There have been a bunch of Google events recently, covering a range of products, but the same question seems to rise above all others at each of them: When is Chrome coming for the Mac? Even Sergey Brin is asking it. Google has committed to getting the browser running on OS X sometime this year, but after several months in development, it’s still isn’t ready. Today, we get a nice, bland update from Google: “Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine,” says a post on the Google Blog.

The same post points to a more in-depth post on the Chromium Blog which discusses getting sandboxing working on the Mac version. Sandboxing is a security measure Chrome uses to allow to allow it to render sites and run applications without the possibility of harming your overall computing environment in the case of an attack through the web. Apparently, such a technique was tricky to set up for Windows, but it’s much simpler to set up for the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome. Google has posted more information about it here.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced today that San Francisco residents can now send direct messages via Twitetr to the city of San Francisco, @SF311, to complain about street cleanings, graffiti, potholes, abandoned vehicles, garbage issues, noise complaints and more. 311 is the primary contact for city services; residents can call 311 to reach a call center to get answers to questions about city services or submit complaints.

Twitter users and San Francisco residents can simply follow @SF311 (which automatically auto follows) to send and receive direct messages about complaints and questions. The useful part of the new service is the ability to send pictures or video of various offenses, such as a pothole, overflowing garbage can or graffiti. Once you submit a DM to @SF311, you will receive a service request number. Apparently, there is a city staff member devoted to handling and responding to @SF311 Tweets. We’ll see if submitting complaints via Twitter helps make the City’s response more speedy.

Hold the phone! I know all of you were expecting a post about Twitter from Nintendo’s E3 press conference, but I’m afraid to report that it’s just Facebook today. Sorry.

You’ll soon be able to upload wacky images from your DSi to Facebook for all your friends to see. Isn’t that exciting? I LOVE FACEBOOK (and Twitter)!!!

I just took a tour of the Electro-Harmonix factory in Queens, New York and came away with an interesting bit of information. Their lead web guy, Scott Matthews, has created a number of systems to connect musicians and EHX products in ways that I’ve never seen on other conventional music supply sites.

EHX is famous. They’ve been making pedals and effects since 1968 and the sounds their pedals produce have been heard in countless recordings in the last few decades. But how is the average Joe supposed to share his experiences with the pedals? Or, more importantly, how does the professional or amateur guitarist supposed to know how to use the pedals and which pedals to buy?

Nothing like a telling graphic to illustrate what most have been expecting, albeit probably not in this order of magnitude. Veteran media exec Alan Mutter discovered some horrid statistics about the state of ad sales for American newspapers on trade organization NAA’s website, and published his view on the Q1 2009 numbers on his blog. They don’t look pretty.

The stats show that total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago – 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers – we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years.

On average, most businesses currently double the number of digital documents they have every twelve to eighteen months. The impact of this rapid addition of content, argues Google, is that the search functionality of an organization’s databases and Websites need to be scalable in a dynamic environment. Google maintains that scalability is a crucial need of enterprises today, which is why the new version of Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) for enterprise search customers has added a powerful, dynamic scalability feature, allowing businesses to now index billions of documents, in addition to indexing Web pages.

To extend search into the enterprise, Google offers businesses its GSA product, a yellow box (that resembles a slice of Swiss cheese), which is based on a standard Dell server and is powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel. The GSA can index any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. The sixth generation GSA will be able to index 30 million documents, compared to 10 million in the last generation. In the sixth generation of the GSA, Google is now adding functionality to let businesses stack GSAs on top of each other, so businesses can search billions of documents across integrated GSAs. The fifth generation GSAs were not able to be interconnected.

Jeff Victor of STARFLEET, the International Star Trek Fan Association, recently showed me around the 12,500-foot Star Trek exhibit at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. We laughed, we cried, we played a little Dabo. Good times indeed.

Star Trek at the Franklin Institute [FI.edu]

STARFLEET International Star Trek Fan Association [SFI.org]

It’s widely known that China runs a pretty tight ship – to put it mildly – on what its citizens get to see online, especially that content which is served from outside of China. YouTube has been blocked for some time and although Wikipedia was blocked for a while, it’s gradually become more available. However today Chinese authorities have brought the the Great Wall of China on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail, Blogger and a number of other sites. The picture is patchy across the country between ISPs and geography, but my sources – who all agreed to be named in this post – say the ban is blanket ban is closing.

Since many of the sites don’t actually have Chinese versions, it’s hard to know how many people will be affected by this, but for those brave and resourceful business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators with strong links to the world outside China, it’s a crushing blow.

Having traveled to China last year I have a number of contacts there now who have all now confirmed the shutdown. The move is almost certainly related to the date. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on June 4, and the lead-up to any date like this is usually a time when the Firewall is tightened. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected.

Few users seem to have noticed this, but apparently Twitter is no longer appending the correct application that was used to update user streams at the end of each message. Everything is marked as coming “from web”, even if the message was actually sent out from a desktop client, third-party web or mobile application.

Here’s the kicker: after some digging, I found that the company has learned about this issue a couple of days ago but decided not to fix it in order not to disturb the engineers during the weekend.

Yes, the rumors are true: Nokia will start shipping its N97 device (they call it a mobile computer) to no less than 75 countries this month, after starting to accept pre-orders earlier last month. In the second half of 2009, Nokia plans to start rolling out a bunch of new features and functions, but right off the bat it will be the first device to come pre-installed with the recently launched Ovi Store. We hope the experience is better than the actual launch.

Nokia hasn’t detailed exactly which countries will start seeing N97 shipments roll in, but it’s safe to say they will most likely include most of the European markets, as well as North America.

That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist Paul Savage has made this very basic web service, which lists all results for search queries on Google and Bing side by side so you can compare which one produces the best results for the keywords you enter on one single page. We’ve played around with it a bit and found that the tool proves that the user experience for both search engines really is very different:

CrunchGear is on the scene down here in LA, and today was the first big day of the show — even though it doesn’t really even start until tomorrow. Today was actually the day of press conferences by some of the big players, where they drop all their big news and tell you where to check out the latest big franchise games. It’s also a showcase for the latest acquisitions and technology, as well as announcing partnerships and that sort of thing.

Today’s events included Microsoft’s Xbox event this morning, then heavyweight EA’s press conference in the early afternoon, then Ubisoft in the later afternoon (they win the guest presenter contest, with both Pele and James Cameron). They dropped some interesting stuff, though I’d be lying if I told you they didn’t introduce a game where you do fantasy make-up.

One of Twitter’s greatest assets has always been its developer community. But with the countless link, image, and video sharing services available (many of which are very similar to each other), most new services are lost to obscurity. When it comes to determining which services will succeed, the popular Twitter clients hold all the keys. If you’re integrated with one, you’ll be at the fingertips of hundreds of thousands of users who wouldn’t have otherwise known you existed. Getting chosen as an application’s default service can lead to skyrocketing popularity overnight. These Twitter clients are home to some very valuable real estate, and now some of their developers are looking to profit accordingly.

We’ve been hearing from multiple sources that TweetDeck has been toying with charging a fee for services to appear in the popular Twitter client for some time now, so we turned to the company’s founder, Iain Dodsworth, for answers. He says that no services have paid up until this point, but that by the time the next version comes out, that will change. Unsurprisingly, Dodsworth wasn’t willing to go into the details of the arrangements, but we’ve been hearing it will cost services around $50,000 to appear in TweetDeck.

Have you ever thought of a quirky but innovative product that might be useful to the masses but didn’t follow through with the idea? Sometimes these flashes of genius get lost in the shuffle. Startup quirky is hoping to be the platform for product ideas that are born on napkin doodles and in other unorthodox ways. The site then tries to use crowdsourcing to develop the product, by engaging participants in collaborating on every aspect of product creation – from ideation, design, naming, manufacturing, marketing, to sales. It’s like a social network for product development.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman (he created mophie and kluster), quirky lets users submit their product idea for $99. Users can also vote, rate, and influence other people’s product ideas. Every week users can post ideas on quirky to be rated by the quirky community. After a seven day evaluation period, the quirky community chooses one product from the pool of submitted ideas to move forward through the process. quirky’s community engages and contributes to every part of the product’s development, weighing in on everything from naming to logo selection to packaging.

You guys didn’t think I’d go to China and forget to bring you back something, did you? Sillies.

My last day in Shanghai I met with Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang the baby-faced founders of ShirtsMyWay.com. (Pictured here.) ShirtsMyWay allows you to customize a men’s dress shirt with trillions of possible combinations of details, from the material on the collar to the stitching around the buttonholes. Shanghai-based tailors whip it up, and it’s mailed out to you for $65-$95, including international-shipping.

Right now, the site is running a buy-two-get-one-free Father’s Day special, but TechCrunch readers are getting an additional 10% off their entire orders placed before June 7.

Syncing calendars and scheduling meetings over email can be an arduous and annoying task. I’ve often wished that I could send my calendar to contacts instead of going back and forth over email, so we could find a mutual time that works best for various schedules more quickly. Tungle, a scheduling and calendar sharing tool we wrote about during its launch last year, has made scheduling a meeting a whole lot more social and simple through its Tungle.Me technology.

Tungle offers users Tungle Accelerate, a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and soon Lotus Notes.

Since I got home from China last week, I’ve found myself in a lot of conversations where phrases like “the next Silicon Valley,” or “just like Silicon Valley used to be,” keep coming up. But while China is swimming in capital and littered with start-ups, I’m going to argue it’s not the next Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s something far different than I’ve ever seen before.

If you think about it, Silicon Valley doesn’t really move as fast as people say it does. Sure, the rest of the U.S. business world may feel out-lapped by the pattern of companies going from nothing to billions in a few years, but those start-ups are mostly the outliers. For every wunderkind smirking on the cover of a magazine, there are far more entrepreneurs who slogged away for thirty years before ever getting their Nasdaq moments. And there are even more who slogged away for longer and didn’t.

And even the breakout Googles and Facebooks of the Valley had the clear benefit of building their companies on top of decades of infrastructure build-out. I mean “infrastructure” in the sense of technology infrastructure—the chips, routers, open source stack, etc.— but I also mean it in the sense of Valley infrastructure that makes it possible to come up with an idea at breakfast and have a company by noon. It’s taken decades of continual boom-and-bust cycles to create the complex fabric of venture capitalists, angel investors, lawyers, term sheets, accounting methods and best practices that a newby entrepreneur waltzing in the Valley today has the luxury of taking for granted.

What makes China so staggering is that everything that happened to corporate America over decades—think the television and media studios build out of the 1950s, the greed of the 1980s, the dot com bubble, the build out of physical and IT infrastructure, current Web 2.0 and CleanTech innovation—is all happening to China at once.

Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.

In return, all they need to do is claim and verify their listings at the Google Local Businesss Center. It takes about as much time as setting up a new email account, maybe a little more. Google gets clean data (and, thus, better results), businesses get free analytics and an opportunity to train Google’s search engine. Right now only a few hundred thousand businesses in the U.S. have been claimed out of approximately 20 million.

During his keynote at the TWTRCON conference yesterday in San Francisco, Steve Rubel showed off a mind map he made entitled “The Future of Twitter.” The map, which I’ve embedded below with his permission, is an interesting way to look at the state of the service.

It starts out branching into two different directions: “Twitter and the Ecosystem,” and “Twitter as an OS.” One side shows what could happen to Twitter in the future from possible threats (of services that can kill it), to companies that could acquire it, to those that it could acquire. The other side shows Twitter as a social OS versus its role as a marketing OS. From there it goes into its role as a platform, and the rise of the apps based around it.

Blog and media network Sugar Inc. will announce a third round of funding today, $16 million from Sequoia Capital.

They are using at least some of the proceeds, they say, to buy out NBC, which invested $10 million in the company in June 2007. The NBC investment came with an advertising sales deal that the companies dissolved last year.

The company has now raised a total of $31 million in capital.

Sugar is also announcing the acquisition of Los Angeles-based Shopflick, a video powered fashion marketplace founded by Patrick Yee in 2007. It raised $7 million last year and brought on board David Grant as CEO.

Grant, who is the former President of Fox TV Studios, will become president of a newly formed Sugar division called Sugar Digital Entertainment, which will “expand the Sugar brand into online video, television, film, videogames and other content formats.”