by MG Siegler on November 20, 2009

Today, during the Filtering the Stream roundtable at our RealTime CrunchUp, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur asked why Facebook isn’t giving third parties access to their Friend Lists. Obviously, that’s a good question now that Twitter has starting giving third parties access to its Lists feature via an API. Normally, you’d expect a canned response along the lines of “we may do that in the future” or “we’re thinking about it,” but Facebook’s VP of Platform Bret Taylor was much more candid.

Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

by Leena Rao on November 20, 2009

Salesforce.com co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff is sitting down with TechCrunch IT editor Steve Gillmor and TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld to discuss the socialization of the enterprise. Benioff recently unveiled his own social strategy for Salesforce: Chatter. Debuted at the company’s Dreamforce event, Chatter allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups within the platform, enabling them to be connected via a unified stream. In addition, developers will now be able to tap into Chatter’s API to build social enterprise apps off of platform. While Chatter looks and feels like a social network for the enterprise, Benioff is quick to nix that moniker, preferring to call the platform a collaboration tool.

Below find my notes (paraphrased):

by Greg Kumparak on November 20, 2009

Everyone loves picture messaging – or at least, they love the idea of it. The iPhone carrying masses clamored for it, then celebrated once they got it by sending everyone pictures of their immediate surroundings and beloved pets before forgetting the feature exists. After the novelty wears off, it’s generally reserved for the occasions when there is genuinely something interesting to show. Need the wife’s advice on whether to buy the blue shirt or the green one? Picture message. Want to ask her out to coffee? You’ll probably stick with text.

FunMobility, a company thats been cashing in on cell phone media (like ringtones and wallpapers) since 1999, is looking to change that with FunMail, a service which they’re dubbing as “every-day picture messaging”.

by MG Siegler on November 20, 2009

At our RealTime CrunchUp event today in San Francisco, the first roundtable is entitled “Filtering the Stream: Getting Rid of the Noise.”

The panel is populated by a lot of big players in the space: Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox, Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur, Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal, CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss, Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng, Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor, MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn, Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen, OneRiot, CEO Kimbal Musk, and Angel Investor Ron Conway. Our own Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor are moderating.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

by Jason Kincaid on November 20, 2009

Twitter has apparently come across the Holy Grail of advertising, and it’s coming soon. Today during his interview at the RealTime CrunchUp, Twitter COO Dick Costolo told the audience a bit about the company’s upcoming advertising business. Costolo was vague on the details, but he did make some promises: “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.”

Costolo didn’t divulge many more details, though he did mention that it wouldn’t be tied into the site’s retweet feature. When TC editor Michael Arrington tried to clarify by asking if the ads would be integrated into the Tweet stream, Costolo said that “he didn’t say the ads would be mixed in with tweets”. But he didn’t say they wouldn’t, either.

Costolo closed out the topic by saying that the message he wants to send is that “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

by MG Siegler on November 20, 2009

Opening our RealTime CrunchUp event today in San Francisco is Twitter COO Dick Costolo. Our own Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor are sitting down with Costolo for a 30 minute conversation.

Twitter is one of the hottest players in the realtime field right now. And it has a $1 billion valuation, which has been the source of much controversy. Twitter also recently signed search deals with both Microsoft and Google.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

by Leena Rao on November 20, 2009

We’re here at the second TechCrunch RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco, where we’ll be taking a deeper dive into realtime technology and where the streams are taking us. Kicking off the event is a conversation with Twitter COO Dick Costolo. And we’ll have much more real-time goodness coming your way throughout the day (see the agenda below). Watch the live stream of the event, powered by Ustream, here!

by Leena Rao on November 20, 2009

There are a number of real-time search engines in the space, including Collecta and OneRiot. Today, at the Real-Time CrunchUp, Infoaxe debuts its real time search engine.

What makes Infoaxe unique is that it doesn’t tap into streams from Twitter, Facebook, or Digg for content. Infoaxe’s search engine relies completely on attention data generated by the startup’s web history search engine.

by John Biggs on November 20, 2009

Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.

I’m teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We’ll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.

by MG Siegler on November 20, 2009

Brizzly was first unveiled in private beta at our first CrunchUp event in July, so it’s only appropriate that today, the day of our next CrunchUp, it’s being opened to the public. Now, to be clear, the product is still technically in beta, but that’s only so the team at Thing Labs can keep experimenting with new ways to make Brizzly even better.

For those who have not had the opportunity to try Brizzly yet, it’s a web app that serves as a way to interact with both Twitter and now Facebook. It has advantages over Twitter’s regular website because it shows pictures and videos inline, and they actually did lists (which they called Groups) before Twitter. Now that Twitter has rolled out that functionality, Brizzly has integrated it. Perhaps more importantly, Brizzly also offers as one-click way to do the old-school way of retweeting. You know, the “RT” way.

by Greg Kumparak on November 20, 2009

Buying someone else a phone is risky business. Preferences vary, you’ve gotta get their carrier right… it’s a tough game. But if you’re down to make a gamble, we’re here to help. I’ve spent more time playing with new phones in the last year than anyone should ever spend with any phone ever, and have broken down my favorite offerings from each carrier by “Best Bet”, “Best Bet For Under $100″ (though it’s usually worth it to splurge), and “Best Bet for Business” for you Enterprisey folks.

by John Biggs on November 20, 2009

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the Wii-holder. The Charge Base IC is a $34.99 induction charging device for Wiimotes and looks like something out of a Frank Lloyd Wright sketchbook. The base sits firmly on the ground while sweeping cantilevered arms reach out to cradle your Wiimotes with magnets. It’s almost graceful, this amalgamation of clear and white plastic, the glorious sense of weightlessness, the architectural stability with just a touch of grandeur.

But darn it if the lights on this thing aren’t too bright.

by Robin Wauters on November 20, 2009

Frustrated with the fact that Pandora does not provide its streaming service in Canada, Vancouver-based Jeff Anderson set out to build a community-driven Internet radio service of his own along with other music fanatics, and dubbed the project Listen.fm.

Currently still in private beta, Listen.fm is not going to be a ‘revolutionary’ service, says Anderson, but rather just a great place to listen to and discover new music that can legally be shared with others. The site has been in the works for nearly a year and should be launching in public beta some time next year.

by Robin Wauters on November 20, 2009

Like a love child of eBay and CouchSurfing.com or craigslist, AirBnB lets anyone that owns space fit for accommodating travelers – be it a couch in a small apartment or the master bedroom of a 19th-century castle – post that space as a listing on its website and connect potential renters to its respective owners.

Once called Airbed and Breakfast in full, AirBnB aims to provide a secure online marketplace for these types of transactions and make people ‘travel like humans’ again.

Now the startup, which came out of Y Combinator’s winter 2009 class, is making it easier for people who share interests (e.g. photography) or have another connection with each other (e.g. alumni who’ve attended the same university) to share travel accommodation and recommendations thanks to the addition of Groups.

by Jason Kincaid on November 19, 2009

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

by Nicholas Deleon on November 19, 2009

We’re only about five weeks away from Christmas, so now’s as good a time as any to talk about (drum roll, please) e-books. Amazon kick-started the e-book market (with apologies to earlier e-book readers) with the introduction of the Kindle in the fall of 2007. Two years later, Barnes and Noble, IREX, and Sony announced new or updated e-book readers of their own.

The question becomes, which e-book reader is right for you? The truth is, they’re all very similar, so it should come down to what books their compatible book stores carry. Oh, and price, of course.

by Leena Rao on November 19, 2009

For security nuts and enterprise clients, Cisco is launching an iPhone app, called Cisco SIO, to put Cisco Security Intelligence Operations in users’ hands. The app gives giving users real-time access to security information and also lets users create personalized alerts to show security threats that could impact their network.

Powered by the Cisco’s Security IntelliShield Alert Manager Service, the app informs, protects and enables IT staff to respond in real time to alerts and threats to the network. The application will deliver data on early warning intelligence, threat vulnerabilities and sill suggest solutions to any problems that take place. It also provides unique IP and URL address e-mail and Web reputation look-up powered by the Cisco’s IronPort SenderBase Security Network. Via the app, you’ll also be able to access Cisco security news and information from the company’s blog, Twitter feed, podcasts and press releases, which Cisco hopes to use to engage with the greater security technology community.

by Michael Arrington on November 19, 2009

Tomorrow’s Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco is going to be a blast. It’s an all day event absolutely filled with the thought and business leaders in the space, as well as a whole slew of newcomers launching new startups.

And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.

And we want your help.

Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.

by MG Siegler on November 19, 2009

Earlier this month, Twitter rolled out a Spanish language version of its service. This was the first language to gain native support beyond English and Japanese. Today, it’s announcing French support as well.

As the service announced in October, it needed help from the community in order to roll out to the so-called “FIGS” languages. That is French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Just over a month later, 2 of those are already complete.

by Robin Wauters on November 19, 2009

eBay has just announced that it has completed the sale of Skype, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. The investor consortium who is the buying party and will control an approximately 70 percent stake is a group led by Silver Lake Partners and includes Joltid (i.e. the company founded by Skype’s original founders) and “certain affiliated parties”, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

As previously announced, eBay received approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The company also retained an approximately 30 percent equity investment in Skype. The company also purchased senior debt securities with a face value of $50 million as part of a Skype debt financing.

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