This is a full page ad that will run in the San Jose Mercury news tomorrow. I want to make fun of the wine and cheese crowd flocking to jump on the anti-Prop. 8 bandwagon, but I’m not going to.

Discrimination in any form isn’t acceptable, and banning gay marriage is discrimination. Prop 8 will eliminate the right to marry for same-sex couples in California by amending the state’s Constitution. If you are a registered California voter, I’d like to ask you for a favor – vote against Prop 8.

Here’s a list of people who’ve added their name to the ad:

Paris Based Awdio will announce today a first round table of 1.5 million euros (about 2 million dollars) closed with Ventech. Awdio offers a unique music service that connects the best clubs around the world to the internet and allow them to broadcast live their music online.

Zazzle, the site that lets you custom-design and sell everything from T-shirts and hoodies to sneakers and skateboards, has launched a new feature that may well put it leagues ahead of its competitors: embroidery. And while the prospect of having an embroidered shirt may not sound appealing at first (I’ve always associated embroidery with tacky nametags emblazoned on polo shirts), Zazzle’s new feature is very impressive and will likely draw a large number of new customers.

In the past, most custom shirt designs from Zazzle and its competitors have used flat prints that are essentially glued on top of the fabric (these are higher quality than the iron-on products you’ll find in stores, but look similar). These look fine enough on T-shirts, but tend to look much cheaper (and tackier, depending on the item of clothing) than designs that are actually sewn into the fabric, and don’t hold up as well to multiple washings. Now, Zazzle’s new embroidery option is giving users the chance to have their designs sewn into their clothes, resulting in items that are much better looking and durable.

In a downturn, cash is king. KillerStartups, a blog that covers killer startups (and any other startup that issues a press release, actually) has acquired the domain Startups.com for “mid six figures” in cash, CEO Gonzalo Arzuaga tells me. So let’s call it $500,000. That is within reason for a primo domain name. After all, Business.com was built into a business that sold for $350 million.

Contrast that against the $17.2 million that Startups.com raised during the dotcom boom before shutting its doors in January, 2002. Back then, Startups.com was a startup incubator, offering office space, HR, and other business services to startups (Guy Kawasaki was on its board). The only asset that survived was its URL.

After months of giving and taking back free Wi-Fi to iPhone users, AT&T announced that all BlackBerry users will be privy to the “nation’s largest Wi-Fi network” if you have an unlimited data plan. Other Wi-Fi-enabled devices will receive the same treatment in the future.

If you think there is too much noise about the U.S. election now, wait until next week. On Election Day, not only will every media outlet be covering the vote, but so will voters themselves who will have ample opportunity to Tweet, Digg, video, and IM the vote.

Most of these “reports” will probably consist of people telling the world that “I’m voting!” or who they just cast their vote for. Who you vote for used to be a private affair, but no more. It is almost as if your vote does not count, unless you IM or Tweet it. (But don’t worry, it does).

On the bright side, when every voter is also a potential election observer, any shenanigans can and will be instantly broadcast over the Web and quickly picked up by the mainstream media. At least there will be a clear record that can serve as a starting point for later investigation if need be. No doubt, there will be false Tweets as well.

The BBC is reporting that a UK campaign aimed to crack down on gaming piracy is targetting completely innocent people.

Citing a story in Which? Computing magazine, the BBC reports that Atari had accused an elderly couple from Scotland, Gill and Ken Murdoch, who disputed the claim saying they had never played a video game in their lives. The accusations were apparently based on an analysis of IP addresses and submitted by law firm Davenport Lyons, which was hired by Atari and other game firms to start prosecuting illegal file-sharers. In the case of the Murdochs, a letter was sent giving them the chance to pay £500 ($819) compensation or face a court case.

In a charming display of hindsight, Apple has described the improvements and updates to MobileMe that rolled out in September 2008. The improvements were mostly tweaks (”Provides a ‘loading’ graphic to indicate that messages are still being loaded instead of a blank page”) although some were potential showstoppers (”Resolves an issue where attempting to add contacts from MobileMe mail was not working” and “Clicking Logout from Account now fully logs you out of MobileMe”).

Why, however, describe all this right now? Well, the initial MobileMe launch was a disaster and the product is quite complex. It is, in short, a copy of OS Xs basic PIM tools like Mail.app and Address Book on a web-based platform, something Microsoft is aiming to do in the next few years/months and something Google is doing amazingly well as evidenced by GMail and their online office suite.

Google Knol, which we’ve likened to a monetizable Wikipedia upon launch, has quietly released three international versions today, enabling French, German and Italian speaking experts (or people who like to think they are experts) to contribute so-called ‘units of knowledge’ to the site.

The success of Google Knol has been less than stellar (traffic is stagnating). To be fair, Knol has only been released for about four months, and It obviously takes more time than that to build a repository of the world’s collective knowledge.

Expanding into other countries could give Google some more momentum and increase the numbers of expert articles significantly over time.

Project Playlist sure is on our radar lately. The service, which lets users search for music on the web and build embeddable playlists, has 9.3 million unique monthly visitors and a whopping 822 million monthly page views according to Comscore.

But the company has been acting very strangely. First, the service has been down since at least Monday along with the message “We are doing some upgrades. We will be back online shortly.” Not a good sign for a company that’s generating roughly 30 million daily page views when its live.

We’ve heard rumors of a big financing, but they’re also in the middle of RIAA litigation which will likely suck any capital out of the company for royalty licensing fees.

We’ve heard rumors that ex-facebook Chief Revenue Officer Owen Van Natta is the company’s new CEO (and have confirmed that he was “highly interested” in the job as of a week ago). Company employees are boasting they have a new ex-Facebook CEO, so putting 2 and 2 together…

So why isn’t the company talking? They aren’t responding to press inquiries, and Van Natta is silent as well.

RIAA litigation. A dead site. Funding rumors. Big name CEO hire. What’s going on? Hello?

Last month AOL began releasing parts of its new tear-down-the-walls home page strategy, allowing users to view email from Yahoo and Gmail.

Today they launch the rest of the new features (we had a leaked screen shot here). Users can log into social networks (Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and AIM) to view news feeds and update status. Bookmarks can be added to the top left of the page, and a feed reader is included at the bottom of the screen. AOL is also inserting direct inks to third party news sources via Relegence, a company they acquired in 2006 and began integrating into AOL Finance in late 2007.

The new home page is being rolled out to users in stages, but you can access it here.

AOL, the smallest of the big four portals (if you care to call Google a portal), has had significant homepage growth over the last year. Unique visitors have grown 14% to 33 million, total minutes on the site have grown 50% to 600 million, page views are up 43% to a billion, and total visits have increased 16% to 440 million (Comscore worldwide). Stats for the competitors are below. Everyone is up at least a little in unique visitors, but page views, total minutes and total visits have declined at MSN and Yahoo.

RADUS (pronounced “radius”) is a new media hub that serves as an aggregator for content that includes RSS feeds, videos, photos, and music. And while the site certainly isn’t the first to bring all of these together, it does so in a very slick way and makes for great eye candy.

The site’s interface consists of a large media viewer on the left situated next to a smaller panel for browsing file types. Written content (like blog posts from RSS feeds) is displayed in a multi-column format that resembles a magazine article. Similarly, the media panel displays videos and images where appropriate. Unfortunately the sidebar isn’t very effective when it comes to searching for content, as it doesn’t leave enough space to describe a given video.

I’ve aimed a lot of criticism at human powered search engine ChaCha over the last couple of years. The service lets users ask questions, just like a normal search engine. But instead of a computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real human beings answer instead.

The ChaCha service was absurd in its original web version, which has since been discontinued. The mobile version is actually very useful, although we questioned its scalability when it launched. New information from the company suggests they’re keeping costs low enough to make a business model out of it. More on that soon.

Now about this image.

Where isn’t Netflix anymore? It looks great on the 360, it’s ending up in set-top boxes and media players from multiple makers. Now, if you had the foresight to buy a Series 3, HD, or HD XL you can now stream all of Netflix’s 12,000 streaming titles.

The service will use the same interface used by the 360 and the Roku box. You select films on Netflix.com and then add them to your instant queue. The films stream immediately upon selection. You can enable your TiVo for Netflix downloads by visiting www.tivo.com/netflix

Virtual goods have massive monetization potential, but many sites simply don’t have the resources to build a virtual goods engine or to produce assets that its users would be willing to pay money for. Boston startup Viximo, launched earlier this month, is looking to offer sites a turnkey solution.

The company has built an embeddable gift store and showcase that can be integrated into any site, and also features its own microtransaction system (you can use your own system if you’ve already got one in place). Viximo CEO Rob Frasca says that while the site’s all-in-one package and ease of use will be a big selling point, its most valuable (and difficult to replicate) feature is its large library of digital assets. For now Viximo is offering virtual gifts similar to Facebook’s popular gift store, but Frasca says that the platform supports puzzles, ringtones, or any other kind of virtual good.

This is part two of our coverage on today’s Downturn RoundTable hosted by VentureBeat. For Part One, which details the Venture Capitalist panel, click here.

The Entrepreneurs

In a panel moderated by Kara Swisher, Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the company behind WordPress), led off by saying that he wished this kind of “panicky” advice had been around for the last bubble, explaining that his startup at the time didn’t react quickly enough to stay afloat. Nirav Tolia, co-founder of epinions, added that his company had fallen prey to similar mistakes in the last bubble by investing in growth (in terms of employees and office space) before it was necessary.

Today at VentureBeat’s Downturn RoundTable, two panels of Silicon Valley’s elite – one made up of Venture Capitalists, the other of experienced entrepreneurs – offered a roomful of startup CEOs their advice for weathering the economic crisis. And while the two panels differed in some respects (with the VCs saying that they’re open for business and the startup veterans calling this a falsehood) the general consensus was at least in part optimistic: Money will be tight and many companies will endure painful cost cutting, but it’s cheaper than ever to run a startup and innovation will continue to thrive.

The VCs

In a panel moderated by VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers led off by agreeing with the themes in Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation of Doom, expressing his concern that we are just entering an economic crisis of confidence, and that startups must enact swift and effective cost cutting – a sentiment that was echoed throughout the panel.

MySpace has offered MTV Networks’ EVP Digital Music and Media Courtney Holt the top job at the newly launched MySpace Music, CNET reports. We’ve confirmed this through our own sources, and we believe Holt has all but accepted the position and is in the final stages of contract negotiation.

The hunt for a CEO is nearly a year old. Earlier this year we reported on some of the early candidates. Last month we reported that ex-Facebooker Owen Van Natta was interviewing for the position, but those discussions were somewhat complicated by a simultaneous effort by Van Natta to sell Project Playlist to MySpace as well.

Currently Holt is Executive Vice President, Digital Media, MTV Networks Music and Logo Group where he oversees all digital initiatives.

Facebook blew past MySpace in visitors from across the world back in April, but the global gap continues to widen. According to the latest figures from comScore, Facebook attracted 161.1 million unique visitors worldwide in September, compared 117.9 million for MySpace. For Facebook, that number was up from 4.7 percent from the 153.9 million people who visited the social network in August. Visitors to MySpace declined 1.6 percent globally from 119.8 million.

This week on the CrunchBoard we want to welcome BeenVerified, Design About Town, and Span to the the new services and sales directories on the CrunchBoard. The directories are an easy way to reach the start-up community.

While you are checking out these new directories, make sure to look out the latest job listing on CrunchBoard.