I just got my hands on the the Twitter Peek aka the Tweek and I’m trying to figure out who, specifically, this is for. First, consider this my review: this device is not very good if you’re a Twitter “power user” like myself or anyone else with maybe 100+ followers and a few hundred folks you follow. To be clear, this isn’t quite Peek’s fault as they’re clearly not interested in pleasing folks like you and me. They’re looking for folks from a different aviary, presumably new Twitter users who haven’t quite gotten hooked but are interested in the service enough to stick with it and have $199 burning a hole in their pockets absolutely right now and don’t really follow very many people. If you know any of those people, please send them to Amazon to pick this up.

For the rest of us, this thing is pretty rough. I follow 2104 people and so this thing was buzzing and Tweeting all afternoon until I finally turned it off. Weird batches of tweets would come in, all from one person, for example, or weird messages like “Oh Hey, you’re Tweeting so much! We’re going to try to catch up” or something to that effect. It’s also really slow. You have to click twice to read a Tweet – once to bring up the menu and once to read the Tweet – and scrolling is really bad. And it makes a buzzing and a tweeting noise when tweets come in – which is all the time. And it’s $99 with 6 months free or $199 for life. And it only does Twitter. No email. No texting. I’m really selling this thing, aren’t I?

When Loopt launched in 2006 it was ahead of a curve that is just starting to be recognized: Location. Now, with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and even Twitter fueling the location-based services frenzy, Loopt realized that it needed to shift its strategy a bit. Enter Pulse, a new feature launching today.

Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to.

[Sweden] The Swedish government is following in the footsteps of the Finns (well almost), as their IT-ministry is now promising that 90 percent of all Swedish homes will have access to a 100 mbit/s broadband connection before 2020.

According to Swedish IT-minister Åsa Torstensson it isn’t possible to function in the information society of today without a fast internet connection. You hear that? This is the information society, people!

Infectious, a startup that makes high quality decals and skins that let you customize the look of your iPhone, car, laptop, skateboards, and more, is launching a new feature today: one off prints of your own custom designs. Starting today users will be able to use an integrated Flex app to upload their own images, which they can then have printed out on high quality adhesive stickers (or decks, in the case of skateboards).

We’ve been watching Infectious for a while — back in May 2008 the site launched large, vinyl decorative stickers for your car, and they released decorative iPhone covers just in time for last year’s holiday season.

Whenever you hear about bugs and exploits being discovered in the iPhone’s browser, Safari, it’s usually the doings of some masterful meddler who devoted hours to unearthing any flaws they could find — not some user casually tapping around the application. Apple’s pretty good at keeping things locked down, and the iPhone’s got enough users that most of the nasty user-facing bugs have been flushed out. Well, except for this new one.

It’s not an incredibly common bug, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would hit most users – but for the iPhone users this newly discovered bug does affect, it could mean huge operator fees.

We’re at PayPal’s much-hyped PayPal Innovate X 2009, the payments company’s first dedicated developer conference. PayPal, which reported strong earnings recently, is hoping to engage developers in producing applications on top of PayPal’s newly released API. eBay’s CEO John Donahoe said this morning that PayPal is set to be bigger than eBay in the near future, forecasting the payment company’s continued growth and dominance in the space. We reported on parts of the open platform here and here. PayPal is already testing the platform with startups Payvment, FundRazr, Lottay and TwitPay. PayPal is officially opening up its PayPal X platform to developers and will be presenting a roadmap for its view of the future of payments.

Here’s a comprehensive list of the Adaptive Payments APIs that PayPal is releasing today. Adaptive Payments are the first suite of APIs that are part of PayPal X’s open platform. Here’s a comprehensive list of the Adaptive Payments APIs that PayPal is releasing today. I’ve also embedded the full list of APIs that will eventually be available on PayPal X below.

NBC is gearing up for the 2010 Winter Olympics with some changes to its mainstay site, NBCOlympics.com, scheduled to go live tomorrow. (See screenshots below). Once again, just as it did with the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC will be using a video player based on Microsoft Silverlight technology to offer full HD videos. Except this time, the video player will have DVR-like functionality, with the ability to rewind the video, highlight clips and save them.

The video player will also incorporate Facebook Connect, to allow people to chat with their friends as they are watching the events. NBC expects the addition of Facebook chat to make the videos a more social and engaging experience, and also hopes viewing times will subsequently increase.

Gameloft, one of the world’s largest mobile gaming development houses, has just released their numbers for the third quarter of 2009.

In the first three quarters of 2009, Gameloft has already slung $132.3 million in mobile applications. This is up roughly 18% percent from the same time period last year, during which they brought in roughly $112.2 million.

Today is the first day of PayPal’s much-hyped PayPal Innovate X 2009, the payments company’s first dedicated developer conference. PayPal, which reported strong earnings recently, is hoping to engage developers in producing applications on top of PayPal’s newly released API. We reported on parts of the open platform here and here. PayPal is already testing the platform with startups Payvment, FundRazr, Lottay and TwitPay. PayPal is officially opening up its PayPal X platform to developers and also unveiling additional APIs at the conference and will be presenting a roadmap for its view of the future of payments.

Taking the stage this morning for the keynote address is PayPal’s senior director of PayPal’s developer network, Naveed Anwar. He says that PayPal X, the new platform, is officially open. PayPal moves over $2200 dollars per second. John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO, takes the stage next. He says that this is an important marking point in the company’s history. The bottom line message is that working together with developers to unleash the next wave of payments technology. Donahoe admits that eBay was not know as the a bed of innovation but saw the opportunity in PayPal. Marc Andreessen has been a huge part of technology playing a growing role at eBay, says Donahoe. PayPal was given an unlimited budget to hire talent and develop key innovations.

Collaboration on editing documents and spreadsheets is becoming a key feature in productivity suites with the emergence of Google Docs, Zoho, Etherpad and others. Even Microsoft is adding collaboration features to Excel in its new version of Office. While Microsoft is adding this limited functionality to its new version of office, DocVerse offers a plug-in for Word, PowerPoint and Excel that lets you collaborate with other users when editing a document.

Once downloaded, the DocVerse plug-in will appear on the right-hand sidebar of any Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel file. You can invite other users to collaborate with you, and once all partied have downloaded the plug-in, you can share documents with each other. Whether users are working on a document online or offline, DocVerse will track, manages and sync all changes to merge them into one updated version of the document. You can communicate with other users via an IM feature within the plug-in as well.

Two years ago, a bunch of labels affiliated to music giant EMI Group sued both MP3tunes and its infamous founder Michael Robertson – former founder and CEO of MP3.com and currently running VoIP startup Gizmo5 – over alleged copyright infringement. A year ago, a judge did the sensible thing and tossed out the part of the case that could personally bankrupt the man.

Fast forward to about two weeks ago, when a new ruling gave EMI again a way to go after Robertson’s personal assets in court.

Lawsuits can be the source of all sorts of surprising and off the wall stories and this one, filed by a Google Atlanta-based former data center employee takes the cake. In the lawsuit, which was filed on Oct. 29 in a federal court in Atlanta, the former employee, James Bara, alleges both sexual and religious discrimination from his superior.

While it doesn’t sound juicy, the stories that Bara tells are. Bara was initially a contractor for Google’s Atlanta office, working as an assistant in the Data Center. After six months, he was hired by Google as a full-time employee. According to the complaint, all was rosy for the next two years until a female transgender employee joined the group Bara worked for. Bara’s boss, a woman named Pam Sohn, allegedly made inappropriate comments about this woman, and ridiculed her sexual preference.

Following an investigation that lasted over a year, Turkish authorities are fining Internet giant Google a total of 71 million Turkish Lira (approx. €32 million or USD $47 million) for supposedly dodging the national tax system.

Local media reports (links in Turkish) teach us that the Turkish government claims it is entitled to additional taxes because of the fact Google operates its online advertising in the country and even boasts offices and a registered subsidiary there while bills and payments originate from Ireland. That latter part rings true, since the search juggernaut’s European headquarters are located in Ireland’s capital and most of its support and financial services are centralized there.

But Turkish authorities say Google is required to pay national taxes for revenue generated through its registered company based in Turkey, and asserts that an extensive audit shows that the American company owes the government nearly $50 million in unpaid taxes.

Israeli startup Soluto has closed a healthy $6.2 million second round of financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Giza Venture Capital. This is on top of the $1.6 million round the company raised a year ago from Proxima, bringing the total amount of capital invested in the company close to $8 million.

The company, which is aggressively keeping its operations hidden from the public eye for now, is only willing to describe itself as being in the ‘anti-PC frustration software’ business. Our man in Israel, Roi Carthy, says the company is one of the hottest in Israel at present day, so let’s take a closer look at what they’re building over there.

Remember the Twitter Peek thingie Peter Ha spotted last week?

Yeah, it’s official now and is actually a neat little device if you Twitter a whole lot and don’t carry a smartphone.

Wait, what?

The University of Southern California (USC) will be sharing some numbers about its startup funding activities at First Look L.A. tomorrow, an invitation-only event it’s organizing in partnership with UCLA and CalTech. These numbers are nothing to sneeze at: in less than two years, USC has managed to raise an impressive $115 million in funding for 15 startups.

For your background: the University of Southern California, to be more precise its Stevens Institute for Innovation, helps USC spin-offs manage intellectual property, regularly incubates and showcases new high-tech ventures and connects promising young teams to appropriate investors for follow-up financing.

[Finland] Last week marked the end for Nokia’s unsuccessful games service N-Gage. Nokia announced that they will be closing down the service at the end of September 2010. About four hardcore fans protested mildly in the N-Gage blog as the rest of the world yawned. Seems like N-Gage was a project doomed to fail. Who was the target audience again? Oh who cares.

The service was launched in 2003 as an attempt to tap into a growing games market. Anyone remember the clumsy N-Gage phone? Didn’t think so. Although maybe its hideousness and general usability difficulties probably stuck on your mind.

It’s no surprise that Animoto’s new video product is a hit. Upload a few short videos and images, add a song, click a button and bam, you’ve got a very high quality souvenir of your recent holiday or other event. Here’s one I put together for Foo Camp in August. More examples are here.

So far it’s a one-size-fits-all product. And since it’s such a good one no one is complaining. But there have been requests for holiday themed platforms, says CEO Brad Jefferson. And so on December 1 they’ll release themed templates for various holidays. The new product will be called Animoto Originals, and the video below is an example.

Look for holiday and life event themed templates (Christmas, weddings, etc.). Short videos are free. Full length videos (the length of a song) are $3 each, or you can buy a yearly subscription. My parents loved one holiday video I made so much that I had a DVD of it sent to them for $20 – which is another revenue source for the company.

Sample video is below.

With close to 100,000 iPhone applications now available on the App Store, finding the ones the ones that you will actually enjoy and use can be difficult. There are other apps and sites that offer a resource for you to find and share popular apps, and even present customized recommendations, such as AppsFire, 16 Apps or Sidebar, which we recently wrote about here. But what about tapping into your social graph to help find the apps that are popular amongst your friends? Enter Chorus— a free iPhone app that helps you discover apps with the people you trust most – your friends.

Chorus, which is developed by envIO Networks, is sort of like a mobile social network based around the apps that your friends have downloaded. The app features real-time feeds from your designated friends (those who have also downloaded Chorus and whom you have friended) displaying the apps they are downloading, and what they are saying about them in the app.

Sharpcast’s SugarSync, an application that synchronizes data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, is rolling out a service designed specifically for businesses. As people split up their digital lives across devices and the Web, allows you to back-up any kind of digital file, including videos, spreadsheets, photos and documents, in the cloud and access it from virtually anywhere via a variety of devices. You can read our past reviews of SugarSync here and here.

SugarSync for Business, which is specifically designed for small businesses, lets enterprise users sync data across computers and smartphones syncing capabilities, share folders and collaborate with employees within its platform. The version allows administrators to create account for many users, where employees share the storage amount, but each employee has a separate user account (the employee’s data is not shared with other employees). Admins can set storage limits for each user and also receives alerts when user is near limit. And it’s easy to delete a user account without losing the data that’s in the account.