Now that we’ve all actually seen Chrome OS, the immediate reaction that most are jumping to is that it won’t be killing Windows anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt Microsoft, and apply long-term pressure to the dominant OS. In fact, Google’s positioning for Chrome OS reads like a page out of Apple’s playbook, only the opposite.

Google is aiming Chrome OS right at the bottom of the market. That is to say, cheap computers, netbooks. Apple, of course, takes the opposite approach, targeting the high end of the market which their high-quality and high-margin machines. If Google is successful with its Chrome OS netbooks (let’s call them ChromeBooks), what we could see is the squeezing of Microsoft, an idea I first laid out a month ago. With attacks from the top and bottom, Windows will be relegated to the middle. And ultimately, if Google has its way, marginalized.

ZURB, a well-regarded interaction design and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that has in the past done work for eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Zazzle and many other familiar names, regularly publishes insightful design deconstruction posts for homepages of some of the most popular websites on the net, using its very own Notable app (also see our review of the website feedback tool).

After taking a critical look at CNN.com, MSN.com and Twitter.com, the ZURB team has recently shined its light on TechCrunch.com. And we took notice.

Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a new product today, Zoho Recruit. A niche product, Zoho Recruit, is an application designed to help HR Departments and staffing agencies management recruitment.

Zoho Recruit, which is an offshoot of Zoho People’s recruitment technology, is an Applicant Tracking System that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes, candidates and contacts. The application will source candidates by gathering resumes from multiple sources on the web and includes a technology that will weed out the candidates.

Annoyed because you have to leave your e-mail inbox every time you would like to respond to someone else’s Facebook status update? Good news: the social network is testing a brand new feature that will enable you to comment on threads by e-mail.

It appears as if the new feature is currently being tested only with a very small subset of users; we haven’t seen it at the bottom of any Facebook notification e-mails yet and there are only about 4 tweets from the past couple of days mentioning the new feature.

The much hyped music streaming service Spotify has extended its mobile reach significantly today with the release of an app for phones powered by the Nokia-led Symbian operating system.

This follows earlier clients for both iPhone and Android and means that the service will now be accessible on millions more handsets from Nokia, obviously, along with Sony Ericsson and Samsung which also support the platform.

Unfortunately, for once users in the U.S. will have to wait longer as Spotify has delayed the launch of it’s service there until the new year.

Phones powered by Symbian far outstrip the iPhone and Android (for now) in Europe where Spotify is currently available. Today’s release should see the company strike further carrier deals or at least extend their current offering with mobile network 3, leading to more ‘back door’ or ‘feels like free’ premium subscriptions.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, is back on his one-man crusade to defend the App Store from the latest wave of criticism pointed in its direction.

This time, Apple is having to battle the news of Facebook’s all-star developer Joe Hewitt quitting the platform, more high profile app rejections, and the rise of Android as an increasingly viable alternative to the iPhone. Schiller has granted BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl what the publication says is his first “wide-ranging interview on the matter”. Unfortunately, Schiller doesn’t really say anything to quell the growing unrest in the developer community — instead, he’s offered some finely-tuned PR-speak that will placate the vast majority of iPhone users, who are only vaguely aware of the App Store controversies and just need a reminder that Apple is still one of the good guys. But it may only make developers angrier.

Earlier this month college textbook rental company Chegg raised $112M as part of a combined Series D and debt round, bringing the total raised by the company to a massive $144M. Competitor BookRenter will tomorrow announce a Series A round of $6M, raised from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. BookRenter has only raised a fraction of the capital of their competitor Chegg, but the company claims that it is growing at over 300 percent, year-over-year. The companies are loading their war-chests to fight over a fiercely competitive college textbook rental market.

Both Chegg and BookRenter work on a similar principal – students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. Textbooks are expensive, and often have a limited lifespan – these attributes, combined with a market of poor students looking to save a few dollars, have resulted in the textbook rental market exploding in recent years.

Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.

Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index.

We had a great interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday. Costolo always gives the audience a few good nuggets of news and handles the more difficult questions with ease. He’s a pro.

After the conference I reviewed some of the backstage footage we shot of Costolo before he went on stage for the formal interview. We ask lots of great questions – about Twitter’s revenue, business model, details of the search deals, chances of getting bought next year, and the lovely bathrooms they have at the office. He manages to entertain the entire TechCrunch editorial staff while revealing absolutely nothing. We even slip in a question about Feedburner (Costolo cofounded the company and sold it to Google in 2007) at the end, but sadly we ran out of tape before he answered.

One thing Costolo does clear up – even though I’ve known him for five years now, I apparently have been mispronouncing his name the whole time.

The video is below:

Your Roku box just got a whole lot more interesting. Roku, if you remember, makes the Roku player, a small device that sits next to your TV and plays Netflix, Amazon Video, and MLB selections. Roku has just added ten new channels to that line-up and built a fascinating platform for adding more down the line.

The current channels will include: blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. More channels will be available here shortly.

It’s… a self-rolling ball
Customized streetmap clocks from FluidForms
USB-powered Alien figure with illuminated tongue

If you ever sit next to me on a plane you will notice that I have a small ritual that I prepare every time I reach cruising altitude. I begin by pulling out my iPod touch and then my Movie Wedge. The Movie Wedge is a little bean bag with a lip for holding up MP3 and video players. That’s it. It’s amazingly great.

We talked about the Movie Wedge a while back and we’re happy to report that they’ve decided to give us 10 to give away to all and sundry.

Yesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch’s ‘Real Time Crunch-up’. This despite having no idea what a ‘Crunch-up’ actually is.

The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within ‘real-time streams’, which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and it’s place in the public school system I couldn’t have been keener to weigh in.

I’ll get back to my own contribution in a moment, but first, as a courtesy to my paymasters, I should probably relate a few of my ‘key learnings’ from the event.

1) There is such a thing as a ‘key learning’, a phrase which I heard at least three times during the day, and which I gather is what an ‘opinion’ becomes when spoken by an idiot.

We’ve seen in the past year that Hulu gets testy about their video content being used on other sites or platforms, with Boxee and TV.com both forced to remove Hulu content from their sites and applications. Now startup Rippol is facing the same fate.

Rippol just publicly launched their video discovery sites at yesterday’s Real-Time CrunchUp, which combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting video content.

Less than a few hours after Rippol launched, the startup’s co-founder Aaron Crayford received notice from Hulu that the video embeds on Rippol from Hulu were in violation of the terms of service which state that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. While Rippol says that they won’t place ads in the videos or around the videos, Hulu says that the simple fact that Rippol plans to make money from the entire content service violates the TOS. Instead, Hulu offered Rippol the ability to us its site map, which is a feed that links back to Hulu for video playback. Don’t embed, says Hulu. Link instead. Here’s the email notice:

Skype CEO Josh Silverman can’t stop smiling in this video interview we recorded in Menlo Park this morning. And no wonder – despite serious legal and spinoff drama, Silverman has managed to close his multi-billion dollar spinoff of Skype from eBay. His legal troubles have evaporated. Skype is growing like a weed. And he’s managed to keep his job running the business. Life is good.

All he has to do now is manage board meetings with two of the more forceful personalities on the planet – new investor Marc Andreessen and cofounder/new investor Niklas Zennstrom.

Well, that and keep this train on the tracks. Skype has exploded to over half a billion users, and is adding 300,000 new ones every day, Silverman says in the interview. 1/3 of usage is video, despite the fact that video calls can only be 1-1. Voice calls are multi-party. And revenue is cruising along at $185 million/quarter with 24.2% margins. Up to 20 million people are using Skype at any one time.

Full video is below:

Google Calendar is testing out a new feature that should make scheduling events a tad easier than it used to be by allowing you to see at a glance if the event you’re creating will conflict with the schedules of the people you’re inviting. Dubbed “Sneak Preview”, the feature’s name is perhaps more exciting than its actual function, but it should prove to be quite useful. The feature is apparently in a limited rollout right now, so don’t be surprised if you don’t have access to it.

Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview (assuming you have access to it), whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event (provided you’re a friend or coworker with access to that information), and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others.

Most TechCrunch readers have never heard of Tracking202. But affiliate advertisers love the service, which manages advertising campaigns on Facebook, MySpace and other platforms. In fact, Tracking202 was at the center of the Facebook click-fraud issue that we reported on earlier this year. Tracking202 users saw a certain number of clicks on ads via the Tracking202 interface, and far more on their Facebook admin pages.

The company is self funded and has a number of customers who pay for the premium hosted version of the service. Today they’ve announced they’re selling the business to Bloosky, an affiliate ad network. Here’s the email sent out to users this morning:

Editor’s note: More and more mobile app developers are deciding to make apps for Android, even though it still doesn’t have the same reach as the iPhone. In this guest post Kevin Nakao, the VP of Mobile for Whitepages, makes the argument for taking the Android plunge now (as he is preparing to with a new Whitepages Android app launching next week). Follow him on Twitter @knakao

Mobile games publisher Gameloft might have thrown in the towel on Android, but that is a mistake. I certainly understand why they gave up on Android. Since launching in February of this year, our own Whitepages Caller ID app has become a top ten grossing Android application, and yet we’ve seen less than $54,000 in revenue. While our iPhone app download counts are in the millions, our Android app downloads are a mere 17 percent of this volume.

Despite our meager return on investment this year, I believe that the real potential for Android app developers lies in the New Year. Here’s why:

10 days ago, Facebook developer Joe Hewitt rocked the iPhone development world when he announced that he would stop making iPhone apps because he was fed up with the way Apple is running the App Store. This is significant since Hewitt was pretty much solely responsible for one of the most popular (and best) iPhone apps out there: Facebook’s. And now, just a little over a week later, we may be seeing the downside of Hewitt’s decision.

The Facebook iPhone app is broken, and has been for a while now. Every single user profile page contains zero updates or posts. Instead, each loads a stream that reads “USER has no recent posts.” Judging from Twitter searches, tips coming in, and a Facebook thread, this has been the case since at least yesterday, and possibly before that.

Google Voice was GrandCentral before Google acquired that company back in 2007. Like most Google acquisitions it took a long time to fully rebuild the service on Google’s infrastructure, and even today Google Voice is still in private beta.

But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.

So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.

The email: