For our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we’ve got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley’s top VCs and veterans of the space.
Brian Singerman — Founders Fund
Ron Conway — Angel Investor
Dan’l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft
George Zachary — Charles River Ventures
Paul Buchheit — Facebook/FriendFeed
Andrew Braccia — Accel Partners
Michael Arrington — Editor and Founder, TechCrunch
Moderated by Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld

Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services.

Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp.

We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban’s “sales software for real people” service Smibs.

Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.

The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.

With services like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, and Qik bringing live video streaming to the masses, the web is turning into a viable competitor to television for real-time content. But while all of these services are great for bloggers remotely broadcasting footage,or streaming live events, but they come with a few problems: video content isn’t optimized for search engines, and unlike TV, there’s no closed captioning. PlyMedia is looking to change that.

The company is launching a service that will offer real-time captions and super-fast transcriptions to suit the needs of live streamers.

Last year, we saw the launch of identi.ca, the open-sourced alternative to Twitter. At the time, we wrote that the company was never going to rival Twitter. As it turns out, that’s not the goal of parent company StatusNet. Instead, the startup is looking to become something akin to a ‘WordPress for microblogs’. That is to say, they make a platform that others can easily download and install to their own servers. And today they’re showing off the next major step in their platform: a hosted solution for those who don’t want to bother with managing their own install, which will be hosted on status.net.

In effect, Status.Net is to the StatusNet platform as WordPress.com is to WordPress. Status.Net will offer a free package for very basic use, and will then offer a number of premium packages that give access to premium features. We first heard about the upcoming product last month when StatusNet raised $875,000, but until now they haven’t introduced the platform to the public.

Today at the RealTime CrunchUp Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the social enterprise with Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor (he also introduced us to a new real-time Salesforce Chatter platform). Benioff has also signed a pair of copies of his book Behind The Cloud, which we’re going to be giving away to attendees of today’s conference.

To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).

We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.

Twitter has apparently come across the Holy Grail of advertising, and it’s coming soon. Today during his interview at the RealTime CrunchUp, Twitter COO Dick Costolo told the audience a bit about the company’s upcoming advertising business. Costolo was vague on the details, but he did make some promises: “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.”

Costolo didn’t divulge many more details, though he did mention that it wouldn’t be tied into the site’s retweet feature. When TC editor Michael Arrington tried to clarify by asking if the ads would be integrated into the Tweet stream, Costolo said that “he didn’t say the ads would be mixed in with tweets”. But he didn’t say they wouldn’t, either.

Costolo closed out the topic by saying that the message he wants to send is that “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

This morning Google unveiled its much-anticipated new operating system, Google Chrome OS. We were there to liveblog the event, and we also captured a portion of the live video stream that Google was broadcasting. This clip below includes a look at Chrome’s incredibly short boot time (clocking in at only around 7 seconds for a cold boots), some of the apps ChromeOS will be able to run, and the operating system’s interface. Google says that the UI will likely change significantly before Chrome OS ships, but this gives us some idea about how it will work.

Check out the video below.

This morning at Under the Radar, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are taking the stage to unveil SimpleGeo, their new infrastructure for location based services. We’ve been following the company over the last few months and uncovered some basic details earlier, but this marks the first time the founders are talking about the company in public.

SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them. The startup originated as a gaming company, but after spending four months building out their location platform, Stump and Galligan realized they had stumbled across an opportunity: location is soon going to become an expected feature in many applications, and there’s no reason developers should have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include the feature.

Every few weeks Internet dating site OkCupid uses the power of anonymized data to share a few truths about the online dating scene and human nature in general. To be sure, these reports are often highly controversial and aren’t going to be showing up in scientific literature any time soon, but they’re generally interesting (and often amusing) reads. The latest report to come out addresses ‘Your Looks And Your Inbox’, charting the number of messages users receive in relation to how attractive other members rate them.

Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme. But there are a few interesting phenomena.

Back when Twitter Lists first started to roll out to everyone, there was quite a bit of hype over how lists would have a major impact on the way people use the service. The extent of that change remains to be seen (many Twitter clients still haven’t integrated Lists so plenty of people probably haven’t even been exposed to them). But even during its relatively short existence we’ve come across one glaring weakness: there’s hasn’t been a good way to describe what a list you created was actually was actually about. Today, that’s changing: Twitter is rolling out a field for descriptions, according to a tweet from engineer Rael Dornfest.

Zynga is planning to bring FarmVille, the mega-hit Facebook game that currently has over 65 million monthly active users, to its own web portal at Farmville.com, according to sources familiar with the launch. The new site will use Facebook Connect integration to bring the popular game to standalone portal. This will presumably allow Zynga to offer a more engaging experience because it will be able to take over the whole page, without the normal Facebook interface running around the borders, and it also gives them more flexibility with their design. Look for the new site to launch as early as today.

Assuming the new site does well, we can likely expect Zynga to port its other games to their own standalone portals down the line.

Facebook is coming to a PS3 near you as part of the latest 3.10 update, which will be rolled out over the course of the next day. We knew it was coming, but Sony has been vague about exactly when the update would land. Turns out it was sooner than most people probably guessed, coming only a day after the November 17 release of Facebook’s integration with the Xbox 360.

Here are some of the features listed on the press release Sony just issued about the update:

Showcase Trophies: Instantly share trophies you earn in PS3 games in your Facebook stream. Simply sync your PS3 system and easily show off your accomplishments to friends and family.

PlayStation Store Purchase Log Publishing: Let friends and family on Facebook instantly know which PlayStation 3 games you’ve purchased. The PlayStation Store, available to PS3 and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system owners through PlayStation Network, features over 200 downloadable games, many of which are exclusive to PS3 or PSP system owners, in addition to over 4,000 pieces of add-on game content.

Game Event: With a few quick clicks of the controller sharing select game events, progress and statistics is now easier than ever with the Facebook integration.

This afternoon Digg CEO Jay Adelson was interviewed on Fox Business News, where he spoke about the future of Digg and the ways it could potentially cooperate with strugging news organizations. During the interview Adelson made a few interesting comments, some of which contrast with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s assertions in an interview conducted earlier today that “people understand that it’s perfectly fair that they are going to pay for [news]“. Instead, Adelson said that he doesn’t think your average consumer is going to be coughing up money for news any time soon. Instead, he thinks that payments will come from content hubs and aggregators, including Digg itself.

One way Digg can help, Adelson said, is by helping these news sites with their advertising using techniques similar to the ones Digg has implemented.

Last week we reported on Shakira’s decision to use Ustream and Facebook to live stream the debut of her latest music video, Give It Up To Me — a move that’s a fairly huge departure from the standard MTV route we probably would have seen a few years ago. Ustream has just given us the stats of yesterday’s launch, and it’s clear that it drew quite a crowd: over the course of the ten minute live stream, Shakira’s video had 95,000 unique viewers during the initial broadcast. And over the course of the last 24 hours, the video has seen a total of over 500,000 views.

Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube.

Today Ditech networks is announcing that it’s releasing a fully automated version of its PhoneTag voicemail-to-text technology that can operate behind a company firewall, making the service available to the many businesses and organizations where privacy and security are important. The service will also be readily available to enterprise customers, as it is fully functional with Mutare’s popular Enabled VoiceMail servers (though businesses will have to pay to active it). The service will also work on older PBX’s.

James Siminoff, Ditech Chief Strategy Officer (and former SimulScribe CEO), says that this is the first fully automated voicemail-to-text service that can operate behind the firewall. Most services, he says, rely on some degree of human transcription for accuracy, which makes them unsuitable for organizations that deal with sensitive information (a competitor called Spinvox has been in hot water for using humans to transcribe text that was supposed to be automated, leading to an uproar over privacy issues). PhoneTag’s fully automated solution is capable of around 85% accuracy, which makes it a viable solution for businesses that don’t want their voice messages routed outside of the company. PhoneTag also offers a human-powered service for users who aren’t handling sensitive information, which can get up to 97% accuracy.

When you go to search the web, is it because you want to read through a lengthy article related to a subject, or do you just want the facts that answer your question? Factery Labs, a new service that’s launching this morning, is hoping it’s the latter. Factery is a new search engine/API that uses advanced language processing to sift through content on the web to identify the most factual statements — in other words, it takes news articles and webpages and breaks them down into a handful of bulletpoints on the fly.

To give an idea of how Factery works, the company put together a simple search engine with a two-column view: one does a search for your query on Twitter and parses facts from any articles linked from those matches; the other column uses Yahoo’s BOSS engine to look at articles that are less time sensitive

Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events —  is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.

The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites.

“LOST MY PHONE!!! GIVE ME YOUR DIGITS!”

Sound familiar? For years, many people who have recently lost their phones have turned to Facebook to reunite with their friends. But rather than use the site’s integrated phone directory (which is probably more comprehensive than you think) they take a different approach: a new Facebook group declaring that their address book is gone for good. These groups often wind up with over a dozen phone numbers from friends who leave their numbers on the group’s wall. Turns out, that’s often a bad idea — in some cases it’s incredibly easy for spammers to harvest these phone numbers from Facebook. All it takes is a little Google trickery.

Earlier today we received a tip showing just how easy this ‘hack’ was to execute, yielding many thousands (perhaps even millions) of phone numbers. I quickly alerted Facebook to the issue, hoping that they might do something to somehow fix it before I wrote anything. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen — Facebook’s view is that users shouldn’t be using these groups (at least not public ones) to share their phone numbers. And Google has cached many of these numbers, so it’s unlikely they could do much anyway.

YouTube has just announced that it has partnered with Univision, the United States’ most popular Spanish language network, to bring a selection of its content to the world’s most popular video site. The agreement includes rights both to short clips and full length content.

Videos will be drawn from the Univision network, TeleFutura, and Galavision, and will also include footage from special events. Content will be rolled out over the course of the next few months. This is the first time Univision content will be available on the web outside of the network’s own properties, though this is a nonexclusive deal (don’t be surprised if we see similar content pop up on Hulu, TV.com, or other media portals soon).

I’ve spent the last week throughly enjoying my new Droid, and while I’ve come across some problems, most of my issues have simply been with the fact that Android does things differently than the iPhone — the transition just takes some getting used to. But there’s one big issue that needs far more than a UI tweak: Android Market. If there was a theme common to nearly every Droid review, it was that Android’s app selection just doesn’t cut it compared to the iPhone. I think that consensus is only half the story. These reviewers are finding that Android has a weaker selection of applications than the iPhone not just because some of their favorite apps aren’t there, but because actually browsing the Market just isn’t as enjoyable as what Apple’s iTunes offers. If Android’s Market’s perception as a poor man’s App Store is going to change, this experience needs to improve.

Currently, all Android Market browsing and transactions are done through an application that comes with the phone. This mobile application used to be pretty bad (it didn’t even offer screenshots of the apps), but was finally overhauled in September to be more competitive with the iPhone’s mobile version of the App Store. The new version is a big improvement, but browsing the store from the phone isn’t exactly a good time — you can only see a few apps at once, so scrolling through various lists gets tedious.

Over the last week Singularity University, an educational institution based at NASA Ames that draws some world’s top technologists and futurists, has been holding an Executive Program with the goal of preparing executives for the “imminent disruption and opportunities resulting from exponentially accelerating technologies”. The roster of instructors is impressive, with a number of top professors and executives covering fields ranging from stem cells to robotics.

Singularity has been posting a series of articles from reporters who have been attending the event, and over the course of the next few days we’ll be posting full videos of the lectures, as well as some 1-on-1 interviews with the instructors. You’ll be able to find these videos by clicking the ‘Singularity University’ logo in the right sidebar, or by clicking this link.

On Friday November 20, Scribd is teaming with a bunch of other well known startups in San Francisco to hold a new event called Startup Crawl, where they’ll be taking shuttles to check out the offices (and meet the teams) of a dozen different companies, including Engine Yard, Justin.TV, and Yammer.

The event is contracting three or four 56 passenger buses, which will be driving in a circuit between the startups (you can expect a bus every 15-20 minutes, but many of the offices are close enough to walk between them). Each office will be doing something different, with activies including everything from hacking sessions to happy hours. The first shuttle leaves the Embassy Suites SFO/Burlingame at 5:30, and the last bus begins its last run around the circuit at 11 PM. To participate you don’t have to start at the Embassy Suites — you can also show up at any of the participating startups beginning at 5:30.