Back in September, we reported that eBay was attempting to sell off StumbleUpon, the website recommendation service it bought for $75 million in 2007. That didn’t happen. And now the company has been spun off to start life over as an independent startup, backed by new investors and the original founders.

The new company is led by co-founder Garrett Camp, who now steps into the CEO role. Co-founder Geoff Smith also joins Camp in returning to lead the company. The company is backed by Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. David Hornik from August Capital and Sameer Gandhi of Accel Partners join the board.

Apple is really, really close to hitting 1 billion app downloads across the world, according to its new countdown page. If you download an app, you’ll be enrolled in a contest to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro. TechCrunch is holding its own contest in honor of this occasion. Whoever guesses when it will hit one billion, and is closest in minutes and seconds will get free TechCrunch T-shirt. Leave the guesses in comments; we’ll contact the winner.

Apple also featured the all-time top 20 apps, both paid and free.

Steve Case’s startup Revolution Money announced a series C funding today of $42 million led by Goldman Sachs. Case and other existing investors (Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, former AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, and JP Morgan vie chairman David Golden). That is on top of $50 million the company raised is September, 2007.

The company is using the Internet to lower the cost of credit card charges and payment transfers, charging merchants only a 0.5 percent transaction fee instead of credit card fees which can be four to eight times as high. Revolution Money has done a good job signing up banks and merchants to accept its credit card and online payment service, but it is not so clear how good a job it is doing actually signing up customers. In tandem to its regular credit card, it also operates Revolution MoneyExchange, an online payment processing service that is trying to compete with Paypal. MoneyExchange is basically a loss leader to get people to sign up for the credit card. The problem is that nobody is really using MoneyExhange.

Only 33,000 people in the U.S. even visited the site in February, down from a marketing-fueled high of 742,000 a year before in March, 2008, according to comScore. Hopefully, it’s found another way to sign up customers, and I’m not talking about Washington Capitols hockey fans (Leonsis owns the hockey team and is trying to get fans to pay for tickets with Revolution Money credit cards).

Micro-blogging is getting micro-payments. Tinker, the micro-blogging topic tracker from Glam Media which we covered in depth last night, is now live. The service tracks specific topics on both Twitter and Facebook, and allows these “event” streams to be republished as standalone widgets on blogs and other sites across the Web. I’ve embedded an example below showing the subsequent Tweets about our original article.

With the launch, Glam Media is also creating a professional micro-blogging network for journalists and bloggers who want to sign up to cover specific events or topics via Twitter or Facebook. It will be called the Tinker Micro-Bloggers Network. This will be a vetted subset of Tinker users who are advertiser-friendly. Glam is working on a micro-payments system to share revenues with approved micro-bloggers from ads in their associated widgets and Tinker streams.

The CrunchGear mobile newswagon is parked in downtown San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, and although this is a more industry-orientated show, we’ve managed to find some pretty interesting stuff — and of course, a few of the latest games. Check out some of the highlights inside.

Are iPhone app developers getting paid on time from Apple? Not all of them. On this iPhone developer forum, there are numerous threads from developers who are complaining about delays in payments for January and not being paid the amount of money the developers are in fact due from sales. And we’ve received one complaint directly from an iPhone app developer that Apple is late on its payments for January. Apple’s contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. That would have been a week ago.

Developers are expressing a number of gripes with Apple that extend beyond just being paid on time. We also hear (and read) that reaching Apple by phone is a complete nightmare. Emails to Apple go unanswered and customer service reps put developers on hold for 30 minutes to an hour and sometimes hang up on callers after they’ve waited to speak to an agent. Email seems to work best.

Pure Digital Technologies, the creator of the Flip Video line of digital video recorders, got their payday today: $590 million in Cisco stock, a deal we first reported may be happening a couple of weeks ago.

The San Francisco-based company is well known today for creating extremely small, well designed and inexpensive video cameras that take exceptional video. And the software that comes with the devices provides easy to use tools to edit that video and upload it to the web. But Pure Digital wasn’t always selling hit products - it took seven years for the company to get it right. In the meantime, they launched products that just weren’t quite the right thing at the right time.

The company isn’t young by startup standards - it took its first round of funding in April 2002 from Mike Moritz at Sequoia Capital with a plan of creating $20 disposable digital cameras that people brought back to the store for processing. The camera’s memory would then be wiped and the device resold.

iPhone apps have been downloaded 800 million times, and there are now more than 25,000 apps in the iTunes store. Apple is detailing some of the new features in the next version of the iPhone OS in apress conference going on live right now. The new OS, iPhone 3.0, will support 1,000 APIs. Apple seems to be giving a lot of extra love to paid apps, which will gain the ability to sell additional levels, subscriptions, virtual goods, or extra content from right within the app.

Some stats from the press conference:

• There are now more than 25,000 iPhone apps in the iTunes Store.
• iPhone apps have been downloaded 800 million times.
• 96 percent of all apps are approved
• The developer SDK has been downloaded 800,000 times
• 50,000 companies have joined the program
• 13.7 million iPhones were sold in 2008

Cloudkick, a Y Combinator startup, offers a free, easy server management system to businesses whose web infrastructure is maintained by Amazon’s EC2 or Slicehost cloud-based servers. Built off of Amazon Web Services’ API, Cloudkick gives users a single control panel where you can manage all of your servers (or instances) through various platforms.

Cloudkick’s dashboard allows you to easily add or remove EC2 or Slicehost servers with a click and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server. Cloudkick will check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email or voicemail, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer.

When you are introduced to new Web products and businesses every day, as we are here at TechCrunch, it is difficult not to get the startup itch. Mark Hendrickson, who has been with TechCrunch as a writer and Web developer for two years, has decided to scratch that itch and build his own Web service. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will combine location with social discovery, will have “lots of maps,” and will work with Facebook Connect. It will be a while before he is ready to launch it, but if you are curious you can sign up for the waiting list to receive an invite. Or you can follow him on Twitter.

Mark has been a key member of TechCrunch, and he will be sorely missed. Most of our readers know him primarily as one of our more analytical writers. His first post was a side-by-side comparison of different DIY social networks, he’s been a key chronicler of changes at Facebook, and helped us realize that Hulu doesn’t suck.

But beyond writing great posts, Mark is one of the people who has kept TechCrunch humming behind the scenes. Michael and I kept trying to get him to write—and we squeezed 569 posts out of him—but really all Mark wanted to do was Web development. From TechCrunch to CrunchBase to Elevator Pitches, Mark’s hand has touched practically every Web property we operate.

WaTunes, a service that helps independent artists get their music into online music stores like iTunes and Amazon, has announced that it is making its service entirely free. The move is a direct attack on competitors like TuneCore, which also helps independent artists distribute their music but charges fees depending on the number of songs being sold and the number of stores the artist would like to sell their tracks on.

In the company’s blog post on the new pricing scheme (or lack thereof) CEO Kevin Rivers writes:

We’ve went from being free to be charged, to giving 90% of sales, to giving back all the sales earnings. We’ve finally can say that we have raise the bar even higher by providing you guys an ABSOLUTE digital distribution service. As of now, WaTunes will enable it’s customers to continue to sell unlimited music, earn 100% of the royalties, and more, ALL FOR FREE! There are no fees, cancellations, no gimmicks.

So now that the company is giving up its entire source of revenue, how is it planning to make money?

Web design startup AType Studios has launched the private beta of Ohpan, a free personalized side-scrolling interactive ticker feed featuring breaking news, pictures, web links, blog posts, the weather, and tidbits of information. The first 1000 TechCrunch readers to enter the code “TCRUNCH” when prompted here will be able to join the private beta.

Ohpan’s technology is enabled by learning about what communities, sources, and topics users like through their actions on the site (like clicking, saving and forwarding comments). Ohpan will also ask users questions to determine what news should be subscribed to a feed. For example, if a user answers “Yes” to a “Do you use twitter?” question, more Twitter news will be published to the user’s feed. Ohpan then combs through thousands of RSS feeds to find news items and then individualizes the news ticker to the users preferences.

Don’t count out Joost just yet. We recently wrote it still has a heartbeat despite the fact they made the wrong bet years ago by underestimating the power of the web for watching videos. They finally switched to Flash late last year, giving up on P2P, and introduced some social networking features around the video viewing experience to battle established players like Hulu, TV.com and YouTube.

Now it’s taking a step beyond that by forming an alliance with Europe’s leading social networking service, Belgium-based Netlog, theoretically expanding its reach to 40 million people. The deal will allow Netlog’s audience to access Joost’s video library straight from its starting page, where they’ll be able to view, share and comment on 57,000+ music videos, TV shows, etc. Activity will be pushed to users’ news feed, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious.

Social evaluation platform Vanno launched a widget application of its real-time company reputation index called ReputationCheck. Vanno’s platform allows customers and others to share stories about their personal experiences with a particular company, submit news articles they’ve read about companies, fill out surveys and comment on companies. Vanno then quantifies this dialogue and information into an index using Bayesian algorithms (the same statistical methods used to filter spam and detect credit card fraud). The company’s index measures the reputation of more than 5,800 companies worldwide.

Vanno’s reputation index was recently brought into the public light when Vanno quantified the damage Kellogg’s brand sustained after the company pulled the plug on Michael Phelps’s sponsorship following the swimmer’s marijuana photo fiasco. Vanno’s data suggested that Kellogg’s reputation plummeted after its decision, falling even further on the index than when the company had to recall products after this year’s peanut butter salmonella scare

A court in Dendermonde, Belgium, today found Internet company Yahoo guilty of withholding personal account information linked to Yahoo e-mail addresses. The court told the company to cough up a €55,000 fine right away and an additional €10,000 for each day it keeps refusing to hand over the user data. (or $69,197 and $12,590, respectively)

(Update: statement from Yahoo below)

Yahoo got fined for its unwillingness to cooperate in a cyber-criminal investigation which prompted Belgian authorities to subpoena detailed account data for a number of e-mail addresses used by a gang of alleged internet cons. Yahoo’s defense was that it would only respond to requests from American authorities, while the Belgian investigators claim it should turn over the data at their request too because the company operates its services in Belgium. Also worth noting is that the judge is being quoted as saying that this procedure for requesting data “poses absolutely no problem with Google and Microsoft”.

On Friday, during our cloud computing event, Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary noted, “The cloud is the new dotcom.” He was one of the judges for the demo startups, and for good or for bad, he might be right. Cloud computing as a term is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category. Yet there is also obviously something there. Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook all want to become the cloud platform of choice for startups and developers to build their Web apps on.

And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop’s camera—no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.

Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that “we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.” He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).

In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: “This is still Day One.” We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google’s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.

And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don’t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (Videos after the jump).

Tomorrow’s Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can’t join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud

TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT:

Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture.

On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can’t tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other?

I am also happy to announce the startups who will be giving the main demos prior to the roundtable and the panel of judges who will be evaluating them. Here are the companies and what they will be showing off:

I’m here in Redmond, Washington at Microsoft TechFest 2009, where Microsoft is showcasing many of the projects its researchers around the world have been working on. The event is filled with impressive demos covering diverse topics ranging from advanced user interfaces to improving computer-based learning in developing countries. We’ll be posting videos throughout the day, the first of which is a demonstration that essentially combines the mobile video broadcasting of services like Qik with Microsoft’s image and video stitching technology that can be seen in its impressive Photosynth product. The technology can take multiple live video streams focusing on the same subject (as you might find at a concert), and stitches them together to create one large panoramic video. For a full demo, see the video below.

On Saturday we published a letter sent out to some recently laid-off Microsoft employees explaining that they had been overpaid in severance - and that Microsoft wanted some of its money back. Something had clearly gone wrong during Microsoft’s first mass layoffs, as we began to receive more reports that ex-employees had gotten similar letters, and that some had actually been underpaid. One original tipster has detailed how he felt when he initially got the notice:

Right away I was angry because when I got my severance check, I immediately created a budget to stretch this out as long as possible. I know we’re in a recession now and I don’t know how long I’ll be unemployed. And now here comes this letter totally destroying the budget and on top of that, there’s no detailed information on how the error occurred, no details breaking down the severance pay.

Microsoft initially refused to provide any details on the incident, instead stating that it was a “private matter between the company and the affected people”. And then the news began to spread.

Since Saturday, well over 300 news outlets have covered the story. Many of them have deemed this to be a huge PR misstep, but it’s likely that Microsoft PR never even knew about the letter in the first place, and were only alerted to it after the fact. In any case, it’s clear that nobody ever considered how people would react if the letter leaked to the public.

One of the best decisions we ever made at TechCrunch was when we launched CrunchBase, our open startup directory, at the end of 2007. We aspired to make it the best current source of information about technology startups, people and investors. Data is added by TechCrunch editors, our amazing team of interns, and the community at large (it is a moderated wiki, so anyone can contribute data). Over the last year, the database has grown to include more than 15,000 companies, 26,000 people and 1,700 investors. In short, it’s finally gotten big enough to become interesting. So as 2008 drew to a close, we started running statistics on the structured data to see what we could learn.

Today, we unveil our first premium research product, the TechCrunch 2008 Year In Review, which presents our key findings. The report takes a step back from the news that breaks day-to-day and provides a unique perspective on the major trends of 2008. We cover new products, financings and exits across a variety of technology sectors: search, social networking, cloud computing, mobile communications, advertising and ecommerce, consumer media and entertainment, consumer electronics and clean technology.

Below is a portion of the executive summary and key statistical highlights for all to read.