Gmail is constantly adding features to help people become more organized. Today, Google has tweaked its Labels feature to add more functionality to the labels toolkit, helping users implement labels in a more organized way. Your labels will now be located in a new area on your Gmail interface, above your chat list and grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels. You can also now control which labels you’d like to show on your UI and you can hide the rest under a “more” tab.

Of of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.

Interactive fashion community StyleCaster has raised $4 million in Series A round of financing from investor Dan Gilbert, the chairman and founder of Quicken Loans.

Launched in February 2009, StyleCaster is a platform that hopes to be the future of online fashion. The site features style tips optimized for each individual, news and content on the latest fashion trends, a niche social network based around style, and a large online retail catalog of brand-name clothing. And the site isn’t just geared towards women—StyleCaster will soon include a community around men’s fashion.

Public voting in the The Europas, the tech startup awards from TechCrunch Europe, will close today, Wednesday July 1 at 11.59pm London time (GMT/BST). So best get voting. This public vote will be mixed with voting from our advisory board of European tech luminaries to produce the final shortlist. The awards will take place on July 9 next Thursday, with over 300 people attending from all over the European tech scene. There is more information about the awards here. You can also get breaking news about the European tech startup scene by subscribing to our RSS and Twitter feeds.

A huge thanks to our sponsors for supporting this inaugural event: Thanks to the UKTI for sponsoring the pitches; Viadeo for sponsoring the Best Design category; Bootlaw for sponsoring Best Bootstrapped Startup; Quick.tv for sponsoring Best European Investor; Zendesk for sponsoring Best New Startup; Latitude and Parklane Champagne for the Awards Prizes; oneDrum for sponsoring the drinks party and Mixcloud for sponsoring the DJ.

According to MediaPost, The Online Publishers Association yesterday announced that 37 of its members, including juggernauts like The New York Times, Forbes, ESPN, CNN and MSNBC.com are (or are soon going to start) running the new, larger ad units the organization introduced last March.

Since the members who are running these campaigns for brands like Bank of America and Mercedes-Benz reach about 68% of the total U.S. Internet audience, there’s a good chance you will soon see them, too. There’s also a good chance you’ll hate them.

Did you know you can switch tabs in Firefox by making a twisting motion with your fingers on a multi-touch surface? I did. Turns out I’ve been doing it for months — I thought I was late to the party and was too ashamed to mention it to anybody for fear of an epic internet ribbing (”What, you just figured that out?”). But no, apparently it was top secret and highly experimental. That was in the beta, though; it looks like the official version has reduced it to a hack.

Fortunately, mastering this multi-touch-enabling technique will allow you to tweak your gestures, resulting in everlasting glory.

Fifty-seven percent. That’s how much overall venture-backed liquidity decreased in the second quarter of 2009 compared to that of last year: from $6.48 billion to $2.8 billion, if you want the hard numbers. Looking at the chart, I’d say the drop compared to the second quarter of 2007 ($14.6 billion) is even more telling. It’s the bad news from this just-released Dow Jones VentureSource report, with the only positive nugget the fact that three VC-backed companies have been able to complete IPOs (raising a total of $232 million), ending a nine-month drought.

Just half an hour ago, we reported separately that the National Venture Capital Association actually counted five IPOs during the quarter in which a total of $721 million was raised (including DigitalGlobe-$279, SolarWinds-$152 million and OpenTable-$60 million). Also, while the NVCA pegged the number of venture-backed acquisitions at 58 in the second quarter, generating $2.6 billion, the Dow Jones VentureSource report says $2.8 billion was reached through M&As of 67 portfolio companies instead.

After four quarters in which venture-backed IPOs have been dead in the water, a handful finally poked their heads up in the second quarter. The National Venture Capital Association counted five IPOs during the quarter, including DigitalGlobe ($279 million raised), SolarWinds ($152 million), and OpenTable ($60 million). A total of $721 million was raised. Just for a little context, two years ago during the same period, there were 25 IPOs which raised $4.15 billion.

So don’t call it a comeback just yet. But any activity is a sign of hope. And this was the most active period since the fourth quarter of 2007. Will it keep building, or will IPO candidates duck their heads back under water?

The wave of investments in “realtime” is continuing with today’s announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it’s understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.

We were just forwarded an e-mail conversation between a Twitter API team member and a third-party developer because the latter was using a UI for its web-based service that was admittedly very similar to Twitter’s web application.

The startup of course has the right to protect its assets and do its utmost to avoid confusion with users who might think they’re using a Twitter product rather than that of a developer making use of its API.

But something else caught our attention in the thread:

Hi,

Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own?

Thanks,

It’s sad to see a company that we were all so excited about fade further into oblivion. Today Joost, one of the most anticipated startups in 2006/2007, is just an also ran in a sea of big online video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Today CEO Mike Volpi stepped down, the company is laying off most of staff, and refocusing the business to “white label online video platforms for media companies.”

Om has a good monday morning quarterback overview of why they failed, but to me it comes down to just a few things. They over funded ($45 million before they even launched) and they ignored the fact that users were quite willing to sacrifice quality in online video for the convenience of Flash in the browser. Joost waited until late last year to go all Flash - until then users had to use the downloadable Joost software and allow P2P streaming of shows. In the meantime there was no linking to Joost videos. YouTube and Hulu got all that social media and SEO juice that could have gone to Joost.

Founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype and Kazaa, see the world in terms of P2P and downloadable clients. The joke about how everything looks like a nail if you’re a hammer is very true with Joost. But what worked with Kazaa and Skype a decade ago doesn’t work with online video in today’s world, obviously.

This guest post is written by Mary Hodder, the founder Dabble. Prior to Dabble, Hodder consulted for a number of startups, did research at Technorati and wrote her masters thesis at Berkeley focusing on live web search looking at blog data.

Real time search is nothing new. It is a problem we’ve been working on for at least ten years, and we likely will still be trying to solve it ten years from now. It’s a really hard problem which we used to call “live web search,” which was coined by Allen Searls (Doc’s son) and refers to the web that is alive, with time as an element, in all factors including search.

The name change to “real time search” seems a way to refocus attention toward the issue of time as an important element of filters. We are still presented with the same set of problems we’ve had at least the past ten years. None of the companies that Erick Schonfeld pointed to the other day seem to be doing anything differently from the live web search / discovery companies that came before. The new ones all seem to be fumbling around at the beginning of the problem, and in fact seem to be doing “recent search,” not really real time search. While I’m sure they’ve worked really hard on their systems, they are no closer than the older live web search systems got with the problem. All the new ones give a reverse chron view, with most mixing Twitter with something: blog data, other microblog data, photos, creating some kind of top list of recent trends. Some have context, like a count of activity over a period of time, or how long a trend has gone on or a histogram (Crowdeye) which both Technorati and Sphere experimented with in the early years. Or they show how many links there are to something or the number of tweets. All seem susceptible to spam and other activities degrading to the user experience and none seem to really provide the context and quality filters that one would like to see if this were to really work. All seem to suffer from needing to learn the lessons we already learned in blog search and topic discovery.

Bet you didn’t see this one coming. Back in 2007 we wrote about a service called Dial Directions which lets you call a special phone number and verbally ask for directions, which are immediately sent to you via SMS. Today comes news that the company has been acquired by Sakhr Software, a development house specializing in Arabic natural language processing (NLP). And with their powers combined, they’re building a real-time voice translation service that will allow users to translate phrases from their mobile phones on the fly.

It’s a better fit than it sounds. Dial Directions has spent the last few years building mobile applications (it has an app for the iPhone on the App Store), and has also built out the technology required to efficently transfer voice input to servers, where it can then be processed (this server-side processing is also used by Google Voice Search and a number of other apps). Once it makes it to the cloud, this speech will be routed through Sakhr’s software, which is capable of translating English to Arabic and vice-versa. Translated audio and text are then sent back to the mobile phone, all within a matter of seconds.

SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.

The news aggregator, which only features media on publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.

It looks like Apple has already started sending out the beta version and SDK for the next iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.1, to developers.

The iPhone 3.0 software was released just about two weeks ago, ahead of the iPhone 3GS launch. By most accounts it’s pretty stable, though some users have been having battery issues. That’s why it’s a bit odd that Apple would iterate up to version 3.1 already, instead of something like 3.0.1, which it tends to do for minor updates and bug fixes. Could we be seeing a larger update to the OS already?

I’m told that there’s nothing much of interest in the release notes to indicate anything major that is new or changed.

How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. Today, Meebo is creating an ad network across partner sites which use its new Community IM service, which ads a Meebo IM bar at the bottom of participating sites.

Visitors to one of the 85 partner sites which have implemented the Community IM product (including Current TV, DailyStrength, Flixster, and Webs.com) can chat with their IM buddies without leaving the sites. Today, Meebo is introducing new ad units which pop up along the bottom left of the browser, beginning with ads for the Toyota Piou and AT&Ts. For the Toyota ad, a little car icon pops up on the left of the Meebo IM bar, away from all of the chat activity on the bottom right. If you click on the car, a larger ad 900X400 pixel rich ad overlay opens up which can show a video or any number of interactive ads. “When they click we do not take them away from the conversation,” says Sternberg. During the whole time people is watching the ads, they can still chat with their friends through the Meebo IM column on the right.

Twitter has just quietly rolled out a set of changes to its user interface on the “Following” and “Followers” sections of its website. These changes will clearly make it easier to manage who you follow as well as take actions, such as @replying someone or direct messaging them, directly from the page.

There are two new views for looking at these areas. “List” is a compact list of the followers, while “Expanded” offers more details including that user’s last tweet and their real name and location. On the Followers page, there is also a button that allows for one-click following of users who already follow you.

Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.

The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat. As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room.You can try out the gadget for yourself here.

Since its inception, one of the biggest problems with Digg has been that users often submit the same content over and over again. This makes it harder for cool content to become popular because some users digg one submitted story, while some digg another. Today, Digg is releasing “several major updates” to its duplicate (known as a “dupe”) detection system.

The solution sounds fairly intensive. “To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs. Our R&D team came up with a solution that identifies these types of duplicates by using a document similarity algorithm,” Digg’s Director of Product Chris Howard writes in a blog post. He goes on to say that there will be a follow-up more technical post to explain a bit more about how this actually works, but says that it has proven to be a reliable system so far.

Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.

While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of events apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget: