The holiday season is officially in full swing, and Santa is prepping for his big night by offering phone calls to anyone who may need a little extra motivation to stay good through the end of the year (or who would just love to hear from the big man himself). To request a call, visit ChristmasDialer.com, where you’ll be able to choose from three possible voice greetings that can be directed towards any phone number.

The first call is free, while subsequent requests cost around a dollar each (depending on how many you buy at a time). Paid calls can also be made to international numbers, and can be scheduled to go out at a specified time. The site is based on the technology behind PrankDialer, and could probably be recreated fairly easily using Twilio, an API for phones that we covered last week.

Microsoft lined up some great deals for Live Cashback users today. But users are reporting that the site has been down much of the morning, and more than half of my attempts to connect are timing out. Given the high volume of ecommerce sales that take place today, that’s not good.

It’s also not so great for Microsoft’s expanding cloud computing efforts. If Microsoft can’t keep their own sites live on heavy traffic days, they can’t expect other companies to have faith in them as a platform either.

Live Cashback first launched in May 2008 to give users a refund on purchases.

Carl Icahn bought up another 6.8 million shares of Yahoo earlier this week, bringing his total holdings to 75.6 million shares (just north of 5 percent). He paid just under $10 a share, or about a third of what he paid last May when he started building the bulk of his position.

Of course, now he controls three seats on Yahoo’s board, including the one he occupies. So he is personally involved in the search for a new CEO to replace Jerry Yang, and he knows the stock will probably react favorably to the announcement of any new leadership. Why not buy now before the news when the stock is hitting rock bottom? He is obviously in the stock for the long haul now.

Google has rolled out an update to Google Maps, and has expanded Street View to include many new locations including my home town of Seattle! That makes it exciting to me, and obviously it’s exciting for everyone else on the internet because now there are miles and miles of new streets to investigate for hilarity, strange occurrences, and of course yourself. I’ve already scoured half of my routine locations looking for that familiar face, but no dice.

A fan of extremely simple, straight-forward web services? Then you probably know about funny pet-projects like DownForEveryoneOrJustMe or IsTwitterDown (variations apply). Here’s another one for your bookmarking pleasure that won’t make you go back to the website every time:

NotifyMeWhenItsUp lets you enter any website or service and sends you an e-mail notification when it’s back up (and only when it was effectively down). Simple, clean, obvious, free, and as far as I can tell it works like a charm too.

Update: I just got an e-mail a couple of minutes after publishing from one Milov Patel claiming that the service is a complete rip-off of a website called DingIt’sUp.com that was scheduled for launch tomorrow (placeholder for now). The screenshots sure look alike, but I have no way of knowing who stole from whom, or if this is merely a coincidence.

Either way, up to you to check up and compare both services tomorrow if you’re interested.

Update 2: all is well on the playground now, Sahil and Milov are on good terms again. Good.

Get thee to the Applery – or MacMall, MacConnection, or, better yet, Amazon – for some great deals on MacBooks, MB Pros, and iMacs. The Mac Pro, for example, is going for $284 off list at Amazon, making it about $2,500.

There’s a lot of buzz here in the Belgian blogosphere and mainstream media about an incident involving a New York-based blogger, who was fired from her job as a bartender after publishing a post on the bar visit of a Belgian politician.

Current Belgian Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem apparently stumbled into a Belgian bar in New York City on Monday evening with his entourage. Following his visit, bartender Nathalie Lubbe Bakker blogged about their visit (in Dutch), talking about how disgusted she was of how drunk De Crem was and how embarrassed she was about his behavior. Worst part, she wrote, was the fact that one of the politician’s advisors admitted to her that the meetings they were there for on taxpayer’s money were in fact canceled because the UN was meeting in Geneva (which is about 330 miles from Brussels). He reportedly told her they had decided to come to NY anyway despite being aware of the cancellation because the policital situation here was ‘calm’ and that he’d ‘never visited the city anyway’.

This is a guest post by Ed Freyfogle, co-founder of the Nestoria property search engine: OpenStreetMap started four years ago in the UK as a project to create a free and editable world map. What began as a few geogeeks wandering the streets with their GPS’s has turned into a global movement with over 75,000 registered contributors. The database has improved rapidly in quality and comprehensiveness, as have the tools and services around it. OSM is becoming a viable datasource for complex projects. The project’s stats are another demonstration of the awesome power of a motivated online mob. The passion of some of the volunteers is shocking; there’s even a student attempting to go his entire time at uni using only OSM maps.

I’ve been using an Android G1 phone for more than a month now on a daily basis, but I still haven’t given up my iPhone. The more I use them both, the more that I realize my iPhone is a Mac and my Android is a PC.

That is not necessarily a bad thing—except for when my Android crashes (which is a lot). Okay, it does not actually crash so much as it freezes up, forcing me to wait until it figures things out. Which it usually does. Except that one time when I plugged it into the wrong mini-USB charger and it gave me the screen of death: a white danger triangle with a cell phone flat on its back next to it. (Sorry for the fuzzy picture, I took it with my iPhone).

Whose fault was that crash? I’m sure it was mine. But believe me, I’m equally careless with my iPhone. It’s just a lot more stable. That’s kind of what you’d expect since Apple goes to such lengths to control every aspect of the device, including the kinds of apps that can run on it. Android apps also have to go through a vetting process, but it does not seem to be as strict as Apple’s.

CrunchBase, our free database of startup and people information, continues to grow thanks to countless additions and corrections by the community. The site now has entries on 20,000 people, 10,000 companies and over 1,000 venture funds.

The majority of content is added by the community (CrunchBase has wiki features to allow unlimited versioning control to step back if bad entries are made). When an important deal or milestone about a person or startup is reported on any site, people add it to Crunchbase for others to find.

The newspaper industry in the U.S. continues to shrink at an alarming rate. According to the Newspaper Association of America,, total industry advertising (both print and online) in the third quarter was $8.9 billion, down 18 percent from the year before. The oniine portion of that was $750 million, down 3 percent. So far in the first three quarters of 2008, the industry’s total advertising revenues have shrunk by $5 billion to $27.8 billion.

Print advertising has been declining for ten straight quarters, but this marks only the second quarter that online advertising also went down. More concerning is that the overall rate of decline seems to be accelerating, a trend we noted in September. Here is the percentage change in total newspaper advertising for the past five quarters:

Right on time for Thanksgiving day, µTorrent – client of choice for many BitTorrent users – has released a Mac version in beta, after a rudimentary alpha release was leaked a couple of months ago (on a BitTorrent tracker, at that).

The lightweight µTorrent client for Windows was first publicly released in September 2005, and was acquired by BitTorrent in 2006, who continued development on the application and promised to release a Mac version. It has now arrived, but as Torrentfreak points out, the Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment and may still contain serious bugs.

There are a lot of Twitter clones out there, often built by companies outside the US trying to steal the company’s thunder by creating local communities with a translated application, something the San Francisco startup has focused little on so far. That this isn’t always a direct road to success, proved German Twitter clone Duduku last year when it put itself for sale on eBay. Not that being inspired is necessarily a bad thing.

But services like Koornk (yes, that really is spelled correctly) clone everything about Twitter without adding anything of value nor approaching the concept from a novel business perspective. In fact, what’s even worse about Koornk (again, yes that’s really the name) is that they steal so much of Twitter’s lay-out and wording that it’s not even fun anymore. From the typical bird logo to the color scheme, the icons and even the font, the whole thing just screams Twitter to me.

A quick update on the Mobuzz saga (the Spanish online video entertainment startup turned to asking for user donations to keep its head above water): they’re now officially in the deadpool.

From the website:

It is with deep regret that we inform our friends and fans that MobuzzTV has closed officially today. We need to take some time to see how best to reorganise our project. We have been talking with many interested parties but unfortunately we have not been able to financially sustain our operations until the agreements were closed.

The company has made it clear that all donations will be returned, and that the video archive built up over the last 4 years will remain online.

Amazon is using the Thanksgiving break to quietly release some bad news – they’re shutting down one of its web services – Alexa Web Search. The service, which we first covered way back in 2006, is already closed to new customers, and existing users have until January 26, 2009 to move on to something else.

Amazon says in an email to developers that the reason for the closing is low usage, and I believe them. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all offer competing services. On the Alexa Web Search site itself Amazon says the service has been “deprecated,” which is a fancy word for shut down.

The email:

Israel-based mobile VoIP startup Fring joins the layoff parade by letting 10 people, or around 20% of total staff, go. Company CEO Avi Shechter says the company is doing well, though, and the layoffs were to ensure that the company had enough capital to get them past 2009.

Schechter also says Fring has recently raised a third round of financing, but declines to specify the amount or investors yet. Fring had raised $13 million over two previous rounds of financing.

DotNetNuke Corporation, the owner and maintainer of the open source web application framework that goes by the same name, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A venture funding from August Capital and Sierra Ventures.

DotNetNuke is a web application framework written in VB.NET, and is used by developers worldwide to create, deploy and manage interactive web, intranet and extranet sites. It’s DotNetNuke.com community website has over 630,000 registerered members, and the open source framework (the application is licensed under a single BSD open source license) has been downloaded over 5.5 million times to date.

Twitter is emerging as a major force in breaking news. But some people disagree.

Today we saw yet another illustration, when people in Mumbai got the word of terrorist attacks out to the world well before mainstream media even knew something was happening. Mathew Ingram points out previous examples of Twitter users breaking important world news.

If I didn’t hear about something important happening by watching my Twitter stream, it’s the first place I go to get an idea of what’s going on. Years ago I would have turned to the cable news channels, now it’s Twitter.

It’s not just the speed of early reports either. Twitter also serves up a constant stream of updates as situations progress.

I like StumbleUpon, the website recommendation engine that lets me click a button whenever I’d like to view a new, potentially interesting website. But for all the hours it has helped me waste, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it useful – pages that get recommended are rarely related to each other beyond a general category, so there’s never any logical train of thought.

San Francisco-based startup BuzzBox is looking to add some logic to the art of ’stumbling’ with its new Firefox plugin, Fast Forward. The service generates site recommendations based not only on their popularity, but also by the order in which they were viewed. For example, when I clicked the ‘Fast Forward’ button while reading about Twitter users reporting on the terror attacks in India, the service directed me towards the latest CNN coverage on today’s atrocities, as this was the page most frequently visited after reading the TechCrunch article.

The German startup community has been notorious for blatant clones of popular sites developed elsewhere (my personal favorite is Freundefeed). One startup that is sometimes associated with this trend (perhaps unjustly) is Qype, a Yelp-like site for reviews that has established a strong presence throughout Europe. CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher says that he wasn’t aware of Yelp’s existence when he launched Qype, but at this point it doesn’t really matter – Qype is on fire, and is on its way to becoming the dominant local review site in a number of countries, including England, France, and Germany.

Uhrenbacher says that Qype sees 6.3 million monthly unique visitors across The UK, France, Spain, and Germany (where the site was originally founded and receives around half its traffic). The site also recently launched a localized version for Brazil. But while Qype is multilingual, it treats each localized version as its own site – you’ll never run across a review in French if you’ve specified your preferred language as English.