Keith Teare was hanging around the Real-Time CrunchUp today showing off his newest project – Speedi.ly.

What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional metadata. This metadata payload is exactly what Robert Scoble is talking about with his SuperTweet idea.

Here’s what Speedi.ly returns for this story we wrote on the Skype/eBay sale:

Tomorrow’s Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco is going to be a blast. It’s an all day event absolutely filled with the thought and business leaders in the space, as well as a whole slew of newcomers launching new startups.

And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.

And we want your help.

Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.

Yammer, a twitter-like service for closed groups, continues to add new features that I wish Twitter would implement as well. In the last day or so they added a simple notification for unread messages that syncs across the many ways users can access the service (mobile, AIR, browser). The notification is available through the Yammer API as well.

Twitter needs something like this. Various Twitter clients built by third party services try to do it on their own, but without the feature at the API level it only works if you access Twitter just from that client.

Yammer has consistently pushed new and useful features quickly to users.

If you don’t use Yammer at your business, you should. We’ve been fans of the service since launching at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It has replaced email for most of our in-office communication. And the service is very reliable, other than the occasional service outage while their CEO David Sacks is off playing poker in Vegas.

The company is also getting more serious about the Android platform. Until recently the only Yammer app for Android was created by Nullwire. Yammer acquired the product from Nullwire and will now develop it in-house. You can download it here.

This story just screams amateur hour, although I can’t figure out exactly who’s the amateur. Maybe everyone. A CEO says too much in an interview and gets fired. Lawyers go after the blogger to get content removed. And a partner is pissed off. Not bad for a day’s work.

It involves TweetPhoto, a service we’ve been writing about since last April. The company has had their rite-of-passage fight with Apple over an iPhone app, and they’ve done a deal with Kodak that got them some additional press. But until now, no serious drama.

TweetPhoto (now former) CEO Dan Caulfield did a 23 minute podcast interview with Frank Peters earlier this month. He apparently said too much in the interview, disclosing confidential information about partnerships. He was fired by the company for the transgression.

That’s enough drama to make me want to listen to the podcast. But it gets better. The company also had its lawyers fire off a letter from its law firm to Frank Peters, demanding that he remove the podcast.

Just to be clear, a company is threatening legal action against a blogger for posting an on the record sound recording of the company’s CEO.

On Monday we broke the news that MySpace was in late stage negotiations to acquire music service iMeem. Those negotiations are now concluded, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and an agreement has been signed. MySpace will acquire most of the assets of iMeem for a purchase price of around $1 million in cash.

$1 million isn’t the “real” purchase price for the company. Some assets are being left behind, say our sources, including millions of dollars in accounts receivable plus some other cash. All or most of these assets, plus the purchase price, will be used to pay off some of the debt iMeem has accumulated.

About half of iMeem’s 55 employees will now work for MySpace. The rest, we’ve heard, will be looking for a new job.

One question that’s still unanswered – will the iMeem service live on? That’s completely up to the music labels, say our sources. iMeem’s deals with the labels terminate on this acquisition. The service is running at breakeven, we’ve heard, so MySpace may push to keep iMeem alive.

One thing is clear – MySpace is getting the iMeem assets for an absolute steal. I wouldn’t be surprised if other bidders suddenly get interested in iMeem and try to disrupt the deal before it actually closes.

Yesterday we wrote about the soon to launch Google Phone, a Google branded Android phone that we believe will hit the market in early 2010.

Lots of people are saying there’s no way Google will enter the phone market directly and compete with all these handset manufacturers who have bet on Android. Daring Fireball, PC World and IntoMobile are among the doubters. And a lot of people are pointing to a Tom Krazit/CNET article last month that quoted Google’s Andy Rubin: “We’re not making hardware…We’re enabling other people to build hardware,” and “Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that the company would “compete with its customers” by releasing its own phone.”

Normally I’d just point to the fact that many companies deny the existence of products until the day they announce them. Apple scoffed at the notion that they’d ever build a phone until they announced the iPhone, for example. The last thing Google wants is a lot of confusion among handset manufacturers just when those manufacturers are putting the finishing touches on their own Android phones.

But there may be another way Google will argue that they aren’t “competing with customers” by launching their own device – technically, it may not be a phone.

The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP driven device. And Google may be lining up at least AT&T to provide those data services for the Google Phone, says one person we spoke with today.

The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It’s no longer a myth, it’s real.

The next “super” Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that’s much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone – The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you’re willing to give up the Droid’s keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon.

But it isn’t the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone.

Way more interesting are the rumors we’ve been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).

There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

That’s it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn’t a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we’ve gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors:

The problem: users have complained about the autofocus feature on the Droid since day one. As in, it didn’t work (video). Last night I wrote that some users found a fix – clean the lens. It turns out that probably didn’t do a darn thing.

But there were even better conspiracy theories out there, such as Engadget’s idea of a secret software update, which quickly spread around the Internet.

It turns out that wasn’t true, either. And we’ve confirmed that there’s no such thing as a secret software update on Android phones anyway, at least according to people at Google. Updates, even security updates, must be approved for installation by the user.

So what was the real reason for the problem, and the fix? Well, it fixed itself. The problem, as MobileCrunch duly noted, was an issue with the phone’s timestamp: “According to Google Engineer Dan Morrill, there is an unfortunate bug in the Droid’s autofocus routine. It improperly rounds a timestamp used in the calculations, which somehow throws the entire focusing process off. Today it works, and tomorrow it will work…but 24.5 days from now, the bug will be back.”

But by the time the problem cycles back again, Verizon will have pushed out a fix for the problem.

As we say around the office, Android is freedom from the iPhone. But sometimes that freedom feels a little bit like this:

Later today Senator Rockefeller is holding a U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers. He released a report on his findings in advance of the hearing.

The documents contain a lot of previously unavailable information on the size of the market, and where the money is flowing.

Background: hundreds of well known ecommerce companies add post transaction marketing offers to consumers immediately after something is purchased on the site. Consumers are usually offered cash back if they just hit a confirmation button. But when they do, their credit card information is automatically passed through to a marketing company that signs them up for a credit card subscription to a package of useless services. The “rebate” is rarely paid.

Intelius is one company that is using these scams to go public. But scores of even more well known ecommerce companies use these scams as well, including: 1800flowers, Buy.com, Classmates.com, Columbia House, Expedia, Hotels.com, Fandango, FTD, Hotwire, MovieTickets.com, Orbitz, Priceline, Shutterfly, Travelocity, US Airways and Vista Print. Each of these companies has received over $10 million in PTM revenue, according to the report. Hundreds more received less.

Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty are the three largest companies partnering on these scams. The report states that these three companies have earned over $1.4 billion in revenue from 35 million transactions. 4 million people are currently enrolled in the plans.

One problem that has plagued a lot of Droid users is a malfunctioning autofocus. Take a close up picture of a barcode, or a high contrast image, or various other photo types, and the autofocus just doesn’t work properly. You can tell the phone has auto-focused when green frame lines are visible in the corners (another way is to view images after you’ve taken them and see if they are, cough, blurry).

A lot of people have complained about the problem, even our own guys over at MobileCrunch: “The main issue is with the auto-focusing system, primarily because it just doesn’t work.” Here’s a video of the problem. More complaints here.

Most users where hoping for a software upgrade in the near future that would fix the problem. But now some users are happily finding another, somewhat lower-tech fix – cleaning the lens with a soft cloth: “This works and sounds crazy. I just read that if you clean the camera lens really good with a soft cloth you will get the green focus. I’ll give anything a try so I did it. My camera now focus’s all the time. Green focus on all my shots. Supposedly there is a little bit of oily film over the lens and when wiped clean it fixes the issue. give it a shot and report here. I can tell you it worked lol…4 shots, all green….”

MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.

The iMeem acquisition isn’t yet finalized, we’ve heard from sources, and awaits approval from various stakeholders.

We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.

iMeem found a way to survive a few more months. But now they’re under the financial gun again, we’ve heard, and investors aren’t willing to put more capital into the company. But MySpace is stepping in to acquire the company.

There was lots of news late last week about a proposed modification to the Google Books settlement agreement. Today there was going to be more news – a televised debate about Google Books on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour. But, alas, Google backed out.

The details are of the fight are subtle, but all the hubub centers around what’s broadly called orphan works – where it’s hard to figure out the author/rights holder of a given work. Depending on how broadly you define orphan works, they make up between 2 million and 8 million of the 15 million or so books that have been published in the U.S. And while this is the apparent battleground, the real fight is over the whole Google Books scheme.

Google says they’re saving humanity, or something close. Which is probably a stretch. Their opponents, fueled by donations from Google competitors (among others), says Google wants to “establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress’s role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.”

As usual, Paul Carr sorts it all out for us. And while the details of a legal settlement on how the rights around digitized copies of old printed books aren’t exactly riveting, the players involved sure do make it a lot of fun to watch.

…Because the Open Book Alliance isn’t led by just anyone. No, one of the guys in charge over there is Gary Reback (pictured above). The man who many credit with taking down Microsoft. I interviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed.

Back when I was a teenager my parents had a simple rule – I had to be home by midnight. There was a doozie of an exception, though. If I was drinking they didn’t want me to drive, so all I had to do was call home, tell them I was drinking and I could stay over at a friend’s house.

You can imagine that my parents pretty much thought I was an alcoholic in high school since twice a week like clockwork I called home at 11:45 pm to let them know I was too drunk to drive home and would be staying the night at wherever. Most of the time I wasn’t actually drinking, but who wants to go home at midnight? One time I remember calling home from Las Vegas (a four hour drive from Huntington Beach where I lived) to let them know I had had a couple of beers and would be staying at my friend John’s house down the street until morning (oh, right, like there’s anything you can do about it now, Mom).

Today things are different, though. And seeing iPhone apps like iCurfew just makes me shudder. Kids are still going to stay out late and not tell their parents what they’re up to. They just have to get way more creative about it, I guess. Because iCurfew tells your parents exactly where you’ve been and where you are now. You can send messages back and forth along with a handy Google map showing where the little troublemaker is right at that moment (probably outside a 7-11, trying to get someone to buy them beer).

Any kid worth his salt will try to figure out a way around this. My thought is to pay off someone to hold onto your phone and hang out at the movie theater messaging nice things to your parents while you are off doing God knows what. But I’m sure some enterprising young hacker to be can come up with a much more elegant solution.

But they better hurry, because adding a breathalyzer to this thing is probably next.

Social Network application developer and advertising platform RockYou has raised a whopping $50 million in a Series D round of financing from existing investor Softbank, we’ve confirmed with the company. RockYou, which launched in November 2005, has now raised $119 million in capital and has revenues rumored in the $30 million to $40 million/year range.

The company continues to develop and acquire social networking applications, but a big part of their business is serving advertising to their own as well as third party apps. And they are now taking a deep dive into the rather sensitive area of in-game offers. Last week the company spoke publicly about Scamville, saying that they would only offer Facebook compliant offers. When asked what types of offers that includes, the company said they’re looking at paying users to watch and respond to videos (like clips from upcoming movies), and getting them engaged with nonprofit groups like ASPCA and UNICEF.

There are 213 million monthly users of apps that RockYou owns directly or has advertising relationships with, says the company. And tomorrow they’ll launch a new virtual goods application on MySpace, called Gifts By RockYou, that lets users buy gifts for friends.

MOG continues to tease us with short videos showing parts of the upcoming MOG All Access music service. Last week they showed a video on playlist creation – the best part was seeing how search works. Now they’ve uploaded a new video that shows robust music discovery through playlist searching. Type in any number of artists and see playlists that include all of those artists. You can also combine artist names with tags (Miles Davis Dinner Party, etc.).

I’ve been able to test the service and it’s the real deal. I criticized MOG for charging for music when it was first announced because there are free services from iMeem, MySpace Music and others. But since then the landscape has changed – Spotify may not launch for free in the U.S., MySpace Music may move to a paid model, etc.

MOG is focusing on the user experience and making it easy to find and play music. That’s a big difference from the free music streaming services that exist today – those services actually don’t love it when you stream a song because they are paying somewhere between $0.004 and $0.01 per stream. MOG isn’t paying per stream, and so they let you get to and play music very, very quickly. Spotify also does this, but it isn’t available in the U.S. and lacks the social component, which the video shows really helps with discovering music.

MOG says the service will launch soon. It’s going to be very, very good. And if you don’t want to pay the $5/month, you can always write a music blog under their umbrella and get it for free.

It was just 11 days ago that Microsoft’s “ambassador to startups” Don Dodge was laid off as part of a broader workforce reduction. Last week he showed up in Silicon Valley to “see friends” as he put it. But it was clear that he was also interviewing for jobs.

We sat down with him to do a proper exit interview while he was in town.

I got a few tips from Googlers that he was seen roaming their Mountain View headquarters, and I confirmed tonight that he has been offered a job at the company. He has accepted, and will shortly begin working for the company that he only recently considered the enemy.

Irvine-based mobile phone app developer Rock Software is launching an iPhone app called Mark Cuban’s Puzzle Palace. The app, designed for adults, is $0.99 and lets users turn images into puzzles.

Cuban’s image is on the home screen of the app, and users can choose to turn some of his personal pictures into puzzles, or use your own. The app is available now at rockapp.com/cuban (redirects to iTunes).

You compete for fastest time to put a puzzle together.

If I had an iPhone I’d definitely buy this just to make fun of Mark the next time I run into him. Alas, I’m on a Droid, so I’m safe for now.

No Righteous Cause is complete without a colored wristband. That’s why I’m so excited that the no-hand shake movement (yes, movement) now has an official blue wristband for people who want to show that they support the effort. Get a ten pack of them here for $20.

Here’s who has (sort of, not really) pledged their support for the No Handshake cause to date:

• OpenCandy, Bessemer Venture Partners
• Some German city
  
• CNN, Dalai Lama And The Obamas
• One in three Canadians
• Brad Feld and Boston Globe
• NEW – The New Yorker, via this cartoon

Last week we gave away a TwitterPeek device on a whim. It turns out giving stuff away for free is popular, so we’re going to keep doing this every Friday until we forget to keep doing it. Up this week was going to be a shiny new pair of Facebook cufflinks. But at the last minute Sonos stepped in and is generously offering to give one of our lucky readers a $399 Sonos ZonePlayer S5 all-in-one wireless music system.

Want it? It’s yours. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible. Sonos is generously donating the device and covering the shipping costs as well. If you aren’t lucky enough to get the free one, you can buy the S5 for $399 here.

More details on the S5 in the demo video below. You can also read more about it on CrunchGear.

I’ve mostly been a spectator in this whole Rupert Murdoch de-indexing his news sites from Google circus. First because I didn’t really believe he even knew what he was talking about (or how much traffic he’d lose), and more recently because Erick Schonfeld took the story here at TechCrunch.

But suddenly this is a fascinating story to me for a bunch of reasons. This may be less about the self destruction of traditional journalism and more about the search wars.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch’s Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a video last week (embedded below) with a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it. TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher has been sniffing down a similar trail.

If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.

This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites – if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft, just as bidding wars have broken out in the past over the right to serve search ads into third party publishing sites.

If Murdoch is going to go through with this de-indexing Mexican standoff thing, he might as well do it the right way and drive the fear of God into Google. As a spectator, I’ll enjoy watching the fireworks.

Moments after Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joins the Wikimedia/Wikipedia advisory board things start to go crazy.

Way back in 2006 Jason Calacanis, then an executive at AOL, was trying to convince Wikipedia to puts ads on the site. It would generate $100 million a year in revenue, he said, which could fund the project and other charities:

I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the summer. I begged him to put a leaderboard on Wikipedia and told him I would get AOL to sell it and host Wikipedia–for free. He declined saying there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I then explained to him in detail how that one leaderboard could make over $100M per year. I told him that they should take the $100M and give it to charity. They could help fund MediaWiki, the EFF, Firefox, and dozens of other open source projects.

Agree with them or not, Wikipedia has held firm to their no-ads philosophy, struggling through with donations instead. But today Rex Hammock noticed something on Wikipedia – a banner ad.

These aren’t “real” ads promoting third party sites, products, etc. They’re just in house ads reiterating the policy that Wikipedia will never have ads.

“Knowledge Forever, Ad-Free Forever, Wikipedia Forever,” say the ads. They link to this page asking for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark will join the advisory board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation advisory board was created in January 2007. The main job of advisory board members is to attend a once a year meeting at the annual Wikimania conference. They also contribute in their specific areas of expertise. I guess that means customer service for Newmark (his Craigslist title is Customer Service Rep), as well as patting Wikipedia on the back for also creating a massively massive website based at least party on sparsity of design (something he has direct experience doing himself).

Newmark has called Wikipedia “first draft of history.” Current advisory board members include:

I’ve had a nagging frustration in my otherwise perfect relationship with Google Voice. The service systematically replaces my friend’s phone numbers with their Google Voice numbers when they call, even when they aren’t calling from Google Voice. Not only has this led to a lot of confusing and time wasting “how did you get my Google Voice phone number?” conversations, it is a clear violation of Google’s own privacy policy.

Here’s how this works: Let’s say you signed up for Google Voice sometime in the past. The main benefit of Google Voice is that it forwards calls to your other phones – the whole “one number for life” thing. So you probably told Google Voice a few of your other phone numbers – home, work, mobile, etc. And then perhaps you stopped using the service after testing it.

Now if you call my Google Voice number from any of those real phone numbers that you told Google about, the caller ID and archived information on Google Voice (missed and received calls, voicemails) says your Google Voice number, not the number you are calling from.

That creates confusion. If I have your mobile number stored in my phone, it doesn’t recognize the Google Voice caller ID and I tend to ignore the call. Then I read the transcribed voicemail and realize it’s someone I know. I check my address book and the number isn’t right, though. I add the new number and maybe delete the old one, thinking you’ve changed phones. It’s a mess.

Inbound text messages have the same problem. And if I return the text message and you don’t have the feature turned on to your real mobile phone, you won’t get them. Or at least I think this is what happens. It’s all very confusing.

Google’s Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we’ve heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point. We’ve heard at various times that Google has a legion of engineers working on the not so glamorous task of building hardware drivers. And we’ve also heard conflicting rumors that Google is mostly relying on hardware manufacturers to create those drivers. Whatever the truth, and it’s likely in between, having a robust set of functioning drivers is extremely important to Chrome OS’s success. People will want to download this to whatever computer they use and have it just work.

We expect Google will be careful with messaging around the launch, and endorse a small set of devices for installation. EEE PC netbooks, for example, may be one set of devices that Google will say are ready to use Chrome OS. There will likely be others as well, but don’t expect to be able to install it on whatever laptop or desktop machine you have from day one. Google has previously said they are working with Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba on the project.

We’ve seen convincing and not so convincing screenshots of Chrome OS over the last several months. The good news is the speculation is about to end, and you can try it out yourself. If you have one of the supported devices, that is.

This was inevitable, particularly after this video surfaced. Sacramento based law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is investigating complaints about unauthorized charges imposed social network users who were mislead into accepting offers of dubious quality. Among those being investigated: Facebook, MySpace, Zynga, RockYou, Offerpal Media, SuperRewards and many others.

It’s ScamVille, the lawsuit. And we’ve spoken to one other law firm considering a class action claim against these companies.

Will users be vindicated and get their money back? Maybe part of it. A recent class action settlement against WebLoyalty for post transaction marketing scams led to a $10 million settlement, just a tiny fraction of the total revenue pulled in by these offers. The law firms are the ones who get a payday.