By far the two companies I’ve written about the most recently are Apple and Twitter. This is to the delight of some people, and the absolute horror of others. And now I’ve got something that will really whip up the fanboys and enrage the haters: Me writing about Apple writing about Twitter.

Yes, Apple has a new business profile of the micro-messaging service that it put up today on its site. The headline may just say it all, “Twitter. Triumph of humanity.” But it’s actually a fairly in-depth look at how Twitter uses Apple products to conduct their business. “Pretty much everyone here at Twitter uses a Mac,” says Alex Payne, Twitter’s API lead, in the video that accompanies the profile.

Earlier this month we reported on eBay’s spinoff of StumbleUpon, a company it owned for a little less than two years. Ebay bought the company for $75 million in May 2007. Unknown until now, though, was the spinoff value of StumbleUpon. According to a source close to the transaction, it was $29 million.

New investors Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital joined StumbleUpon founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith in purchasing the company back from eBay. Outside investors put in 85% or so of the $29 million, we’ve been told, with Camp and Smith making up the rest.

eBay was paid $25 million in cash for StumbleUpon and retains a 10% interest in the spun off entity. $4 million remains in the company to fund operations.

We’ve reported in the past on how Apple has not only been late on payments to iPhone app developers, but has also neglected to pay some developers for their app sales at the store entirely. We thought that perhaps our post might call Apple’s attention to the problem. Apparently, developers complaints have gone unheard at Apple and now they are so upset that some of them are threatening to sue Apple for breach of contract.

As we wrote earlier, Apple’s delay in payments is affecting some developers but not all of them. Some are being paid but other developers are claiming no payment from Apple for sales and continued poor customer support from Apple. You can read the complaints on the developer forums here and here.

Apple’s contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. Developers are claiming that there are massive delays in payments for as early as last fall and are not being paid the amount of money that the developers are in fact due from sales. One developer, who hasn’t been paid since November 2008, forwarded us an email chain between Apple’s App Store finance team and himself. An Apple employee, who was responding to the developers complaints, wrote that the developer’s continued emails about the late payments was “bordering on harassment,” and claimed that the finance team receives thousands of emails a day and couldn’t get to his right away. Another developer on the forum says that he hasn’t been paid since September and is owed close to $7000 for sales.

I can’t stop drooling over Gmail Labs. It’s simply a great idea for expanding a product, without forcing all users happy with the current one to upgrade to features they don’t want. And tonight may be the best Gmail Labs feature yet: Google Search In Gmail.

Yes, it may sound lame or obvious, but it’s a pretty kickass feature. Once enabled, it puts a Google Search widget in the left side toolbar of Gmail. From there, you simply input a query into the search box, and it will pop up the results in an overlay window at the bottom — the same type of window it users for IMs and Tasks. It will show you the top three results in this box automatically, or you can click “more” to expand the box. You can also pop the results out into their own window.

The name “Android” is at the very core of Google’s mobile initiative. It’s even successfully gotten people to move away from calling the devices “Google Phones” or “GPhones,” something which seemed impossible prior to the unveiling. But Google may be in serious trouble of losing that name — or at least having to pay a hell of a lot of money to keep it.

Erich Specht, a man who runs a small Midwestern data company, applied for and was granted a trademark on the Android name in 2002, according to Forbes. Google? Well, it tried to trademark the name in 2007, shortly before its massive Android PR blitz — but it was rejected a few months later. Still, Google pushed forward with trying to gain legal rights over the name, but its appeals were again and again rejected, and its trademark application was apparently suspended last November.

So what does that mean? Well, Specht is seeking $94 million from Google (and all the other members of the Open Handset Alliance) for infringing on the Android name. He’ll be in court next week, and Google will have 60 days to respond to him. Given Google’s rejections by the Patent and Trademark Office, this things seems to reek of a high-priced settlement, in which Google gets to keep using the name while paying Specht something substantially less than the $94 million. But, it’s not quite that cut and dry.

Yesterday, days of hype culminated in the unveiling of the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which made its debut at a presentation put on by Harvard University’s Berkman Center. Unfortunately the resulting video footage turned out to be an exercise in frustration (or boredom). Not because it was uninteresting, mind you, but because we couldn’t see the apparently innovative search engine that creator Stephen Wolfram was talking about.

Apparently someone has had a change of heart over the media squeeze, because the Berkman Center has posted a new version of the video (or at least 10 minutes of it), this time with footage of the service.

This portion of the video includes a number of queries, including calculating the GDP of France (which results in a graph of the GDP over time) and the number in Internet users in Europe, generating a relevant histogram.

Yesterday myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook reached out to FunAdvice President Jeremy Goodrich to talk about a possible acquisition. Based on certain assumptions, Cook said, he’d be prepared to offer $125,000 cash up front, $25,000 in consulting fees and $125,000 in MyYearBook stock.

Goodrich emailed Cook back and bcc’d us with his response: no deal. I asked Goodrich, who I don’t know, why he copied us on the email string. His response: “I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting.”

Interesting indeed. I wish all startup founders did this. The email string is below, with some contact information removed. I’m sure Cook is thrilled.

It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund, which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled backwards, you know).

The app was working, and could be released sometime this summer, according to my source. The photo above shows the app on a Blackberry Bold, and appears to be showing off its contact search functionality. You type in a few letters, and it returns the contact information for every match in your inbox (even people who you haven’t necessarily added to your address book yet). I wonder what else it can do.

Good news, BlackBerry users! Never again will you need to kludge around in your browser just to dig up a number or determine who’s behind the number that just called. Following the success of their iPhone and Android applications, WhitePages will soon be announcing the upcoming availability of a native BlackBerry application.

It’ll still be a few days before the app makes its way to the BlackBerry App World, but we’ve been tinkering with a pre-release copy for a few days now.

For the past several weeks, plenty of my friends have had the new Twitter interface featuring both Search and Trending Topics on the main page, but I had yet to see it. Today, I log in to see that I’m finally special enough to get it as well — only to learn that it’s now officially been rolled out to everyone.

Say hello to the new Twitter.com, it’s a lot like the old one, but with the two important features. Search works great because it’s all done on the page without any reloads. And perhaps the most useful feature is that you can save searches that you do over and over again. Also included in the right hand sidebar is Trending Topics, which keeps track of the hot items people are searching for across Twitter. Not surprisingly, right now Swine Flu takes up the top two spots, with Mexico a little below it.

With more than 15 billion photos (and 60 billion image files with replication for different sizes), Facebook eats up a lot of storage with its photo application alone. Members are adding 220 million new photos every week. Facebook currently has more than 1.5 petabytes of storage for its photos, and that is growing at a rate of 25 terabytes a week. Last year, Facebook spent an estimated $30 million on NetApp storage appliances alone just to keep up with the growth of photos and other uploaded content. To reduce some of these costs, Facebook decided to engineer its own storage architecture called Haystack.

Now more details have emerged about how that system actually looks and works. In a nutshell, Haystack will allow Facebook to switch from expensive, commercial storage appliances to commodity off-the shelf hardware. It is going from a traditional network file system to something more akin to stripped-down network application that does only what it needs to do. Not only will Facebook get the cost savings of going commodity, but they also get a 3X improvement in storage capacity. In other words, what used to take 30 discs to store, now will take only 10.

BuddyPress, the side project of blogging powerhouse WordPress, has just hit version 1.0 and has officially launched. It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress (MU — more on that below) blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites.

Here’s what version 1.0 features: Extended profile, private messaging, friends, groups, “the wire,” activity stream, blog tracking and forums. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff in a first version — and it looks great (see the screenshots below). All of these features should be relatively straightforward from their names, except “the wire,” which is basically like your Wall on Facebook. People can go to that area and leave messages.

The domain Ad.com sold for $1.4 million yesterday at domain name registration company Moniker’s TRAFFIC conference in Silicon Valley. The winning bidder was Divyank Turakhia of Directi.com and CEO of Skenzo, a domain parking company.

Moniker made more than $2 million in domain names at the TRAFFIC auction, with Ad.com taking the highest bid. Bottledwater.com took the no. 2 spot at $45,000 and Athletic.com received the third highest amount, selling for $40,000.

$1.4 million may sound like a lot to spend on a domain, especially given the current state of the economy. But Ad.com is a two-letter domain that is easily pronouncable and actually means something, so it’s definitely valuable in the domain market. And a recession doesn’t seem to be stopping companies from spending the big bucks for desirable domain names so Turakhia may be able to flip Ad.com for a profit. Travelzoo bought Fly.com for $1.8 million in January. Vibrators.com was sold for $1 million a back in November and A&T’s YellowPages.com paid $3.85 million for YP.com in December.

Travel guides are a dime a dozen on the web. But for the most part, they’re not very conducive to really exploring – it’s not much fun to click through various guides to get a feel for where you’d like to visit, because each guide is loaded with a wall of text. Ruba, a new travel site that launches today, is looking to offer users a way to visually browse through cities and their attractions around the world, offering photo-rich guides and an emphasis on making it easy to quickly discover new locations.

The site is headed by Mike Cassidy, who has founded a number of successful companies, including Xfire, which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million. Cassidy says that his team has worked to create a very clean site that is very snappy and easy to casually browse through, with a strong technical emphasis placed on search. Rather than ask users to tag the guides they create, the search engine identifies keywords in their descriptions and titles. And while this can be prone to false positives, in the demo I saw it seemed to work quite well (a search for ‘kids london’ resulted in guides like “Top 5 Things To Do With Kids In London” and “The London Aquarium”).

Yesterday, we talked a bit about how some companies are clearly trying to capitalize on the Swine Flu craze that is sweeping the nation. Naturally, someone just had to make an iPhone app.

And the winner is IntuApps, which has Swine Flu Tracker, waiting for approval from Apple before it’s released into the App Store. IntuApps’ Barry Schwartz, who is also a blogger, sent along some screenshots of the app. In it, you can see the current Threat Level for the disease, a map showing confirmed and suspected cases, a symptoms area to inform people, and an alert page for breaking news on Swine Flu.

Millward Brown, a subsidiary of the WPP, has come out with its annual list and report, BrandZ, that ranks the most valuable brands in the world. Unsurprisingly, Google tops the list for the third year in a row, with the Google brand valued at $100 billion, rising 16% in value over the past year from $86 billion. Microsoft comes in second, with its brand valued at $76.2 billion, only rising 8% in value over the past year. Last summer, Google had the no. 2 reputation in the world, according to The Reputation Index, and Microsoft didn’t even break into the top 40 (the company was ranked #43 in terms of reputation). In last year’s BrandZ rankings, Microsoft was third on the list behind General Electric, so the company has inched a little closer to Google.

This list is in. Time has released its annual Time 100 list, honoring the most influential people in the world. There are a lot of interesting names including Sarah Palin and President Obama, but let’s focus on the names from the tech sphere.

Moot (the creator of 4chan), Jeff Bezos, The Twitter Guys, Sam & Dan Houser, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Nathaniel Silver, Nandan Nilekani, and Shai Agassi have all be included. And some of their write-ups are really interesting because of their authors. For example, Moot is written up by the man perhaps now best known for being the “Rick” in the “Rick Roll”, Rick Astley. The “Twitter Guys” (founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey) are written up by Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter users with a million followers. And Jeff Bezos is written up by Bill Gates.

It looks like all it took for details of Palm’s post-Pre phone to begin spilling out was for us to break the news of it yesterday. Just hours after, a blurry shot of the handset was out. Now, before the next day is even half way over, a decent shot and a full list of purported specs have made their way out.

Many of us have been saying it for a long time: location based services are the future. But up until now they’ve been a distant, hazy future, because they’ve been so difficult to use. That’s going to change soon, and it looks like Google is going to be leading the way.

Google has just announced that it has become the default location provider service in Firefox, which means beginning in the latest Firefox Beta (available here) users will be able to update their location from their web browser without having to install an extra plugins or programs through Google. This is big.