Beginning this evening Hulu now features Grey’s Anatomy, a very popular prime-time medical drama that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. The episode selection for the show is pretty sparse right now — you have five episodes from the most recent fifth season to choose from (with large gaps in between each) but we may well see the selection rotate through the summer. Hulu plans to release more ABC shows over the next two weeks, which will include Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show.

The news may be just the shot in the arm Hulu needs to carry its strong traffic numbers through the summer. The site had seen very impressive growth all year, in no small part due to its Super Bowl and subsequent star-studded ad campaign. But last month came word that the site’s growth was dropping off, and the number of unique visitors to the site actually decreased between March and April. Hulu hasn’t been around long enough to figure out exactly what to attribute this to — it could well be television’s seasonal surges in popularity or possibly a saturated market. In any case, the site is still extremely popular, but I’m sure they’d like to keep that arrow going up and to the right.

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The fund will make investments of $50,000 to $50 million (yes, $50 million), but will generally focus on early stage opportunities. And here’s a fun fact: they don’t currently have a website, and apparently they aren’t sure they will have one in the future. For now they’ve reserved a16z.com for use if they do ever launch a site. Basically, if you don’t already know Andreessen or Horowitz, or know someone who knows them, getting in contact with them is going to be…difficult.

Andreessen has long been one of my favorite people to interview, because he is tapped into nearly every hot company and isn’t afraid to answer questions directly. That is, when you can actually get him to sit down with you and a camera, notepad or tape recorder. But last week, he had to chat it up with the press since he and long-time partner Ben Horowitz were announcing their the new venture fund. This is not going to be your typical venture capital firm.

For one thing, there’s that $300 million fund size. That’s pretty big for a first-time fund and gargantuan when you consider there are only two general partners, Andreessen and Horowitz. It’s big enough that some people didn’t think they’d be able to pull it off.

How did they? Well, did we mention Andreessen was one of the partners? Heard of the browser? And the lesser-known Horowitz is no slouch. He was the CEO of their second venture, Opsware, which sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. As instant as Netscape’s success may have been, Opsware was the opposite, a hard post-bubble slog.

It’s too early to tell how well Andreessen’s third company, Ning, will do, but Andreessen and Horowitz’s angel stakes in companies like LinkedIn, Delicious and Twitter show their savvy at picking good teams and how much other entrepreneurs in the Valley value their advice. For instance, Andreessen is the only independent member on Facebook’s tiny board of directors. And investors were impressed by the 45 or so companies that Andreessen has independently invested in over the years. Just one, TipMobile, has gone under so far.

So, that’s how they raised $300 million in the worst fundraising environment in 40 years,  here’s why: Andreessen says there are only fifteen companies started each year that matter. By “matter,” he means they’ve got the potential to generate $100 million year or more in revenues, and those companies wind up making up 97% of the aggregate industry returns. The firm wants the flexibility to invest as much as they want in those fifteen names, whether it’s $500,000 or $50 million per deal. Considering the two have run big teams and small teams over their time at Netscape, Opsware and Ning, there’s no logical reason they should tether themselves to just one stage of investing.

Like Founders Fund and unlike most everyone else, Andreessen and Horowitz are more comfortable investing when an entrepreneur wants to stay the CEO. Hiring a “grown up” CEO always sounds like a great idea, but almost always hastens a company’s failure, Andreessen argues. There’s strong evidence that the biggest hits come when the founders stay engaged at a C-level position. See: Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

Another distinction: They’re not meddlers. Because there are just two of them, Horowitz and Andreessen won’t always take board seats. If they pick the right entrepreneurs, Andreessen argues they shouldn’t have to.

The whole interview lasted about an hour, and you can see many of the highlights on my Yahoo show, TechTicker, today. Meanwhile, here are five other interesting things he said:

1. Twitter and Facebook’s investors aren’t worried about monetization, but “it’s sweet” of you to. Twitter has spent about $15 million acquiring 30 million users. It’d be a no-brainer to recoup that if need be. Meanwhile, Facebook will generate more than $500 million in revenues this year—it’s spent far less than that to build the company to date. In other words, these are pretty fiscally conservatively run businesses with huge growth potential and no trouble raising additional cash.

2. Digg isn’t done. Andreessen is still bullish on Digg, citing the fact that Kevin Rose is no longer distracted with Pownce and Jay Adelson is moving to San Francisco to manage the company full-time. He thinks having both guys focused on the company will make a huge difference in the next twelve months.

3. The venture capital market should stop whining about Sarbox and other factors that are hurting their ability to take companies public. Says Andreessen, “Build Companies More Valuable and You Won’t Have this Problem.” That said, he sees a conceivable scenario where public markets are no longer how investors get returns at all. Instead, the same institutional names that used to buy the bulk of the shares at an issue, will just buy out VCs at premiums in private deals. That’ll essentially mean everyday Joes can no longer invest in high growth companies. That’s a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how many scars you have from the dot com bust.

4. At least 300 venture firms will go out of business in the next five-to-ten years.

5. Innovation and opportunities to build businesses on the Web aren’t done. They won’t be done for a long time because the Web is one of the only inventions that’s pure software, compared to computers, the television or even the railroads. That means it can completely change without having to fit into set molds. Anyone—Andreessen included—is deluding themselves if they think they know where it’s going. (In other words, don’t listen to anyone making Web 3.0 predictions.)

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Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax network). NextWave acquired PacketVideo in 2005 and the company is now its main source of cash.

The investment indicates how important PacketVideo’s technology is to NTT Docomo, and raises the possibility of an outright purchase down the line. Other customers of PacketVideo include Verizon Wireless, Orange (in France), and T-Mobile. They might not feel so warm and fuzzy about PacketVideo now being so closely aligned with another carrier, even if it is in Japan.

In the past, NTT DoCoMo tried to expand abroad through an aggressive investment program. Maybe it sees cheap assets it wants to grab once again. The $45.5 million investment values PacketVideo at $130 million.

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Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits? The ability to use social media to fundraise for charitable purposes has been questionable. A few months ago, the Washington Post reported that Causes, one of Facebook’s popular applications used by non-profits to raise money, was not netting much money for charities, despite its large amount of users (according to the application’s page, it has 26 million monthly users).

Twitter, the current darling of the social media world, is increasingly being used by charities. In addition to building awareness, Twitter has potential to raise charitable contributions. One of the more successful initiatives launched in the Twittosphere was February’s global Twestival, which raised over $250,000 for charity:water, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing nations. The volunteer-run organization held events to bring Twitter communities in nearly 200 cities together. 250K sounds like an awful lot of dough to raise over the microblogging network, but this amount fell way below Twestival’s goal of $1 million.

Still, Twitter’s viral, real-time nature allows for a fast (and relatively low-cost) way to raise funds. Tweetsgiving, another Twitter-based charitable initiative raised over $10,000 in just 48 hours in November of 2008 to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. Beth Kantor reports that she was able to raise over $3000 via Twitter in just 90 minutes.

Other charities have used guerrilla follower tactics, developing ‘follower-challenges’ to raise money for causes. For example, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation recently found a donor who was willing to give $25,000 if the Foundation’s CEO, Doug Ulman, could reach 25,000 followers in three days (he started with roughly 10,000 followers at the beginning of the challenge). Ulman was able to surpass 25,000 and reach the goal.

Ashton Kutcher added a philanthropic element to the race with CNN to reach a million followers by promising donations to Malaria No More if he won. And Kutcher even initiated a follow-up fundraising effort for the charity shortly after. Hugh Jackman recently issued a challenge on Twitter to give $100,000 to the any charity that is best described within the 140 character limit.

Even on a smaller scale, there are some capabilities that Twitter provides on its platform that other social media outlets don’t have. For example, hashtags are one part of a fundraising effort on Twitter that can make it easy to search and identify a particular trend. Blame Drew’s Cancer (hashtag: #blamedrewscancer) is a great example of this. Drew Olanoff recently contracted Hodgkins Lymphoma, and launched Blame Drew’s Cancer as a way to get Twitter users who are complaining about something to use the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. The tweets are pulled into www.blamedrewscancer.com with the hope the Tweets would be tallied to elicit a large donation from a non-profit organization. The site recently announced that Livestrong will be a partner.

The examples I mention above are just a sampling of ways non-profits and philanthropists are using Twitter to fundraise. Twollars and Tweet4Good also offer interesting ways for non-profits to raise money over Twitter. But it’s pretty clear that there are many compelling ways to use Twitter’s viral nature as a valuable fundraising tool for charities.

Some may argue that the thousands raised through social media sites doesn’t match the millions raised through traditional tactics, including direct mail and events. But most charities are relatively late-adopters to new technologies, and the success we have seen this early is probably a strong indication of the potential that is yet to be unharnessed. This isn’t to suggest that Twitter will replace conventional ways of fundraising, but it provides a low-cost, yet engaging way to diversify a charity’s fundraising efforts. And in this economy, diversification is too important to ignore.

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Click the image above and then click the logo you know all too well to download.

Happy jailbreaking, and in case you didn’t know yet: happy unlocking too.

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In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena - by very, very far. After the US launch in 1995, the company quickly established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. But although Amazon wins in Canada and Europe, things are not going as well in Asia. In China (where Amazon started offering a localized site in 2004), it practically gets destroyed by local player Taobao [CN]. Traffic-wise, Amazon gets dwarfed by a local e-commerce site in Japan, too: Rakuten.

Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country’s online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. (Note: Statistics from different sources can vary widely because of totally different methods of measurement. The Japanese numbers, for examples, do include travel.)

Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year.

This short case study tries to shed light on Rakuten’s background and key success factors, why they win against Amazon in Japan and what efforts they make to go global.

1. Rakuten vs. Amazon Japan
With 47 million members (1 in 3 Japanese is registered), Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten Marketplace) is a household name in this country. The biggest difference to Amazon is that Rakuten was founded as a B2B2C company without a warehousing function. It’s a platform for individual merchants to sell their products to individual customers online.

And they’ve been very successful with it, even though Amazon launched their Japanese site as early as 2000. Look at the table below for a head-to-head and a Google Trends traffic comparison chart:

2. Rakuten’s success factors: Aggressive pricing and wide diversification
The idea and main success factor for Rakuten was helping Japanese brick and mortar businesses that wanted to set up customized online storefronts by themselves. As early as around the end of the 1990s, CEO Mikitani began systematically undercutting prices of existing hosting services by up to 75-85% and combined this with an aggressive sales and consulting model. As a trade-off for cutting out middlemen, merchants had to pay upfront, which made it possible for Rakuten to maintain a positive cash flow. Until today, the site offers its merchants a number of services to make their lives easier (real-world seminars, a monthly merchant-only magazine, phone support etc.). In return, Rakuten pockets fixed “virtual real estate” fees from the 28,000+ merchants currently registered on the site, in addition to commission payments (2.6% of each retailer’s sales revenue).

In parallel, the company stepped away from its original B2B2C roots in the last years, quickly turning into a gigantic web conglomerate. And the company transformed more radically than Amazon did in the US: Rakuten acquired popular online portal Infoseek (Alexa Japan rank: 20) to drive traffic to the main site, established an auction service (now Japan’s third largest), provides online securities brokerage, bought an online travel service (Rakuten Travel is now Japan’s biggest hotel reservation site) and offers a blogging platform (the No. 3 in blogging-crazy Japan). In addition, there is a Rakuten credit card (nearly 2 million Japanese own one), a personal consumer credit service, an e-bank (Japan’s biggest), a ticket sales service, a real-world Rakuten baseball team, a popular golf court reservation sub-site etc. etc. You get the picture.

3. Rakuten Marketplace: 35 million items from $1 to $100,000
But despite the rapid diversification in recent years, Rakuten is still known mainly as an online shopping site for the Japanese. And in contrast to Amazon, they can get anything on Rakuten, from used $70,000 four ton-trucks, Gucci handbags, digital content (Amazon Japan doesn’t offer downloads), down to apples and oranges directly offered by regional farmers.

The price level is relatively low for many items, as many shops offer identical products and the collected setting allows for users to quickly compare prices. Shipping is generally free on all books, DVDs, CDs and similar media. Rakuten also has the so-called “Super Points” system in place, a reward program for members (you are not required to register to buy on the site). Amazon’s counter offer, “Amazon Point”, was established as late as 2007.

Here is the translated version of Rakuten Ichiba’s massive top page (click to enlarge):

4. Amazon Japan’s strong position
Seeing this cluttered top page (which isn’t regarded unusual in Japan at all), it’s interesting to notice Amazon resists the urge to change their globally uniform design approach to accommodate Japanese tastes (Amazon’s US site basically serves as a design blueprint for all their sites worldwide).

But Amazon isn’t doing business as usual in Japan, making additional investments in its subsidiary instead. Next month, the company will set up a new distribution center just outside Osaka (it will be Amazon’s biggest in Japan). In the last weeks, three new categories with some 130,000 items were added to the site. And it’s possible for Japanese retailers to open an online shop on Amazon since 2006 already.

Overall, Amazon has positioned itself very well in Japan, proving that foreign web companies can enter this country successfully. And they also show that being inferior in traffic doesn’t always translate to being (proportionally) inferior in sales. Amazon’s parent company doesn’t break down sales figures on a country level, but some sources [JP] estimate the Japanese subsidiary rakes in roughly 10% of Amazon’s total sales and income. Assuming this is true, this would bring sales in this country to around $1.9 billion and operating income to a handsome $84 million (even though just yesterday, Japanese tax authorities reportedly demanded back $119 million in taxes from the company for unreported income).

5. Rakuten’s internationalization efforts and English services
Rakuten has been talking about going international for years now, and they’re already testing waters in a handful of countries. In the US, Rakuten acquired New York-based e-commerce company LinkShare for $425 million four years ago (Rakuten USA itself is headquartered in Boston). Rakuten Taiwan and Rakuten Europe (in Luxembourg) were established last year. Rakuten Travel has expanded to Korea, Guam, Thailand and China.

International customers can already book hotels in many Asian countries through Rakuten Travel’s English interface (which is on Rakuten Japan and works very well). About a fourth of all items available for Japanese customers can be ordered from selected countries through a service called Rakuten International Shipping Services. Non-Japanese users can access Google-translated item pages (24 languages are currently supported), place an order, pay via credit card and then wait for direct delivery from Japan (it’s even possible for foreigners to collect Super Points).

This is just a makeshift solution, sure, but way better than what many other Japanese online retailers offer.

6. Conclusion
Rakuten says sales outside Japan currently account for less than 10% of total sales, and overseas sales are currently growing at an average of about 20% monthly. Mikitani regularly mentions Asia (China in particular) as the next big market for his company.

But the current economic crisis has triggered what seems to become a trend among online giants: selective internationalization. MySpace decimated non-US staff just recently, Facebook is rumored to have second thoughts about China and Germany-based business social network Xing last week decided to shelve expansion plans for the US and China.

That’s why my guess is Rakuten will avoid battling it out with Amazon in their core markets and focus on untapped countries or niche segments instead - despite those aggressive announcements of the past. (In January last year, for example, the company said it will make inroads into 27 different countries by 2013. Mikitani regularly claims his final aim is to build the world’s biggest Internet company.)

Things are going quite well in Japan, but on a global level, Rakuten will have a tough time. The big competitors will certainly not cede markets such as Latin America, Africa, India or South East Asia to them standing by and doing nothing. In the US and core markets in Europe, Amazon dominates. In China, Taobao already established itself with 120 million users.

For the time being, there shouldn’t be a realistic chance for external players to win these markets over. This is true even for a conglomerate like Rakuten and its charismatic leader (who, in addition, still has to deal with a pretty strong service called Amazon domestically).

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6,000 or so people have congregated at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas for this year’s World Series of Poker to fight for $50 million or so that will be split among the last 10% of players left standing. Among them are a number of tech startup entrepreneurs. We’re tracking four of them, plus any others that pop up.

This is David Sacks’ third WSOP. Sacks, a former PayPal exec and the CEO of Geni/Yammer, walked away with nothing two years ago. Last year he took home $25k in prize money, and twittered every hand. This year he’s way up after the first day, with $91k in chips. That likely puts him in the top 10% of players. He is twittering summaries of his play at @davidsacks. You can see his player card here with last year’s results.

Jason Calacanis (Mahalo founder) is playing today for the first time. He’s been sponsored by FullTiltPoker (they paid his $10k buy in) and looks absolutely ridiculous (he’s pictured above). Look for his twitters later this afternoon.

Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya is playing beginning today as well. And we’ve heard but haven’t verified that former Yahoo exec David Goldberg (currently CEO of SurveyMonkey) is at the WSOP too.

The tournament has just started so there isn’t much to report yet. One concern we have - Sacks is set to speak at our real time event this Friday, which is day three of the tournament. He told me today that if he makes it to day three he “has to play,” and won’t make the event. My response? It was NSFW.

Good luck to everyone. Except Sacks. I hope he loses it all on day 2.

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The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009.

In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? That is a combined set of “other” browsers and appears to include Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2.0.

If you look at a 30-day version of that same chart, it shows Safari 4 with 4 percent market share and Chrome with 3 percent market share. It doesn’t yet break out Firefox 3.5, but if you assume that makes up the bulk of the remaining dotted line which jumped to nearly pass IE6 in the past week, you can figure out more or less which browsers are taking share from Microsoft. (I’ve used data from the most recent daily chart in this post, but embedded the monthly chart below which has data as of June 30).

As I said, this is early data from one source. Net Applications, another commonly cited source for browser market share, is currently reviewing its June numbers, but I have a feeling they will show similar trends. (This Wikipedia page shows other browser market share sources, most of them haven’t been updated since March). It is difficult to make any firm conclusions at this point, since market share is shifting so rapidly as every major (and minor) browser tries to convince users to upgrade.

But we are in the midst of a major upgrade cycle simultaneously across IE, FireFox, and Safari (with the Chrome wild card thrown in). When all is said and done, we might see a major shake-up in market share and almost definitely will see leadership pass from IE7 to another browser. The question is will that be IE8 or Firefox? Whichever one wins, the good news is that IE6 is finally dying.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

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The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-person audience.

The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry, a new mobile operator that promised to “revolutionize the telecom world”. Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical.

Then the company’s CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn’t need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service.

I was intrigued. By now you’ll have guessed that the calling was done over Wi-Fi, which I suppose isn’t really unique even if it made me wonder how they did it without launching a third-party app like Skype. Looking to learn more, I went to their official coming-out event the evening after, when they presented the newly founded company to a host of local geeks in more detail, giving them the chance to beta-test the service for a couple of weeks to iron out bugs before launching publicly.

Here’s how it works: Cherry - which is essentially an MVNO - pre-installs software (so yes, in the demo there was actually an application running in the background) on smartphones which it will sell as a packaged product, starting with a Symbian version for Nokia E-Series phones and expanding to other platforms later. Once activated, Cherry lets you call your contacts either over Wi-Fi or the GSM network when you insert a SIM card. Take out the card, and you can only call over a wireless Internet connection.

The funky part? Cherry automatically switches you from one to the other. This process, called a handover, can seriously cut into your current calling and roaming costs when you’re a frequent traveler or on the road often, and it doesn’t even require you to change numbers. You could easily dial your office number from your home over Wi-Fi, leave the house and have the software automatically have Cherry switch you over to a carrier’s cellular network once you’re out of range. There’s no interruption of service during the handover, which means you won’t even notice - until you receive your bill, since it’s obviously cheaper to call over Wi-Fi than the GSM network. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this automatic handover is a quite unique value proposition.

I did a short interview with Cherry CEO Bernard Noël De Burlin and Telco Service Manager aka mobile guru Davy Van De Moere after the event (apologies for the abrupt ending, my Flip’s batteries ran out of juice).

And just in case you don’t have a couple of minutes to watch the video, let me save you the trouble of asking: support for iPhone and Android are on the top of their list and a Windows Mobile-compatible version should be available soon.

(Full disclosure: the company gave me a Nokia E51 and free calling minutes so I could try out the service under normal circumstances on a daily basis. I need to return or pay for the phone end of August 2009.)

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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.

Forget the tech blogs, said investor Roger McNamee. Brew PR head Brooke Hammerling instantly acquiesced, and decided to go with a sort of guerrilla approach instead by “whispering” into the ears of prominent Twitter users like Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and Jason Calacanis. CNET was also given the story, but it managed to eek out only a single comment.

Ms. Hammerling, while popping green apple Jolly Ranchers into her mouth, suggests a press tour that includes briefing bloggers at influential geek sites like TechCrunch, All Things Digital and GigaOM.

But Roger McNamee, a prominent tech investor who is backing Wordnik, is also in the room, and a look of exasperation passes across his face at the mere mention of the sites.

“Why shouldn’t we avoid them? They’re cynical,” he says, also noting his concern that Wordnik would probably appeal more to wordsmiths than followers of tech blogs. “That’s where I would be most uncomfortable. They don’t know the difference between ‘they’re’ and ‘there.’ ”

Without missing a beat, Ms. Hammerling changes course, instantly agreeing with Mr. McNamee’s take. “I love you for that,” she intones. “I’ll leave the tech blogs out. Let them come to me.”

Instead, she decides that she will “whisper in the ears” of Silicon Valley’s Who’s Who — the entrepreneurs behind tech’s hottest start-ups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

The result? Not much. Wordnik is flatlining at an abysmal amount of traffic. Comscore and Quantcast don’t even register the site as a blip.

Compare Wordnik to Topsy, another recently launch service. Topsy launched on TechCrunch exclusively. The domain now has 577,000 results on Google, compared to 56,000 for Wordnik. And the traffic difference is stunning:

I’d say this experiment in a pure social media launch failed.

The article goes on for pages describing Hammerling’s incredible networking skills and propensity to namedrop at every opportunity.

Ms. Hammerling’s connections have been crucial for Brew in finding and serving clients, says Ms. Cook, her business partner: “Without question, that allows us to play at a different level, because we’re not just doing P.R. and media relations; we’re connecting people at the highest level, helping deals get done.”

I know Brooke well. I guess you could say I’m one of her many thousands of “very close friends.” And I don’t dispute that she is well connected, or that those connections help her get clients.

I believe Brooke’s client have been better served if she stood up to McNamee and told him that Wordnik would have had a better launch if they hadn’t ignored the blogs that are interested in covering new startups. Instead she became a “yes woman” and told McNamee exactly what he wanted to hear.

Hammerling and her peers in the industry should help guide their clients through the minefield of journalists and bloggers, rather than simply avoid it entirely out of fear or ignorance. She isn’t in the room to drop names or “help get deals done.” She’s there to make sure the client’s news gets spread appropriately. In that they failed miserably, and the client suffered.

As cool as Kevin Rose is (and he did apparently Twitter that Wordnik was “truly amazing”), this is not a launch strategy.

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For all of you World of Warcraft fans out there, there’s a new Twitter client that is worth checking out. TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for WoW that lets you send and receive Tweets within a game. If you are busy in the middle of a WoW match, you can put Tweets in a queue to send when it’s more convenient.

The client also lets you upload in-game WoW screenshots using TwitPic and will automatically send out Tweets when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement.

Tweetcraft also caught the attention of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who blogged about the client today.

Here’s a video with details of the client:

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That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy’s acquisition by WordPress’s parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic’s premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don’t want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.

The acquisition opened doors for PollDaddy, helping the site form relationships with large media portals like Fox, NBA.com, and Playboy (the TechCrunch network also uses them frequently). PollDaddy says that its traffic sources are pretty evenly distributed across its portal at PollDaddy.com, its API, and WordPress.com, each of which account for around 33% of new content.

Alongside today’s traffic news, PollDaddy is rolling out a new rating widget (seen above) that lets visitors rate blog rate images, comments, videos, and posts themselves. The feature will be available both on PollDaddy’s homepage and on WordPress.com. This is interesting not only because of PollDaddy’s wide reach, but because of what the company plans to do with it down the line: PollDaddy intends to tie aggregated ratings data into its site PollDaddy Answers, which will surface the hottest images, blog posts, and other content on the web. This could prove quite powerful, potentially turning the site into an alternative to Digg.

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If I open up an email and see it filled with paragraphs of information, guaranteed my eyes are going to glaze over. Certainly sometimes it’s an important message that I do need to read, but most of the time it’s just a core message filled with paragraphs of bloat. I don’t want or need the bloat, I need the core message. And that’s why I love Twitter. You simply cannot go over 140 characters. And more often than you may imagine, that’s enough.

Now, on the face of it, plenty of people will disagree with me on that point. But think about it. In an age where we’re bombarded by tons of information, from multiple angles, all day long, there is something beautiful about brevity.

I used to read screenplays for a living. Trust me when I say that there is no shortage of people who can blather on about something to seemingly no end. But the skill in writing a screenplay often came down to if you could convey what you needed to convey in just a few lines. It’s not an easy thing to do — at all. And while it’s not quite the same because it’s even more compact, Twitter forces you do to a similar thing in its own way. And Twitter is hardly the only form of communication that has done this.

Most users know by now that the 140 character limit of Twitter is actually tied to the limits of text messaging. Text messages can only be 160 characters long (Twitter needed to reserve the extra 20 characters for usernames). But do you know where the 160 character limit comes from?

The LA Times ran an excellent piece a few months ago about Friedhelm Hillebrand, the father of the modern text message. He dreamed up the 160 character limit while working at a typewriter in the mid-1980s, trying to see how long sentences needed to be to convey something. He found 160 characters was the magic number he kept arriving at. But the deciding committee for SMS still wasn’t sure until they looked at postcards and found that most of those had messages of 150 characters or less.

And so you see, while you may think Twitter’s character limit is silly or frustrating, it’s actually born out of two other forms of communication that are widely accepted and used the world over. You may not think of Twitter being just like a postcard, but in some ways it is — one that you can instantaneously send to many friends or acquaintances at the same time. And minus the cost of a stamp.

Even with the rise of technology, the lure of the short message remains. And that was the key reason why I found Twitter compelling when I first started using it over two years ago. I never thought of the limitation in a negative sense, but rather as something that could inspire creativity in messages. And could even spur communication.

It’s liberating to know that you only have 140 characters or less to respond to something. For a lot of messages, that removes a huge burden of trying to say enough to the person you’re talking to so that they don’t think you’re being rude. With a 140 character limit, a correlation between briefness and rudeness doesn’t exist.

And that’s why more and more I’m finding myself telling people, “Just message me on Twitter.” It’s a two-way street. I don’t want to have to read you go on and on about something that could be said in one line, and you won’t have to listen to me go on and on about something in response. Again, it won’t work for all messages, which is why Twitter or something like it will never kill email, but for a lot of messages, it works just fine.

Characters and time are saved. It’s a limitation that is liberating.

[photos: flickr/pink sherbert photography & inlaterdays]

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The good side is very good: thousands of layers of mostly needless middlemen and processes are being eliminated as journalists get a direct channel to their readers. And, because it’s a two way medium, readers get that channel right back. And in the cases where the subject of an article has been wronged, the Web gives them powerful megaphones to fight back. In short, the more everyone has a voice, the more reporters are challenged to make sure they are right, because they will be called out.

Look at what happened with the plagiarism scandal around Chris Anderson’s new book. Anderson says it was a mistake around a change in how they were going to use citations, and I take him at his word. But it’s safe to say any author who’d considered borrowing heavily from Wikipedia won’t now. We like to think that we act virtuously because of personal or professional pride, but nothing enforces those ethics like the real possibility of getting caught and hugely embarrassed.

But the bad side is also very bad. The elimination of those layers – typically fact checkers, editors, lawyers and just time to make sure a work is fully baked—also allows mistakes, lazy reporting, a dependence on rumors, and hot-headed, unfair treatment to subjects. Worse: The metrics around the Web make it crystal clear which kinds of stories drive the most traffic. That leads to salacious reporting for the sake of clicks and comments.

It’s easy to point the finger at blogs, especially by certain members of old media losing money quarter-after-quarter. (Cough, cough.) But this is not just a technology change as most corners of media are fighting for survival, it’s become a cultural change. And this week, I’ve been struck by two non-blog examples that reflect the tension.

Right about now most people reading this probably have guessed the example of salacious reporting and unfair treatment I’m driving at is Ben Mezrich’s new book on Facebook. I’ll say upfront I haven’t read it. Galleys have been very closely guarded. Once I do read it, if everything everyone who has read it has told me is wrong, I’ll apologize for what I’m about to say. But, on a professional level, I find the ethics behind this project disgusting.

It’s essentially a book based on talking to one source who had a falling out with the company just as it was moving to California and becoming more than a dorm room project. That’s like someone writing a book about you based solely on what your old college ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend said.

Mezrich has been clear to say he’s never met or talked to Mark Zuckerberg in the intro and in interviews, but that doesn’t stop him from drawing potentially damaging conclusions about his character and selling it as a non-fiction book that’s getting made into a movie that people will take as fact.

In contrast, I spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing and following the subjects of my last book, which as most people know, included Zuckerberg amid other Web 2.0 figures. And I’m about one-third of the way through research for my next book, which includes spending 40 weeks in other countries following entrepreneurs. It’d be a lot easier to write a narrative without that whole burden of actual reporting. If I could sit in Silicon Valley and make up what I think entrepreneurs in Africa are like, that’d sure help out on my bank account, my health and my neglected personal relationships.

To be clear, I have no doubt Mezrich’s book will sell better than mine and make a juicier movie. But I wouldn’t swap the karma points. I don’t know how you call yourself a non-fiction writer and publish a book about a living person that’s based on you “imagining” what they are like. And let me tell you, having first interviewed him when he was 19 and spent countless hours with him since, the idea that Zuckerberg is some kind of sexed-up lethario is laughable fiction.

Why didn’t Mezrich write a novel or a different non-fiction book that he actually knew something about? It just seems like a cheap way to get a film deal and sales since the “imagined” subject is also leading the hottest private tech company in the world right now. (Indeed, the film rights were reportedly sold before the book was written.)

Even Mezrich’s publicist admits as much, according to a New York Times Blog post where he said, “The book isn’t reportage. It’s big juicy fun.” I’m guessing it’s not fun for the people trying to build a company who Mezrich essentially calls womanizers, drug addicts and backstabbers. Probably not fun for their families, employees and investors either. If this is where media is going on a book level, magazine level or blog level—I want out.

Contrast that to what’s playing out with another hot non-fiction book that was also optioned for a film: Moneyball. Some people accuse Michael Lewis of taking some liberties with facts here or there, but I’ve never met one of his subjects who felt he was treated unfairly, including the subject of Moneyball, Billy Beane. Like his style or not, Lewis did his job: He invested countless hours reporting and wrote a book that told a dramatic story that also happened to be true.

Recently, that book was also being made into a movie, to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Steven Soderbergh. The plug unexpectedly got pulled. It seemed Soderbergh reworked the script to be less a feature film version of things and more a real-life reenactment with some of the actual people playing themselves. Quippy anecdotes and funny lines were cut because they weren’t actually said in real life.

I’ve not been a huge fan of some of Soderbergh’s more experimental work, and I don’t know if his treatment would have made a better movie. But imagine: The people who are allowed to take the most liberties with a “true story”—the filmmakers—hewing more to the truth than an author who ostensibly gets paid to write the truth.

The media world is upside down these days, and I hope when all the volatility is done we wind up on the Soderbergh side of things.

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As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup.

While all of this has been going on, CallWave has been building the “fuze platform” that powers Fuze Meeting, which it’s pitting as a sleeker, lighter, and cheaper alternative to services like WebEx. Last fall, the company decided to show off an early version of the product to some press, perhaps prematurely (it was labeled as “incomplete” by CNET). Finally in May, a full eight months after making its public debut, Fuze Meeting finally became commercially available. And only now that the company’s financial wranglings are complete is it ready to really announce it to the public.

I played around with the complete version yesterday, and for the most part I was impressed. The application is slick and intuitive, and unlike some other screen sharing apps, Fuze Meeting requires no plugins — it should work on just about any browser, and also offers support for both the iPhone and BlackBerry. Screen sharing supports high resolution video sharing, allowing presenters to jump to any point in the video as each participant’s screen is updated in real time. Presenters can also annotate video frames, which will likely appeal to marketing organizations.

While the service is currently working on acquiring free users, it is going to operate under a subscription model of $29 a month, or 12 cents per minute for users who would prefer to pay as they go. This is substantially cheaper than WebEx, but other less well known alternatives sport similar price points, so cost won’t be the only thing Fuze can rely on to differentiate itself.

If you’d like to see a video of the service in action, check out the clip below. Warning: it features Moran’s kids, and may be too cute to handle.

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A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. “Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!,” they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. “@Linux thanks, nice to be here,” they replied.

Short, sweet, and to the point. A sign of peace in the operating system ecosystem? Probably not. But it’s something — just look at the shirts that were going around in this war just a few years ago (above).

Twitter is turning into quite the sanctuary for rivals to at least pretend to be nice to each other. Just look at Coke and Pepsi the other day.

[photo: flickr/will hybrid]

[Thanks Russell]

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One of his most popular ones was a video from 4 months ago in which he calls out rapper 50 Cent. Sexman wonders how 50 still has “street cred” after doing endorsements for Vitamin Water, makeup and dildos (I’m not kidding). “What else is he gonna do? 50 Cent diapers for your little gangsta?,” Sexman wonders at one point. He concludes that 50 Cent is “just a media whore!”

Well, 50 Cent has responded. Yesterday, the rapper posted a video alongside Sexman, who apparently flew from Canada to New York to meet up at the rapper’s request.

Pure. YouTube. Gold.

Here’s another old classic. Sexman’s review of the latest Rambo review.

[thanks Corentin]

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Despite our best intentions, it looks like the DEMO v. TechCrunch50 war will continue, even with DEMO under new management.

In 2007 we launched the first TechCrunch50 event - a place where companies can launch to rabid fans and tech press. These launching companies are the stars of the show, and they don’t pay a cent to attend. We thought DEMO’s longstanding policy of forcing launching companies to pay a $20,000 fee was ridiculous, and led the conference organizers to make decisions based not on the merits of the startups but simply on who was willing and able to pay. Not only do we let startups launch for free, we give the top one a $50,000 prize.

Our conference has grown rapidly - nearly 2,000 people attended TechCrunch50 last year while DEMO languished in San Diego with a paltry few hundred. To be fair, our events were on the exact same dates, so they were hit doubly hard. This year we moved our dates to give them some breathing room. We thought we were done battling DEMO.

But today DEMO announced that they’re giving away a “massive” prize - $2 million in advertising credits - to the top two startups at the event. The press is eating it up, saying that TechCrunch50 looks paltry in comparison.

Of course, there’s a catch. The “advertising” is remnant stuff on IDG properties (IDG owns DEMO) and will certainly be priced at rate card. They’ll also charge for creative and other expenses. Meaning there is very little actual value. I’m guessing that the amount of advertising actually delivered would be in the tens of thousands of dollars of value, at best. And, of course, every startup launching still needs to pay to launch.

But whatever. You want adverting? We’ll give you advertising.

DEMO says they’ll give away $2 million in advertising (it might be $1 million total, they aren’t very clear). We’ll double whatever they’re giving. We’ll give away $4 million in advertising if they’re giving $2 million. And if DEMO increases their number, we’ll increase ours to stay at 2x whatever they are at. Our ads will be on our various TechCrunch networks sites and via our terrific sponsors, who are going to be adding their own inventory as well. We’ll give half to the top two winners, and half to everyone else who launches.

We’ve always supported the startups that launch at TechCrunch50 in every way we can. Throwing in free advertising is easy.

Let’s just take a look at the two events for comparison purposes.

TechCrunch50: Free to launch, 2,000 attendees, $50,000 cash prize to winner. $4 million in free advertising. Awesomeness in a bottle.

DEMO: $20,000 to launch your startup, maybe 500 attendees, $1 million in remnant unsold advertising on IDG properties to each of top two startups.

The choice seems pretty clear to me.

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When we reported on Kiva.org’s decision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited.

It looks like Shah’s prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva’s community platform titled “Unhappy Kiva Lenders.” The members, which total 375 lenders from around the world, are angry that Kiva is extending loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. The team’s page states that “including borrowers from the USA has undermined the very core of what made [Kiva] so unique and special; small, impactful contributions to entrepreneurs in impoverished situations in developing countries.”

The tirade on the page is harsh, calling the decision “shameful and disgraceful” and a deviation from Kiva’s core mission. The group cites an example of a recent Kiva loan request from a U.S. entrepreneur who had a college degree and a career in architecture who wanted to start a business in website design. The loan he requested was for $7000 to start the business, an amount the lenders suggest could help 7 to 10 different borrowers in other parts of the world.

Kiva’s stated mission is “to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” The anti-U.S. lenders claim that lending to U.S. entrepreneurs doesn’t alleviate poverty because Americans aren’t living in true poverty, compared to people in underdeveloped countries.

**US borrowers do not have to pay to send their kids to elementary school. **They don’t have to build their own house. **They don’t have to walk miles to get the bare minimum of medical care….if needed they can access FREE, generally high quality medical care. **They have a system of laws and courts in place that work. **They enjoy police and fire protection. **They generally have access to inexpensive and dependable public transportation. **They take for granted electricity, clean water, inspected food and indoor toilets. **

Some of that may be true. On the other hand, Shah makes a compelling case for the need for a micro-lending platform in the U.S. He says more than 10 million U.S. business owners face difficulty obtaining capital—even before the credit crisis and economic slowdown which made lending tight. And there’s no doubt that with the credit crunch creating a drought of lending, small businesses in the U.S. are finding it tough to find funds, especially if their financial history isn’t stellar. Finally, there is nothing wrong with giving U.S. lenders the opportunity to boost entrepreneurship at home, especially at a time where jobs created by small businesses can help lift the economy out of a recession.

It seems to me like the angry protests are misdirected. Kiva’s lending program has long been hailed as one of the more innovative platforms on the web and its ambitions have always been towards helping foster entrepreneurship (as well as alleviating poverty) in various areas of the world. Kiva’s decision to offer microlending to U.S. entrepreneurs reflects a genuine need for additional lending in the U.S. economy. And who knows? Kiva’s policy may attract a new crop of lenders who want to help at home first, and once they get hooked, spread capital overseas as well. The more capital that goes into the Kiva system, the more chance borrowers everywhere will have to eventually tap into it because many Kiva lenders simply recycle their loans as they are paid back.

We’ve contacted Kiva.org for a formal response.

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Start Mobile

Apparently, Apple doesn’t like the way one piece of art in the app depicts President Obama. Is it out of line or tasteless? Well, you can determine for yourself, because you’ve undoubtedly seen the art in question before: It’s Shepard Fairey’s famous “HOPE” image of Obama that was everywhere during his Presidential campaign.

So why on Earth would this be rejected? Well, here’s the wording in the rejection:

It contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

“Ridicules public figures”? This image is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian — yet, Apple apparently finds it inappropriate.

To be clear, the app in question is a free demo app of Start Mobile’s galleries and contains a dozen images, but Apple is clearly just unnerved by the Obama one as you can see in the correspondence below which the developer has shared.

Here’s Apple’s initial rejection letter:

Subject: Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery 1.0: Application Submission Feedback
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:27:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: iPhone Developer Program
To: XXXXX@XXXXXXX.com, XXXXX@XXXXXXX.net

Please include the line below in follow-up emails for this request.
Follow-up: 74455381
Dear START MOBILE, INC.,

Thank you for submitting Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

An example of a public figure is attached.

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program
****************************

Here’s Start Mobile’s follow-up trying to explain why the image is not ridiculing a public figure:

Subject: [Fwd: Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery 1.0: Application Submission Feedback]
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 21:56:29 -0700
From: John Doffing
To: iPhone Developer Program

Follow-up: 74455381

Apple Developer Program:

The attached image is most certainly NOT content that ridicules a public figure, nor is it in any way “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory”.

The attached image is an iconic portrait by globally acclaimed artist SHEPARD FAIREY, and is actually included in the National Portrait Gallery!

* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7817466.stm

According to the BBC:

“When people think of a portrait of Obama, they think of this image.”
Fairey’s works are also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

–

THANK YOU!

Best,
John

Now, lest you think Apple is possibly rejecting the app because Start Mobile doesn’t have permission to use the artist’s work, Start Mobile has three other apps featuring the work of Shepherd Fairey that are already in the App Store.

Okay, so maybe Apple’s isn’t comfortable with the bit of legal wrangling that is taking place over the artwork? That’s possible, but that’s not what it says in the rejection. And there are other applications like this one that use the image in question. And, you’ll notice, that’s not even the real version of the image, and it’s being used in the app’s icon. Why Apple would let that slip by and not this app? I have no idea.

And further, Start Mobile actually has another app that also features an Obama image that has been sitting around waiting to be approved for 2 months now, presumably for the same reason. That app features artwork from urban artist Justin Bua, and contains the image of Obama shown on the right.

So why doesn’t the developer just remove the offending images and get these apps approved? Well, because he doesn’t think he should have to, and believes this is just another case of the App Store approval process gone off the tracks.

“You notice that my original email to you didn’t scream CENSORSHIP or anything like that. I am quite sure that this is simply what amounts to a clerical error. A billion apps sold. 50k apps. etc etc. So this is just growing pains on their part. But unfortunately, it effected us directly, and had we not done SOMETHING, the end result would have been what amounts to accidental censorship,” Start Mobile’s John Doffing told us over email.

He goes on to note that he spoke with someone in developer relations a few weeks ago about the rejection, and they indicated that any apps that contain images of Obama may simply be getting rejected outright because there was a lot of “incendiary political content” that was coming through the App Store approval process around the time of the election. Sometimes “‘the baby is thrown out with the bathwater,” is what Doffing was told.

Doffing said that openness about what was going on made him hopeful that the app would find its way to the App Store, but that apparently didn’t change anything.

Sadly, this looks like yet another ridiculous App Store rejection. While Apple has no shortage of developers wanting to make apps for the platform, at some point, all of these ridiculous rejections run the risk of turning developers away.

Apple badly needs to straighten out its policies and get a team in place that doesn’t make dozens of silly mistakes with regards to app approvals and denials. The system continues to be broken.

Sure, Apple can do what it wants, but it’s asking developers to make apps for its store, which move iPhone and iPod touch units and make Apple all that money. Increasingly, the promise is that developers can earn a living off of the platform, or at least supplement their income. But they can’t do that if Apple keeps rejecting their apps for no apparent reason.

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One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post, or the one at right. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.

More importantly, the retweet buttons will begin supporting URL shortening service other than bit.ly, and will include an option for sites to choose their own custom short URL. (For instance, we use http://tcrn.ch). Tweetmeme will also offer analytics for site owners to see how their retweets are spreading. Basic data will be free, and Tweetmeme will likely charge for more detailed analyticss. All of this, of course, also turns into valuable data for Tweetmeme to determine the most popular links and stories on Twitter, and makes Tweetmeme itself a better news aggregation site.

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