It’s no secret that bloggers love their polls — they’re a great way to increase user engagement, and sometimes you can even get some useful data from them. But most people probably don’t realize just how popular these polls really can be. PollDaddy has just released some of its latest stats, and they don’t fail to impress: the company is now serving 430 million poll impressions per month, with a reach of over 74 million people worldwide, giving it a Quantcast rank equivialent as the 22nd most visited online service in the world.

That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy’s acquisition by WordPress’s parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic’s premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don’t want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.

It’s not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their “system” for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim, for quite a while. But that isn’t keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting. And while it’s not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn’t disappoint.

As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.

Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone’s integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there’s been one annoyance that’s aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you’ve launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch.

Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone’s music library. In order to play music as you ran, you’d have to first open up the phone’s iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone’s multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.

Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.

That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

It’s been a big day for Facebook, with news earlier this morning that the social network will soon be totally revamping its privacy settings and making it easier to share with the entire web. Now developer Joe Hewitt, who is responsible for Facebook’s massively popular iPhone application, has posted a note to the site describing some of the new features we can expect from the latest iteration of the app, which he says is “98% done”. Hewitt doesn’t give an exact release date, but we can likely expect it very soon.

Facebook’s privacy conference call just ended, and it’s clear some major changes are going to be coming to the social network soon. Some of these, like a totally revamped privacy control page, are both long overdue and very welcome. But others, like the Transition Tool, seem ripe for disaster.

Facebook clearly wants its users to become more comfortable sharing their content across the web, because that’s what needs to happen if the site is going to take Twitter head-on with real-time search capabilities. Unfortunately that’s far easier said than done for the social network, which has for years trumpeted its granular privacy settings as one of its greatest assets. Now, those settings are turning into problematic obstacles.

This morning Facebook is holding a conference call/web share for press outlining changes the site is making to its privacy options. Facebook hasn’t given us much of a heads up as to exactly what they’ll be changing, but there’s a good chance it will have something to do with the ‘Everyone’ sharing settings the site has recently been toying around with, which takes the social network one step closer to mimicking Twitter’s functionality. There’s also a chance Facebook will be overhauling its convoluted privacy control pages. The call begins at 10 AM PST.

Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Back in 2007 we wrote about a service called Dial Directions which lets you call a special phone number and verbally ask for directions, which are immediately sent to you via SMS. Today comes news that the company has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a development house specializing in Arabic natural language processing (NLP). And with their powers combined, they’re building a real-time voice translation service that will allow users to translate phrases from their mobile phones on the fly.

It’s a better fit than it sounds. Dial Directions has spent the last few years building mobile applications (it has an app for the iPhone on the App Store), and has also built out the technology required to efficently transfer voice input to servers, where it can then be processed (this server-side processing is also used by Google Voice Search and a number of other apps). Once it makes it to the cloud, this speech will be routed through Sakhr’s software, which is capable of translating English to Arabic and vice-versa. Translated audio and text are then sent back to the mobile phone, all within a matter of seconds.

Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.

The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat. As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room.You can try out the gadget for yourself here.

Around this time last year we saw a stream of high ranking employees leaving Yahoo as the web portal reached new lows following the fumbled Microsoft deal. Now, we’re beginning to see a similar trend from MySpace, the once-shining social network that has been recently hit by stagnating growth, waves of layoffs (both in the US and abroad), and the ousting of its co-founder CEO. The latest member of the executive team to leave is SVP Engineering Allen Hurff, who annouced his decision to leave the company on Friday. A tweet he sent out that day confirms his departure.

Hurff was with the company for over four years, where he and former SVP Operations Jim Benedetto were largely reponsible for building up MySpace’s technology team (Benedetto left the company in March). Hurff also played an integral role in MySpace’s adoption of OpenSocial, serving as Chairman of the foundation. The OpenSocial platform, which allows for the integration of third party applications in MySpace, will likely play a key role in the site’s success moving forward, so this is a big loss for the social network.

Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.

The product’s official name is the Call-To-Action Overlay, and it’s about as straightforward as ads come: it’s a semi-transparent pop-up that links viewers to any website you choose. For example, I could place an overlay on a TechCrunch video inviting users to visit the corresponding post we wrote about it. Yes, it’s that simple.

It’s hard to believe, but you’ve never been able to do this on YouTube before now. If you ever wanted to drive users watching your YouTube video to another site, you’d have to include it as a link in the summary at the right-hand side of the page, which most people ignore anyway. Users can include links in annotations, but only to other YouTube videos. Think back to President Obama’s landmark election campaign, which was helped in no small part by his YouTube presence. If he ever wanted to direct visitors to one of his campaign homepages, he’d have to ask visitors to enter his site’s URL manually. That’s a pretty major hurdle to overcome. This gets rid of it.

Last month we wrote about OffiSync, a powerful plugin that directly ties Microsoft Office to Google Docs, allowing you to save your desktop files to the cloud automatically. Since launch the plugin has fared quite well, with over 50,000 downloads. And today it’s releasing a new version that could prove immensely useful for those of you that frequently use Office.

The biggest addition to the plugin is integrated text and image search. While Office comes with a directory of clip art, it leaves something to leave desired — I almost always find myself just going straight to Google Image search. Now, using OffiSync, you can search Google Images directly from within Office. The plugin supports advanced searches, like sorting by color, size, and usage rights. Once you’ve found an image you like, simply hit ‘Insert’ and the picture will appear wherever your text cursor was. There’s also an integrated browser: just navigate to the page you’d like to quote, highlight the text, and hit Insert.

They may be mysterious and perhaps even a bit shady, but secondary equity markets, which allow employees to sell off their shares to other buyers, are quickly heating up. Because of the rarity of IPOs and acquisitions in the startup world these days, early employees and founders are becoming increasingly anxious to convert some of their shares into cash (one need look no further than reports of employees selling Facebook stock at relatively low prices for proof).

Unfortunately, because these markets are trading shares of private companies, buyers and sellers are often left in the dark as to the worth of their stock. SharesPost, a private equity market that’s currently operating in public beta, is looking to help: the site has launched a publication platform for analyst reports meant to complement its equity market. And it’s offering a free two month membership to TechCrunch readers, which you can sign up for here.

As a teaser for what’s available on the platform, the site has shared two valuation reports on some of the world’s biggest social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn. You’ll want to check out the full reports here and here to read the full analysis and methodology (you may have to register).

Facebook has just named former Genentech Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman as its new CFO. The news comes three months after Facebook ousted Gideon Yu from the position, citing at the time its desire to find someone with “public company experience” (which was bizarre given the fact that Yu had public company experience).

At the time of Yu’s departure there was speculation that he had been unable to secure investments at the company’s lofty $15 billion valuation established by the Microsoft deal, and that the company was considering an early IPO. Since then, things have changed: Facebook just raised a $200 million investment from Russian firm DST at a $10 billion valuation, which means it has plenty of money to keep its server farms churning and keeping pace with the site’s staggering growth.

Digitalsmiths, the video distribution and analysis platform that powers TheWB.com, TMZ, and a number of other popular sites, is rolling out a new product suite today dubbed VideoSense 2.0. The new suite includes a number of features that will make it more appealing to content owners looking to distribute video across the web, but the most interesting new feature for consumers will be the platform’s revamped video search, which can best be described as a “Google for video”.

Granted, there already is a Google video search, but this goes well beyond that, allowing users to search for any actor, scene, or piece of dialog they’d like across shows in the Digitalsmiths library. Digitalsmiths has spent years building the technology to perform speech recognition and visually match actors’ faces and environmental elements (it can tell if a scene is taking at a beach or on a mountainside), and it’s quite impressive.

This post is a bit different from the technology news that we generally cover here at TechCrunch. But it’s something that I think needs to be said.

Last night I got word that my parents had witnessed a tragic accident while driving in Northern California. I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say one person was killed and others were left bleeding, in various states of unconsciousness. Thank God my parents were not hurt in the accident, but they witnessed it first hand, as well as the disturbing aftermath.

Immediately after the accident, my parents and other witnesses began trying to dial 9-1-1. Attempt after attempt resulted in a busy signal. This isn’t unusual in the event of an emergency, as multiple dialers often tie up the lines to report the same incident. Except it seems that nobody managed to get through for far too long: emergency personal didn’t arrive for 20 minutes. The first officer to arrive at the scene said it took him two minutes to get there from the time he got the call. Which means that it took approximately 18 minutes for the news to reach him in the first place.

During a conversation with my father following the accident, he said one of the most profound things I’ve heard since I arrived in Silicon Valley: “Why is it that I can pull out my cell phone and call France or browse the Internet whenever I want, but I got a busy signal for 9-1-1 for 20 minutes?” I wish I had an answer for him.

It’s been a while since we last took a look at Swoopo, the “entertainment shopping” site that’s one part auction-house, one part virtual casino. Since launching in late 2008, the site has closed a $10 million funding round led by August Capital, and has grown to over 2 million members. Now, the site has quietly expanded to launch a Canadian portal, and is also beginning to test a ‘buy it now’ function on its German site that allows users to apply the costs of their previous bids towards the purchase of an item.

For those that aren’t familiar with Swoopo, here’s how it works: the site uses a unique pricing model that invites you to purchase virtual “bids” for 75 cents, which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by fifteen cents and an extra 20 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. Oftentimes items wind up selling substantially below their market value, but this lower price comes with some risk: if you bid on an item, you don’t get that 75 cent bid back when the auction concludes.

For the last few weeks it hasn’t been unusual to see AT&T among Twitter’s trending topics — following its disappointing performance at WWDC and the activation issues with the iPhone last week, the carrier hasn’t exactly been garnering positive reactions from its legions of Twitter-using members. Today, it’s reached the top spot on Twitter once again, and, once again, AT&T is the target of waves of contempt.

The source of the recent flurry of AT&T tweets is Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, who tweets that for “a few hours of web surfing in Canada” he was charged a whopping $11,000. AT&T is apparently claiming that Savage managed to download 9 gigabytes in Canada using his USB data connection (which he calls “frakking impossible“). What’s worse, the customer service rep Savage was dealing with was apparently a bit loose with their decimal points, telling Savage that “data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb”. Read that again — there’s a couple orders of magnitude difference there.

When you’ve just gotten laid off, the last thing you want to hear is that you can’t cash your last check because of one final payroll screwup. But that’s apparently exactly what’s going on over at MySpace, which laid off over 30% of its staff (or around 480 employees) earlier this month. The company has just asked many of its laid off employees to refrain from cashing their checks due to an error in calculating how much they should be receiving. Employees are getting voicemails from FIM notifying them that the company has issued a stop payment on their checks, and that they can expect an updated check next week.

This isn’t the company’s only blunder during this sensitive time. We’ve heard that that last day for the terminated MySpace employees was chaotic and poorly planned, and that the company hasn’t been very tactful regarding treatment of laid off employees. In the press release announcing the layoffs, CEO Owen Van Natta called the company “bloated”, displaying a surprising lack of respect towards the terminated workers. It gets worse: MySpace has been holding a number of meetings for staff who are still at the company, during which they’ve referred to the recently terminated employees as “fat”. Unfortunately, some of these “fatty” employees have been present at these very meetings — the company has kept a number of terminated employees onboard through the duration of their contract, creating a group of so-called “walking dead” who are being insulted to their faces. Classy.

In the last six months or so, the real-time web has really started to take hold. Services like Facebook, FriendFeed, and YouTube are finding ways to update their services on the fly with impressive results. But aside from Twitter, there haven’t been many sites built from the ground up with real-time in mind. Until now. Today sees the launch of Vyoom, which may well be the first robust social network to launch with real-time at its core.

The site behaves (and looks) like a mix between Twitter and Facebook. You’ll be spending most of your time in the ‘Social Stream’, which is a constantly updated list of the latest status updates posted by both your friends and other members of the site. The Social Stream is broken down into two sections: the public stream, which shows every update posted to the site by anyone, and the private stream, which shows updates posted by your friends. All updates are displayed immediately after they’re sent — you never have to refresh the site or click a ’show new updates’ button. And if things are flowing by too quickly you can always hit pause.

Heyzap, the Y Combinator startup that offers an easily-embedded widget containing thousands of Flash games, is launching a major new product today that introduces the company to an entirely new source of revenue. Dubbed HeyZap Payments, the platform offers developers a way to easily integrate a microtransaction system into their games, which could be a boon for both developers and Heyzap alike.

Up until now one of the problems plaguing small-time Flash game developers has been monetization. These games are often ripped from the sites from which they originated, so aside from ads that are integrated into the games, developers haven’t had many good ways to generate revenue. Heyzap Payments may help change this: regardless of where a Flash game is embedded, its developer will be compensated for any in-game purchases through the HeyZap platform. Co-Founder Immad Akhund says that the platform is extremely easy for developers to integrate, with a “drop-in” set of code (he says it shoud require about as much effort as integrating Google Analytics would).

If there was any question about the significance of the iPhone 3GS’s impressive video functionality, here’s your answer: YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by a whopping 400%. For a single phone model to have such a major impact on the site is simply phenomenal.

Even without the iPhone, YouTube is seeing major growth across the entire mobile space — the site has seen uploads go up 1700% over the last six months. It’s not hard to guess why. Video-enabled smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, as are high speed data connections. YouTube also attributes part of the growth to a streamlined upload flow (note how easy it is to upload a video from your iPhone to the site), as well as its improved sharing capabilities (you can now syndicate your videos to services like Facebook and Twitter).

This morning Google Voice was featured in a segment on the Today Show, during which NBC News correspondent Janet Shamlian outlined her experiences with the service over the last few months (her verdict: she loves it). It’s an interesting piece to watch if only to see how the mass media is trying to describe Google Voice without confusing everyone watching, which can be a difficult task.

Shamlian and Matt Lauer briefly address the potential privacy concerns that have been raised over Voice, which would give Google access to your voice conversations and voicemail. Given that many of us have already used Gmail for years, handing over sensitive data to Google isn’t exactly novel, but it’s a valid point nonetheless. That said, the Today Show piece entirely neglects the other real challenges facing Voice at this point: it requires you to start using a new telephone number (unless you wait it out until number portability) and the numbers shown by your outbound calls can be different from the ones your friends have, which can lead to confusion.

Google has just debuted the latest entry to its fleet of Labs products, introducing the search giant to the travel space. Dubbed City Tours, the new site can build itineraries for brief trips to locations around the globe in a matter of seconds. At this point details on the new product are fairly sparse — it looks like Google hasn’t written its customary blog post yet, but given how basic the product is it’s pretty easy to figure out how it works.

Getting started is incredibly easy — just type in where you’re visiting (say, San Francisco or London), and Google will present a suggested itinerary spanning a three day trip, with around a dozen attractions per day depending on the city. From there you can change the number of days you’ll be staying (Google will show more attractions the longer you stay), and you can also manually adjust the list of places you’d like to visit. You can add a new attraction by entering its name in a text field, and Google will try to find it in its database. All attractions include a star rating, along with its hours operation and location.