Mike Schroepfer, the extremely well regarded VP Engineering at Mozilla, is now Facebook’s Director of Engineering.

He’ll be heading up Facebook Platform and the main product front end, he said by telephone this morning, although his exact scope of responsibility hasn’t been nailed down yet. He will report directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg starting in September.

Schrep, as he is known, headed up the engineering team within Mozilla responsible for Firefox. Before that he was the CTO of Sun Microsystem’s data center automation division (responsible for the highly ambitious N1 project). In order to become a leading Internet platform, Facebook needs to inject more open-source DNA into its engineering ranks. Schrep should help it do that.

Since Mozilla won’t IPO, it could face more defections of top talent over time.

CrunchGear’s Nicholas Deleon pointed out that misspelling Cuil - as if that were possible - results in a bit of NSFW action for those who transpose the i and the l (culi.com). Try it yourself in the privacy of your home office or bedroom. Cuil launched last night.

Hard drives are boring. You plug them in, watch them spin, and then replace them when they die. Hopefully somewhere in there you back them up and maybe reformat them, just to switch things up a little, but you’re pretty much dealing with a bucket of metal platters that store information.

Enter the SimpleTech [re]Drive. I’d wager that this drive is probably one of the best external devices I’ve seen in a while. It does what drives are supposed to do - it reads and writes data at USB 2.0 speeds - and is surprisingly cool and silent.

Read more…

Think you’ve got the gift of foresight? The Washington Post has partnered with Predictify, an online polling service, to create a “Prediction Center” that allows readers to vote on possible outcomes for selected stories. Users will be able to leave their predictions and discuss their beliefs on an integrated comment thread, with the most accurate participants appearing on a leaderboard. You can access the main Predictify hub here.

Predictify, which launched in 2007, goes beyond basic polling systems by integrating discussion features and monitoring a users’ accuracy score across the entire service. While there isn’t currently a way to weight one question more than another, the site’s algorithm does take into account the type of question and the accuracy rate of participants. Besides the Washington Post, Predictify is also found on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle’s sites.

To offer an incentive for users to take part in the polls, the site has also implemented a premium program that allows companies to sponsor a poll and reward the most accurate participants with cash. In return, these sponsors are entitled to the demographics data that the service asks for with each vote. CEO Parker Barrile says that at this point it isn’t clear if the Washington Post will be making use of this feature, but if it does it will clearly distinguish sponsored polls from normal content.

While this partnership isn’t groundbreaking by any means, it serves as a reminder that “old media” is willing to embrace the interactivity afforded by the web. Whether or not the Washington Post’s implementation of Predictify will be popular remains to be seen, but for now it’s a big score for the service.

Note: TechCrunch is syndicated to WashingtonPost.com.

LiveStreaming video service Mogulus will announce a new round of financing later today. The size of the investment won’t be disclosed, although we’ve heard from a source that it is in the $10 million range. But far more important than the amount of capital raised is the investor. Gannett, a $4 billion company which owns USA Today and other news and media properties, funded the round.

Mogulus, like competitors Ustream and Justin.tv, allow anyone with a camera, computer and Internet connection to live stream to the Internet, reducing huge overhead costs for remote coverage (you don’t need things like satellite uplinks).

Mogulus allows upstart video bloggers like Sarah Austin to host live video shows on a shoestring budget. But it also facilitates serious journalism. In May, for example, controversial statements made by Hillary Clinton on a Mogulus stream led to nationwide media coverage.

Gannett gets this. And i assume they’ll find ways to enable their reporters around the world to start using Mogulus to get video footage to the web as fast as possible when news breaks.

Mogulus has now raised nearly $13 million in capital - about the same as Ustream. But even with Gannett behind them, Mogulus has no time to waste in growing their service - YouTube is said to be launching live video sometime this year.

After two weeks of all the iPhone apps I care to download, I can say this: most of them are useless. I use a few of them daily (Facebook, MySpace, Loopt, Phonesaber) and a few others occasionally (BoxOffice, Pandora, Twitterific). Most, though, sit unused after testing and are far from being “must-have applications.”

DataCase, though, looks to be different. It will turn your iPhone into a wireless drive for file storage, and includes a viewer for most popular file formats (Office, PDF, etc.). The application has been highly anticipated but is yet to launch - the creator says by email that they want it to be perfect before releasing it.

For now we have to settle for the demo video that they just put up on YouTube and is embedded below. DataCase will cost $7 when it does launch, and I expect a lot of people will buy it immediately. This is exactly the kind of utility application that I need. The ability to email out any file on the phone would be a nice feature add, too.

The new Cuil search engine apparently got a bit more traffic than the team anticipated immediately after launch a couple of hours ago. Everyone is trying it out to decide for themselves how disruptive it may be to the old guard search guys. For now, you’ll have to wait, a message on the site says “We’ll be back soon…Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience.”

Launching a startup ain’t easy. And flatlining right after your launch is more of a rite of passage than an embarrassment. Here’s hoping Cuil is cool again by morning.

Update: Yay! It’s back.

Search engine Cuil launched earlier this evening, claiming a bigger index size (120 billion web pages) than Google or any other search engine. The pedigree of the founders and execs, which includes three ex senior Googlers, means the service will be compared to Google from day one. And the way they will be compared is index size and, more importantly, relevance/ranking of results.

We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.

A search for Dog returns 280 million results on Cuil and 498 million on Google. Judging relevance of results is subjective, but Google returns Wikipedia as the first result, then dog.com. Cuil returns Dog.com, wikipedia isn’t listed on the first page of results. Both are meaningful results, but Google is better.

More searches, Cuil v. Google: Apple (83 m v. 571 million) - neither mention the fruit. France (102 m v. 1.5 billion) - Cuil’s category refinement makes their results better for this query. Stonehenge (800k v. 8.5 million). Silicon Valley (3.2 m v. 24 m). Techcrunch (600k v. 6.5 m).

It seems pretty clear that Google’s index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil’s unless we’re randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil.

And Cuil’s ranking isn’t as good as Google’s based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. With Google, we’ve all gotten used to trying a slightly different search to get the refined results we need. Cuil does a good job of guessing what we’ll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries.

And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.

Menlo Park based Cuil will launch later this evening with an index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web (Google doesn’t disclose the size of their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages) (Update: see our very early testing here). They’ve also dropped one of the “l’s” from their name - previously the company was “Cuill.” Either way, it’s pronounced “cool.”

The super-stealth search project was founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello (CEO) and Anna Patterson (VP Engineering) were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are also ex-Google employees, and the company has been the subject of intense speculation over the last couple of years.

Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. By some estimates, Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business.

Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France - cheese - wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users. This is a semantic approach to search, but very different from Powerset’s natural language approach. Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to understand what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to properly categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.

That means users search the same way they always have, but Cuil will try to return better results via refinements in a “explore by category” module to the right of results. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed,” “cocker spaniel,” etc. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog.”

Cuil is experimenting with a new type of search interface as well. Results are shown in three columns and contain an image and more summary text than existing search engines. In addition to refinement by category, Cuil will recommend related searches via tabs across the top of search results. A search for New York, for example, also has tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees, etc.:

Cuil also says that they will put user privacy at the top of their business objectives. User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, and cookies are not used to associate a computer with queries. The data is simply dumped as it is created. That means user data cannot be turned over to others, whether its via blind stupidity or lawsuits.

Cuil has raised $33 million over two rounds of financing from Greylock, Madrone Capital Partners and Tugboat Ventures.

Is India finally ready to produce some world-shaking Web companies? It certainly has the raw talent. And increasingly it has the capital. Accel is the latest VC fund to focus on the sub-continent. It absorbed Indian VC firm Erasmic, and is relaunching it as the Accel India Venture Fund.

One of Erasmic’s investors is Google. The fund does seed-stage investing inside India, and will continue to do so under Accel’s ownership. (Four Erasmic partners will keep running the show).

Accel India will reportedly raise a $60 million fund this quarter. Which may not sound like much, but it is six times bigger than Erasmic’s current $10 million fund. And, remember, this will be earmarked for seed investments, in India. A dollar goes a lot further there.

Accel has been around since 1983, but didn’t create its first non-U.S. fund until 2001 (focusing on Europe and Israel). It entered China in 2005 through a partnership with IDG. And now it is going after India.

Will Accel find the next Facebook in India? Probably not (It is an investor in the original Facebook here in the U.S., by the way). But it gets to dip its toes into one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. If it can find a couple startups to shake up India alone, it will have been worth the investment.

Hulu, the online video joint venture between NBC and News Corp., launched last October. Today the site has 140 free on-demand movies available to anyone (as long as they are in the U.S.) and 700 total titles (including TV). As of March 2008 they were serving 83 million monthly video streams.

Tonight the site is launching a number of new embeddable widgets that allow third party sites to add Hulu content. We’ve embedded one of the widgets, which let’s users show all episodes of a particular TV show, below (I of course chose the Daily Show).

We also used this announcement as an excuse to interview Hulu CTO Eric Feng, who joined when Hulu acquired his startup Mojiti in 2007. Feng’s team formed the backbone of the Hulu. They started coding in late summer 2007 (Feng says the first line of code was written on August 6) and had the Hulu product out the door by October.

The full interview is below. Feng also demo’s the new widgets near the end.

One of the biggest draws for massively multiplayer online games (MMO’s) is the satisfaction that comes from earning in-game items and abilities. Unlike simple Flash games where your accomplishments vanish the moment you step away from your computer, MMO’s allow you to acquire virtual goods and work your way up a skill ladder, in the hopes of eventually becoming powerful enough to dominate over everyone else. Unfortunately, many people simply can’t spare the hundreds of hours a game like World of Warcraft takes to finally reach this leet status.

Today sees the launch of Moondo, a new gaming “world” that is trying to merge the best parts of MMOs and the casual games that litter the web. The Moondo world is comprised of a number of multiplayer minigames that feature 3D graphics that rival those seen on most MMOs. Each minigame is intended to require only about 15-20 minutes, though they include multiple levels that should keep gamers satisfied for hours at a time.

What differentiates Moondo from most other multiplayer minigames is the introduction of persistent goods and a leveling system. For example, a shield that a user might acquire during the course of a shooting game could later be used on the platform’s driving game. As gamers continue playing, they progressively acquire more goods and skills, and the platform’s matching system ensures that they are only pitted against players of comparable experience. At launch, there are two games available (an FPS and a racing game), but that number should grow quickly, as Moondo says that the platform is designed so that it can pump out a new game every 8 weeks.

Moondo’s biggest challenge lies in making the powerups and levels acquired by each gamer seem worthwhile. It’s one thing to be known as a powerful wizard or knight in a persistent world like World of Warcraft - everyone knows you’ve earned it. But when such advantages are carried over to smaller minigames, it might just make them unbalanced and less fun.

For the time being Moondo is only available as a standalone client on Windows, but the company plans to roll out browser support (so that it should be platform-agnostic) by October. The game is the first product from Funtactix, a Benchmark and JVP-funded company that has spent the last eighteen months developing the platform that powers Moondo. Another company that is introducing persistent accomplishments to casual gaming is CasualCafe which we covered here.

Since launching the CrunchBase API less than two weeks ago we’ve seen a great response from developers, who have already developed a number of impressive plugins and applications. The CrunchBase API offers access to information from thousands of tech companies, VCs and startup entrepreneurs. It’s free to use, there are no accounts to sign up for and no request throttling. The API returns clean, pretty-printed JSON, and only basic attribution is required. Here are some of great applications already in the wild:

CrunchBase WordPress Plugins

Two plugins sprung up that make it easy to insert the CrunchBase widget into WordPress blog posts. The first, developed by Vaibhav Gadodia, queries the CrunchBase API to determine the CrunchBase URL for a company. Joost de Valk, the author of numerous WordPress plugins, also released a CrunchBase widget plugin that supports all of the CrunchBase entity types (companies, products, people, and financial organizations).

CrunchBase Social Graphs

Finnish readers Mikko Kivelä and Bemmu Sepponen have generated whopper social graphs using the full web of CrunchBase data. One of the graphs maps company connections in CrunchBase, while the other is concerned with the people involved. They also created a fun text file that counts the degrees of separation from any company to Google (TechCrunch is 2 away). We’d love to see a version of They Rule using financial organizations instead of board members.

Semantic CrunchBase

Quite possibly the most exciting use of the CrunchBase API is Semantic CrunchBase, a RDF/SPARQL mirror of CrunchBase that adheres to the principles of the Semantic Web. Semantic CrunchBase comes to us from active Semantic/RDF community developer Benjamin Nowack. A RDF/SPARQL interface enables queries to be run against the CrunchBase data. For example, you can query for all the companies that were funded during January 2008 (which you can already do via a web interface with our advanced search page). Semantic CrunchBase is a great add-on that will open up new doors with respect to the applications people can create with CrunchBase data.

If you are doing something cool with CrunchBase data we’d love to see it. Become a member and post on the CrunchBase Google Group. Follow us on Twitter. Subscribe to the CrunchBase Blog.

One of the reasons Twitter is such a useful platform for publishing is that it is largely spam free - you only received messages from people you choose to follow. So even though a large number of spammy accounts have appeared on the service, the only real damage they do is when they trick people into following them (a lot of people just auto-follow whoever follows them as a courtesy).

Recently Twitter has tried to raise the bar even higher by removing accounts that appear to be trying to game the system. A lot of spammy accounts are just being deleted.

But what happens if someone finds a way to get others to follow them by exploiting some vulnerability in Twitter? The service would be overrun with spam overnight.

That appears to have happened today - I, along with 7,000+ other people, are now following user johng77536, even though I never hit the follow button (the account is following zero other users). The account, which is just two hours old, is now one of the top 100 Twitter accounts (it is currently #63), and growing fast. There are two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com.

This is the first time we’ve heard about Twitter being exploited in this way. Our guess is they found a vulnerability in the API and are going to push this for all its worth before being shut down. We’ll see how quickly Twitter responds.

We did a search for the username and came up with this link, where a user with the same name purports to be John and/or Lena Granger (who may well have nothing to do with this).

Update: Per the comments below, it looks like the vulnerability is being used for at least one other account (image), which links off to the same hotmoda site.

Yahoo’s inability to launch Delicious 2.0, which was feature complete and in private beta back in September 2007, has become a bit of a joke around Silicon Valley.

Last month we called on Yahoo to provide guidance on when we might see the new version of the service. In a blog post today, the Delicious team says to get ready for the new version, it’s “almost ready.”

We heard this all before. In January the Delicious blog strongly suggested a launch was imminent, but it never came. We heard from sources inside the company that the issue was an inability to scale the product properly. Some team members suggested caching of bookmark data to reduce the load on the database servers. Others thought a fresh set of database queries were needed every time a user pulled up a page on Delicious. Since that page lists every tag they’ve ever used, the site crawled.

It’s unlikely the team would head fake us again with a blog post unless they were really sure it was time to turn on Delicious 2.0 for everyone. It’s just too bad that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left the company before he was able to see it go live.

More screen shots of Delicious 2.0 are here.

Thank you to the nearly 1,100 people who flowed through the Quadras Conference Center for our Mobile Web Wars event and the party at August Capital immediately afterwards. We were able to donate $7,500 to Malaria No More, which will protect at least 750 children from Malaria for five years.

This was our third annual party held at August Capital, who continue to graciously co-host the event with us at their offices, which includes a huge outdoor deck. Here are our wrap ups of the 2007 and 2006 parties at the same location. Thanks in particular to David Hornik, who continues to convince his partners that it is a good idea to have a thousand or so over caffeinated, slightly intoxicated entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and press roaming their hallways.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, you can see the official photo stream here and more here and here - some are also included below.

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The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations were in full swing as of last Tuesday, had passed the term sheet stage and the two companies were in final negotiations in the $200 million range. But sometime this last week Google decided to walk from the deal. Digg was notified on late Thursday or Friday.

Google was in the due diligence stage of the deal, where they peer deep into Digg’s technology and financial statements. Most term sheets are non binding, so anything that gives the buyer pause can be used as an excuse to walk away - but generally the buyer already has a very good idea what they are getting well before the term sheet stage.

Two sources close to the companies suggested that some issue that came up during technical due diligence was to blame. One source said that the issue was more personality driven, and that Google decided after spending more time with Digg’s top team that there just wasn’t a fit.

Either way the deal appears to dead and can be added to the long list of failed Digg acquisition deals. And when a company is “left at the altar” other buyers are usually hesitant to step in.

So what will Digg do now? We’re hearing they’ll just push through with a new round of financing. Digg hired Allen & Co. to represent them in the sale, but the investment bank is just as good at closing massive venture financings, too (they represented both Slide and Ning in their recent a half billion dollar valuation financings).

Here’s the live stream of our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable, which starts at 3PM PT and ends at 5 PM. The Roundtable is a freewheeling discussion about whether the mobile Web is finally here and which platform will win going forward. While the iPhone seems like a slam dunk right now, can older platforms like Nokia’s Symbian or Windows Mobile replicate its success? Does Apple have anything to fear from Google’s Android? To help answer these questions we have an amazing group of mobile startup CEOs, top iPhone app developers, and other technologists on the RoundTable.

Please add your own comment or questions inside the video player or Twitter them to MobileWars. I will try to incorporate questions from the Web audience in the discussion.

Free video streaming by Ustream

We are also streaming live via cellphone camera on our Kyte channel:

The participants on the Roundtable are:

David Rivas, Nokia, Vice President of Technology Management for S60 Software
Walt Doyle, CEO Ulocate
Tom Conrad, CTO Pandora
Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media CEO
Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous
David Hornik, partner, August Capital
Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook (replacing Joe Hewitt)
Guy Ben-Artzi, Founder of Real Dice and CEO of Mytopia
Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck
Gannon Hall, CMO of Kyte
Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt
Marc Davis, chief scientists of Yahoo’s mobile group
Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob
Richard Wong, partner at Accel
Andreas Weigend, people & data (former chief scientist, Amazon)
Tatsuki Tomita, SVP of Consumer Product, Opera
Mike Rowehl, chief architect, SkyFire
Mary Ann Cotter, CEO, Cooking Capsules
John Faith , GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace

Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook, just announced at our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable that Facebook’s iPhone/iPod app has reached 1 million users.

Facebook is currently ranked as the 6th most popular free application on Apple’s App Store, and has been among the store’s top applications since the store’s launch on July 10. We posted initial download numbers for the apps soon after the store’s launch (Facebook had around 9,000 downloads at the time). Since then, Apple has changed its policy and no longer posts the number of downloads for each app, so we need to rely on developers to report their figures.

We’ve asked MySpace for their corresponding numbers. Off hand, John Faith, GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace was able to tell us that their mobile WAP site sees 1.7 million uniques a day (users can access the MySpace WAP site without using the native application). This is certainly a large figure, but it doesn’t provide a direct comparison. We’ll update the post when we can get more comparable numbers.

At Facebook’s f8 conference this week, the company announced that it would soon be open sourcing its iPhone application, so we can expect to see a number of copy cats in the near future.

In a blog post today Google says they’ve identified 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. It’s actually more, they say, but some web pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other.

What they note way down in the fourth paragraph, however, is that they don’t actually index all of those pages, so you can’t find them on Google. Estimates on the true size of the Google index are a mere 40 billion pages or so.

Why don’t they index all the pages they’ve found? Some of them are spam. But it’s also very expensive to index sites. And the fact that Google indexes many news sites, blogs and other rapidly changing web sites every 15 minutes makes all that indexing even more expensive. So they make value judgment on what to actually index and what not to. And most of the web is left out.

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.