Sir Richard Branson has announced on the Google Blog Virgle, a joint Google/ Virgin project to establish permanent human settlement on Mars.

Sir Richard writes:

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world…In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.

Virgle is currently taking applications on its site here. The official site also includes a 100 year plan for Mars Settlement and a statement explaining the benefits of the project being Open Source.

Update: there’s also a YouTube competition and official video channel. Page and Brin explain:

Right on schedule: Google is releasing their April Fools jokes onto us as the calendars hit April 1 on the east coast (here’s last year’s efforts). Google Australia got a head start earlier today with the very funny Future Search. Gmail’s effort this year isn’t in my opinion as funny.

Gmail Custom Time lets users send emails with a custom date in the past, putting it in the recipients inbox at the old date:

How do I use it?

Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?

Yes. You’ll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born — crazy talk.

Funny? You decide. The team did better last year in my opinion.

But the joke has started a minor Wikipedia war, which makes it more interesting. In describing the technology Google says “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox)” and links to the Grandfather Paradox on Wikipedia. Someone changed the words “time travel” to “gmail” in a revision, along with the comment “Gmail starts a wiki-war by linking directly to this article on April 1st…”

The change was quickly put down by the Wikipedia police, of course. And then changed back. And then reversed. You can watch the drama in real time on the article’s revision history page (or feel free to participate with your own flourishes).

I wonder who’ll get tired first.

Well it only took ChaCha fourteen months to figure out what everyone except ChaCha (and these guys) knew when it launched – search with a human guide as a business idea is ridiculously stupid.

The idea is that you do a search on ChaCha and a real person works with you via a chat interface to give you results. In theory those results would be better than Google. In reality, they weren’t (see image to right), and ChaCha still had to pay all those guides.

Today, according to an email sent to ChaCha’s guides titled “The Future Is Here,” they announced that guided search will be discontinued in favor of the one product they offer that isn’t monumentally dumb – mobile search. They claim that “new users are growing at a staggering rate every day” (most likely due to cell phone spamming).

So what happens to all the guides who worked on desktop search? Some of them, at least, can now apply for new positions on the mobile product.

The full email is below, and details of the company and their funding are here. Thanks Luke Kling for the tip.

Read More

If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling – it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s “hit” song Never Gonna Give You Up.

YouTube is RickRolling its own users on April 1. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia actually link to the Rick Astley video. We’ll see if YouTube.com does the same at midnight EST tonight, too.

This is ok, but not nearly as funny as it would be if the YouTube team broke into the Google search servers and simply redirected Google.com to the video. Now that would be funny.

More coverage of this here.

When I started TechCrunch nearly three years ago it was meant to be little more than a hobby. I love startups, and writing about them was fun, not work. But since then this hobby has grown into a real business. We have a number of full and part time employees that need to get paid every two weeks, and advertisers/sponsors that we owe a certain level of professionalism towards. We’ve also acquired a number of other startups (plus this one, just announced). TechCrunch is a serious thing, and needs to be treated seriously by others. We demand some respect around here.

My own personal brand has risen over the years as well to the point where I believe I can say without hubris that I am a very important person. Forbes recently named me No. 2 on their list of web celebrities, for example, and Business Week says I’m one of the 25 most influential people on the web. I’ve also appeared in numerous JibJab videos. More details, if you care to read them, are on our about page. My agent has told me numerous times that I need to be more careful with how I leverage my personal brand, and to be aware of others who are using/abusing it for commercial reasons.

So we’ve been increasingly concerned about developments at Facebook over the last few months that allow advertisers to post ads using my picture and name to endorse their products without my explicit permission. I’ve received literally dozens of emails from readers asking me if I’m associated with Blockbuster’s Movie Clique application, or the new Jackass movie (no to both).

These ads appear in both the sidebar and in my friends’ news feeds. See examples below:

Our attorneys believe that the use of my image and name in third party advertising is a violation of my statutory and common law publicity rights (we’ve written explicitly about this issue before). Specifically, this leads to user confusion as to whether or not I am actually endorsing these products.

The key factor in determining whether a use is permitted or not in California (where I live) is Civil Code Section 3344, which was first enacted in 1971. California is perhaps more aggressive than any other state in protecting publicity rights because of the number of people engaged in the entertainment business. The law allows for recuperation of damages, attorney’s fees and injunctive relief, as well as unspecified punitive damages and statutory damages of $750/incident in the event a person’s “name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness” is used “in any manner on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services, without such person’s prior consent.” There are additional common law remedies available to us as well.

Facebook will argue that users give permission in the terms and conditions. They also allow users to opt out of having their images placed in ads. Our lawyers say that’s a pretty good defense but that they can most likely win over a jury anyway if they focus more on emotional issues rather than the actual facts and legal precedent.

In truth, there hasn’t been much in way of actual damages to back up the lawsuit. But where we’ll really be able to stick it to Facebook is the $750 per incident statutory damages. It’s a stretch, but we’re going to argue that every impression of an ad that includes my name or likeness is an “incident.” Based on our calculations and recent comscore data, we estimate the number of impressions to be in the hundreds of thousands at the very least. Multiplying that number by $750 gets us to damages of at least $150 million.

At this point we’re prepared to settle the case for $25 million in Facebook stock (priced at the employee option price, not that ridiculous $15 billion Microsoft valuation), a small fraction of the amount we’ll almost certainly receive if this case goes to trial, plus guaranteed exclusives on all new Facebook product releases. A recent case involving Taster’s Choice, for example, had an award of $15.6 million in damages.

I am sad that this had to blow up to the point where we are publicly suing Facebook over the matter. We’ll be filing the lawsuit tomorrow along with a related civil case for assault and battery and infliction of emotional distress. In a round of negotiations over the lawsuit with Facebook led by Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, things got out of hand. When our team of lawyers offered to settle for a mere $50 million, Kelly told me Facebook would “bury you and bury your crappy blog” if we filed the suit. He then threw his steaming hot triple soy latte espresso at me, which caused extensive second degree burns over the top half of my body. Later on, he also unfriended me.

Google Australia launched Gday today, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The technology behind Gday is called Mate, which stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

More here.

I’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a while but they just launched some nice beta software so it seems like the right time. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their alpha code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live.

Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter. They’re offering white-box services to providers who can rebrand a Whisher hotspot or simple pay-as-you-go accounts for cybercafes, etc.

You can also share your Wi-Fi for free and then pick up other hotspots anywhere in the world, similar to FON. This, combined with micropayments model, makes for an interesting product. The product is available now for OS X and Windows. You can download it here. Coverage is fairly sparse in the U.S. but it’s considerably more robust overseas.

This morning I checked out Ping.fm, a fairly new service in the social network aggregation space that lets you update your status on several sites at once. So I can submit “Mark is brushing his teeth” to it and both my Facebook friends and Twitter followers will see the message.

The site, which is currently in private beta, launches a new iPhone version and WAP site today (1,000 of our readers can sign up here by entering code “techcrunch”). It works with Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, LiveJournal and Tumblr, with MySpace, Bebo and Friendster support coming soon. Update: Ping.fm is giving away a 32gb iPod touch to someone who follows them on Twitter.

Ping.fm works pretty much as you would expect. After signing into your various accounts, you can syndicate (or “spam”, as one other person in the office called it) your status to these services. My only beef is that there’s a 60 second lag between the time you submit your status and the time it shows up on these networks. Oh, and there’s no way to check your current status. But you can update your status in alternative ways, such as via email or IM message to a Gtalk or AIM bot.

As I was thinking about Ping.fm, however, I felt as though I had seen this done before. So I scrounged around a bit and found HelloTxt, which does essentially the same thing. And then I remembered that Socialthing, an activity aggregator we reviewed a few weeks ago, also lets you propagate your status from a centralized site – in addition to doing a lot more.

So Ping.fm is essentially a feature of Socialthing, although admittedly it does provide some extra goodies. The funny thing is, despite my preference for Socialthing over Friendfeed, these activity aggregators will also become features of social networks (we know Facebook has plans to make this happen). Where does that leave Ping.fm a year from now? Basically a feature of a feature.

To be fair, Ping.fm is a project being run by two guys in their part time. One of them, Sean McCullough, is also a loyal TechCrunch reader who created an RSS reader that displays our headlines within Facebook.

But I do think Ping.fm can be used as an example of a problem many Web 2.0 services face. They can fulfill a substantial need, work properly, and even possess a real business model – but if they can be easily replicated by a larger, more established player then they probably won’t survive in the long run. That’s my view at least, and it’s corroborated by the advice I heard once from another entrepreneur: “don’t build your business around a feature”.

Then again, people once thought Google was just a feature – nothing more than a search box. And it turned out they were so good at that feature that it became a sustainable product.

Google’s Web-based word processor, Google Docs, can now be used offline to view and edit documents in your browser. That means you no longer need to be connected to the Internet to write a letter or draft an agreement. When you connect again, all your changes are updated. Google Docs now joins Google Reader as a Web app that can work offline. Spreadsheets and Presentations are coming up next.

This offline capability has been a long time coming. Google Docs is finally taking advantage of Google Gears, a browser plugin for creating all sorts of offline apps which launched nearly a year ago. Using Google Gears, Zoho came out with an offline version of its Web-based word processor last August.

Is it me, or is innovation at Google slowing down?

TheFunded, a site where entrepreneurs can leave anonymous feedback about their experiences with venture capitalists, has created quite a stir on Sand Hill Road. Rarely do I meet with a VC without the subject of it coming up, and how unfair it is. The fact that the site is now publishing confidential term sheet clauses as well only exacerbates the angst.

Now VCs are fighting back. Someone has launched TheUnFunded, a site that works very much like TheFunded but let’s VCs share their opinions of the entrepreneurs they meet with. The site will officially launch tomorrow (4/1), but it’s live now:

Inspired by TheFunded.com’s ability to allow entrepreneurs to anonymously rate VC firms, we thought it was only fair that investors also be able to anonymously rate startups and entrepreneurs. So we decided to launch TheUnfunded to do just that.

Only investors that can prove their identity will be allowed to join TheUnfunded, where they can anonymously provide feedback on the startups that they’ve met with along a five point scale. The fund raising process is indeed a long, difficult one. From an investors perspective there was just no way to tell how much an entrepreneurs well-crafted story matched the reality of their business. Until now.

The VC behind the site reached out to me to tell me about it, but asked to remain anonymous for now. There’s already entertaining content on the site, though:

The founder arrived 10 minutes late — and began the meeting by telling me that he just came from Sequioa (yeah, right). He then proceeded to state (five times) that his company was the next Facebook.

Wow – this guy was clueless. He started his slide deck and went on autopilot. I think he spoke for 18 minutes straight without even looking to see if I was awake. But worse than his pitching skills is his knowledge of his industry and competitors. I named four competitive companies that he never heard of.

The founder arrived on time and hit on my receptionist. My assistant came to bring him back to the board room, and the founder hit on my assistant.

Facebook isn’t just messing around with a few European language translations any more. They’re using their new user-powered translation engine to get Facebook into 22 more languages, on top of English, French, German and Spanish.

It will take some time for users to translate the sites, and Facebook likes to stagger launches to maximize PR. If you want to help out with the project, the application is here.

Seattle based wiki-startup Wetpaint has been talking to a number of big content sites about a new product they’ll be releasing soon, we’ve heard. The screen shot above is a mock-up that Wetpaint is using to pitch potential partners.

The product is an embeddable wysiwyg wiki. That alone is interesting, just because there aren’t any easy ways to embed a wiki into third party sites today. Google Sites doesn’t yet allow embeds, for example. PBWiki, a popular wiki startup, does allow embeds via their API, but it isn’t as simple to use as most widgets.

But what we’re hearing is that this isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, although we haven’t heard of any products doing this before.

Why is that interesting? It’s interesting because it pulls the Wiki content directly into a site’s HTML and allows it to be indexed by search engines. That means partner sites will get the SEO benefits of the wiki, a major plus for these partners.

That’s all we know for now. The product is being called Balco, although that may be an internal project name, not the name of the to-be-launched product. If Balco is as useful as we’re hearing, it’s definitely something we’ll use here at TechCrunch.

Update: PBWiki’s David Weekly adds something related to this in his API documentation (scroll to bottom). When/if Wetpaint launches Balco, we’ll do a side by side comparison.

When we hear from Aviary it’s bound to be something entertaining and fun. The New York based company remains in private beta but adds to its suite of image manipulation products regularly. The newest tool is called Dodo, a web-based time machine.

A video demo is below. You upload an image to the service and it will “age” it based on user input. An example: upload a picture of yourself, tell it how many years out you want it to age you, tell it how much you drink and smoke, and not any planned plastic surgery. It will then show you what it thinks you’ll look like down the road.

Aviary says the tool isn’t just for fun – that it may also be useful for “tracking down long missing children,” and “determining if a girlfriend will end up looking like her mother.” Demo video below.

What’s the technology behind it? Well, it’s pretty close to magic. Anything is possible in early April, it seems.

Publish2, the stealth Digg-Clone-For-Journalists that announced a fundraising this morning, is being very quiet about exactly what their product is and how it works. In an interview last week they told me only friends and family were testing it.

Well, it turns out “friends and family” is fairly expansive term in their book, and includes a lot of people who are quite willing to talk about it. As we said, Publish2 is a Digg-like site where anyone can submit links but only journalists can vote those links up and down. It also has a private research feature that lets journalists bookmark items without sharing them. “It’s like Delicious,” said one person testing the service, adding “I would never use the public part of the service, I’m too competitive to share my research with other journalists.”

So Publish2 looks to be a little like Digg and a little like Delicious. The only problem is that it may not be as good as either of those products.

We are moving closer and closer to the social inbox—email that talks to your social networks. Today, Xoopit launches in private beta. Not to be confused with Xobni (another email 2.0 app), Xoopit is a plug-in for FireFox that lets you easily view all the photos, videos, and files buried in your e-mail as attachments and sent to you as links from across the Web. The first 700 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get in. CEO Bijan Marashi explains:

We are building an index of your personal information across the Internet. Email is the most important repository of your personal data. Xoopit processes the social media you have been piling up for years and transforms it into a fun application.

The application indexes your Gmail (other email services will be added in the future) and lets you view attached files (photos, videos, etc). It also fetches any images that friends might have emailed you from Flickr, Picassa, Shutterfly, Kodak, or YouTube. It is an attempt to turn your email inbox into a dashboard for managing all the pictures and videos everyone emails you all the time. In turn, you can post your own photos, videos, and other media directly to Facebook, your blog or email from the application.

Xoopit is also announcing a $5 million A round from Accel and Foundation Capital. It previously raised $1.5 million in an angel round from Foundation Capital, Michael Dearing, Jeff Ralston, and Eric Telenius.

If you are going to be anywhere near Amsterdam this Thursday or Friday, you should go to the Next Web conference. It is one of the best gatherings of European Web 2.0 startups and entrepreneurs. Nine days ago, I had no plans to travel to Amsterdam. But tomorrow I will be flying over there to moderate the two-day event. (Don’t ask how this happened, but it involved a late-night phone call interrupted by the Amsterdam police). TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher will also be attending. TechCrunch is a media partner, which means TC readers can get 200 Euros off the 750-Euro ticket price by entering the promotion code “tc08″ when you register.

The speakers include the usual suspects, like Garret Camp, Robert Scoble, and Kevin Rose. An episode of Diggnation will be filmed and streamed live from the stage. But the real draw is a series of rapid-fire presentations from 24-and-counting startups (including eBuddy, Fav.or.it, Empressr, CoComment, and Radionomy—each one gets five minutes) and all the Euro 2.0 networking you can handle.

The organizers are a trio of crazy Dutchmen who are themselves Web entrepreneurs and started the conference a few years ago for themselves and their friends. These are the same three entrepreneurs who once famously showed up one morning at TechCrunch headquarters (aka Mike’s house) in white suits. One of them, Patrick de Laive, explains how they try to make the Next Web different:

The conference is cool because we don’t focus much on making money but more on content, networking, and fun. We’re Internet entrepreneurs, not conference organizers. We make sure we have the best speakers in the world talking about the future of the web and not about their companies. We don’t have sponsors on stage or CEOs telling us how well they did last year.

Barry Diller won a court battle today against Liberty Media’s John Malone. Now Diller can finally go ahead with his plan to break up InterActive Corp. into five pieces—HSN, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Interval International, and the new IAC (Ask.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Evite, iWon, Match.com, BustedTees, Vimeo, GarageGames, and CollegeHumor). Malone, IAC’s largest shareholder, was trying to prevent the spin-offs from happening.

Whether the financial maneuver will “unlock” any value for shareholders remains to be seen. (I’d be surprised if it did). But there is no doubt that IAC is an unwieldy, multi-headed beast whose collection of disparate businesses never really had much to do with one another. As I reported last November:

Diller will continue as CEO and chairman of IAC, which still remains somewhat of a grab bag of about 30 Websites. But at least those businesses are starting to finally be able to stand on their own feet. It doesn’t make much sense for them to be weighed down by Lending Tree because of the mortgage credit crisis or overshadowed by the Home Shopping Network. IAC’s holding company model gave shelter to its startups with the earnings of its more established operations, but any troubles in the larger businesses are difficult for the smaller ones to overcome no matter how fast they are growing.

The problem, as came out during the trial, is that those underlying Web businesses are not growing as fast as Diller had hoped either. Ask.com failed to reach its goal of doubling its market share of search, and Ticketmaster missed out on the growth of the secondary ticket market and recently had to buy TicketsNow for $265 million to compete with StubHub (owned by eBay).

Can an independent IAC compete more effectively against Web startups, or is it just a collection of Web 1.0 dogs?

(Photo by JDLasica).

San Mateo based mobile phone advertising provider AdMob has passed the 20 billion ads served mark.

Since March 2007 the company’s monthly impressions have grown from 500 million ads per month to 2.5 billion advertisements per month today. AdMob’s 20 billionth ad impression was from financial services conglomerate HDFC. The ad was served in India at 1:56am GMT on Tuesday, March 25, while a visitor was browsing Cricinfo’s mobile web site on a Nokia N70.

We’ve covered AdMob a couple of times, but it’s a company doing some big numbers that we don’t hear that much about. Their client list is first rate: companies currently using AdMob include Porsche, Ford, Toyota, Adidas, CoverGirl, Herbal Essence, EA Sims, Terminix, TruGreen and Let’s Talk. Where it gets better (and why this is a company just waiting to be bought out) is two key clients: Google and Yahoo. The web’s two leading companies are using AdMob to advertise their services on mobile phones.

Everybody wants to get in on social networking and user-generated video. Reality Digital, a white-label YouTube that lets media sites add video-uploading and social-networking features, raised $6.3 million in a series B financing. OpenView Venture Partners was the sole investor in the round. The company previously raised $2 million in a series A from private individuals in November, 2005.

In addition to video-uploading, Reality Digital’s platform can also handle audio, blogging, mashups, mobile uploads, profiles, forums—pretty much any feature that you’d see on MySpace or Youtube. It also includes a full management suite that lets companies monitor usage and manage advertising campaigns. Customers include MTV Networks, the Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, and the Daily Reel Reality Digital also powers the back-end of Adobe Premier Express, which is Flash-based software for creating video mashups. Reality Digital competes with KickApps, VSocial, and VMix.

It can be hard to find good video content on the web, especially when you’re on a mobile phone. vTap wants to make things easier for you.

The service, which launched last fall, aggregates video from across the web – from over 50,000 sites like ESPN, YouTube, The New York Times, and the Associated Press. It then provides fast search capabilities that recommend results even before you’re done typing. You can also use it to browse video by categories when feeling less picky.

All this, however, takes a bit of effort every time you want to watch something entertaining or informative while sitting on the bus. So vTap has come out with a new “feed” feature. It takes a list of topics once and then continuously suggests videos uploaded onto the web that fall into those topics. The idea is that you can discover video tailored to your interests with very minimal effort beyond the initial setup.

Feeds can be accessed either through a desktop browser or a mobile phone. Most mobile users access vTap using Windows Mobile or iPhone (one additional value of vTap is that it automatically transcodes all video into QuickTime for iPhone compatibility).

vTap’s also taking the feed technology one step further by integrating it into social networks and constructing feeds based on the information people provide in their profiles. If you install either the Facebook or MySpace feed application, you’ll be able to access feeds built with not only your profile info but your friends’ as well, regardless of whether they’ve installed the app themselves.

MyWaves also suggests videos for mobile users but it only builds feeds around one topic at a time (you can combine many of them with vTap).