property that covers people doing interesting things online. It was announced on the Yahoo corporate blog. An introductory video is above.

Stories include text and video elements and allows reader comments. They’ve also integrated MyBlogLog into the site. Example: here’s a story called “Brokeback Hill” about some guy that is “outing” secretly gay politicians.

The site is intersting, but Yahoo’s forays into content creation continue to baffle me. They should get serious about it, or drop the effort.

This guest post is written by David Sacks, the founder and CEO of new startup Geni. Previously, he was COO of PayPal. He also produced the movie “Thank You For Smoking.”

For the last several years, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have all suffered a declining share of pageviews, but that does not mean the portal is going out of style. Rather it has been redefined, first by Google, and now by Facebook in potentially even more profound ways.

The core question a portal needs to answer for a user is “How do I find the information I need?”

In the early days of the web, the answer was browsing, which made sense when there were a limited number of useful sites. (Remember when it was a big deal for Yahoo to put the “New!” or “Recommended” icon next to a website’s name in their directory?) But as the number of websites became infinite, search replaced browsing as the dominant paradigm for finding new sites, and Yahoo’s failure to keep up in this area allowed Google to take the lead.

Google has continued to leverage its lead in search to become a full-fledged portal. Once users have found what they are looking for, Google makes it easy, through their iGoogle product, to subscribe to that content through alerts, RSS feeds, or a huge selection of widgets, all of which are compacting more useful information onto fewer start pages than ever before. As a result, iGoogle has become Google’s fastest-growing product. But iGoogle has a serious limitation: it doesn’t involve sharing; each user has to make an individual investment in set-up and can’t benefit from the work of others. It’s not really a Web 2.0 product.

Facebook has a new answer to the portal question. The “social graph,” or your network of relationships, will push information to you. You’ll learn from your friends. Thanks to Facebook’s new developer platform, the types of information being disseminated now include not just news, photos, events, and groups but also music, videos, books, movies, causes, political campaigns — and the list is rapidly growing into almost every conceivable category.

The advantage of this approach is that it makes it relatively effortless for users to access a world of information that is both increasingly comprehensive and personal to them. Even if all this information were available through search (and it’s not), search actually requires work; the user must know what they’re looking for and type it in. Then they must parse the results to determine which are valuable, labor which is not shared and reused by others. By contrast, Facebook requires no work once your network is set up. Your friends push information to you that is likely to be useful, and if not you can tune your preferences until it is. Facebook promises a kind of Socratic knowledge: it tells users things they didn’t even think to ask.

While the process of structuring new kinds of information for the social graph to distribute is still sorting itself out, it is easy to object to the frivolity of information on Facebook. For example, Facebook is great at telling me what my friends just had for lunch, but how about hard news? Well, for starters, I’m waiting for the Digg application to not only display articles I’ve digged on my profile, but also to aggregate all the articles dugg by my friends. This could lead to the kind of social news site that MySpace promised but failed to deliver.

Not only Digg, but virtually all Web 2.0 applications which are based on the wisdom of crowds can be reconceived as Facebook apps based on the wisdom (or trust) of friends. To the extent that these services cater to publishers who seek a mass audience, such as YouTube or Flickr, the social graph will not threaten their business. But to the extent they publish content intended for friends, or if the value of their service increases with the participation of friends, these applications face only two choices: get each user to recreate his or her friendship network on their own site or migrate their service to the Facebook platform lest someone else does it first.

The potential for Facebook to layer on any feature whose value increases with the participation of friends is an incredibly broad canvas for a portal. Moreover, as each new application gains acceptance, it enriches the overall value of the network and makes it incrementally more likely that the next application will be tried. Much of what we know as “Web 2.0″ will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook.

To be clear, the social graph will not replace search, in the same way that search did not replace browsing. And search may still be more easily monetized than the social graph. Still, as a basis for a portal, neither Google nor Yahoo has anything nearly as cohesive holding its properties together. Google can layer on any feature where search is paramount, which is hugely valuable, but as it expands beyond this core competency, it becomes increasingly hard to press its advantages into new areas. Yahoo already seems to have reached the limits of its far-flung empire, eliminating redundant operations such as Yahoo Photos.

In my view this is a misdiagnosis of what ails Yahoo. The problem is not too much peanut butter (i.e. that it’s spread too thinly). The problem is the bread at the core. Browsing plus second-tier search is not sturdy enough to hold everything together. The new portals are defined by the quality of their bread, not their peanut butter.

Yahoo was right to focus on an acquisition of Facebook but not for the reason it thinks. In its view of the world, Facebook is just another media property, a particularly fast-growing and sticky one to be sure, but ultimately just more peanut butter. In reality, Facebook’s social graph could have provided the bread to connect Yahoo’s far-flung empire.

But what would be in such a deal for Facebook? They will have their own empire soon enough.

Find out more about Geni at the Techcrunch Database.

I first wrote about Israeli widget site Gizmoz in December 2006. At the time, the company hadn’t launched its product to create personalized widgets using users’ pictures and voice, but they had a working demo. Today, the product launches for everyone to use. Gizmoz is also announcing a $6.3 million Series A funding round from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital and distribution partnerships with RockYou and Freewebs.

These are animated, talking, 3D images that can be embedded on any website. When compared to what Sitepal and others are doing on the avatar side of things, or Snapvine in the voice recording space, it really shines (see, however, Sitepal’s comment in our previous post for a different viewpoint).

Creating a Gizmoz takes about a minute and requires a single photo of the subject. Gizmoz renders a 3D image of the photo. Users then customize it by adding hair, body, accessories, clothes, etc., and can also distort the face in a number of ways. When you add your voice, via a microphone or by typing in text that is converted to audio. the avatar adds facial expressions, eye blinks, breathing and lip syncs to the voice. Here’s an example using my photo:

The key uses for the product will be to create a welcome clip like the one above, or to create a welcome “voicemail” service where people visiting your site can leave audio messages (like Snapvine).

Gizmoz is built on the Flash platform; however, like Flektor, which was recently acquired by MySpace, all of the code was developed in-house by CEO Eyal Gever and his team over the last four years. That will make it an even more attractive acquisition target for MySpace and others.

The company has also created a cool personalized demo showcasing the announcement:

Tommorrow, Google will be hosting a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide. The bulk of developers will be gathering at the San Jose convention center for a keynote by Google’s VP of Engineering, Jeff Huber. At the conference Google will be outlining their developer strategy. But the big announcement will be Google Gears, an open source browser plugin that will enable developers to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs. As a developer, you’ll be able to make an application with the assurance that it will work offline and online across browsers.

The plugin is a 700K download for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ that installs three developer APIs. One API will handle the creation of data objects to store application information locally, another will be a SQLite relational database for searching the data, and the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background without overburdening the browser. More info on the APIs are available at the gears website.

The first demo of Gears will be for Google Reader, but more Google apps are expected to come. Reader will add a green download button to the user interface. When you click the button, Reader will download the last 2,000 messages to your computer, preparing your computer to work offline or under a spotty internet connection.

Downloading will take place in the background, using the asynchronous JavaScript API. While offline you can read these articles and carry out your usual sharing and tagging. When you get back online, just click the button and Reader will sync your offline activity with their server. Right now the syncing is initiated manually, but it’s easy to see that it will become more seamless as the program develops. Gears could conceivably solve the large data overhead problems of Google’s AJAX applications, pushing updates to your desktop instead of slowing down your browser.

Google is releasing opensource and early to developers to get some preliminary feedback. They are also collaborating with a host of other partners such as Opera, Mozilla, and Adobe, which will to integrate flash and Apollo into their system.

Robert Scoble (coverage) and Artur Bergman (coverage) were also at the press event.

Jason Calacanis, formerly of Weblogs, Inc. and more recently an Entrepreneur in Action at Sequoia Capital, will launch his newest startup, Mahalo, this afternoon at 3 PS PST. The site is password protected until then.

Mahalo is a search engine, and will join Powerset as the more interesting new engines to launch in 2007.

The service has features that are similar to the new Netscape news finder product that Calacanis launched last year at AOL: expert guides will determine the most relevant results. The main search results are provided by guides (Mahalo employees), who find relevant results for search terms. User submitted results are also included.

The primary results for search terms are included at the top, in a “top seven” area. These are hand picked results from the guids that should all be good results for the query (see screen shot below of results for “Paris Hotels” – click for larger view). To the right of the results are “Guide Notes” which include additional information including relevant additional searches and “Fast Facts.” In the case of Paris Hotels, the “Fast Facts” include the country, language, currenty and telephone country code.

Additional hand picked results appear below the Top Seven, and Google results round out the query.

Also in the right sidebar is a place for users who’ve registered with the site to submit links relevant to the query. The more users who’ve submitted a unique link, the higher it appears on the list. Mahalo will be looking for fraud in this area – if a guide determines a link to be spammy, they will ban the link, the user and the user’s IP address “forever.” However, if a link gets enough votes and is determined to be relevant by the guides, it will move over into the main search results area.

Each search page also has a discussion/forum area, where any registered user can add their thoughts to what’s included on the results page.

Mahalo has 40 full time guides today and have created 4,000 results pages – each of which will serve approximately 12 various queries. Calacanis says that the guides are steadily improving results and adding more queries – they expect to have 10,000 by end of year, and 25,000 by end of 2008.

They are really focusing on top search terms, which they obtain from a number of search engines and other sources, Calacanis says. If a user makes a query that has no Mahalo results, they are given Google results instead. Calacanis stressed that it is going to take them a couple of years to get really deep results for most queries – until the end of 2007 the site will be in Alpha, and will be in beta for all of 2008. “It takes a few years to build a really compelling search engine,” he said.

Mahalo has now completed two rounds of financing. The first was led by Sequoia Capital. The second was led by Elon Musk and News Corp. The size of the rounds have not been disclosed, but Calacanis says he has enough capital to run the business for up to four years without revenue.

Disclosure: We have no financial interest in Mahalo; however, Jason Calacanis is our partner on our upcoming TechCrunch20 Conference.

As we expected earlier today, eBay has confirmed an all cash $75 million acquisition of social discovery service StumbleUpon. eBay says StumbleUpon fits will with their “goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust” and helps them learn more about newly emerging community based businesses.

Although you can imagine “StumbleUpon Shopping” coming soon, eBay is leaving the company alone and taking a wait-and-see approach. The corporation will remain completely intact, except for the addition of eBay’s Michael Buhr, who will serve as general manager for the product.

Throughout 2007, StumbleUpon has seen tremendous growth. They currently have over 2.3 million registered users, serve 5 million daily recommendations, and are experiencing a 150% year over year growth rate. Here’s a quick look at their latest stats from comScore:

More crunch: click here for the StumbleUpon fact sheet.

On May 17 I shared my frustrations with constant downtime on group instant messaging service Twitter. The responses were interesting. Twitter users are passionate about the service and many see it as a mission critical application.

A lot can change in the space of 2 weeks. Since writing that post Twitter’s uptime has improved remarkably. There are still downtime issues; Twitter was offline for over 5 hours Monday according to Pingdom; however these figures are deceptive as there is a noticeable improvement in quality when Twitter is up. Twitter has not been plagued by intermittent functionality failures such as API support issues that block third party tools such as Twitbin from connecting, as was the case two weeks ago.

I asked Twitter’s Biz Stone what was going on behind the scenes at Twitter.

Has Twitter become more stable following the issues earlier in the month? What has the Twitter team learned from the experience?

Biz Stone: “We’ve worked to isolate various parts of our system to prevent one outage from taking out the entire network. Investigation into the causes of previous bouts of instability have taught us a great deal about our usage patterns and shown us a clearer path towards being prepared for future waves of growth and usage”.

In what way has Twitter’s reliability improved?

Biz Stone: “Our recent efforts towards scalability allow us to stay on our current growth curve, and even increase the rate as we add new ways to send and receive updates such as our recent Facebook application”.

What next in terms of scalability?

Biz Stone: “We’ll continue to isolate different aspects of the system and perform micro-optimizations of heavy-usage areas. We’re currently implementing additional internal tools which will enable us to do more meaningful research of usage patterns. Finally, we are adding more machines”.

Let’s hope Twitter stays on the straight and narrow.

More crunch: click here for the Twitter fact sheet.

We are getting reports from advertisers that Google Audio Ads have been added as an option to their Adwords accounts, although we can’t confirm yet that everyone now has the feature (please let us know if you do not see it).

Google is offering $400 in free advertising to Adwords customers.

The service has been in testing since late last year. Advertisers can purchase ad spots on radio stations, paying on a CPM basis. Google will also use professional voice actors to produce your audio ad (most radio stations will also do this for free).

Look for the “Audio Ads” tab in your Adwords account. Screen shots below.

Virtual world Entropia, which combines chatting with friends and blowing up aliens, announced their expansion into China through a deal with Beijing’s Cyber Recreation Development Corp (CRD) over a year in the making. The CRD is supported by Beijing’s Municipal government and intended to promote and develop investment in “cyber recreation” in China. The company says Second Life was also in the running for the deal.

The deal is quite ambitious. Entropia currently has over 500,000 registered users, but the new Chinese partnership will permit up to 7 million concurrent users with an overall aim to attract an unheard of 150 million world wide. The company also expects their virtual economy’s bottom line to grow, eventually adding another 1 billion real dollars annually from the partnership. Entropia has already been able to sell a virtual banking license for $400,000. David Liu, CEO of CRD, envisions an Entropia utopia. He expects the partnership to bring 10,000 work-at-home, pollution-free job opportunities to China.

Entropia also plans to expand their virtual real estate from the deal by enabling media companies to add their own planets to the universe. They’re currently in negotiations with film, music, and gaming companies for their own planet. Competitor Second Life has made several similar corporate branding deals in their virtual world.

Entropia still faces competition from Second Life in China and their own home grown competition from HiPiHi and a TBA world from Shanda Corporation. Second Life’s top entrepreneur Anshe Chung has even been running operations out of China since last January. However, adult themes and continued investigations into illegal activities within the virtual world (child abuse, stalking, gambling) don’t bode well for getting the seal of approval of a government that blocks Wikipedia.

The Photobucket and Flektor acquisitions were confirmed by Fox Interactive today in a press release. No details on prices, so we are assuming earlier reports were correct: $300 million for Photobucket (including a $50 million earnout) and $15-20 million for Flektor.

We had earlier reported that MySpace made both of these acquisitions; in fact parent company Fox Interactive was the buyer.

See Photobucket and Flektor at the Techcrunch Database.

I’m hearing that the eBay/StumbleUpon acquisition will be officially announced sometime today – almost certainly at the end of trading. Keep an eye our for the press release. We originally broke this rumor in April when a term sheet was reportedly signed. The Wall Street Journal picked up the story earlier this month.

I don’t know if the price will be disclosed, or if the rumors of $75 million are roughly correct.

Widgetbox have announced the wide-spread adoption of its new Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature which eases the transition to an open platform for social networks.

The Widgetbox Remote Gallery feature enables social networks to embed a select number of widgets from third party developers and provide access to the over 10,000 widgets from the Widgetbox main gallery, giving their users the ability to easily find and use widgets to customize their profiles, blogs and web pages.

Partners can brand their own Widgetbox Remote Gallery and have control over the widget selection in the Widgetbox Remote Gallery. Galleries can be as large or small as desired and widget selection can be rotated as needed.

Launch partners include Freewebs, imbee.com, Xanga and Six Apart’s TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.

The quickly growing music social network Last.fm has been acquired by CBS for $280 million in an all-cash deal.

UK based Last.fm launched five years ago and has become a social networking favorite with 15 million active users. It has become a massive repository for music information (artist and song wikis, listening data from users, etc.). In the U.S., companies like Pandora, MOG and iLike all compete with some of Last.fm’s features, although none of those startups has built the basic social network/community of last.fm.

The deal sees Last.fm’s management team staying in place and the site maintaining a separate identity.

Last.fm has been an attractive takeover target for some time. CBS as a buyer though is surprising and is a sure sign that the media giant is getting serious about Web 2.0. CBS acquired video blog WallStrip for $5 million earlier this month, and has been on a bit of a buying spree lately after filling out the management team on the interactive side of the business last year.

Previous TechCrunch coverage here.

This certainly explains why Last.fm was a little slow to jump on the Facebook Applications bandwagon last week – they were understandably distracted.

At the D: All Things Digital conference Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil Microsoft Surface, the first in a new category of surface computing products from Microsoft that will “break down traditional barriers between people and technology”.

A Surface computer is able to recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.

The new product is aimed directly at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues and should be commercially available towards the end of the year.

It’s an interesting product in that it’s completely out of left field. Microsoft gives examples of ordering a beverage during a meal with just the tap of a finger and quickly browsing through music and dragging favorite songs onto a personal playlist by moving a finger across the screen. Build this into a bar and you’d get one-touch beer service although I’m not sure if they’ve found a way to work out when your beer glass is empty so replenishment becomes automatic, maybe in a later version.

The practical uses for Surface at the point of sale are broad. This is touch screen point of sale technology at a new level.

Initial launch partners include Harrah’s Entertainment, Starwood Hotels and T-Mobile. Coverage at CrunchGear here.

Update: Channel 10 has a great first look video here.

At their peak, rock legends “The Grateful Dead” attracted an estimated community of 40,000 self-proclaimed “Deadheads” trailing them as they toured the country. The movement had originally spawned from fans meeting at concerts and networking on mailing lists. Mailing lists turned digital with the launch of Dead.net, which will relaunch in the next 24 hours as a full blown social network.

The new version of Dead.net was created on the Drupal content management platform and features extensive archives cataloging Grateful Dead history, songs, photos, memorabilia, and shows, indexed and searchable by tags. Dead users will be able to participate in forums, upload their own photos, and bookmark concerts and shows they have attended. Fans will also be treated to exclusive free mp3 show downloads.

Exclusive screenshots as follows: