I’m sorry, but RSS feeds are way too slow. I know this first-hand. As part of my job here at TechCrunch, I monitor a lot of RSS feeds for breaking news. We also produce our own feed and I can see how quickly it propagates to various feed readers and feed-powered news aggregation services. The lag time between posting a story and seeing it pop up in the RSS feed is usually a few minutes, and then it can take another 10 to 15 minutes or so for it to appear in something like Google Reader. And the TechCrunch feed is probably checked more frequently for updates than most other feeds. In our business, every second counts and RSS just isn’t cutting it.

While there is an argument to be made that RSS is dying, being replaced by more instantaneous forms of content delivery such as Twitter and other real time streams, many people aren’t quite yet ready to give up on it. Instead, they want to save it by speeding it up. Tomorrow, at our Real Time Stream CrunchUp, we will see three demos of projects that do just that in slightly different ways.

The free version of Google Apps is history. The current sign up page makes no mention of the previously free Standard edition. Instead, new users get a 14 day free trial, and then must pay $50 per user per year after that trial. Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use.

Earlier this year we reported that the usage caps were being squeezed by Google over time for Google Apps, from 200 users down to just 50. When the service first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.” A paid version first appeared in 2007.

Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, commented on our post that talked about the decreasing number of users allowed for the free version, saying that the cap reductions were needed to keep resellers happy, adding “There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” - we have no plans whatsoever to do that.”

One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything. We fought over the fine print in the contracts after the meat of the deal was ironed out by CEOs. Skinning and dressing whatever the hunters bring back to the cave is fine for some people. But it’s not exactly being in the middle of the action.

PR firms today aren’t much different than corporate lawyers. They are paid to perform a service. They like to think of themselves as core to the strategic action of their clients. But more often, they’re just there to spin whatever happened in the most favorable light possible. Then they smile and dial and pray for coverage. Occasionally they are called in to smother a story, which is mildly more exciting, I imagine. But when a CEO is wondering what she should do next to drive her business forward, she generally doesn’t call her PR firm for advice. Or at least I hope she doesn’t.

PR firms are apparently just as frustrated by always being in the back seat as the law firms are.

I’m fascinated by Claire Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times today about PR in general and the birth of a startup, Wordnik, specifically.

The second batch of 150 tickets to attend our 4th annual summer outing on July 10 at August Capital are available now, courtesy of Eventbrite. They’ll go fast so grab them now. Update: This batch is sold out.

We are also selling tickets for our Real Time Stream CrunchUp earlier that day (a CrunchUp ticket includes entry to the party as well). The CrunchUp is a mini-conference exploring all aspects of the real time stream and its impact on everything from information consumption and search to media and business.

The lineup of speakers includes founders, CEOs, and top engineers from Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, Salesforce, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Collecta, Qik, and more. It is amazing how much activity is going on in this area. The number of stealth companies and products that want to launch at the event alone is overwhelming, and we are working hard to fit as many of them as we can into the schedule. (More details soon).

August Capital Tickets

Friday, July 10
5:30 - 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA

Tickets are $20 to help manage the guest list and minimize no shows. Due to extremely limited availability, we regret that tickets are non-transferrable and non-refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Additional tickets will be released over the next two weeks.

As usual, there will be lots of start-up demos, giveaways, drinks and fun. CrunchUp tickets include expedited entry to the August Capital outing.

Demo tables, photowalls, games and other sponsorships are available to make a memorable impression with MeetUp attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Phase 4 has launched. Last week we told you about Facebook’s new “everyone button” that lets users who have chosen to keep their profiles at least partially private send the occasional status message or other content out to the public. That feature, which goes hand-in-hand with the recent search engine for public status messages, launched today to a small number of users.

Don’t be fooled by what appears to be a minor change in the user interface. This is another indication of Facebook’s extreme desire to get users to make as much of their data public as possible. Just like Twitter.

This new version of Publisher lets users add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. Each piece of content can be shared with everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends and friends. Users can also customize the settings further.

You can now control who you want to inform of your Facebook friends when you add any kind of content to the site. This is actually a much welcomes feature—I think its helpful to be able to control who sees different types of content that you publish to the site. On the other hand, Facebook also lets you publish to “everyone,” which lets you make updates visible to anyone (including Google).

Here’s how it works: After writing a status, uploading a photo or creating other content from the Publisher, use the lock icon in the lower-right corner of the Publisher to access the drop-down menu. From there, you can then choose to make the post visible to everyone, friends and certain networks, friends of friends, and a custom list.

This year’s Wiimbledon is fast approaching (Saturday the 27th), but it’s not too late to sign up for the tournament. Jump on over to the EventBrite page and register for the tournament. Wiimbledon is free to all, but you’ll have to pay to play. Barcade is once again hosting the event and they’ve committed to matching our donations to Child’s Play.

On a mobile phone, the more you can automate search, the more likely people are to use it. Or at least that is the principle which seems to be guiding Geodelic Systems, a startup which is creating a “search-less search” experience for mobile phones. Today in a press release, it revealed that it raised $3.5 million in an earlier round possibly in 2008 from Clearstone Ventures (where it was incubated) and Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Rahul Sonnad, who previously founded thePlatform, a Web video publishing service he sold to Comcast in 2006.

Geodelic is creating a location-aware search engine for restaurants, movies, stores, flights, hotels, and local attractions which recommends results based on their distance from you. A “location carousel” brings up nearby results on a map by category and it learns from you behavior which places, stores, and brands you like the best, and will target you accordingly. The app is designed to be as passive as possible, eliminating or minimizing the amount of typing required. However, it doesn’t go as far as some augmented reality tagging apps such as Layar or Sekai Camera, which add a data layer on top of the view through a phone’s camera.

KIGALI, RWANDA– As I’ve mentioned before I like my entrepreneurs risk-taking and a little crazy. Earlier this week on TechTicker, we ran an interview with a guy who fits that bill: Shai Agassi.

In some ways, Agassi is even more ambitious than Elon Musk—you know, the guy who builds rockets and $100,000 electric sports cars. Agassi wants to re-engineer the entire auto and oil infrastructure with electric cars, charging stations, battery replacement stations (staring robots who actually change the battery for you) and sophisticated software to keep it all running—one country at a time.

His company is called Better Place, and while some have accused Agassi of being an egomaniac, I give him huge props for walking away from one of the most powerful jobs in the tech world to start a new company that was this hard to pull off.

I last interviewed Agassi several years ago on stage when he was at SAP, and I was covering the oh-so-sexy enterprise software beat for BusinessWeek. If memory serves, we were good-naturedly sparring about whether Oracle’s acquisition strategy would work. (I’d argue I was right.) But I have to say, I like this Shai better. He made his name as an intense and gifted entrepreneur who wasn’t afraid to take risk and sometimes people like that are wasted inside big organizations, even if they have the top job. Agassi seemed inspired and unleashed compared to his SAP days. There’s more about Better Place itself and Agassi’s plan here.

But at the end of the third segment (embedded below), Agassi said something that’s been sticking in my head ever since: America has to start making things or the economy won’t work. He argues you don’t have a country with just a service economy to support it.

Were visits to the doctor ever a pleasant experience as a kid? Of course not! Even regular checkups were a hassle and a nightmare, but those lollipops and model airplanes were totally worth it in the end. But my experiences differed greatly from the kids who were stuck in hospitals with life threatening illnesses and the like. It sucks being sick and stuck in a hospital with nothing to look at other than those sterile white walls, right? That’s exactly why we’re getting involved with Wiimbledon this year and donating proceeds to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play Charity.

What Steve Bryant and Lane Buschel started two years ago in Brooklyn has now become something more than just a Wii tennis tournament. I went last year and had an incredibly fun time watching folks in all manner of costume playing a little Wii, drinking a lot of beer and having a generally fun time. But we’re changing that around a little bit this year to include a fundraiser that will hopefully raise the single largest sum of money for Child’s Play ever.

We’re here in Moscone and ready to rock. Watch this space for upcoming coverage and live streaming from the convention center. What will we see from Apple? An iPhone 3GS? A tablet? Steve? Robot Steve?

Follow along with WWDC Bingo and tune in at 10am PT/1pm ET for full live coverage. Until then, head to MobileCrunch or CrunchGear for live updates during the long wait.

Update: And we’re off! New Macbook, new Snow Leopard OS<>/a>, 40 million iPhones sold, but no Steve Jobs. Here’s a recap.

Quite often when we write about something related to Twitter, it’s funny or stupid — or both. But it’s important to remember that Twitter at its core is a powerful medium for disseminating information. And sometimes that power can be used for good — like fighting cancer.

Drew Olanoff, a man fairly well known in web circles, recently got some horrible news: He has cancer. That’s just about the worst news anyone could ever want to hear. But rather than sit around and feel bad about it, Olanoff decided to be proactive and use the bad situation for some good. He teamed up with developer Mike Demers to create Blame Drew’s Cancer, a site that asks you to blame everything that goes wrong in your life, on Drew’s cancer.

The Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS) in Sapporo/Japan, one of Asia’s most important web industry events, is a wrap, and we were there to witness a total of 12 startups presenting at the launch pad. The judges awarded 3D model maker MotionPortrait with the top prize. Graph sharing service Vizoo [this and many of the following links are in Japanese], recommendation engine Deqwas, photo management service Cerevo and virtual world Ameba Pigg came in second to fifth. You can read about all winners here.

Here is a quick rundown of the pitches delivered by the seven other companies (some of these were way more promising than the winners).

I am currently in Sapporo/Japan, attending the Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS) [this and many of the following links are in Japanese], a two-day event that takes place twice a year. Organizing VC company Infinity Venture Partners regularly not only attracts the cream of the crop of the domestic web industry but also a number of high-profile attendees from abroad. This time, these include RockYou CTO and founder Jia Shen (whose company is currently expanding to Japan), Admob CEO Omar Hamoui, (who today announced Admob’s foray into the Japanese market), Korean web entrepreneur Chang Kim (who recently sold his Seoul-based company to Google and writes a highly recommended English blog about Korea’s web scene) and Casee CEO Xin Ye (Casee is China’s answer to Admob).

The program also includes a launch pad, which just took place and gave a total of 12 Japanese start-ups the chance to present their wares onstage to a panel of judges and a crowd of about 300 people. But the word “Launch Pad” is a slight misnomer as IVS serves as a venue also for established start-ups to get their products in front of as many influential bloggers, VCs and entrepreneurs as possible. So unlike TechCrunch50, for example, the IVS concept doesn’t require companies to actually start businesses here.

In the end, a service called MotionPortrait won the title of best startup of the IVS Launch Pad.

You can read my thumbnail sketch of each of the five award-winning contenders below, along with my personal impressions. Please note some of the companies have yet to launch homepages in English.

Google Friend Connect is now integrated with one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks, Netlog. Netlog, which has more than 45 million users worldwide, just implemented Google’s alternative to Facebook Connect, which allows users to sign in using any ID supported by Google Friend Connect (including Gmail, Yahoo, and OpenID) and share their activities with their existing contacts.

Google’s integration with Netlog lets users sign into sites and blogs using Friend Connect with their Netlog ID and password. Users can use their Netlog profiles on the site, invite other Netlog users to join Friend Connect, and also share their Friend Connect activity with friends on Netlog. On the back end, Google uses standards like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial technologies to enable Netlog and other social networks and sites to plug into Friend Connect.

Remember when MySpace lost three key execs before the whole chaotic reorganization? They announced their departure in March. And we’ve now confirmed that they are closing a substantial round of funding, even before they’ve picked a final name for the company.

The company, whatever it will be called, was founded by Amit Kapur (MySpace COO), Steve Pearman (MySpace SVP Product Strategy) and Jim Benedetto (MySpace VP Technology). The company is now backed by August Capital and Redpoint Ventures, who jointly funded a roughly $10 million venture round. David Hornik from August and Geoff Yang from Redpoint have joined the board of directors.

What do we know so far about the company? Not a whole lot except that Redpoint and August are rumored to be “very excited” about it. The company is supposedly targeting the message board/Internet forum space with technology that aggregates content and serves advertising against it. Real time search (bingo! fundable!) may be part of the business plan as well.

Spam filtering tool Mollom, a competitor to Automattic’s Akismet, has struck a deal to filter messages and comments for Netlog, one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks. Mollom will be filtering more than 4 million messages in over 25 languages for Netlog, which has 40 million worldwide users.

Mollom says that it has set up dedicated servers within Netlog’s data center to enable real-time, 24/7 monitoring of messages and comments. Mollom’s technology automatically blocks comment spam, contact form spam and fake user accounts using a filtering technique based on the combination of content analysis and CAPTCHA challenges. When new content is analyzed by Mollom’s text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is spam, Mollom asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge.

Tickets for our Star Trek screening in Tel-Aviv are now available, get em’ while they’re hot right here.

This Thursday the 21st at 7pm we’re taking over the main screen in the Globus Movie Theater in Azrieli Center for a screening of the new Star Trek flick. There are 320 seats to fill and hopefully you can be one of those joining us.

We’re taking care of the ticket cost, but there will be a $2 charge just to minimize no-shows.

With our Silicon Valley screening a success, we’re looking ahead to where else we can spread our geekiness. TechCrunch Screenings is heading to Tel Aviv.

On Thursday the 21st at 7pm we’re taking over the main screen in the Globus Movie Theater in Azrieli Center for a screening of the new Star Trek flick. There are 320 seats to fill and hopefully you can be one of those joining us.

We’re taking care of the ticket cost, but there will be a $2 charge just to minimize no-shows. Keep an eye for a follow-up post tomorrow evening Israel time for the sign-up link. Thanks to Jay Yun from Trapster, we’ve got photos of the Screening and Meetup in Silicon Valley after the jump.

Our opening night screening of Star Trek tonight in Redwood City is totally sold out, but we’ve held back ten tickets for a special Trekkie caption contest. The rules are simple: leave a comment with a funny caption for the photo above, and we’ll pick out the five best entries, who will each win a pair of tickets. We’ll choose the winners at 2:45 PM PST (be sure to leave your real Email address so we can contact you).

We’re also opening up a waitlist for the movie, which you can sign up for here. We’re thinking that the first 20 people (and possibly more) on the list should make it, but you have to be there in person and there are no guarantees, so give it a shot if you don’t mind potentially getting turned away.

For those of you who already have a ticket, we’re going to be letting people into the theatre beginning at 6, so get there before that if you want a good seat. Feel free to leave a caption if you already have a ticket, just be sure to note that you don’t want to be in the running (likewise for those of you who aren’t in the San Francisco Bay Area but want to show off your Trekkie wit).

We’ve got a few more tickets to the Star Trek screening tomorrow night at 7 p.m. in Redwood City (see here and here for more details). We’re paying for the price of the ticket, and charging a $2 fee to minimize no shows. After the show we’ll meet at the nearby Red Lantern for a drink or three.

Get your tickets here. And we now have three sponsors for the event. Microsoft Live Search, which helps more than 200 million people a month find stuff on the web, is buying everyone a soft drink at the movie theater (remind me to disclose this when we write about the new search launch). Trapster, a location based mobile application that alerts users in real time when they approach speed traps, is buying everyone popcorn (woohoo). And Eventbrite is helping with the cost of the tickets. Thanks very much, Star Trek sponsors.