Anyone familiar with internet startup culture knows how little capital it takes to start a tech company these days. With hardware and software costs practically nonexistent for most new companies, the main determinant of whether a promising startup will get underway and off the ground lies with the founders’ circumstances, namely whether they can pay off their personal bills from month-to-month and find a place to work.

This climate should produce an a important, long-term counterweight to the problems of our economy as a whole. While established corporations have been reeling, laying off workers and draining money from the federal budget, tech companies in high growth sectors have continued to sprout up with the promise of new jobs and services. And with costs so low, entrepreneurship – and its concomitant boon to the economy – these days relies overwhelmingly on one factor: the entrepreneur.

Numerous startup incubators over the last few years have emerged in the US and elsewhere to reflect this new state of affairs. Y Combinator led the charge in 2005 and has since been joined with organizations such as TechStars, LaunchBox Digital and fbFund, to name just a few. These firms serve as enablers, giving entrepreneurs just the nudge they need to get started, whether that nudge comes as a bit of money to survive until a larger round of funding or some mentorship that emboldens them into action.

Unfortunately, the pool of entrepreneurs that can benefit from these programs is smaller than it could be due to outdated immigration law. Ideally, an aspiring entrepreneur from Bangalore who has some chops and a wish to start the next Google in San Francisco should be able to immigrate and set up shop here. With a little venture backing, there’s virtually no downside since they won’t be taking out loans or stealing anyone else’s job. If their venture doesn’t work out (a likely scenario), they can pack their bags and head back home.

The potential upside, on the other hand, is obvious and enormous. So why doesn’t this scenario play out more often?

One big reason is that the immigration law that’s most relevant to would-be entrepreneurs isn’t designed with their likely circumstances in mind. A lot of talk about the H-1B visa was made around the election last year, but that visa only covers immigrants who want to become employed by preexisting American firms. The lesser known EB-5 visa intends to help foreigners create businesses in the US, but it involves a couple stipulations that make it unworkable for many modern entrepreneurs.

First off, the EB-5 requires that an immigrant invests $1 million (or $500,000 under certain circumstances) of their own money in a new business. This rule ignores the fact that tech startups are often backed by venture capitalists, and it overemphasizes the role of money instead of assessing a foreigner’s talent and ambition as primary factors. The EB-5 is also only given to immigrants who can promise to create 10 full-time jobs within 2 years, which doesn’t mesh well with the reality that successful startups (while creating plenty of new jobs in the medium and long-runs) often maintain deliberately low head counts in the short-run.

It’s for these reasons that a group of techies and politicians alike have begun to rally around the concept of a Startup Visa, which essentially constitutes a set of improvements to the EB-5 that would make it more useful to today’s entrepreneurs. The Startup Visa concept, which was initially proposed and explored by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, aims to get rid of the requirements for $1 million in investment and the creation of 10 jobs. In their place, it would establish the requirement that entrepreneurs be financially backed by at least one accredited investor in the US. This rule would serve primarily to validate the foreigner as a promising entrepreneur by leveraging the venture capital community’s judgment as a proxy. It would also ensure the admittance of only entrepreneurs with enough capital to get started.

The StartupVisa movement was first introduced to me by a few of its main proponents – Dave McClure, Eric Ries and Shervin Pishevar – this past September when I was traveling with them through DC on a GeeksOnAPlane trip. One of our trip’s members, Eric Diep, had a particularly poignant story about the difficulties he’s encountered as an entrepreneur from Canada who tries to conduct business in the US. You can watch a video of his story from the trip above.

If you have any personal stories about how difficult it can be as a foreign entrepreneur wishing to immigrate to the US, please share them in the comments. And whether or not you are in such a situation, please provide us with your impression of the Startup Visa concept by answering our poll below. If you wish to support the cause, you can tweet your local representative using @2gov, a service run by David Binetti that enables grassroots communication with House and Senate politicians. US Representative Jared Polis of Colorado has already begun proposing these sorts of changes to the EB-5, but many more politicians will need to get aboard the idea before the new law becomes a reality.

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It would seem that tech startup culture – which extols the virtues of agility, cost-efficiency and risk-taking – should make strange bedfellow with the staid, inefficient, and downright corporate practice of federal governance that’s conducted from within the Beltway everyday. Many in the Valley also presume that their startup ecosystem would be best off if left alone by all three branches of government, lest they impinge on its ability to innovate and create vibrant new businesses.

However, at a GovTech meeting attended by GeeksOnAPlane in Washington, DC on Friday, administration and state department officials insisted that a sea change of sorts is occurring within the federal government, one in which our public officials have begun embracing both Web 2.0 technology and the management methodologies that have made it possible. The message from officials was that the Obama administration in particular is dedicated to leveraging new information technology for increased transparency and responsiveness, with the goals of enabling citizens to learn more about their government and make their voices better heard. Andrew McLaughlin, the administration’s deputy CTO, talked about turning the government into a platform that enabled “services at the edge”, with Data.gov and Apps.gov as first draft efforts towards this end. Interest was also expressed in how the administration might adopt startup techniques to drive innovation in how it governs, with Eric Ries explaining how the lean startup method can applied by government and Director of Citizen Participation Katie Stanton declaring that government is at its own “pivot point”.

More generally, we heard about how the federal government possesses an interest in stimulating entrepreneurship – both domestically and abroad – for the purpose of creating jobs and furthering international peace efforts. Dave McClure spoke in support of a so-called Startup Visa that, while currently on the drawing board, would make it much easier for venture-backed entrepreneurs to relocate to the US and hire Americans at their new companies (an idea first proposed as a “Founder Visa” by Paul Graham this past April). Such legislative change would theoretically have immediate effects on the Valley’s ability to attract and retain talent from abroad. Esther Lee of the US Department of Commerce also noted that Obama made the support of entrepreneurship in Muslim countries an important part of his Cairo speech, reinforcing the notion that pro-small-business governance can produce both economic and national security.

Startups would also do well to think of how government involvement in their businesses might actually benefit them. For one, the federal government (and more local governments around the country) can serve as customers that present opportunities to scale and generate evergreen revenues. Evan Cooke of Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup that provides easy-to-use telephony APIs for developers, learned firsthand about the government’s interest in licensing new technology. He was enthusiastically thrust a business card by an administration official even before he left the stage after giving a demo on how quickly the government could set up a flu hotline with his software.

Tempering all of this optimism were remarks made by panelists at a Startup2Startup lunch at The Washington Post headquarters following the GovTech meeting. Errol Arkilic, program manager for the National Science Foundation, took care to remind us that the federal government is an animal with very different parts, some of which move quickly and adapt, and some of which move at snail’s pace and resist innovation. While the NSF dispenses grants within months, other departments are slowed by vested interests and imposing backlogs of records managed under legacy systems. And whereas Silicon Valley operates under a sense of urgency, DC often succumbs to inertia, especially since the government mainly responds to public entreaties instead of initiating change on its own. It’s because of these inherent traits that it has yet to be proven whether this new administration – or any other – can truly absorb cutting-edge technology and its entrepreneurial culture.

Photos courtesy of Jen Consalvo

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This past June I had the privilege of traveling to East Asia with a group of techies on a trip dubbed GeeksOnAPlane. The experience was a quick-and-dirty way to familiarize myself with the tech industries of Japan and China, since we were herded through back-to-back conferences and networking events meant to give us primers on a number of sectors such as web, mobile, and gaming (you can read about what I learned in each of those countries here and here).

I’m happy to say that the second GeeksOnAPlane trip will take me the other way around the world starting today. Our first stop will be in DC where we plan to meet with representatives from the White House Digital Media Group and the State Department Technology Innovation Team followed by an afternoon Startup2Startup lunch at the Washington Post. After that short layover on the east coast, we’ll jump the pond to attend Seedcamp in London and then the Picnic tech festival in Amsterdam. While I’ll be flying back home after Amsterdam, the rest of the group will continue to Berlin, Prague, Paris, and back to London for a series of other tech events such as Future of Web Apps and Ignite.

As during my trip to Asia, I’ll report back here on what I discover about tech and entrepreneurship in the nation’s capital and abroad. For more information about the trip, visit the official GeeksOnAPlane website. And a special thanks to Founders Fund, AIM, PayPal, O’Reilly and Ignite – the trip’s main sponsors – for making this all possible.

Follow us on Twitter at @GeeksOnAPlane. We’ll be using the hashtag #goap.

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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.

The result is a set of some pretty amusing and informative posts about what it’s like to experience Chinese quarantine. Welcome to Hotel Quarantine will start you off with the back story, while The Seven People You’ll Meet In Hotel Quarantine is the post that should stand the test of time.

Most relevant to the TechCrunch audience, however, is the second-to-last piece, Quarantine 2.0, where Mike reflects on how social media helped make his time in quarantine bearable. He describes how he was able to use Twitter to interact with the outside world and live vicariously through the rest of the GeeksOnAPlane group. Skype and other live streaming services helped him tap remotely into the events we were attending. And blogging, of course, helped him pass the time and ensure that his experience wasn’t for naught.

Kris Krug, who spoke at a TEDx event in Shanghai on Monday, noted that these days “If you don’t stick it on the Internet, it didn’t happen”. For Mike, that didn’t sound like hyperbole, since no one could share his memories unless he published them online. As he put it, “[It's] not that social media replaces or reduces the need for human interaction, but when you’re forced into a situation that specifically prevents human interaction, social media becomes your best alternative.” Well put, I think, and a good counter-argument to the idea that social media is a waste of time and ironically anti-social. Not that most of us live in a quarantine-like environment, but it’s important to step back and see just how much better we’re able to connect with other people through space and time these days, even compared to 5 years ago.

The most inspirational part of his post comes as an update:

Been thinking about all this more throughout the day. It’s hard to imagine five years from now that we’ll look back at this and think how primitive it was and how much things have changed. But in the meantime, how cool is it to live in a time with so much change, and so many things left yet to be discovered? I’m leaving this quarantine more excited than ever that I get to work in web technology, and to think, no matter how mundane something such as “What are you doing?”, or a video of this kid starting a dance party is, we are changing the way we live our lives, and that’s pretty cool.

Hear, hear. Let’s hope Mike will join GeeksOnAPlane for the full tour when it travels next to Latin America or some other region, with or without a high sensitivity to transmittable illness.

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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.

Perhaps the most refreshing presentation of the day came from Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, President of Google China, who admitted that Google has had a difficult time breaking into the Chinese market and competing against Baidu, the dominant search engine here. He attributed the slow advances in their marketshare to patience and humility, explaining that Google has had to carefully learn about the market and how it differs from those in the West.

This was a trend that appeared throughout many of the presentations. Foreign companies who try to localize for China are often outgunned by Chinese competitors who know the culture and business environment here better. They also tend to suffer from a litany of other missteps, such as entering China too late, failing to set up a local development team, getting blocked by complex local legislation, and simply being outwitted by local competitors with better ideas.

Lee gave an overview of how Chinese internet usage differs from what we see in the United States. According to studies, the Chinese read news and conduct searches at a similar level to their American counterparts. But they read and write email a lower frequency, preferring other communication methods like instant messaging (Twitter, for that reason, has the potential to take off here…if numerous other clones like Digu, Fanfou or Zuosa don’t take the wind out of its sails first). The Chinese also consume a lot more music, almost all of which is pirated or provided by free by companies like Google. Gaming and blogging are also two popular activities, while ecommerce still plays a comparatively smaller role in the web industry.

Kaiser Kuo, a technology commentator in Beijing, presented the Startonomics crowd with a balanced view of how censorship works in China. On the one hand, it poses a definite human rights issue that needs to be solved over time. On the other hand, reports of censorship in China are often over-exaggerated, especially when they affect Western services like Twitter (which is only used by a very, very small fraction of the population here).

He was keen on pointing out that the Chinese government isn’t like a bogeyman always lurking around the corner ready to crush out any and all vocalized signs of dissent. Instead, it tends to focus on preventing organized resistance, while leaving most individuals who air their grievances online alone. If anything, censorship plays out indirectly, with the government putting pressure on web companies to patrol their own users’ content. Pornography, for example, is strictly banned here, so companies need to police their services vigilantly or suffer penalties.

The biggest trend we saw throughout the presentations was just how big gaming is for Chinese youth. While mobile technologies aren’t as big here as in Japan, the Chinese spend a lot of time and money on casual games, especially in internet cafes. The industry is lucrative, with a fraction of wealthy gamers (~10%) willing to shell out lots of money for virtual goods. It’s no surprise then that 6 of the biggest 10 internet companies are game publishers.

World of Warcraft is unusually popular, given that it’s made by a Western company (Blizzard), although legacy games such as Starcraft and Counterstrike also make the rounds via piracy. Other big players include the Chinese companies Netease, Giant Interactive (who among other titles developed Zhengtu Online), Kingsoft and the9. While there’s been a shift from console to browser-based games in the last few years, the impulse has remained the same: Chinese youth play games not particularly because of the challenge or entertainment, but rather because they are lonely bored lonely and have few other recreational options.

Steve Mushero of ChinaNetCloud, an internet service provider, gave a detailed overview of how fractured the internet infrastructure is here. Unlike the mesh of networks that carry data across the United States, data served up in China tends to stay on the network of one monopoly. Unfortunately, these monopolies tend to be region-specific, making it difficult and costly to send data across the country latency-free. The Chinese also don’t apply standard internet protocols such as BGP, complicating life for system admins who already have to deal with data centers that vary widely in quality and price. While bandwidth is a big business here and readily available, connections in and out of the country are flaky – here one day, gone the next.

There’s a perception in the West that Chinese web companies clone Western services instead of coming up with their own ideas. My impression has been that this is certainly the case, although not exclusively. There are also web companies trying new things, or at least copying Western services and then remolding them for China; they just tend to get drowned out by the clones, which actually affect Chinese companies as well. The popular social network Kaixin (at kaixin001.com), for example, was cloned by competitor Xiaonei after the latter company bought the domain kaixin.com. Overall, the industry is like the Wild West. There are a slew of startups (unlike what we saw in Japan), many of which are going after the same markets and creating an intense competitive environment for foreign and local companies alike.

Slides from Startonomics Beijing can be found on SlideShare. Dr. Kai-Fu Lee’s presentation is embedded below.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Founders Fund and BlueRun Ventures for helping make this trip possible for the entire GeeksOnAPlane group.

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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.

Take mobile, for example. Before coming here, I had the impression that Japan was light years ahead of the US when it came to mobile technology. I’ve found that this reputation, while supported by indisputable advantages, belies a more complicated reality. Mobile devices certainly play a far greater role in everyday life here, with something like 90% of the Japanese owning 3G-capable handsets and 85% of all phone subscribers accessing online services while on the go regularly. The Japanese also use their phones for purposes simply not available to Americans such as watching live TV, scanning QR codes, and paying for goods with the proximity readers that are located in stores and subway stations.

However, we’ve also seen demos of several Japanese mobile applications, and the technological sophistication and design of these apps are surprisingly primitive. The general quality appears more in line with the WAP apps from yesteryear than the powerful iPhone and Android apps that have come upon the scene over the past year or so. And from what I’ve been told, they operate in a very closed environment akin to Compuserve that gets reinforced by strong carrier lock-ins and family plans.

Speaking of the iPhone, the reaction to it appears to be mixed here. While the iPhone is (generally speaking) more advanced than any other handset on the Japanese market, it poses a number of problems for Japanese consumers. Namely, it doesn’t play nicely with the closed suite of online services that Japanese have become accustomed to using on their phones. It doesn’t do TV streaming without a $100 hardware add-on. The touch keyboard isn’t great for entering Japanese characters. It has a hard time enticing people away from the strong contract lockins they have with other mobile providers. It doesn’t contain a proximity chip for mobile payments. And the iPhone service contract is expensive, despite the fact that carriers have begun giving the device itself out for free in exchange for contracts.

Social networking is another area in which familiar trends can be spotted alongside peculiarities. Whereas we in the US track the ongoing struggle between Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, the Japanese witness a mindshare grab between the social networks Mixi, Gree (which had an IPO last year) and DeNA (which operates mobile social network Mobage-town). These networks are very Japan-specific, despite attempts among them to branch out to surrounding geographical areas such as China. Mixi, for example, requires a Japanese phone number and an invitation to join. While Japan doesn’t appear to breed the same sort of clones that we see come out of China, Japanese firms don’t hesitate to borrow ideas from Western companies. Mixi has forged an open strategy modeled after Facebook with platforms that are designed, and even named, quite similarly (e.g. “Mixi Connect”).

Two differences between Japanese and American social networking are particularly conspicuous. The Japanese are much less inclined to put their real identities online, preferring instead to use usernames and avatars that obfuscate their individuality. This is perhaps one reason why Facebook hasn’t taken greater hold here, although I’ve heard from several people that its translations have been rather poor (Twitter, on the other hand, has experienced a modest level of success already). Not surprisingly, Japanese social networkers also tend to spend a lot more time on their mobile devices compared to their American counterparts, with mobile pageviews greatly exceeding desktop pageviews on the predominate social networks.

Entrepreneurialism in Japan is inauspicious despite how good the infrastructure is here. In addition to enjoying an extraordinarily high level of mobile connectivity, many Japanese have access to very cheap and fast broadband in their homes. But for a country that also has a large enough population (~127 million) to form a self-contained market for internet services, Japan isn’t home to a large entrepreneurial community. Much of this results from the culture, which discourages people to undertake risky ventures. The government could also be friendlier to small businesses, as it tends to defend incumbent corporations against the encroachments of young upstarts (although luckily web ventures don’t butt heads with them as much as others). The country’s business laws were also not designed to foster new companies until changes were made recently in 2006. As a consequence, the entrepreneurial community is small enough for people to notice when even individual members leave.

Tonight we’re off to Beijing in China to see how things operate in the world’s most populous country. Follow our travels – and the media we produce – on Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, Twitter and our blog.

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Join us below as we watch the presentations.

Slides from today’s presentations:

Shuji Utsumi, CEO Q Entertainment; Gaming in Japan

Gen Miyazawa, CEO Cirius Technologies; Mobile in Japan

Overview of US Platforms & Social Networking with Dave McClure, Bradley Horowitz and Doug Gould

US Startup Investment Markets Overview with Dave McClure, Joyce Kim, David Troy, and Ryan Pipkin

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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.

In a couple of minutes, I’ll be boarding a plane bound for Tokyo with the group you see above. And over the next few days we’ll be attending conference-type events, such as Startonomics Tokyo, where we’ll hear about a variety of topics such as the Japanese investment climate and startup success stories. My main goal is to share with you all what this all looks like to someone who’s familiar with the web but from an almost purely American point of view.

If you find these insights interesting, I encourage you to follow GeeksOnAPlane on Twitter. I’ll also be posting snippets of my experience to my own account. If you want to comment on any of our travels, use the hashtag #goap on Twitter.

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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.

If you’re interested in hearing what the experts in a particular group have to say, you can become a follower of that group with a single click. All of the tweets from the group’s members will then show up in your Ginx timeline, regardless of whether their tweets are related to the group’s topic or not. When asked about whether it would be better to just show followers those tweets that are relevant to a group’s topic, co-founder Pierre Omidyar insisted that getting the whole stream of tweets from group members actually lets you learn more about who the members are as people. And in turn, this makes the news and commentary you get from them more personal.

This new groups feature is a natural addition to Ginx’s core functionality, since it advances the notion that Twitter should be used to learn and educate others about the world. It does pose the risk of information overload, however, since by joining just a few groups, you’re expanding the number of people who contribute to your timeline considerably. In anticipation of this problem, there are checkboxes next to the timeline that let you temporarily remove all tweets from a particular group. But something tells me that most users will still want to be part of only one or two groups at a time, lest they have trouble separating the wheat from the chaff.

Only select users have the power to create groups, although I’m told that this will change soon so that anyone can set up their own. Everyone can start following the existing groups today, and if you’re not already a Ginx user, the first 100 users to sign up with this code will get in: 842A11AC93EA.

Update: We’ve created a group with TechCrunch employees that you can follow.

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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.

CEO Jenny Zeszut says that most companies start off using Scout Labs – and similar products by competitors – to cover their asses, basically by discovering when bloggers and the Twitterati are complaining about their brands. But Zeszut says that over time companies tend to get more involved with the data that Scout Labs collects, reading through blog posts and studying the data to see just what can be learned from customers.

There are six main sections to the Scout Labs dashboard: Blogs, Sentiment, Graphs, Photos, Videos, and Twitter. The first displays all of the blog posts that have been indexed by Scout Labs related to a particular keyword or phrase. The Sentiment section breaks these blog posts down into positive, neutral and negative categories. Just which category Scout Labs puts a particular post into is determined by an algorithm, but you can always change a designation manually and this manual intervention actually improves the algorithm for going forward.

In the other sections, photos, videos and tweets related to your brand are collected for display as well. It’s understandable that Scout Labs doesn’t determine the sentiment for photos and videos, but it would be nice if you could filter tweets by those that are saying nice things about your brand and those that are saying not-so-nice things. Right now, it’s basically a replication of the functionality you’d get from Twitter’s own search engine.

The Scout Labs dashboard is designed for use by teams of brand managers. When you sign up for the service, you’re allowed to invite an unlimited number of colleagues into your workspace. But you’ll have to pony up more for every additional workspace you add. Each workspace costs $250 and lets you monitor 25 concurrent “searches” (aka keywords or phrases). As you buy more workspaces, the price of each incremental workspace does go down.

Zeszut says that 300 companies already use Scout Labs with 2,000 more on the waitlist. Starting today, all of those waiting (and more) will now have access to the entire dashboard.

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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 the media companies, 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 they’ve had three years to collect.

Things started off badly yesterday when prosecutor Håkan Roswall made himself look like a Luddite after fumbling with his computer and failing to open a PowerPoint presentation. But the biggest setback for the prosecution came today when it was forced to drop half of its charges against The Pirate Bay— those that concern “assisting copyright infringement”— because the screenshots it produced showed no clear connection between the tracker and the .torrent files under consideration.

The founders, Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, have done a good job so far making this whole trial look like a silly spectacle. After showing up to the trial in a pirate bus with supporters from the Pirate Party wielding microphones, the founders proceeded to post obnoxiously boastful messages to Twitter like the one from Peter Sunde that simply declared “EPIC WINNING LOL”. The optimism on their part isn’t unfounded, since the prosecution has indeed forced itself into retreat out of what looks like sheer incompetency.

However, The Pirate Bay isn’t out of the woods just yet. As Ars Technica points out, the site and its founders could still be found guilty of simply making copyrighted material available:

When contacted by Ars Technica, Danowsky said that Sweden’s copyright act does not require actual distributions to take place. “A work is made available as soon as it is for sale or for hire or given away,” he said. “This does not have to involve any actual transfer of the work. And the right to control availability is protected by the Act, so making available can be in violation of copyright even though no actual distribution has taken place.”

Napster was nailed, at least in part, for simply making infringement possible and not doing anything to stop it – something known as “vicarious infringement”. It’s yet to be seen whether the Swedish legal system will look more kindly upon The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay launched in 2003 and reported 22 million simultaneous users just this month. The site’s offices were raided in 2006 by Swedish police, setting the ball in motion for this trial.

[Image courtesy of TorrentFreak]

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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.

Co-founder David Cohen says that admission rates are about on par with last year, despite the recession. With the deadline of March 21st still over a month away, TechStars has already received 100 applications for its Boulder program. Last year, 400 applications were collected in total. Those who apply after today will get the chance to state a preference for either location, and those who have already applied to the Boulder program can contact TechStars to switch their preference to Boston.

It would seem TechStars is intentionally trying to fill the mentorship void left by Y Combinator when that incubator announced its departure from Boston in January. However, Cohen says that TechStar’s expansion into Boston has been in the works for about six months now, so Y Combinator’s decision didn’t play a role.

TechStars plans to run its Boston and Boulder programs mostly separately, even though they are going to be held at roughly the same times. About 5-6 investors have contributed to each program, and Boston has its own set of east coast mentors that includes Colin Angle, Don Dodge, Eran Egozy, and Chris Heidelberger. Boston entrepreneur Shawn Broderick will be in charge of managing the new branch.

The programs will mix, however, at the end of both sessions when the best from each are combined and given the opportunity to present to investors in Silicon Valley.

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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.

Dawdle already has a handful of these storefronts up and running, such as one for BRE Software and another for Magisterrex. Products listed on each storefront can be filtered by type, price, platform, genre, and more. There appears to be no shipping fees or tax for any products, and Dawdle takes a consistent 11.99% commission on all sales.

Seller reputations are built around user reviews and the number of ways sellers identify themselves. Their rankings go up, in particular, the more they link their storefronts to sites that reinforce their identities (Facebook, Twitter, Xbox Live, etc).

CEO Sachin Agarwal says that the items on Dawdle are currently split about 50/50 between newly released products (like those for the Xbox, Wii, PS3, etc) and classic products (like those for Nintendo 64, Genesis, NES, etc.) To generate interest in this new storefront feature, Dawdle has hired a sales team that will actively reach out to independent retailers.

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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.

Currently, developers can build websites that embed videos from MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo (such as this one that also embeds videos from YouTube). But soon developers will be allowed to display only thumbnails and meta data associated with MTV’s videos. If users want to watch the actual videos, they’ll have to follow links back to webpages that are owned and monetized by MTVN.

This not only means that developers can no longer build websites that automatically incorporate MTVN’s high quality video content; you simply won’t find legitimate embeds from MTVN anywhere, since you’re already not allowed to embed the videos as an end user (Correction: End users can actually grab an embed code from the player and there’s been no announcement as to whether this will change as well).

We don’t know yet why MTVN decided to pull the plug on the most useful part of its API, but we do know that at least several developers are angry, especially since they helped MTVN debug the API only to see their capabilities limited. We’ve sent an email to the staff member who posted the announcement and hope to hear back from him soon.

Update: MTVN Corporate Communications representative Mark Jafar has gotten back to me with the following details:

All of our online video is and will remain embeddable for end users, just like Hulu. That includes music videos, clips and full-episode content across MTV.com, VH1.com, ComedyCentral.com and our entire Web portfolio.

The only thing we’re pulling back is fully open access to our music video API, and it’s purely an issue of economics. Every music video we stream through the API costs us money due to our deals with the record labels, regardless of whether an ad is attached or not. So, allowing developers to use the open music video API can be a money-losing proposition for us. However, we’re absolutely open to extending the music video API to third-party publishers who are willing to work with us to monetize. It’s all about striking that right balance between innovation and commerce as we continue to move forward and try new things.

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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.

According to Stone, this round is intended for Twitter to go from strength to strength:

Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it’s obvious that we have the world ahead of us.

Stone has also indicated that it’s time for Twitter to get serious about making money, saying “We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products.”

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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.

Ning gave adult networks until January 5th to pack up their bags and leave. That gives us the rest of the month to see how the network of networks fared without them. And it actually fared quite well, picking up almost 1 million unique visitors in the United States (from 3.94 million in December to 4.79 million in January). That pickup is almost enough to pass Bebo, which attracted 4.97 million Americans in January and barely managed to halt a downslide that surely didn’t make AOL happy.

What’s not clear is whether there’s been much dispute over what constitutes adult content. As far as we can tell – and as CEO Gina Bianchini outlined prior to the evictions – Ning hasn’t prohibited nudity entirely. Nudist social networks are still listed in its directory, for example, although all of them appear to be private networks. If you’ve run a Ning network with borderline content that has been either kicked out or allowed to stay, please let us know in the comments.

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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.

Facebook stands out from the others not only because it’s the most popular; it’s also the only one showing consistently healthy growth. Chris DeWolf in a recent interview with Charlie Rose said how he doesn’t expect Facebook to pass MySpace by 2010 in terms of U.S. unique visitors (as we’ve predicted in the past). But that prospect is still inching towards reality, as shown by the graph below.

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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 has 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.

The founders – four graduates from the University of California at Berkeley – obviously felt the need to create a whole new site around this idea, one that could possibly supplant MySpace as the most party-inclined social network around. The Scene started off as an application on Facebook called TheBarBook, which currently has about 6,250 monthly active users (although the company claims it has over 150,000 total users). It’s previous incarnation as a Facebook app shows through clearly in the new site’s design. Many elements, such as the Wall-like area called “My Feed” that displays prominently on the homepage, were blatantly recreated from Facebook. Things to do on the site include sharing your status, adding photos, creating events, viewing profiles, and making friends.

The Scene is also a lot like Yelp, with a near identical set of search boxes at the top of each page that asks you what type of establishment you want to search for and where. Each bar, club and lounge in your area is given its own profile page where users can post quick notes (effectively mini-reviews) and add their own events. Perhaps most usefully, each venue page also shows a list of related places under the header “People Who Go Here Also Go To”. And you can see everyone else enjoys your favorite dive bar under a list simply called “People Who Go Here”.

One thing I’d recommend to the team behind The Scene is to open up user profiles. Whenever I click on someone’s avatar, it takes me to a page where I’m abruptly informed that I can’t see the person’s information because I’m not friends with them. This is too much like Facebook where it needs to be a lot more like MySpace. After all, half the point of going out at night is to meet other people who like to have fun, too.

Addendum: I should note that The Scene isn’t the first social network to try translating social network activity directly into real-world experiences. College Tonight tried to convince college students to “get up and get out” (but not via Facebook) and failed spectacularly. It’s still trying under a new name but appears to have been forced into side services like college merchandise sales.

Update: Co-founder Erik Ober has since pointed out that one of the reasons they decided to leave Facebook and build their own site was “due to Facebook’s platform restrictions”. And he explains that TheBarBook’s current low usage numbers are a result of having not worked on the app since last summer and migrating the app’s users to The Scene.

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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.

Functionally, Ginx is a replacement for the experience of using Twitter at Twitter.com. The small development team behind Ginx has used Twitter’s API to rebuild virtually all of the functionality found at Twitter.com. And then it has gone a few steps further to make sharing links easier and more powerful.

For example, when you look at tweets in Ginx, you don’t see TinyURLs that obfuscate their destinations. Rather, Ginx pulls out the original URL and displays it alongside the webpage’s title and an image from the page, if available. You can also click a tab to view only tweets that contain links, or only tweets that contain links that you have visited previously (for when you want to go back to something you once came across on Twitter).

When you click on a link, it takes you to the page but leaves a bar at the top with the Twitter username and avatar of the person who shared it with you. A box lets you enter a reply to that person, retweet their message, send a direct message to the person about the page, or create a brand new tweet with the link. This is intended to make it easier for people to respond to the content they’ve found on Twitter.

Back in the Ginx interface, the service tries to keep track of what people are saying about a particular link, even when they’re not in your follow list. Just click on the conversation link below a shared link and you’ll see a thread of messages pertaining to it, from anyone who uses Ginx (in this way it’s like FriendFeed but the replies are not restricted to people within your social circle). Ching says that this feature in particular is meant to help you discover new people with similar interests. (Update: I think I was a bit confused about this feature. It appears as though the conversations thread only shows replies to a particular person’s tweet that contains a link, not all messages about a particular link that has been shared on Twitter).

While Ginx is ostensibly focused on spreading journalism through the Twittersphere, it also takes liberties to improve the Twitter interface in a variety of unrelated ways (hell, if you’re going to rebuild the Twitter interface, you might as well go all out). There’s a feature that lets you view people’s timelines as they actually see them so you can get a better sense of what conversations they’re engaged in. When you copy a link into Ginx, it automatic calculates how long it’ll be once shortened so you have more room to type. And when you click on a term preceded with a hash mark (e.g. “#obama”), it’ll take you to a page that shows all tweets with that tag.

Right now Ginx is a sophisticated extension to Twitter, but Ching insists that the company will not limit itself to only one social network. It plans to eventually support lots of other networks in the future, perhaps when the other’s have opened up their APIs as much as Twitter has. As far as monetization goes, there are no firm plans on that front either, but Ching suggests that any revenue model may eventually have something to do with helping publishers spread their content to new audiences.

Even as things stand currently, Ginx is an intriguing service that essentially flips the idea of Digg on its head. Instead of the wisdom of the crowds dictating what you read online, Ginx intends to help you discover and share news with people you trust.

Ginx remains in private beta but we hope to share invites with readers soon.

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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.

Here’s how it works. WujWuj’s retail partners enter their goods into the GroupBuy system and then embed special GroupBuy widgets on their websites. Each widget shows a photo of the item on sale and how much the price will drop as more people commit to buying. Consumers who have already committed to buying (after seeing the products on retailers’ sites) can grab the widgets and embed them on their own social networking profiles and websites, which will then lead their visitors back to the same WujWuj purchasing form.

Customers are guaranteed to pay no more than the maximum price they’ve indicated for a good, and once the time period is up for a particular group buy, all of those who have committed to purchasing will pay the lowest price reached. WujWuj lets retailers charge customers with their own payment gateways and it collects just 1.9% of all successful sales as a fee.

Will this system make online group buys more popular and viral? Majthoub is cautiously optimistic. He points out that several other companies (such as previously reviewed eSwarm) have tried to improve the group buy process and failed. But he also believes WujWuj may have finally devised a system that’s so simple for both retailers and consumers that it might actually work.

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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.

Yahoo plans to start charging for BOSS in late second quarter of this year. Will the service actually start making money for the company then? It’s hard to say since Yahoo won’t divulge how many developers use BOSS in production or how many queries they each generate per day. All we know is that Yahoo BOSS, on the whole, reached 10 million queries per day this past December.

For Yahoo to make no money even after the pricing scheme goes into effect, it would have to have enticed over 1,000 developers, each making no more than 10,000 queries per day. There’s a decent chance that this will indeed be the case, since 10,000 is a fairly high number of queries (our entire blog network here at TechCrunch generates only a few thousand queries per day). Yahoo is still in the phase of attracting developers to its first real web services business, so it makes sense to keep things free for most users. But the company may very well be forced to lower the free queries threshold later on in order to produce a substantial return on its investment.

The upside to this new SLA for developers is that they’re given complete freedom to run any advertisements they want alongside the web results they pull from Yahoo. There may have been an effort on Yahoo’s part to generate a return on BOSS through advertising, but somewhere this idea must have been dropped in favor of giving developers the freedom to shop for ads anywhere they want. Placing a restriction on the advertisements that partners could run would have imposed its own enforcement costs as well.

To offset the (mostly downer) news that’s Yahoo’s going to begin charging its most demanding developers, the company is simultaneously announcing a few technical upgrades to BOSS. The same semantic markup used by SearchMonkey, the tool used by site owners to customize the way their pages show up in Yahoo’s results, will now be included in the XML returned by BOSS. The example below shows how extra information marked up on a LinkedIn profile page (in RDF or microformat) will be sent alongside normal results data.

The BOSS API is also being amended to allow for longer abstracts (developers can now request 300 characters instead of the standard 170). And the Site Explorer API is getting rolled into BOSS so that developers can more easily retrieve data about inbound links to their pages.

Disclosure: Yahoo BOSS powers TechCrunch’s own search engine, and I personally worked with the Yahoo team to get it up and running.

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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”.

By default, Gmail determines your location by looking up the geographical data associated with your public IP address. Since this isn’t always very accurate, Google encourages you to install its Google Gears browser extension software, which can more accurately identify your location using WiFi.

This project doesn’t appear to be related to Google Latitude, at least from a programmatic point of view. But expect Google to release a variety of “hooks” into the Latitude platform throughout its products, since it’ll be most useful as a platform not a standalone application.

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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).

Eliot Van Buskirk from Wired suggests that the merger “could lead to a dramatic change in how event tickets are sold: from the fixed price norm that often results in quick sellouts for popular shows to an auction-based model that legitimizes what scalpers have always done.” The rationale:

If Live Nation and Ticketmaster merge, the combined entity could bypass the primary ticketing system partially or completely, forcing fans to bid against each other for tickets in Ticketmaster’s TicketsNow secondary market rather than selling them at a fixed price in the primary ticket market, the way they have done in the past.

This is not the first time Live Nation and Ticketmaster will have worked together. According to Barry Diller, who’s Chairman of Ticketmaster, “It was less than two months ago that Ticketmaster ended its 10-year partnership with Live Nation.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported that the two companies were close to making a merger announcement early Monday morning.

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