We are super excited and quite honored to announce today that Peter Thiel will be joining the TechCrunch50 program on Monday, September 8 for a one-on-one interview with me from the main stage. As you probably know, Peter is the President and Chairman of Clarium Capital and the Managing Partner of the Founders Fund. Before starting Clarium and the Founders Fund, Peter served as the Chairman and CEO of PayPal, the company he co-founded and eventually sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Peter and the Founders Fund are early investors in some of the hottest start-ups in the Industry including companies such as Facebook, Causes, Jaxtr, Powerset, Geni, Slide, Quantcast, and ooma among others. In our conversation with Peter, we will ask him to share his thoughts on what he looks for in start-up investments, as well as where he thinks the market opportunities exist for new companies and emerging technologies.

You will not want to miss this live interview with Peter Thiel from TechCrunch50. Stay tuned for additional content updates – as we have a number of surprises yet to announce!

TechCrunch50 is right around the corner. Please register for your tickets before we sell out!! You will not believe what we have planned for you this year (September 8, 9 and 10).

As we move closer to the conference, we are encouraging everyone to book their hotel reservations (many hotels are already sold out) and register for the conference before we sell out. For companies seeking to launch and showcase products at TechCrunch50, please take a look at our Exhibitor Package. If you have questions about sponsorships, please reach out to Heather Harde or Dan Kimerling. All media inquiries should be sent to Sarah Ross.

Palm as just released their much anticipated - and leaked - Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device with a touchscreen and UMTS/HSDPA GSM networking. The phone also includes G.P.S. and improved WiFi handling for better and easier WiFi hand-off.

The new Treo is thinner than devices like the 800w and is targeted at the mobile professional market and is not an “iPhone-killer.” Instead it is part of a conscious strategy by Palm to release a series of “great” products in order to bring themselves back out of the doldrums.

I love Palm OS - WinMo not so much - and each iteration of the Treo seems to be a step in the right direction. Can these WinMo phones save the company? I’m not quite sure. HTC, Samsung, and even LG are all releasing low-end, powerful smartphones for the casual to high-use business user. The Palm Centro has the casual set sewn up right now but not for long - contracts run out and the iPhone is quite tempting to the folks who once loved the Motorola RAZR. Motorola and Palm both have a big problem on their hands and we can only watch and wait to see how this pans out.

The phone is available on Vodafone and O2 in Europe and will be available unlocked for $549 in the U.S.

Read the full release and view a video…

Can anything put the wind back in eBay’s sails? The once-iconic auction site is making cosmetic changes to its fee structure and moving away from the auction model to emphasize more fixed-price listings. But it’s hard to get excited these days about eBay. It seems that the Web has moved on and eBay is stuck in still waters.

Don’t get me wrong. eBay is still a massive site and a cash machine. But once you reach 238 million visitors worldwide (comScore) and 26.4 billion pageviews a month, it’s hard to know where to go from there. Maybe that is why pageviews are actually down 15 percent year-over-year, and the stock is down 26 percent.

This is not about fixed price versus auctions. The main challenge eBay faces is that it is becoming easier and easier to find things to buy on the Web simply by searching for what you want on Google. During the early days of the Web, people needed a few big e-commerce sites they could trust and that could organize everything that was for sale online. That need was filled by Amazon and eBay.

But now people are comfortable trawling the Net for the best bargains, and eBay is no longerteh first place they go. Partly that is because eBay has done such a good job creating a semi-professional class of online sellers, that it is harder and harder to actually find bargains there. So online shoppers are going elsewhere.

Can eBay do anything to regain its lost momentum? Give them your suggestions in comments.

(Photo by Cindy Funk).

Got that hacking jones, but can’t find anyone to hack with? Head on over to JustHackIt, a site aimed at developers that launched last night. It is a place for developers to find each other, work on projects, and maybe even start a company. Developers can post projects they want to do and search through postings from other hackers.

The site describes itself this way:

The idea: Outside of Silicon Valley, lots of hackers are interested in web startups but don’t have a plethora of available co-founders to start a company with. Even if you know other hackers, often there are times when you want to start a project but your friends are busy. So the idea is to connect people who want to build something RIGHT NOW. Ideas can be simple 1 page websites or complex Google competitors

It reads a bit like the personals section of Craigslist, but don’t let that turn you off. Basically, it is a bulletin board for hackers. The problem is that it is too simplistic. Once you start a project, then what? Who owns it, how are any revenues or shares in a resulting company/site divvied up?

JustHackIt doesn’t help to answer those questions.

TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S., which CEO TJ Mahoney says represents a $60 billion market. So it is a pretty big niche. FlipKey aims to become the reputation management system for vacation home rentals. Property owners can take review data in the form of a widget and place it on their sites or property listings. (See examples here and here).

TripAdvisor plans to include FlipKey reviews on its own network of sites, which attract 12 million visitors a month in the U.S., and 28 million worldwide, according to comScore.

Mahoney previously was a co-founder of Compete.com. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is an advisor to the startup. FlipKey raised $500,000 last December from angel investors, including Allaire, Care.com CEO Sheila Marcelo, and venture capitalist Nick Beim of Matrix Partners.

Today, Aircell announced that their fleet of Boeing 767-200s will have the Gogo service enabled on flights originating from NYC’s JFK to LA, San Francisco and Miami. CrunchGear will have a seat on a flight to LAX today that leaves JFK at 12 PM EDT. Head on over there now for more details and the full press release. Again, there will be no VoIP enabled on these flights nor will there ever be.

The local ABC affiliate dropped by YouNoodle’s offices in San Francisco to get an idea of how useful their new startups valuation predictor is. ABC’s Sue Thompson interviewed CEO Bob Goodson on how the service works, and I dropped in for a cameo and a dose of healthy skepticism.

We first covered YouNoodle in February way before it launched. It entered public beta last week, and now anyone can enter their startup information and see how the service scores it from 1-1,000 along with a dollar valuation prediction a few years out.

It’s a shame, really. A team of developers have partnered to finally bring a legitimate copy and paste solution to the iPhone - one that can actually move data between different applications (previous solutions could only shuffle data within the same app). But as great as it is to see a team of developers work together to overcome one of the iPhone’s shortcomings, it probably won’t see much use.

A few weeks ago, Proximi released a new text client called MagicPad that included copy and paste - a feature the iPhone has lacked and one that many users have been demanding for over a year. Copy and paste was achieved through a fairly intuitive interface, and while it may not have had the same polish that an Apple-designed solution might offer, it got the job done. Unfortunately, all copy and pasting was restricted to within MagicPad.

Now Zac White has developed an open source solution to the issue called OpenClip, a platform that will allow developers to include cross-application copy and paste. OpenClip makes use of a shared space on the iPhone that is accessible to developers and doesn’t break the SDK agreement, though Apple could conceivably reject apps that include it regardless. From Zac’s blog:

Basically, all you have to do to get the benefits is include a few classes and use the very simple API to copy data or paste data. The special part is cross application. Copy a cocktail in Cocktails and paste it into MagicPad (Video of this in action).
There are some limitations. This technically complies with all Apple agreements. It is completely possible that apps that use this wouldn’t get on the App Store. Not for any real reason other than it will eventually step on Apple’s toes. It is also conceivable that the technology this is built on will break in the future. The hope is that the update that breaks this also brings copy and paste support.

But even if the apps do get approval, Apple’s Mail and Safari applications will still be missing copy and paste. And while 3rd party apps are great additions to the iPhone, many users spend the vast majority of their time on the phone either searching the web or using email, where the functionality will still be sorely missed.

That said, the new initiative may well finally spur Apple to release its own solution. It’s uplifting to see these developers work together, but it makes Apple look like a withholding curmudgeon - obviously the phone can do copy and paste, so why not give it to us?

You can read more about the new initiative at MobileCrunch >>

You can see a video about the new initiative at GeekBrief.TV here.

Trilliant, a company that works on the nation’s “Smart Grid“, has closed a $40 million funding round led by MissionPoint Capital Partners and zouk ventures. As part of the deal, Mark J. Lewis of MissionPoint and Anthony Fox of zouk will be joining the company’s Board of Directors.

Smart Grid refers to the improved power grid being rolled out nationwide (and in some European countries) that makes use of computers and advanced sensors to more efficiently distribute power, saving money and cutting back on emissions. Older power grids still rely on technology developed over a century ago, which has led the US Congress to pass the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, allotting $100M in funding every year between 2008-2012.

Earlier this year we saw another similarly large investment in more efficient power sources when Infinia raised $50 million for its renewable energy source, which combines a Stirling engine with a large solar collector.

Last June we got a sneak peek at nrme, a location-based message service for the iPhone. The service behaves like a regional Twitter, but is geared towards sharing information rather than chatting - it’s sort of like a neighborhood bulletin board in the cloud. Instead of using a follow system, nrme makes all messages public to users within a 9 block radius (users can still private message each other if they’d like).

Today, the app has finally gone live in the App Store (despite rumors to the contrary, the approval process was only a matter of a week or two, not months). After a quick test run I have a few gripes about the interface, which is still a work in progress, but my biggest concern is the absence of content that has been posted by anyone “near me”. This isn’t unexpected because the app just launched, but I worry that the service will never be able to get a meaningful amount of information. To help combat this “chicken and the egg” problem associated with a new app and its lack of users, nrme is focusing its marketing efforts in San Francisco, even though the app is available to the entire country.

I really want this service (or another one like it) to take off. The prospect of being able to let people know when a bar is full or a store has just gotten a shipment of a hot item like the iPhone 3G is very appealing - and the altruistic nature of it would build a sense of community. The fact of the matter is that there are dozens of location-based applications on the iPhone (some of which are very similar to nrme), but most of them have gone largely unnoticed and lack content. At this point, it is beginning to look like we might have to wait for an established player like Twitter or Facebook to implement geo-awareness before we’ll see a location-based app that’s actually useful.

Other geo-aware services with some similar features include GeoGraffiti and to some extent, Twinkle.

One of the reasons why the guitar has become a staple in pop culture is its immediate accessibility. In lieu of standard notation, guitar players have developed tablature - a more intuitive representation of a song that uses numbers to indicate which fret on a guitar each note is played. Even the most inexperienced musicians can usually learn the system in a matter of minutes.

One of the problems with tablature is that it does a poor job representing rhythm and the duration that each note is played - both of which are essential. To remedy this, most people play a recording of the original song as they examine a tab so they can figure out when to play each note. But this process is frustrating and time consuming.

Songsterr, a new startup that launched earlier this month, is looking to help guitar players skirt this issue by accompanying each song with an audio file that plays alongside it. The site’s Flash player will also automatically scroll through each tab, indicating exactly which note is being played.

While the player will be a great help to many novices, it’s lacking support for a number of techniques found in more difficult songs, like slides, bends, and vibrato. There’s also no support for multiple instruments, which are found in most popular songs, and some of the tabs are incomplete (for example, the Johnny B. Goode tab omits the song’s signature intro riff). However, the company says that it will improve on these issues within the next month.

The site is mimicking functionality that has been offered by downloadable software clients like Guitar Pro and Power Tab for years, but is doing it from within the browser - a big plus given the portable nature of the guitar, when you might not always be near your own computer. At launch, the site includes 150 songs and says that it will have 50,000 songs by the end of the month, along with support for user uploads in the Guitar Pro format.

Unfortunately, while the site is off to a good start and has a massive number of potential users, it’s likely going to get derailed by lawsuits from the record industry. Many of the web’s most popular tab sites have been waging a losing war with copyright holders for years, as even user-created tabs for songs are considered infringements. The company is based in Russia so it may be able to avoid the lawsuits for a while, but don’t expect this one to last if it can’t secure some deals with record labels.

For those of you who read WSJ for the articles, the new BlackBerry-compatible WSJ.com Mobile Reader will open up the nasty walled garden that is WSJ.com. The application will be free and most of the content will be open, although there are plans to lock it down in the near future. The application will draw in stories from WSJ.com, AllThingsD.com, and MarketWatch.com.

You can track specific companies and get 30-minute old stock quotes on the fly. Why no iPhone implementation? Until HSBC pulls the trigger on Apple, the iPhone isn’t quite WSJ’s audience.

Read more on MobileCrunch…

The real estate slump may still be helping to drag down the economy, but real-estate sites like Trulia and Zillow seem to be holding up just fine. In fact, the number of monthly unique visitors to Trulia has more than doubled to 2.4 million over the past year, according to comScore. Zillow, in contrast, remained steady at 1.9 million U.S. uniques in July.

The strength of these real estate sites in a down market makes sense since prospective buyers (those that are left) now have more time to look around and research their dream homes. Both Trulia and Zillow do a good job of letting you slice and dice your search by any number of variables (price, location, number of bedrooms, square footage, type of home). Unfortunately, neither one offers a way to filter out homes that suck.

Both also offer market stats, and additional information about local schools and such. Zillow perhaps has a few more bells and whistles, such as its famous Zestimate, which might explain why visitors pent 41 million minutes on the site in July versus 12 million minutes for Trulia. People love doping vanity searches and checking out how much their neighbor’s houses are worth. Zillow also serves up larger photos of houses than Trulia in search results. So maybe Zillow is doing a better job with engagement.

Or maybe home searchers are finding what they need faster on Trulia. From my own anecdotal experience, Trulia seems to offer more comprehensive search results for specific towns and neighborhoods. One example: Trulia turns up 97 results for a house search in Chappaqua, NY; Zillow turns up only 83. (I’m sure I could come up with a counter-example for Zillow if I looked long enough). But when you are looking for a house, that is really all that matters. The real-estate search engine that captures the most listings and shows you the most relevant ones will win. For whatever reason, it looks like Trulia is winning mind- and market-share.

What’s your favorite real-estate search site?

We’re a gadget blog, true, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get a mean drink on when we’re cornered. Luckily, Maestro Dobel was nice enough to send us a bottle of their $74.99 Diamond Tequila, offering us entree into a world that was once reserved for Jay Z and mortgage brokers between 2002 and 2007.

Read more…

We’re seeing a lot of desktop metaphors moving to Web interfaces in the browser. The latest example to cross our inbox is Microspaces, a service in private beta that lets you organize Web pages in folder-like Microspaces. But unlike desktop folders, the contents are made up of Web pages, so they are constantly updated. In that sense, each Microspace folder is somewhat like a browser tab, except you can collect multiple Web pages in each one. Thus the pages are nested inside one another.

Each Microspace is searchable, embeddable as a widget, and can be accessed by a unique URL. You can also put widgets and Web apps inside Microspaces, in addition to Web pages.

An example of how this works can be found at Storylinez, or you can watch the video below. (More videos are available on the Microspaces site, and you can sign up there for a private beta invite as well). It is all based on Ajax, and was designed by Mike Buchanan.

I like the fact that people are playing around with more visually rich browser interfaces, but I am not convinced that you gain more in visual information here than you give up in speed versus simpler text-heavy solutions to the same problems (RSS feeds, Netvibes, bookmarks, etc.). But it’s a step in the right direction.

Tim O’Reilly is tearing his hair out because he thinks that we link too much to CrunchBase, our startup database. He levels the unforgivable charge of self-linking at us, and puts us in the same company as the New York Times (which in this case is not a good thing). In his post (which I link to above), he makes the following connection between how we link to Crunchbase and how the New York Times constantly links to itself:

Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).

Tim is simply confused here. We’re not nearly as bad as the New York Times, which I agree generally does a really poor job of linking to any authority other than itself. (But it depends where you look. Some of its blogs are linking out more and more. Maybe the rest of the paper will take notice). Moreover, company links on TechCrunch are usually not the most prominent link in any given post. Most posts include other outbound links to other blogs, news articles, press releases, and the like.

As far as CrunchBase is concerned, we have no hard and fast rules for linking to company profiles there. Sometimes we link to the CrunchBase profile, sometimes we link directly to the company’s site. More often than not, we do both. Sometimes we’re lazy or pressed for time, and only link to one or (gasp) none at all. But my preferred method, for instance, is to link the company logo in a post to the CrunchBase profile and link the first mention of the company in a post to its Website.

Am I ruining the Web by doing that? I thought more information was better. Yet O’Reilly warns ominously about self-linking:

When this trend spreads (and I say “when”, not “if”), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn’t easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers.

To be fair, O’Reilly does give kudos to CrunchBase itself for linking out to other sources. And he is correct that we do try to link to CrunchBase as much as possible. But that is because we think it’s a really good resource, a place where readers can get up to speed on a company at a glance. Each company profile has a succinct description of what it does, how much money it’s raised, who are its founders and investors, who are its competitors, as well as recent posts about the company from all over the Web.

Oh yeah, and its free. There’s plenty of M&A and acquisition data in there that we are not trying to charge for. In fact, anyone can take the data in CrunchBase and repurpose it on their own Websites through the CrunchBase API.

O’Reilly ends with a suggested rule of thumb for self-linking:

Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.

Again, I couldn’t agree with him more. And CrunchBase more than passes that test. But don’t take my word for it. Do a Google search for some of your favorite Web startups, and more often than not you will find a CrunchBase profile on the first page of results. And it’s not just little-known startups either. try searching for Twitter or Friendfeed, and you’ll see the same thing. We do have some Google juice at TechCrunch, but even we couldn’t do that on our own.

Update: Tom O’Reilly responds in comments:

Just to be clear, I like crunchbase. I think it’s a great idea. However, I’d like links to crunchbase to be marked as such. You might try using Apture to provide that visibility (as well as other cross-linking capabilities.)

Mostly, though, I was trying to point out a trend, and sensitize people to it, so that it doesn’t creep up on them. We’re all like frogs in slowly warming water. Eventually it boils. But often, we don’t notice things that we should until too late.

(Image by Dan4th Nicholas).

Google’s philanthropic arms, Google.org, is investing a little over $10 million into the development of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). Rather than extracting heat from the ground a few hundred feet down (or less) as traditional geothermal systems do, EGS goes several kilometers deep into the hot rock under the Earth.

If we could tap just two percent of that heat under the continental United States, one MIT study estimates that would supply more than 2500 times our energy needs. But getting that hot rock cost-effectively will require new technology. (See the video above for an illustration of a 50 megawatt EGS project in Australia).

The money will be broken up in the following way: $6.25 million will go to AltaRock Energy, another $4 million will go to Potter Drilling, and a $500,000 grant will go to a geothermal lab at Southern Methodist University.

The University of Michigan’s quarterly customer satisfaction index came out today, and in the Website category Google came out on top with a score of 86 out of 100 (up 10 percent from last year). Yahoo slipped 3 percent to a score of 77. MSN’s score was flat at 75, and tied with NYTimes.com and ABCNews.com. AOL came in at 69, and that is 3 percent better than last year.

Here are some select scores, with the comparable 2007 numbers in parentheses:

American Customer Satisfaction Index Scores (2nd Quarter, 2008)

Google:                86 (78)
Yahoo:                 77 (79)
MSNBC.com:        76 (74)
ABCNews.com:     75 (74)
MSN:                   75 (75)
NYTimes.com:      75 (73)
Ask:                    74 (75
CNN.com:            73 (73)
USAToday.com:    73 (72)
AOL:                   69 (67)

The only surprise here is Google’s massive jump. Is it really doing that much of a better job than last year, or is it just that its halo effect keeps growing?

(Photo by Bing Ramos).

MobileCrunch has a fairly detailed look at the new Android emulator. We go through all the current apps—the phone, the browser, Google Maps—and even crash the OS a few times for good measure.

Android adopts a traditional desktop user interface, letting you drag icons around that launch different apps, as well as look at a full menu of apps hidden away in a tray. A small search box can also be placed right on the opening screen.

Another nice little feature is the ability to assign certain contacts different priorities. Your ex-girlfriends can all be sent to voicemail, for instance (or not, depending on your current state of desperation).

See the rest of our Android coverage here.

UPDATER - Audio has been cleaned up considerably. Thanks for your patience.

My first computer, purchased by my parents after nearly a year of begging, was an Apple II+. That was 1982. I was a Windows user for the next 20 years, but went back to Mac when they switched to Intel chips a couple of years ago. Since then I’ve bought seven Macs for myself, as well as at least one of every iPod and both iPhones. A lot of these were test devices that I’ve passed on to friends and family.

My obvious enthusiasm for Apple products is fairly evident to readers of this blog. But recently I’ve had a string of bad apples come my way, so to speak. It’s time for Apple to stop screwing around and start paying attention to product quality.

I’ll excuse the one hour of battery life I seem to be able to get out of my iPhone. An arrangement of extra power cords (USB, car, wall) and external batteries gets me through the day. I’ll also excuse the fact that iTunes seems hell bent on not syncing applications from my desktop to my iPhone, and inexplicably removing apps from my phone without any notice. I love that damn phone, and it will take a lot more than lost apps and dropped calls to get it out of my hands.

But I don’t have the same blind dedication to other Apple products, and a string of costly problems has left me more than frustrated.

Mac Mini, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and Macbook, All Failed

I was pretty excited about my Macbook Air, which packs a ton of hardware into a slim and elegant case. But it was unable to stay connected to Wifi for more than a minute or so, even on the brand new Apple Time Capsule router we’re using at the office. I took it into the Apple store - they kept it for a few days and said nothing was wrong. I argued with them and they did nothing. And since I waited more than two weeks after buying it to bring it back in, I couldn’t simply return it. That $1,800 piece of hardware has now been dismantled for parts for a project we’re working on here.

A high end black Macbook made it through one meeting before having some sort of hardware problem that shut it down for good. I still have a few days left to return it for a refund.

The one year old Mac Mini I was using to drive my living room television failed a month ago. It turned itself into a brick. Parts of it are on my coffee table.

My main travel computer, a seven month old Macbook Pro, had a keyboard failure two weeks ago. Apple repaired it and I’m using it now.

That leaves three other Macs in good working order. One is a Macbook pro that my dad now uses. The other two are iMacs that have never had any problems.

But having major issues with four out of seven computers is, um, unacceptable.

MobileMe Has Screwed Up My Work Ecosystem

I have Macs in my main office and my bedroom, as well as my travel computer. I have spent years getting .Mac, which syncs calendar, contact and email data across machines and in the cloud, working properly. It tended to break a lot, but if you kept the OS constantly up to date and were willing to tinker with it, it was a great way to keep synced across any number of computers. I didn’t really care which one I picked up to access email, write a post, etc.

Then came MobileMe and the Apple’s automatic transfer of .Mac customers over to that ridiculously broken new service. I had a suspicion it wouldn’t work at first given how touchy .Mac was, and so I didn’t touch anything on my old computers. But I have never gotten it working on the new Macs I purchased, and now .Mac has failed on all of the synced machines. No more calendar access, contacts syncing, etc.

Apple keeps giving customers free time on the service as a way to apologize for the problems. But that isn’t good enough. I’m not price sensitive to the $99/year they’re charging for the service. But I need it to work, and I need it to work right now.

The failed computers could just be a coincidence, although the wifi problem with the Macbook Air is well documented. The MobileMe debacle, though, is affecting everyone. Apple shouldn’t have merged the services, at least old .Mac customers wouldn’t be enraged today. They need to get their house in order or they risk alienating all these new customers they’ve added over the last few years. The new buyers aren’t Apple fanatics and won’t sit quietly as they try to access broken services via failing hardware.