We had a great interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday. Costolo always gives the audience a few good nuggets of news and handles the more difficult questions with ease. He’s a pro.

After the conference I reviewed some of the backstage footage we shot of Costolo before he went on stage for the formal interview. We ask lots of great questions – about Twitter’s revenue, business model, details of the search deals, chances of getting bought next year, and the lovely bathrooms they have at the office. He manages to entertain the entire TechCrunch editorial staff while revealing absolutely nothing. We even slip in a question about Feedburner (Costolo cofounded the company and sold it to Google in 2007) at the end, but sadly we ran out of tape before he answered.

One thing Costolo does clear up – even though I’ve known him for five years now, I apparently have been mispronouncing his name the whole time.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Skype CEO Josh Silverman can’t stop smiling in this video interview we recorded in Menlo Park this morning. And no wonder – despite serious legal and spinoff drama, Silverman has managed to close his multi-billion dollar spinoff of Skype from eBay. His legal troubles have evaporated. Skype is growing like a weed. And he’s managed to keep his job running the business. Life is good.

All he has to do now is manage board meetings with two of the more forceful personalities on the planet – new investor Marc Andreessen and cofounder/new investor Niklas Zennstrom.

Well, that and keep this train on the tracks. Skype has exploded to over half a billion users, and is adding 300,000 new ones every day, Silverman says in the interview. 1/3 of usage is video, despite the fact that video calls can only be 1-1. Voice calls are multi-party. And revenue is cruising along at $185 million/quarter with 24.2% margins. Up to 20 million people are using Skype at any one time.

We talk a little about Skype’s business in the interview. But most of the focus in 2010. “You’ll see Skype become a lot more ubiquitous in a lot more places, both mobile devices as well as embedded devices,” he says, adding “expect to see us on a lot more platforms.”

We also spoke about Skype as a developer platform. Extras is now long gone, but Silverman reiterated that soon Skype will push far more powerful developer tools that can turn Skype into a service. That means Skype can run outside of the Skype client. That doesn’t necessarily mean Skype in the browser, they still say Flash isn’t powerful enough to run Skype in browser. But perhaps we’ll see Skype code being build directly into browsers.

We also spoke briefly about Chrome OS. Google’s new operating system doesn’t let users install software, meaning Skype is out. Flash is the only third party plugin Google will say will be included. Things like Silverlight and Skype are in limbo unless and until Google decides to include them. Silverman ends the interview with “If the Google folks are interested in building Skype into Chrome we’d certainly be interested in having that conversation.”

I hope they do have that conversation, soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The company is self funded and has a number of customers who pay for the premium hosted version of the service. Today they’ve announced they’re selling the business to Bloosky, an affiliate ad network. Here’s the email sent out to users this morning:

From: noreply.newsletter@tracking202.com
Date: Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 3:54 PM
Subject: Tracking202 Has Been Acquired!
To:

We have some BIG news to announce today. As of a little over a week ago, Tracking202 has been acquired by Bloosky, another company within our space. We wanted to give you details about everything that has been going on that has lead up to this point as we’ve always been 100% transparent with our users and would want to remain so. We felt this acquisition was beneficial for everyone and there are a lot of things we wanted to disclose in this blog post to clarify why this deal makes a lot of sense for all of our users.

Tracking202 was founded a little over 2 years ago and have grown tremendously in the short time span we’ve been around. Many may not realize this but we’re still very much a bootstrapped startup operating out of our house! Literally we have desks in the living room, bedrooms, kitchen, etc… Its not what you would have probably have imagined for the growth we’ve seen and support shown from all of our users around the world. We appreciate everything and all the love you’ve given us. But as you may have realized, we were perhaps growing too fast.

As some of you may have noticed in recent months, its been getting harder and harder to answer support around the clock the way we use to in the early days. The number of users grow larger every day and unfortunately we didn’t have enough resources, staff, or funding to keep on doing support and everything else without infringing on time spent innovating on the technology everyone has grown to love. Above all else, we only have two full time programmers on board, one of them being Wes himself who’s pretty much coded 98% of everything we have today!

Having said that, we were limited on growth in several areas and with the launch of our new network, had a hard time keeping up with the sheer volume of affiliates that were getting on board with our software and network. Lately, its felt like we were in a catch-22 situation, working hard just to maintain things, even when we gave our best efforts its been difficult to continue to grow the company and help the community the way we have wanted to.

Several months back, we had the privledge of meeting with the founders of Bloosky. At the time, we were thinking of strategic ways the two companies could work together to help each other out. Wes and I were also debating about bringing outside funding to continue growing the company. Although we were affiliates early on and for the most part, have self funded Tracking202 with all the campaigns we’ve built in our early days, it got to a point very early on where we no longer had time to run any campaigns and went full steam into Tracking202. With that, the company grew based on what it was able to bring in itself for revenue in terms of software subscriptions, advertising, and of course now network revenues. However its difficult to scale when you have limited resources, time, staff, and funding to continue to grow.

After debating long and hard about bringing on venture capital (VC) to grow the company who probably wouldn’t understand our business, we decided we didn’t like that option. We felt it was in Tracking202’s best interest as well as the interest of our users and the community we created to keep VCs out of this. What started as just a discussion on a simple business partnership ended up becoming talks of a potential buyout. This made a lot of sense to us because Bloosky was already involved in the space and more than just funding, they had extensive knowledge and ideals that complemented Tracking202 VERY WELL. After long talks, the deal made a lot of sense.

Before I dive into why I think this partnership is great, I wanted to give you guys a background on what Bloosky does for those unfamiliar with the name. Many companies in the space know who they are but they don’t have such a strong presence among the affiliate community. The reason for this is because most affiliates don’t deal with Bloosky directly or run Bloosky’s offers. Over the last couple years they have focused on working with other types of publishers, emailers. The other thing they are known for is their advertising relationships and focus on providing advertiser services. They have call centers, creative services and a strong ad sales team. They pull in an average of 60-100 new offers per week!

Tracking202 on the other hand as many of you know, is a publisher focused company with a strong affiliate base and technology that control several traffic sources such as search, social, contextual, media buys, etc… basically other than email. Like two halves of the same coin, the combination of the two companies made perfect sense. So what does this mean to our users?

Wes and I are staying on board to continue our vision of what we believe Tracking202 should have been since day 1. This deal gives us an equity stake in Bloosky and allows us to gain valuable resources necessary to continue doing what we do best. Above all else, Bloosky shares the same passion, values, and vision we have, which is one of the key reasons we were excited to do this. We would never compromise our values or visions for anyone, hence why we didn’t want to go the VC route when we could of. With this deal moving forward, this allows us to put more emphasis on support where it is needed. We now have more resources and funding to accelerate on the growth of the technology side building faster and bringing more tools, and to help the community as a whole to help our affiliates better. We saw several positives in this and Bloosky have been very supportive of everything we’ve done and wants to see our goals achieved. We hope with this, you’re able to get a glimpse of things to come and see why this is so beneficial on so many levels. We hope to make Tracking202 an even greater company in the near future. Thanks for everything to every one of you guys out there! We couldn’t have done it without the support and love you guys have shown us. The ride had been wild and it’ll only get wilder from here on out =]

Kindly,

Steven and Wes

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.

So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.

The email:

From: voice-noreply@grandcentral.com
Date: November 20, 2009 11:55:25 PM PST
To:
Subject: The GrandCentral website is shutting down – GrandCentral is now Google Voice.

Dear GrandCentral User:

We’re writing to let you know that we will be closing down the GrandCentral website as of December 31, 2009.

All GrandCentral accounts were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but since that time, you’ve still been able to log-in to your GrandCentral account and listen to old messages there. You will no longer be able to log-in to your GrandCentral account after December 31. Because of this, we strongly suggest downloading any messages or contacts that you want to keep in the next 43 days.

We will send you another reminder before closing down the site, but we suggest you take action now to download any information you want to keep.

- The Google Voice Team

And since we love Google Voice so much, I think it’s ok if we say goodbye to GrandCentral by looking back at the many times over the years that we’ve poked fun at the service. A few of my favorite missteps made by the awesome service from the GrandCentral archives:

GrandCentral A Little Too “Beta” For Some

GrandCentral’s “One Number For Life” Not Really

GrandCentral Homeless Stunt Worked So Well It’s Time For An Encore

GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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:

Speedi.ly successfully categorizes the story as about technology. Not bad for on the fly and human-free categorization. You’ll see the field for entities as well, which is currently blank. Speedi.ly will soon turn that on as well.

Now check out the results for this article from the SF Chronicle, properly categorizing it under sports:

Why is this useful? Most URLs passed around today on Twitter and Facebook are completely metadata free. Search engines like Topsy are forced to look at the text in the Tweet or status message, if any, for context on what the URL is about.

Even Digg and Delicious rely on data entered in by humans to categorize URLs. With a service like Speedi.ly, those services can create a sort of real time page rank on the fly.

If you want to try it out yourself, go to http://classify.speedi.ly/fun and us login:customer and password: logmein. Note that this isn’t going to be a huge wow moment for most users, but potential partners will be able to see what Speedi.ly is capable of.

There are a couple of other services sniffing around the same space as Speedi.ly. Factery, which we wrote about earlier this week, looks at shared URLs and pulls out key facts. And Thompson Reuters has OpenCalais, which has 18,000 customers.

I interviewed Keith this afternoon about the service on video. It’s embedded below. He also mentions that Speedi.ly is already working with a partner to categorize URLs on the fly.

Disclosure: I’m friends with and have had business relationships with both founders – Keith Teare and Louis Monier. And Keith is a shareholder in TechCrunch.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow in person, if not at the event then at the party afterwards. See you there.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

“The interview posted on your website contains numerous factual inaccuracies and disparaging statements from Mr. Caulfield that TweetPhoto is concerned were made in an effort to harm the economic prospects of TweetPhoto and may constitute a violation of the laws prohibiting unfair competition, defamation, as well as tortious interference with contractual relations and prospective economic advantage,” the letter says.

Peters posted the letter and took the link to the podcast down. But it’s still up on iTunes here. And if it gets removed, I’ll upload it to our servers.

I’ve listened to the entire podcast, and there’s not much said that I’d call interesting. A couple of comments about their monetization strategy. And a few sentences on their deal with Kodak. But overall, snoozy stuff. Of course, now that the lawyers are making threats, everyone will listen to it.

And of course it goes without saying that its absolutely absurd that the company is threatening Peters. As I said before, this was an on the record conversation with the CEO of the company. It’s an audio file, so they can’t claim a misquote or any other nonsense.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

$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.

MySpace and iMeem won’t comment on this story.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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.

Users could still make calls just like a normal phone, of course. The calls would just be over the data service instead. In fact, this is the exact vision Google proposed back in 2007 when they were bidding on the FCC auctions for the 700MHz spectrum.

Google can even issue phone numbers to users via Google Voice. In fact, I’ve already ported my mobile number to Google Voice, and Google has plans to roll out that feature more broadly. Google Voice can also handle the VoIP function for the phone.

Are AT&T and the other carriers interested? Our source says AT&T is already bidding for the business, and may be willing to sell data to Google, with certain conditions, for $20/month. The carriers won’t love this, at all. But they’d be dumb to let their competitors take the business instead. Our guess is at least the U.S. GSM carriers, TMobile and AT&T, would support the phone.

Our sources at AT&T have confirmed that they’ll sell data-only plans to customers who bring in BlackBerry and Windows devices, and strip out the voice plan. They won’t do this with all devices – you can’t get a data only plan on the iPhone, for example. But AT&T is open to data-only customer relationships.

Will the Google Phone be data/VoIP only? Right now we only have one thin source for this. But we’re continuing to dig.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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:

One source told us that HTC, a Taiwanese company, is building the new Google phone, but we think that information is incorrect. We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung (we mentioned this on CrunchGear earlier this week). Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google. So rumors like this one may be much more important than they first appear. But either way, the best information we have right now points directly at Korea as the birthplace of the Google Phone.

We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January.

That’s all we have for now. We don’t yet know what the device will look like, how big it will be, or even if it has a physical keyboard. But we do know that Google is getting into the phone building business directly, and doesn’t seem too concerned about competing with all the other device manufacturers building Android phones.

Update: The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP device.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.

450 or more ecommerce sites have added the scams, says the report, and 88 of them have earned at least $1 million. Sites can earn CPMs from the ads of up to $2,600, and the conversion rate is up to 4.5%

We’ve written that these PTM scams are kissing cousins to the Scamville social gaming scams we reported on earlier this month. As with Scamville, companies that don’t engage in these tactics are at a disadvantage. They earn less revenue, meaning they can’t be as aggressive on core pricing and on advertising. So without regulation, sites that don’t engage in scamming users are forced out into the practice, or out of business.

You can read thousands of comments from people complaining about the scam here. And here’s a video showing exactly how these scams work, and why people click on them:

The report and supporting documents are embedded below.

111609STAFFREPORT –

111609EXHIBITSTOSTAFFREPORT –

RepresentativeDocumentsPartI –

RepresentativeDocumentsPartII –

RepresentativeDocumentsPartIII –

, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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….”

Everyone on the thread is responding that the “fix” is working (“I just cleaned mine and i got 6 for 6 green shots great find”). A few are saying that the problem went away on its own: “I noticed the camera working before out of nowhere too. Not to say a clean lens isn’t better, but they must’ve done something.”

The software has definitely not been upgraded on the phone. Our guess is those users who suddenly found their camera working properly have simply inserted and removed the phone from their pocket enough times that the thin film on the lens has now been removed.

Does it work for you? Let us know. My Droid never had autofocus problems to begin with.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

What’s in it for MySpace – the acquisition of a seasoned team with lots of experience in music. Plus the iMeem and SNOCAP intellectual property. It’s not clear if the iMeem brand will live on, but iMeem users will certainly be welcome at MySpace, I’m sure.

This is another blow for free streaming music lovers. iMeem and MySpace Music were among the last free streaming services in the U.S. And MySpace Music, we’ve heard, will soon be forced to turn to subscriptions to manage costs.

iMeem was founded six years ago by then 23 year old Dalton Caldwell The first product was social networking via a client application that included file sharing, status messages, etc. It morphed into a music streaming service over time. According to Comscore, iMeem had 16 million unique visitors worldwide in September.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

Reback was set to go on NewsHour to debate Google Books with the engineer that does most of the talking for Google – Dan Clancy. Both are quite able to defend their positions intelligently. Or at least, they would have. Clancy never showed up, leaving Reback at the studio, alone.

Why did Google back out? According to Reback, Google told the show that they didn’t want to put an engineer against a lawyer on TV: “They said I was a lawyer but Clancy was not, so the debate would be unfair.” Reback says that’s ridiculous. “Clancy goes around peddling his story and appearing on panels with lawyers all the time,” he said (which is true). Reback also notes that “Google has hundreds of lawyers, dozens of whom have worked on this. Surely, they could find a lawyer to debate if they were afraid to put Clancy up” (which is also true).

For their part, Google says they aren’t interested in debating the legal niceties of Google Books on broadcast television. Gabriel Stricker, head of search communications at Google, says that they were told Harvard profession Robert Darnton would be their opponent on the debate (his thoughts on Google Books are here, and wow he desperately needs an editor), and that Reback was added at the last minute. When they found out about the change, Stricker says, it was too late to find an appropriate Google attorney as a replacement.

Stricker says Google wants to have a “philosophical and ideological conversation about Google Books” in front of a mainstream TV audience, not a legal debate. And he adds “the fact that Gary finds it necessary to try to create conflict surrounding the existence of the conversation is exactly why we would prefer not to have a conversation with him.”

And I don’t blame him. Reback is the last person I’d want to debate anything with on TV.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

It’s unheard of for Google to go from a first interview to an offer in such a short period of time. For Dodge, the process from first interview to first day on the job was less than a week.

He’ll be working for another ex-Microsofter, Vic Gundotra. Gundotra worked 15 years at Microsoft as General Manager of Microsoft’s developer outreach efforts. He joined Google in 2007 as VP Engineering, responsible for mobile applications and developer evangelism.

Dodge will have a similar job at Google as he did at Microsoft – developer evangelism. He’ll be focusing on Google Apps.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Mark 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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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
• Update: AND Dilbert

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Update: Congratulations to R.J. Steinert for winning the Sonos S5 Wireless Music System!

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

Of course there’s another sideshow going on here as well – the renegotiation of the MySpace search deal with Google that ends next year. That deal brings in $300 million a year to News Corp., and it’s clear Google is done paying that much money.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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. But they clearly are ads. As a commenter notes below, Adblocker even filters them out.

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

Update: Readers point out that this is an annual effort by Wikipedia.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0