For all the complexity of the human mind, when it comes down to remembering what we’ve been up to for the last few weeks our memories are pretty pitiful – you might remember a few notable events, but your day-to-day activities barely make a dent. And while some of us are not prone to such bouts of mental inadequacy, the vast majority of the population probably can’t remember what they were up to last weekend, much less a month ago.

Memiary, a site built by developer Sid Yadav over the course of a weekend, is looking to help you remember what you’ve been doing with your life. The site is a micro-diary, offering a private place to fill in your thoughts and takes only a minute or so to fill out every day. Blogging fills this role well enough for many people, but most of us aren’t comfortable with sharing the most personal details of our day-to-day lives with anyone who stumbles across our webpage. And most of us simply don’t have time to fill out longform diary entries, so the short text snippets work well.

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Two weeks after laying off 30 percent of his employees, Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke finds himself out of a job. He is being replaced by vice president of engineering Bahman Koohestani (former CTO at Cyworld and Orbitz), who will be acting as “interim” CEO.

Jaxtr offers VoIP calls to both your regular and mobile phone. Its last round was a $10 million Series B in June. Investors include Lehman Brothers Venture Capital (yup, they are still around), August Capital, Mangrove, Mayfield, DFJ, and angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. (Guericke was part of the founding team at LinkedIn).

The company is obviously going through a rough time, but Koohestani still spins it as a “very healthy” business. He offers the following partial stats:

There is no escape from the advertising recession. Not even for hotshot TV advertising startup Spot Runner. Despite having raised more than $111 million, half of that as recently as last May, the LA-based company may be in for a major round of layoffs next week following the election (and the associated last-minute media blitz).

As many as 25 percent of its more than 300 employees may find themselves without a job come next Thursday. While the exact number has not yet been determined, I have been able to confirm that the company is currently going through a cost-reduction planning process and is looking at all options in light of the deteriorating advertising environment.

Last night in Manhattan at Terminal 5 we were privy to an intimate gathering to check out Chevy’s extended-range electric vehicle, the Volt. We’ve mentioned it here and there on the site, but this was the first opportunity for anyone on staff to get up close and personal. I came away impressed and I’m rarely wowed by anything domestic. It certainly helps that the Volt will be in the upcoming Transformers movie, too.

The Volt represents a shift in the automobile industry, but we won’t know for sure what sort of impact it will have because the Volt won’t hit full production until 2010. I won’t even begin to try and breakdown all the different facets of the Volt as if I’m an automotive pundit, so I thought I’d share the presentation that was given to me by Bob Boniface, lead designer for Volt, and Frank Weber (he sounds like the Governator), Vehicle Line Executive.

Video and gallery after the jump.

The latest video market share figures for September from Nielsen Online’s VideoCensus have been leaked to Beet.TV, and they show a huge 56 percent jump from Yahoo to 264 million videos streamed during the month. Yahoo’s share still pales next to YouTube’s 5.3 billion streams. But it pumped out 95 million more streams than in August, when Yahoo was trailing Fox (i.e., MySpace), MSN, and Nickelodeon, according to Nielsen Online. (Compare to comScore’s Video Metrix numbers from July, which had Yahoo in the fourth spot).

People still watch twenty times more videos on YouTube than on Yahoo. And just the number of streams YouTube added in September alone (592 million) was more than twice as many as Yahoo’s total stream count. But the percentage of videos that Yahoo can put ads up against is much higher than YouTube’s. One estimate that was thrown around at a recent online video panel that I co-moderated earlier this week was that YouTube only monetizes four percent of its videos, which would be 214 million streams. So depending on what percentage of Yahoo’s videos are shown with ads, it might catch up to YouTube on revenues faster than the raw numbers would indicate.

There is nothing like a downturn to force a company focus on the bottom line, even a company like Google whose bottom line is still growing at a healthy pace. Continuing its recent efforts to juice advertising revenues wherever it can, Google is changing the way ads are placed on its search results pages.

One of the two biggest determinants of where an ad ranks compared to other ads on the same results page is an ad’s “quality score” (the other is the amount an advertiser bids for a particular keyword). Google is making two tweaks to how the quality score is calculated that could have a major impact on which ads appear at the top of the page.

Lots of factors go into Google’s algorithm that determines the quality score for any given ad, but how many people actually click on the ad is one of the major ones. Ads that appear first, though, get a boost in click-through rates simply by being listed above all the other ads. Google is now taking into account the boost in click-through rates an ad gets by dint of its position, and backing that out from the quality score. That should result in a boost to overall quality scores.

I can’t figure this out. This video, from MTV’s video site, has been bleeped by MTV in an effort to hide file sharing system names in Weird Al Yankovic “Don’t Download This Song.” The original lyrics:

Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA

Strangley, all of those file-sharing sites are bleeped out. Is it a conspiracy?

Yoono, the slick browser plugin that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, has announced its impending support for Internet Explorer which will be available on November 7th. In conjunction with the the new version, Yoono is also announcing integration with both imeem and MySpace, as well as a powerful new widget that will help the plugin monetize.

Yoono has existed for a few years, but recently overhauled its browser plug last May. Since we last covered Yoono, it has become a featured Firefox 3 Recommended Download, and has grown to a total install base of around 1.8 million users (though only 500k of those are using the new version).

We don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a feature for sending text / SMS messages using the built-in Chat functionality.

Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google lists text messaging on its ‘What’s new‘ page (only for US phones, it seems).

Update: the Labs team found a glitch and is pushing the release back a bit (’probably within two weeks’).

Update 2: make sure you read the open letter the Webmail team at AOL writes to Google. It’s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it’s really not and quite unprofessional to boot.

Any holiday is an excuse to be a little creative. Today, Halloween, is no exception.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and FriendFeed have special logos (who else?). Microsoft needs a little more inspiration in my opinion:

And Twitter went one step further, allowing users to add special Halloween themed Tweets using special character combinations. Just try >o< or `O` and see what happens.

I’m not complaining, but some of the ads being paired with some of the content on Brightcove’s Syndication Marketplace may need some rethinking.

This lovely lady is doing a full-nude striptease (we’ve altered the image), along with an Office Depot advertisement promising “Free Delivery.” Which on second thought may be a brilliant idea.

If you’d like to see the evidence for yourself, the not-safe-for-work video is here, or just do a search for “new test” in the marketplace.

When Facebook raised $240 million from Microsoft in 2007, and another $235 million in debt and equity in 2008, everyone thought they had plenty of cash to get through their big growth phase. With that kind of cash, the company could hire as many people as it needed to and not worry about profitability or going public until at least 2009, as board member Jim Breyer said in 2007.

But a confluence of factors may be conspiring to throw those assumptions out the window and force Facebook back to the capital markets much earlier than they originally planned. We’ve heard from multiple sources that they are testing the capital markets right now, in fact, and may be considering a near term capital raise at terms that could be much more favorable to investors than the previous $15 billion round that Microsoft kicked off in October 2007.

Syncplicity, a startup who entered the crowded market of online storage and file synchronization service providers last April, has raised $2.35 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and other private investors, including technology industry veteran Frank Marshall. The announcement comes almost 10 months after the company raised $250,000 in seed funding from relatives, friends and some angel investors.

Like a plethora of at-least similar services, you can use Syncplicity to store, share, backup and synchronize files from your computer onto the cloud.

Syncplicity will remain in beta for now and offers a free account for anyone signing up, which includes 2GB and 2 computers to sync. Also, for every friend you invite you get an extra 100MB in storage in your account up to an additional 3GB.

Never mind that Sun Microsystems just announced a $1.7 billion loss for its most recent quarter (mostly due to write downs of pricey acquisitions like the $4.1 billion it spent on StorageTek). Never mind that its market cap is only $4 billion, despite having three times as much annual revenues and $2 billion in cash. Never mind that co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who returned to help save the company, is now interested in other things.

CEO Jonathan Schwartz has a new plan to get the company back on track. All I’m going to say is that it involves open-source. Schwartz lays it out in the exclusive video interview above, which he conducted a couple weeks ago with TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor. Okay, the interview is with Schwartz’s puppet. But it is an exclusive interview.

(Props to the Puppetman).

Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results – a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files.

In the past Google would attempt to index these image files as well as possible, but could typically search only file titles and nearby metadata – not the contents of the documents. From now on Google searches will include the text within these scanned images in normal search results. When you encounter a scanned document you’ll be able to view it in its original form as a PDF, or as a converted text file (click “View As HTML”).

In the last few months we’ve seen a number of startups that are looking to help you clip small portions of content from the web for sharing and future reference. But most of them require Firefox/IE extensions – a barrier that can put off many users and handicap a potential userbase. Snipd, a Y Combinator company that was in the TechCrunch50 DemoPit, is looking to offer similar clipping functionality but without a required plugin.

Instead of a plugin, Snipd relies on bookmarklets – special bookmarks that can be dragged into a browser’s shortcuts toolbar, but don’t require any installation. And to further streamline the process, Snipd doesn’t require users to create accounts before they get started (they’ll be randomly assigned a user name until they pick one that’s more personal).

If you are one of the recipients of the 1,330 business method patents issued in the U.S. last year, or the thousands more that have been issued rampantly and indiscriminately over the past decade, you are probably out of luck. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. ruled today that business methods are not patentable unless they meet fairly narrow rules. What this means for Internet companies and patent trolls alike is that many of their existing patents may be invalid—at least until the case is heard by the Supreme Court, assuming it is appealed.

This is now well past speculation. Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s former Chief Revenue Officer and Amazon’s former Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development, is the new CEO of Project Playlist.

Or at least that’s what he’s been telling people, we’ve heard from multiple sources.

The company hasn’t returned our emails, even to say “no comment.” Same with Van Natta. We sent TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid by their offices today to get the brush off in person, and the company duly complied. “Our CEO isn’t available to talk to you,” an unidentified spokesperson said. In response to the question “Who is your CEO?” she answered “I can’t tell you that information.”

On the upside, the site’s back up.

Tens of millions of people rely on Gmail, and some even pay for the “premier” edition through Google Apps for Enterprises (which boasts one million businesses as customers). So when some enterprise customers had to suffer through a Gmail outage two weeks ago that lasted 30 hours, it made some headlines. As did the bigger Gmail outage last August that affected all users for about two hours.

In a belated blog post that responds to the criticism generated by the most recent outage, Matthew Glotzbach, the product management director of Google Enterprise, says that only “0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users” were affected. He also claims that Gmail is available 99.9 percent of the time, measured by “average uptime per user based on server-side error rates.” That amounts to 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, including the August outage.