Kyle at the great site iFixIt.com has just opened a new service dedicated to the collection and curation of user-generated content called Gear Teardown. The service, sort of like a how-to site for crazy people, allows folks to document each step in the process of tearing down, and hopefully putting back together, their gadgets.

For example, this teardown of the Moto Krave shows six steps, some more esoteric than others, and essentially allows anyone to figure out which chips are used in each phone.

VeriSign has just put out its quarterly report on the web domain industry stating that there are now just about 183 million domain names in existence. This represents a 3% increase from last quarter and a 12% increase from last year. But perhaps most interesting is the slight turnaround that has taken place in the all-important .com/.net section of the industry.

The fourth quarter of the year is traditionally a slow one for .com and .net registrations, but the whole of 2008 was particularly slow, at least partially due to the “current macro-economic environment,” according to the report. But Q1 2009 saw those numbers turn around:

New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the first quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. This 17 percent increase from the previous quarter also marked the first positive growth rate in new registrations since the first quarter of 2008.

Intel said today that it plans to acquire Wind River Systems, maker of software for embedded devices – think smartphones, other consumer electronics devices, in-car “info-tainment” systems, networking equipment and the likes- in a deal valued at approx. $884 million (or all outstanding Wind River common stock for $11.50 per share in cash). With the move, Intel aims to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices, which it deems an important growth area for the company.

Microsoft this morning announced that it is rolling out Bing Travel, one of the verticals it’s focusing much of its attention on when it comes to the recently unveiled “decision engine” the company set out to conquer market share from Google and Yahoo Search. Bing Travel, as we mentioned when we posted the first screenshots based on the Kumo preview, combines a lot of the airfare and hotel reservation tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with news and other editorial content from MSN Travel (in fact, travel.msn.com already redirects to the new search engine).

Bing Travel is one of the initiatives that Microsoft is launching to differentiate Bing from traditional search engines which mostly provide information and links instead of tools that help visitors make more informed decision quicker.

Some YouTube partners are being hit with e-mails seemingly coming from Google / YouTube teams attempting to trick them into replying with their login credentials and other personal information. One partner contacted us with screenshots of the phishing messages, the first received at the end of May and the second on June 3rd, coming from and delivered to different accounts.

While the first e-mail was quite amateuristic of nature and came filled with stuff that should raise quite some warning flags (typos, clumsy phrasing, Youtube instead of YouTube, etc.), the second appeared more genuine and had a body text edited rather professionally (see screenshot below).

Well people, it’s time. It’s time we celebrated the tech scene in Europe with an awards event which we can really call our own. So TechCrunch Europe will, on July 9, hold the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation in London. “The Europas” – The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 – will honor the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from across the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale.

These awards will recognize and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the past year (Summer 08 – Summer 09), with the tech community invited to have a say in which finalists should be win. Leading lights of the the tech community will be invited to give away the awards to the winners, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet your tech heroes and heroines. The initial filtering will be done by referencing our database on European companies on CrunchBase (so make sure you are in it), then by public vote online, with the final Award winners to be determined based both on the popular votes received through website voting and by The Europas Judging Committee.

In September 2007 we launched TechCrunch UK & Ireland. But within three months we realised the tech story that needed to be written was across Europe. So we went on tour to find contacts and companies. This year we’ve re-launched as TechCrunch Europe and begun running events across the continent to bring the European tech scene together, along with our first ever day-long conference. Today we’re opening up TechCrunch Europe to new contributors from across Europe so that we can really tell the European tech story the way it is.

Heavy hitting angel investor Ron Conway, who’s been called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” by Gary Rivlin, is now focusing most of his investment attention on “real-time data,” according to an email he sent out to friends and contacts earlier this week. Conway was one of the earliest investors in Google, and has invested in more than 500 startups, he’s said in the past.

Conway is changing his relationship with Baseline Ventures, a fund run by Steve Anderson. Since 2006 Baseline has taken the lead in managing Conway’s deal flow. Now, Conway says, he’s reverting back to doing all of his investments directly. He’ll still work closely with Baseline, he says, particularly in syndicating angel rounds and sharing deal flow.

Conway is also accelerating his investing, he says in the email, and has a goal to invest in 40-50 companies in the next 18 months. His focus will be companies exploiting “real-time data,” which he calls “the next billion dollar market opportunity.” Conway is already an investor in Twitter and Facebook, two companies solidly in the real-time space. He’s recently invested in other very young startups like Scoopler and Twitvid. Both are Y Combinator startups. He’s also an advisor to Topsy, a new real-time search engine that launched recently.

Last year (nowTechCrunch editor) Sarah Lacy’s book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good came out in hardcover. Here’s an interview we did with Lacy about the book in May 2008.

The paperback version of the book was just released (buy it here). The book includes a new chapter titled “The Fail Whale” that’s all about Twitter.

The chapter begins with a discussion of the infamous Fail Whale, the image that Twitter put up when the service was down. CEO Evan Williams told Sarah “I hate that fucking whale”:

Startup Bridgevine has raised $3.5 million in Series C funding from Safeguard Scientifics and Constellation Ventures to launch Offerwire, a consumer focused site that aggregates home services deals. This round brings Bridgevine’s total funding raised to $16.6 million. Bridgevine previously provided an online e-commerce engine for consumers and small businesses to find and compare deals specifically on connection and entertainment services, such as high speed internet, voice and cable TV offerings.

Bridgevine’s new consumer site, Offerwire, is an aggregation site of deals and offers not only for connection and cable services, but also for music, dvd rental, magazines, credit cards, security and more. It’s like Kayak for home and entertainment services. Users can comparison shop for deals, bundle services together, and as an added bonus, receive cash back for certain deals. Offerwire has a host of big-name vendors on board including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon, Netflix, and LifeLock.

In the past month, we’ve seen some new search engine launches. Two in particular were able to generate a hype cycle of early positive reviews and excitement: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. One was launched by Microsoft, and the other by a startup. It is inherently not a fair comparison because Microsoft has so much more money to spend on marketing ($80 to $100 million is earmarked for Bing)> But most of the buzz so far has been generated by the respective launches with all of the blog and news coverage that entails.

So even though it is not fair, let’s compare the two, because it is instructive. There is little data on actual traffic or search volume for either site at this point. Instead, I looked at another proxy of interest: Google searches for both sites as measured by Google Trends.

Late last year we wrote about an experimental advertising product that Digg was developing:

One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.

So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.

Compare that to the blog post from Digg a few minutes ago announcing a new advertising product:

I haven’t been much of a cleantech bull in the past, at least when it comes to venture capital investing. I think it’s a huge market, and there’s clearly a pressing social need. I just don’t quite think the science, government cooperation and economics are there yet for it to be a great opportunity for classic venture investing.

Sure there’s low-hanging fruit, and the outliers like Elon Musk who had the cojones to invest $70 million of his own money into building an electric car company. But a huge boom producing several multi-billion winners? Not yet, IMHO.

But Vinod Khosla greatly disagrees with me, and, frankly, you should listen to him, because he’s a lot smarter.

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on the CrunchPad since our last update in April, and have just about nailed down the final design for the device. We’re showing the conceptual drawings here today. In another few weeks we’ll have the first working prototypes in our office.

This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with the case and we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm. The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device.

I believe the device now actually looks better than the original concept design we published last summer. Compare the images below to the first prototype and you can see how far we’ve come. If you’re interested, here’s Prototype B. Pictures of Prototype C, which is the device we’re actually demo’ing to people now, are here.

More images below:

At last week’s hush, hush meeting of newspaper execs on how to monetize content and save a dying industry, the American Press Institute presented a white paper that offers a step by step plan of how newspapers should move forward with paid content. Nieman Journalism Lab posted a downloadable copy of the report, which has some interesting recommendations. Poynter also provided a comprehensive review of the report. We’ve embedded the document below.

The report suggests several models to implement paid content, including micropayments, subscriptions and hybrid models. Google is compared to an atom bomb that “blew up the content business into millions of atomized pieces,” leaving news organizations with the mess of putting things back together. Comparing newspapers to “Humpty Dumpty”, the paper paints a “poor-me” tale of how news orgs are scrambling to put all the pieces back together to “restore their integrity.” And of course, news enterprises are also forced to suffer a second related atom bomb: hyper-linking. The report says: “The culture of hyper-linking and hyper-syndication that fuels the interactive Web has become an atom bomb for the old news business model.” So the remedy for putting the pieces back together according to the API: charge for content, stick it to Google, and renegotiate subscription models with Amazon for the Kindle (which is it implies is unfairly making more money from content than newspapers). Apparently, nobody at the API has actually read Humpty Dumpty, otherwise they would know that you can never put the pieces back together again.

Today at the Startup 2009 conference in New York City, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget interviewed Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes on stage. Hughes recently moved to the city and has been going around to various colleges on the east coast talking to students who have good ideas, but don’t necessarily know how to start companies, as he put it. On the topics of Facebook, the Obama campaign (he was a major player in the online side of it) and even Twitter, he had some interesting things to say.

On Facebook, Blodget of course had to bring up the allegations that the idea was stolen when Hughes was still in college with co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. “Not true,” says Hughes. While both Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to move west to focus on Facebook full-time, Hughes stayed in school. But it’s a decision that Hughes admits he kind of regrets. He wishes that he could have been working on it full-time from the beginning.

There’s no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in unique U.S. visitors and 33% increase in streams. Between Feburary and March, it moved up to become the third most popular video site in the US, with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams.

The latest comScore data for Hulu, which covers the month of April, reports a much more modest 4.4% growth in overall streams, from 380 million streams in March to around 397 million in April. And its unique visitors actually went down month over month, from around 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million over the same time span.

Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month’s Searchology event, Google Squared is now live. You can try it out.

Google Squared is an experimental search engine that is in its own “labs.” It gives you topical search results broken down by categories, something that Bing does in a different way with guided results in the left explore pane. Google Squared is more comparable to Wolfram Alpha in that it is A) really early stage, and B) goes and finds out every facet of a subject based on a single keyword search. But unlike Wolfram Alpha, it does not “compute” answers based on data that it has ingested into its own databases. Its database is the Web.

Bro’s a no no for CoCo? In case you missed the Twitter Tracker bit on Conan last night, here it is again in all its glory. It’s a must-watch no matter what you think of Twitter.

Israeli gaming company GameGround has closed a $4.1 million funding round from Sequoia Capital. The company had previously raised a $2 million seed round from a number of angel investors and founders.

For now, we don’t really know much about GameGround other than the team behind it. It was founded in 2007 by Shaul Olmert (formerly of MTV), Guy Margolin (formerly of 888.com, and Itzik Ben-Bassat. Ben-Bassat, who currently serves as Chairman, comes from highly regarded game development studio Blizzard, where he was VP of international and global business development and worked on integration with Internet services. While he wouldn’t get into specifics, he says that Gameground is looking to expand how far the Internet ties into computer games.

For now, the company isn’t actually making any games — it’s making a special agent for Mac and PC that can work with existing games to expand their online functionality, even after they’re released. At this point exactly what can be done with the agent is unclear, but I suspect it will allow gamers to distribute high scores and milestones to their social networks, and perhaps use your social graph to connect you with your friends in-game.