I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you, but Gnip is worth the trouble to understand. The company, which helps ease the transportation of social content between services (like getting Twitter data to Plaxo, for example), took a new $3.5 million round of financing. Investors include Foundry Group, First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, and the company has raised a total of $4.6 million, all this year.

The company acts as a clearing house for social content, easing the load on content distributors like Digg, Twitter, Delicious and Six Apart. Content consumers like Plaxo and MyBloglog benefit from a single endpoint and a standardized way of accessing data. In short, it unclogs the plumbing.

TechCrunchIT spoke with the Gnip founders on video immediately after launch. In September they launched version 2.0 of the service, and discussed their business model.

Juice, a Firefox browser sidebar developed by Linkool International, has launched to the public. The powerful plugin automatically culls information from around the web whenever you search for or highlight a term, making it a handy reference tool that I could quickly get used to. It also doubles as a media storage tool, allowing you to simply drag and drop videos and image files into the sidebar to save them for later.

Juice pulls from sources including Wikipedia, Google News, YouTube, and our own CrunchBase (through its API) to offer users a quick at-a-glance summary of many popular topics. The sidebar is very polished, allowing for in-line video playback and expandable text summaries, and the media storage function is intuitive.

How can I put into words how I feel about the BlackBerry Bold? In short: I love it and never ever want to let it go, ever. For any BlackBerry user/fan the Bold is everything you’ve wanted and expected from RIM. Sure, it took a little longer than we all expected, but it’s definitely worth the wait. It’s far superior in every respect from anything that RIM has put out on the market. Of course, those of you with a hankering for a touch-screen need not apply. The Bold is for the hardcore CrackBerry addict or is it?

The U.S. Election isn’t until tomorrow, but doesn’t it already seem like Obama has won? That is certainly the impression you get if you look at any of the polls, state-by-state electoral maps, or prediction markets out there. Even the latest Fox News poll has Obama leading McCain by 50 percent to 43 percent.

My favorite prediction tool, and the one with the best record of getting elections right, is the Iowa Electronic Markets. In its winner-take-all market for the U.S. Presidential election, it is predicting that Obama has an 89 percent chance of winning the majority of votes (see graph above). NewsFutures, similarly puts Obama’s chances of winning at 90 percent, and Intrade has his stock trading at 90.6.

Last week Google announced a new set of gadgets for Gmail Labs that offer integration with Docs and Google Calendar. But perhaps most exciting (and under-emphasized at the time) was the introduction of support for third party gadgets, giving users the chance to add features to Gmail beyond what Google offers.

One of the first developers to take advantage of the new feature is Remember The Milk (RTM), a popular To-Do list application that we reviewed back in 2005. The service allows users to access and input to-do items from a variety of locations, and offers its core service for free (you can pay $25 a year for support on extra mobile devices). While RTM offered support for Gmail before now, it was reliant on a Firefox extension, raising the barrier to entry and cutting out a large portion of the browser market.

We are pleased to announce that we will hold a TechCrunch party that will close LeWeb conference next month in Paris. LeWeb is probably one of the most important web event in the industry and certainly the most important in Europe with more than 1500 participants coming from all over the world. TechCrunch has a been a media partner for a couple of years but this year we will do a little more and we’ll hold a special event december 10th at night.

Trying to push through their search advertising deal, Google and Yahoo have revised the terms of the deal to satisfy antitrust objections by the Department of Justice, reports the WSJ (article behind the pay wall). The main concessions are putting 25 percent cap on the revenues that Yahoo can generate from the partnership and making it a two-year deal instead of a ten-year deal.

Putting a revenue cap on the deal goes a long way towards limiting the monopoly factor because Google will only be able to take a quarter of Yahoo’s search-advertising business instead of all of it.

Live video streaming seemed to be all the rage for a while, popularized by startups like Justin.tv, Ustream, Qik, Mogulus and Flixwagon.

Yahoo jumped on the hype wagon back in February 2008 by launching Y!Live, an ambitious effort put forward by internal incubator Yahoo! Brickhouse. Yahoo Live was supposed to tap into the troubled internet juggernaut’s vast online video audience by getting them to broadcast their lives in real-time.

Now Yahoo software engineer Keith Thornill has published a blog post announcing that Y!Live, which never really passed the idea stage, will effectively stop broadcasting December 3.

As the entry fee for smartphones drops lower and lower, the wallet friendly price point found with most feature phones (or, as some might say, “dumbphones”) is beginning to lose its luster. In a day when obtaining a smartphone requires little more than 50 bucks and a 2-year promise, what’s the point of going for anything less?

According to the “Mobile Market View” study released today by The Kelsey Group, 18.9% of mobile consumers in the United States are now toting smartphones, with 49.2% planning to pick one up within the next two years.

A Flickr user named Garrett Ryan Smith uploaded the 3 billionth photo to the site today. The last big milestone was 2 billion photos, a year ago.

They’re well behind Facebook, with 10 billion. And they’re falling further behind – a year ago Facebook had just 4.1 billion photos.

Still, it’s a staggering number of photos for a site that launched in 2004.

The layoffs at Spot Runner are a lot worse than we expected. Instead of 50 to 75 people, Spot Runner is cutting much deeper—eliminating 115 jobs. Co-founder and CEO Nick Grouf characterizes this as “under 30 percent” of the company’s total headcount (which he declines to specify, but must be at least 384 people). We’ve added them to our Layoff Tracker. The majority of these cuts, he tells me, will come from the company’s local-search advertising business, which came out of the acquisition of Weblistic back in March.

That acquisition turns out to have been ill-conceived. Just because Spot Runner sells TV ads to local merchants does not mean those same businesses want to buy search marketing ads from Spot Runner as well. Grouf is now looking for “strategic alternatives” for the business, meaning he wants to dump it on another buyer.

Remember Adonomics (formerly Appaholic), the fishy analytics directory website for Facebook applications that we uncovered was used to pimp a service (the UADA, dead and buried now) from the same people who backed them (Altura Ventures), by ranking them as the biggest Facebook app creator before they ever launched? Well, we sure do.

According to AllFacebook, Adonomics has now been acquired by Adknowledge, which has made acquisitions in this space before (social ad network Cubics in December 2007). We have a feeling this was a very small deal, given the fact that Google Trends shows zero traffic for Adonomics since last April.

ProgrammableWeb has been doing a fantastic job chronicling web app APIs for over three years, and today they reached a milestone, surpassing 1000 APIs tracked. ProgrammableWeb is a great resource for developers cooking up great mashups, so kudos to them.

Quite fittingly, the 1000 API mark was achieved by the submission of the New York Times Community API, demonstrating that mashups are now mainstream.

Teach The People, a Facebook application and fbFund finalist that allows users to create learning communities, has launched to the public. Alongside the public launch, the startup has also annouced its partnerships with The Learning Annex (which offers lessons from celebrities), Destiny Image, and Quinnipiac University’s Professional Athlete Transition Institute which will help initially populate the site with content.

At first glance Teach The People strongly resembles Facebook Groups, but offers a number of enhancements that make the platform more suitable for teaching. Each community instructor can upload documents, media, and online webcasts. The platform also will support premium content, offering an integrated payment system that allows instructors to charge for their online lessons.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was one of the many Silicon Valley leaders to add his name to the NoOnProp8 advertisement that ran in the San Jose Mercury News a couple of days ago.

But that doesn’t mean the proponents of the embarrassingly discriminatory measure can’t buy a little air time on Google Adsense. California residents who view sites that include Google Adsense ads today are seeing an advertisement that says “Support Marriage Rights – Vote Yes on Prop 8 To Protect Traditional Marriage.”

The ad links to protectmarriage.com (the good domain – yesonprop8.com – redirects to noonprop8.com, which must frustrate the gay-haters to no end).

As far as I’m concerned, we’ll look back on measures like Prop 8 as little different than attempts to stop Women’s Suffrage or the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Denying a fundamental right to a person – such as marriage – is hateful and backwards. Google doesn’t have any obligation to run ads like these, and I believe they would be correct in banning it.

Dash Navigation is getting out of the hardware business and cutting 55 jobs, or 65% of its workers. The startup, which is backed by both Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, makes the Dash Express car GPS device. This is a network-connected GPS that pools the location and speeds of all nearby Dash owners to give them back real-time traffic reports. It also supports geoRSS feeds, and other GPS apps.

Despite its novel features (I am a big fan of the device) and the $71 million the company has raised, going into the hardware is business looks like it was a wrong turn. Dash will now pursue a strategy of partnering with other device manufacturers, including cell phone-makers, to add its software to their devices.

It’s hard out there for a VOIP solution. Skype rules the desktop and Vonage rules the den so where does an upstart like VoxOx belong?

The product, founded by a group of voice networking ninjas who wanted to create a desktop-based VOIP and chat solution with full IM and social network integration. Think of it, then as a cross between Adium/Digsby and Skype with a little Grand Central thrown in.

Two startups, ChaCha and Mechanical Zoo, are taking different approaches to tap human intelligence, and human labor, and get you quick answers to your questions.

Despite attempts to evolve search into something more human friendly, there’s still a big hole there. As useful as Google is, it doesn’t answer questions very well, and it isn’t good at making highly subjective recommendations (where shall I eat dinner tonight? What’s the best show to see in London right now?).

That’s where people come in. We ask them stuff all the time. It’s part of being human, and social, and works very well in the offline world.

Don’t pull the plug quite yet on Elon Musk’s electric sports car startup Tesla Motors. After laying off 18 percent of its workforce two weeks ago (69 people out of 384, we have confirmed with the company) and reportedly burning through all but $9 million in cash, Tesla is getting another lifeline in the form of a $40 million convertible. That is convertible as in debt, not convertible as in riding with the top down. Investors have now sunk $186 million into the company.

Add to that the tens of millions of dollars in deposits that Tesla has already collected for 1,200 vehicles (only 50 of which have been shipped). These are $110,000 machines, some of which already have been paid in full and others which have deposits on them ranging from $5,000 to $60,000.

PerfSpot is a MySpace-line social network which has rarely merited much mention, other than by TechCrunch UK last year when it was ranked as one of the UK’s fastest-growing social networking sites, beating Facebook at the time. Now the site, which claims 24 million members, is launching a word-of-mouth marketing service called Friendvouch. One can understand the desire to quickly monetise a social network in these tougher times. But is PerSpot poised to sow the seeds of its own demise? And will other social networks turn to such a strategy as times get tough?