After a whirlwind tour of East Asia with GeeksOnAPlane (see my assessment posts for China and Japan here and here), I’m back in the states and almost fully recovered from a potent bout of jet lag. I’m not complaining, however, since several other members of our group came down with a nasty stomach flu on the return flight. And one member, Mike Su of Break Media, actually got picked up by the Chinese authorities in Beijing on suspicion of swine flu, only to be stuck in quarantine for five days before getting cleared and released.

Mike, who had skipped the Tokyo leg of the trip and joined us in Beijing only a couple of days earlier, took his poorly timed incarceration in stride. Since he needed no real medical attention whatsoever (the officials nabbed him because he had sat two rows away from someone on the plane over who indeed carried swine flu), Mike was left to sit alone in a hotel room for days on end with just his thoughts and a computer. Finding nothing else meaningful to do, he decided to blog his entire experience for the rest of us to enjoy.

This past Thursday, the GeeksOnAPlane group of traveling techies had the opportunity to attend Startonomics Beijing and learn about broad swaths of the Chinese web industry. The speakers, who represented companies such as Google China, Kong Zhong, Five Minutes and ChinaNetCloud, discussed topics such as gaming, social networking, network infrastructure and internet cafes. Overall, we were impressed not only by how massive the Chinese market for computing-related services is, but how fast it’s still growing as well.

According to Georg Godula, whose company Web2Asia helps internet companies get off the ground in East Asian countries, there are currently about 350 million internet users in China, many of which are very new. In 2008 alone, the internet population grew by approximately 80 million people. That’s an astonishing 220,000 per day, or 9,000 per hour. Most of these users are quite young, with a distribution centering around 18-24 years old. Since the number of users outstrips the number of computers, Chinese youth spends much of its time browsing the web and playing games in Internet cafes, particularly in less dense parts of the country where few alternative entertainment options exist.

Over the last two and a half days - the short window of time within which the GeeksOnAPlane group has been staying in Tokyo - I’ve attended two industry events (Tokyo 2.0 and Startonomics Japan) and talked with those who live or do business here about how web technology in Japan differs from that in the US. And while this is enough time to gain only a superficial amount of insight into the Japanese tech scene, I’ve gotten the impression that things aren’t fundamentally that different from the way things are back home; there are just idiosyncrasies (albeit important ones) within the Japanese tech landscape.

After attending a great Tokyo 2.0 event last night (more to come about that later), the GeeksOnAPlane group is now at Startonomics Tokyo, where we’ll be hearing about a broad range of topics pertaining to Japanese tech throughout the day.

Join us below as we watch the presentations.

It’s been over three months since I wrote anything here on TechCrunch, but over the next 10 days or so you’ll be hearing more from me as I travel with a group of 32 techies through East Asia as part of GeeksOnAPlane, a field trip of sorts organized by Dave McClure intended to open our Western eyes to how the technology industry works in Japan and China.

The web as experienced by the biggest continent on the planet unfortunately gets short shrift on the blogs that regularly hit Techmeme. I personally can profess to have only cursory knowledge of the trends and companies that come out of Asia, and that knowledge consists mainly of echoes that get passed along by word of mouth. Sarah Lacy has done all of us a favor by recently reporting from China, but we can always use more to enlighten us about what’s going on across the Pacific.

Ginx, the third-party interface for Twitter that makes it easier to share news with friends, has added a new feature that organizes experts into groups so you follow their ongoing commentary on your favorite topics.

Each group on Ginx is created and administered by a single owner who determines who the experts are in a particular field or category. For example, here’s a group of journalists who are focused on covering Apple news. It’s run by the user mirthlab and members include John Gruber and Arnold Kim.

Currently there are 11 groups in total on Ginx, and all of them are listed in this simple directory. The others include one about China and another about Arizona politics.

The internet is full of all sorts of chatter. And some of that chatter might actually be about your brand. Wouldn’t you like to filter out the noise and hear what people are saying about it?

Enter Scout Labs, a SaaS dashboard that makes it easy to keep track of what people across the internet are saying about particular topics. The product, which we first reviewed in December 2007 while still in private beta, is now generally available.

Today was the second day in the trial brought against popular torrent site The Pirate Bay by a phalanx of media companies formed by Universal, Warner Brothers, MGM, EMI, 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, and Sony BMG.

So far the trial has amounted to a circus wherein the plaintiffs have struggled to make their case. According to them, The Pirate Bay has profitably caused over $13 million in damages by assisting copyright infringement and helping to make copyrighted material available. But they’ve done a lousy job presenting evidence that has been three years in the making.

Boulder, Colorado-based startup incubator TechStars has decided to open a second office in Boston where it will run a concurrent mentorship program starting this summer.

The Boston program - which will probably be located in Cambridge - will accept the same number of companies (10) as the Boulder program, effectively doubling the number of TechStars companies admitted each year. Assuming application rates don’t rise dramatically, this will make it easier for companies to get into the program - especially if they’re willing to relocate to either city.

Dawdle, an online market for resold games, consoles and accessories, relaunched this past Fall as a niche eBay competitor of sorts. It’s a place where gamers can get some money back on their old supplies, albeit not through auctions but a straightforward price listing and “buy it now” process.

After amassing a collection of about 5,000 unique items for sale across the site (but not yet amassing much traffic), Dawdle has decided to make things more attractive to independent, brick-and-mortar retailers who might want to sell their excess inventory online. In addition to simply listing your goods alongside everything else on Dawdle, individuals and stores alike can now set up their own virtual, branded storefronts. These are intended to help resellers cultivate their reputations onsite and hopefully ship more units.

Nvidia has announced that it plans to power $99 mobile internet devices with its Tegra 600 series chips, perhaps as early as this summer.

What’s a mobile internet device (MID)? Well, it’s a gadget that fits somewhere in between a smartphone and a netbook. It’s compact and internet-enabled, but it can’t quite fit in your pocket or make phone calls. It’s primarily intended for web surfing and watching videos over a WiFi or 3G connection.

According to VentureBeat, Nvidia is touting both the long battery life and the HD video capabilities of these Tegra-based devices. General Manager Michael Rayfield says they can go for days without a recharge and they support 1080p HD video playback, which is the high end of what you’ll find streaming online.

When NBC Universal and News Corporation-backed Hulu launched in Fall 2007, it was a signal that old television media might actually grasp the distributive power of the internet. Not only were great programs made available for free as streaming videos, users could grab and embed them anywhere online - in their entirety or just as clips.

So it’s a bit of a shame to see another giant media conglomerate, Viacom, buck this trend and actually clamp down on the embedding of videos from the MTV Network. Yesterday in a post to its developer blog, a staff member for MTVN developer services announced that video embeds would no longer be available through MTV’s API, starting sometime in early March.

Update: We just got off the phone with IVP partner Todd Chaffee who says this round was actually in excess of $35 million. Apparently, $35 million is just the total of what Benchmark and IVP put in ($21 million and $14 million respectively), while the additional amount put in by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital is still unknown. According to Chaffee, “Everybody wanted to protect their pro rata and then some.”

Biz Stone just announced on the official Twitter blog that Twitter closed a third round of funding led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners last night. We have confirmation from IVP that the round was $35 million, and that Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated. The news gels with our report last month that Twitter was raising a new round at around a $250 million valuation following Facebook’s failed attempt to acquire the company, with IVP as one of the leading investors.

Stone says the company was not actively looking for additional funding because they haven’t burned through all of the money from the last round. But he was impressed by both of the VCs who led the round (and presumably also impressed by some very favorable terms).

This is the first time either Benchmark or IVP have invested in Twitter. Union Square Ventures participated in both the Series A and Series B as well, while Spark Capital first joined for the Series B. For more information about Twitter’s funding history, refer to its CrunchBase profile. As part of this Series C deal, Peter Fenton from Benchmark will be joining Twitter’s board of directors.

At the beginning of last December, Ning reversed course on its anything-legal-goes policy by declaring a prohibition on adult social networks. The reason? Porn wasn’t paying the bills; instead of attracting advertisers, it was scaring them away. Legal adult content was also begetting illegal content, which drew the ire of both authorities and lawyers with DMCA notices in hand.

Given the report released by CPM Advisors at the beginning of 2008, which suggested that Ning relied on adult content for much of its traffic, one might expect Ning to take a hit after shooing the smut out the door. But according to comScore traffic from January, that hasn’t been the case at all.

This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide.

Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it. Data from comScore, which unfortunately goes only through December 2008, shows how Facebook’s visitors (221 million) basically matched Blogger’s (225.5 million) by the end of the year. That’s a gap of just 4.5 million versus the gap of 21 million that existed in November. Assuming Facebook’s upward trend continued in January (and Blogger’s remained flat), the social network sits on top of the roost now.

The Scene, a new social network geared towards improving your nightlife, is making its public debut at the Twiistup 5 event in Santa Monica, CA today. After three months in beta, the company is announcing the seed round of funding it raised from Velocity Interactive Group and angel investor Marko Babic. An iPhone application (for when you’re stumbling around the streets at 1:00am looking for the next bar) has also been released.

The Scene has a strong “let’s go out to a club and get drunk” vibe to it (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it makes me wonder how many people who have this urge will actually boot up their computers and start planning out the best way to go about it, let alone carry the iPhone app around in their pockets and post updates to the site as their nights go on.

I met up with Randy Ching, co-founder of Ginx alongside eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, this afternoon to finally get a glimpse of what their secret startup is all about.

We first wrote about Ginx last month when it was revealed that parent company Peer News had raised $2 million in funding. At the time, we could only infer its purpose from Omidyar’s twitter account, which was hooked into Ginx somehow.

Now we know that it’s basically an interface for Twitter on steroids. Ching explains that the most fundamental purpose behind Ginx is to help people share news and other content over the internet. Citing the figure that 20% of all tweets contain links, Ching says that Ginx was built to make better use of them, to encourage more sharing of links, and to connect people who didn’t know each other already along the way.

When online retail service WujWuj first launched, it focused on helping people pool their money to buy gifts for friends and family. That never really took off, so the service was shut down and is now being reborn with new focus on so-called “group buys”.

A group buy is a type of sale in which the price of an item drops as more people commit to purchasing it. Consumers benefit from lower prices as more people commit, and retailers benefit from an increase in sales volume. Essentially, it’s a way for retailers to incentivize their consumers to market their goods for them, because customers will be inclined to spread the word about deals.

WujWuj CEO Monti Majthoub tells me that most group buys are currently organized in online forums like FatWallet and AnandTech. His new GroupBuy system adds more structure and “viral” potential to the process by leveraging the power of widgets.

Yahoo is announcing several changes to its Search BOSS service, which lets developers incorporate web results from Yahoo’s main search index into their own web apps. The biggest of these changes intends to transform one of Yahoo’s most innovative projects into a real business.

Since launch, the BOSS API has been provided entirely for free. Now Yahoo is putting in place a freemium model where it’ll be free only for developers who generate fewer than 10,000 queries per day. After that, a tiered pricing model will kick in that charges for BOSS as if it were a utility (think AWS). Rates will vary depending on the type of query (web result vs. spelling correction, for example), how many results the developer wants returned per query (with a new maximum of 1000 results), and just how far the developer goes over the free queries cap. The pricing scheme is also backed by a newly introduced service level agreement.

Google appears to have a new obsession with knowing and broadcasting your current location. A week after announcing Latitude, which shares your location with friends on Google Maps and threatens to render several startups irrelevant, an engineer has developed location-aware email signatures for Gmail.

After turning on the “Location in Signature” feature in Gmail Labs, you’ll see a new checkbox in the Signature area of your settings that says “Append your location to the signature.” Once the box is checked, all of your subsequent emails will end with something like “Sent from: San Francisco, California”.

This could be good news for the music industry, which suffers from steadily declining record sales and stands to benefit from more ticket sales for live performances. Or just another last-ditch measure to save itself from an inevitable death and rebirth.

According to Paidcontent, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have entered into a definitive agreement to merge into an entity called Live Nation Entertainment.

From the release:

The companies will be combined in a tax-free, all-stock merger of equals with a combined enterprise value of approximately $2.5 billion. Under the agreement, Ticketmaster shareholders will receive 1.384 shares of Live Nation common stock for each share of Ticketmaster they own, subject to certain adjustments defined within the agreement. Live Nation and Ticketmaster shareholders will each own approximately 50 percent of the combined company. The new company anticipates generating approximately $40 million of operating synergies through the combination of their ticketing, marketing, data centers and back-office functions.

Ticketmaster specializes in online ticketing whereas Live Nation focuses on concert promotions. They will still have to go through regularly review before the merger can be completed, and as Paidcontent points out, there will be those in the music industry that create stiff resistance to this consolidation of power (especially with Ticketmaster’s reputation for monopolizing ticket sales on its own).

Google has announced its plan to help consumers gain better information about their personal electricity usage.

The plan, which is listed on Google’s philanthropic website, promotes the adoption of smart electricity meters in homes across the world. These smart meters are better than regular meters because they can provide detailed information about usage rates throughout the day, theoretically letting consumers make smarter decisions about when to leave the lights on or when to run the dryer.

But since installing these devices in homes won’t automatically make the information they gather available to users, Google is also developing a software tool called Google PowerMeter (presumably a web app) that puts this information at people’s finger tips. We can only guess that the graph below is something that this application would produce, since Google hasn’t showed any of it off to the general public yet. The application is currently being beta tested internally by Googlers and will stay that way as Google tries to build partnerships with “utilities and independent device manufacturers”.

Not to be overshadowed by AlertThingy’s announcement earlier today, Seesmic founder — Twhirl owner — Loic Le Meur let us know that his desktop notifications client is also getting a substantial upgrade today.

Twhirl doesn’t support as many services as AlertThingy but Le Meur points out that it’s much more popular. It’s also the only desktop client in its class that supports his video messaging system Seesmic, which is no surprise since Seesmic aquired Twhirl last April.

Until today, users could only play video clips through Twhirl from the people they follow on Seesmic. But now with version 0.9, Seesmic users can record and post video clips from within Twhirl as well, bringing the construction of a Seesmic desktop client to completion.

The battle between desktop notification tools continues. AlertThingy, one such tool with a knack for aggregating a handful of social networks, has released a third version that takes direct aim at competitor TweetDeck.

Just this past month we heralded TweetDeck as an innovator in the space for splitting notifications up into their own columns. While TweetDeck retrieves notifications only from Twitter, you can break up items into their own categories, such as all tweets, replies, groups, and search results. The categorization helps you stay on top of what would otherwise be one massive stream of information overload.

While not ripping off this aspect of TweetDeck completely, AlertThingy now also allows users to “expand” their stream of notifications into columns. AlertThingy is essentially an aggregator of disparate services, so it breaks each supported service — not each type of data pulled from Twitter — into its own column (although, as with TweetDeck, you can set up a separate column with Twitter search results). You can have all your friends’ Facebook statuses in one column, their Twitter updates in another, and their Yammer messages in yet a third. Since AlertThingy also supports RSS, you can create a column for each of your favorite blog feeds as well, turning AlertThingy into a messaging-system-cum-blog-reader.