One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.

Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and Wine and The Shins. When you hit the download button on songs for those artists, a window pops up showing the album where that song came from with with the option to download the entire album or any individual song for $0.99. You can then pay imeem directly by credit card or Paypal and download the song to your computer.

(Screenshots after the jump).

What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.

The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck.

Ever since OS. 3.0, the latest operating system for the iPhone, launched on June 17, prices among the top 100 apps in the iTunes App Store have been fluctuating wildly as developers push out apps taking advantage of all the new features in the OS. Some of the new features we are starting to see in apps include push notifications, turn-by-turn navigation, cut-and-paste, embeddable maps, access to external accessories, search within apps, and subscriptions.

Mobile app distribution service Distimo just put out its June iPhone App store report As you can see from the charts above, the average pricing among the top 100 paid apps was pretty steady until the middle of the month, when developers started to test different price points. The most popular price for an app remained $0.99, but the month of June saw more top apps priced at $1.99, $4.99, and $9.99 (the green bars on the chart above).

Our Real Time Stream Crunchup is only a week and half away (get tickets here). We’ve been working hard to pull together the best startups, investors, engineers, and marketers developing products and platforms which take advantage of real-time data and communications in new ways. The real time stream is fast becoming a dominant metaphor for consuming information, increasingly displacing or at least transforming the traditional Web page. It has implications for startups, venture investors, media, search, and business, in general. We’ll explore all of these facets in panels, on-stage interviews, demos, and a roundtable.

Twitter to Facebook have already embraced the stream, but they are only the beginning. An whole new ecosystem of real time stream platforms and apps is emerging before our eyes. In fact, so many companies wanted to demo their product launches at the CrunchUp that we had to turn some away. But we still managed to fit in about a dozen demos, many of them will be seen for the first time.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more. Individual panels will do deep dives into the market opportunity, the real time platforms, real time search (something I am very excited about), and real time business. By real time business, I mean how businesses are adapting to the stream as a tool for marketing, brand management, customer engagement tool, internal communications, and even resource allocation. Putting together this conference has opened my eyes as to how far-reaching the real time stream is already, and these are early days.

I hope you can join us to see for yourself. Below is the (almost final) agenda:

In the first 24 hours since its release yesterday, Firefox 3.5 has been downloaded more than 5 million times. (It took only a few hours to pass a million). That is certainly respectable, but doesn’t quite measure up to the mania that Firefox 3.0 set off last summer, when it achieved a “world record” 8.3 million downloads in a single day. Maybe we’ll have to wait for Firefox 4.0 to beat that record. But Firefox 3.5 might still beat the 11 million downloads Safari 4 got over its first three days of availability.

After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years ago during the same period, there were 25 IPOs which raised $4.15 billion.

So don’t call it a comeback just yet. But any activity is a sign of hope. And this was the most active period since the fourth quarter of 2007. Will it keep building, or will IPO candidates duck their heads back under water?

How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. Today, Meebo is creating an ad network across partner sites which use its new Community IM service, which ads a Meebo IM bar at the bottom of participating sites.

Visitors to one of the 85 partner sites which have implemented the Community IM product (including Current TV, DailyStrength, Flixster, and Webs.com) can chat with their IM buddies without leaving the sites. Today, Meebo is introducing new ad units which pop up along the bottom left of the browser, beginning with ads for the Toyota Piou and AT&Ts. For the Toyota ad, a little car icon pops up on the left of the Meebo IM bar, away from all of the chat activity on the bottom right. If you click on the car, a larger ad 900X400 pixel rich ad overlay opens up which can show a video or any number of interactive ads. “When they click we do not take them away from the conversation,” says Sternberg. During the whole time people is watching the ads, they can still chat with their friends through the Meebo IM column on the right.

Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). There is also the Data.gov project, which is attempting to digitize government data and make it available in its raw form for citizens and companies to sift through.

While Kundra agrees in principle that all public government data should be online, he also cautions that the reality is government data sits in more than 10,000 different systems, many of them written in COBOL or are still locked in dusty paper archives. But at least the government is starting to tackle the problem. The government collects a wealth of data, and the more accessible it becomes the more transparent government itself will be (not to mention the opportunities to startups which can tap into this data to offer new services). The State Department is also using the Internet, and Youtube specifically, to reach out directly to citizens of other countries every time Obama or Hillary Clinton travel abroad. They record video messages to citizens of other countries, which are distributed in multiple languages. Call it YouTube diplomacy.

Steve Jobs is officially back at work, according to Apple PR. Even though he had a liver transplant earlier this year, a detail which was leaked to the Wall Street Journal and conveniently reported on a Friday night after the markets had closed. Last week, Jobs was spotted back on Apple’s campus and was even quoted in a press release! Today, Apple is hammering home the message that Jobs is back on the job, telling multiple news organizations from ABC News to Bloomberg to the New York Times to Reuters the exact same canned quote (sometimes attributed to spokesman Steve Dowling, sometimes not).

Steve is back to work, Jobs is at Apple a few days a week and working at home the remaining days. We are very glad to have him back.

Not only does Google want to organize all the world’s information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. For the majority of the world’s population, that means making it available on a cell phone, and not a fancy iPhone or Android with a Web browser either. I’m talking about $10 cell phones with not much more than voice and SMS capabilities. If Google can reach people, especially in developing nations, with SMS, it can reach everyone with a cell phone.

In Africa, it is launching a suite of SMS services today, including SMS search, Q&A-style tips, and an SMS-based marketplace. The first country to get these services is Uganda.

As Twitter becomes the default conversation spot on the Web, we’re going to start to see tools which combine site-specific conversations with Twitter. One example is Tweetboard, which creates a Twitter-powered forum for any site. Once a site adds the Tweetboard code to their site, a site-wide tab appears which allows visitors to have forum discussions by simply logging into Twitter (via OAuth). All the conversations are threaded, and comments appear on Twitter as well, potentially drawing in a larger audience into the specific conversation.

One of the difficulties of following a conversation on Twitter itself is that replies to particular threads aren’t threaded together. On Tweetboard, all the discussions are threaded and nested together, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook. Site publishers can choose to set up a Tweetboard using their personal Twitter accounts or create a new one specific to each Tweetboard.

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.

No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal minds of our time. Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better.

Do venture investors with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns? An academic paper from a few years ago by Yael Hochberg, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Yang Lu titled “Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance” (embedded at the bottom of this post) suggests that is the case. They looked at historic venture returns and found that “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition.

A venture firm’s network in the study was defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds. The more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. The correlation between the size of a venture firm’s network and its returns may have something to do with better access to deal flow, talent, advisers, potential customers, and potential exits.

If this is true, then who are the most connected venture firms and angel investors today? Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. “In summary,” says Dondeti, “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.”

So which venture investors have the best networks?

Just like every other major Website, Google was inundated with people looking for news about Michael Jackson yesterday. Above is a chart showing the volume of search queries for the deceased pop star. Searches peaked right around 3 PM PDT, as people all over the world were trying to find out information about his passing.

More details on the Google blog.

One of the hottest areas of search right now is real time search, which attempts to find results based on what is happening right now. Twitter’s search engine fast becoming one of the key ways to navigate the service and discover what people are thinking about any subject at any given moment. Facebook is testing out ways to let you search your personal stream. Google is waking up to the challenge as well (Larry Page is particularly concerned with keeping up).

Every week, it seems, a new startup launches tackling real time search from a different angle. (Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler, Topsy, Almost.at, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Omgili, to name a few).. They are trying to apply real time search to all the different streams of information flowing over the Internet right now: Twitter, Facebook feeds, Digg submissions, blog comments, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube uploads, shared links on bit.ly and elsewhere. The list keeps getting longer every day.

There is something about human nature which makes us want to prioritize information by how recent it is, and that is the fundamental appeal of real time search. The difference between real time search and regular search didn’t really crystallize for me until I had a conversation with Edo Segal, who sold his real time search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and holds three patents on the subject. “Real time taps into consciousness,” says Segal, “search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.”

The second batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast so grab them now. Update: This batch is sold out.

We are also selling tickets for our Real Time Stream CrunchUp earlier that day (a CrunchUp ticket includes entry to the party as well). The CrunchUp is a mini-conference exploring all aspects of the real time stream and its impact on everything from information consumption and search to media and business.

The lineup of speakers includes founders, CEOs, and top engineers from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, Salesforce, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Collecta, Qik, and more. It is amazing how much activity is going on in this area. The number of stealth companies and products that want to launch at the event alone is overwhelming, and we are working hard to fit as many of them as we can into the schedule. (More details soon).

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10
5:30 - 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Additional tickets will be released over the next two weeks.

As usual, there will be lots of start-up demos, giveaways, drinks and fun. CrunchUp tickets include expedited entry to the August Capital outing.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the battle brewing now between Google and Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Even if Bing proves to be just as good as Google, it might not matter because of the strength of Google’s brand. An independent usability and consumer preference study, which we’ve obtained and embedded below, suggests as much. It was conducted by the Catalyst Group, a usability research and design firm located in New York City.

The study was an intense focus group in which 12 subjects were monitored with eye-tracking cameras as they conducted searches. Afterward, they were interviewed and completed a survey. Prior to the test, all the subjects used Google as their main search engine. Following the test, 4 out of the 12, or one third, said that overall they preferred Bing. The other 8 said that they preferred Google because they were already familiar with it, used other Google products, or that Bing’s improvements are simply not enough to make them switch.

The adoption cycle for Twitter is a bit strange. It goes something like this: Ever-increasing waves of hype, links, and attention bring in the newbies to Twitter.com where they get their first taste of Twitterdom. Some portion of those set up an account out of curiosity or a fear of being left behind. They try sending out a few Tweets, look around, get bored by the initial banality of the service and abandon it for other pursuits.

But that is not the end of it. A lot of them come back, either because they keep getting links from friends or keep hearing about it on TV or whatever, and then they slowly start to see the usefulness—a funny Tweet from a friend, a link to breaking news, a way to keep an eye on the general zeitgeist. Twitter is the kind of thing that is easier to experience than it is to explain. But it is an acquired taste and often requires repeated exposure before people get hooked. Once they do get hooked, there is no going back.

Finance sites like Yahoo Finance and Google Finance haven’t changed much in the past ten years. The fonts are different. Maybe there’s some more real-time quotes and fancier, interactive charts. But at their core they all follow pretty much the same formula: dump as much data on the individual investor as they can and let them figure it out. Wikinvest, which started out as a crowd-sourced investing site, is trying to change all of that with a complete redesign that is being turned on tonight for members who log in.

Over the past two years, Wikinvest has become a great resource for researching stocks but some of its most interesting data was hidden away. It is not a daily habit like other finance sites, attracting only about 500,000 unique visitors a month. The redesign aims to change that by putting all of Wikinvest’s industry- and company-specific data front and center. Each stock page has a chart, key metrics, a news feed, wiki analysis, and opinions from bulls and bears.

Google is moving into the mobile ad market with AdSense for mobile apps. Over the past few months, Google has been testing both text and graphical ads with ten mobile app developers, including Shazam and Urbanspoon. Today it is opening the private beta to more developers who meet certain criteria.

These are contextual ads for iPhone and Android apps. To qualify for the public beta, the apps must be free and generate at least 100,000 pageviews per day. The program is only for iPhone or Android apps. Developers must be ready to go live with the ads in four weeks and participate for three months.

The microstock photography business is growing out of nothing. The leader in the market, iStockphoto, is projecting $200 million in revenues this year. When iStockphoto was bought by Getty Images February, 2006 for $50 million, its revenues that for year were about $23 million, according to COO Kelly Thompson. In 2007, revenues were $72 million, and the company never disclosed 2008 revenues. (Update: Thompson says 2008 revenues were around $150 million). Thompson says iStockPhoto has been profitable since before the acquisition and now represents a “significant chunk” of . (Getty Images is owned by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman and does not break out revenues formally via audited statements).

The demand for affordable images for use on Websites and in print is catching on and iStockphoto is the main beneficiary. It sells a photo, illustration, or video every second, and pays out $1.2 million a week to the photographers and artists who upload images to the site. There are nearly 80,000 artists in total represented on the site and 5 million images. “Definitely the print side is declining and we are seeing lots of Web usage,” reports Thompson.

Some of the most promising set of mobile apps being built today use a cell phone’s camera and GPS to overlay data onto the real world. In other words, instead of looking at a browser, you look through the camera lens at the real world around you and information is layered on top of the view projected on the small screen. (It’s not just a viewfinder, you know). Last year at TechCrunch 50, the Sekai Camera demo from Japan that does this blew away the audience. More recently, Layar showed us similar augmented reality apps for the Android phone. Now IBM has its own augmented reality mobile app for Wimbledon called Seer Android (see demo in the video above).

Industry white papers, in general, are dull reading—unless you need a piece of information in one of them to do your job. Then you’ll pay almost anything (i.e. expense it) to get your hands on the white paper you need. Sometimes companies produce white papers and give them away for free, but they have a hard time finding the professionals who might be interested in whatever narrow topic the paper covers.

Enter LinkedIn. It knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in. The business networking site is testing a new feature that turns white papers into ads and presents them to the narrow group of professionals most likely to want to read them. LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.