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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back in August, Twitter announced that it was getting ready to roll out an ambitious new project: Geolocation. The idea was to be able to attach a location to every tweet. Today, the API for the feature has been officially turned on, but location is not a part of the main site — yet.

This means that applications that have been built using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first to be able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.

If you’re addicted to Techmeme, like we are, you’re probably addicted to reading it on your mobile phone too. The problem is that the experience hasn’t been great. There was a mobile version of the site, called Mini-Techmeme, but no one seemed to know about it. More importantly, it didn’t give the full Techmeme experience because it didn’t include discussion items. Today, Techmeme has launched a new version of its site optimized for smart phones.

If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items.

Velcome, darling! Look what we have for you! Sergey Brin wearing VFF KSOs, CrunchGear’s favorite – as Greg calls them – “crazy monkey shoes.” He wore them to the ChromeOS event and Michael took a few candid shots of him. I’m personally a VFF convert and I’m very impressed that Sergey is willing to walk around in these.

Embiggen after the jump.

Ever since Google started talking about its Google Chrome OS, developers, competitors, and observers have been wondering why Google needs two operating systems: Android and Chrome OS. At today’s chrome OS briefing, Google was asked whether Chrome OS would support Android apps. The answer is no.

Of course, as Michael pointed out during the Q&A, Steve Jobs said the same thing when he launched the iPhone without apps, and then when he was ready, it was all about the apps. But Google had a good response: they want to make web apps work well on Chrome OS and therefore will only be focusing on those. Later on Sergey Brin touched on the same theme when he said, “Call us dumb businessmen, but . . . we believe the Web platform is a much simpler way.”

Here’s the initial exchange from MG’s live notes:

After being restricted to just a handful of cities for the first several months of its existence, Foursquare is now in a period of rapid expansion around the globe. Fresh of its launch of 15 European cities a couple week ago, today the site has rolled out support for 50, yes 50, new cities.

Though they haven’t formally announced the massive expansion yet, which pretty much doubles their total (they had 53 cities previously), Foursquare’s Harry Heymann tweeted about the addition today. And if you look in the site’s city drop down list, you’ll see a huge list of new cities.

While you won’t be able to sense it at first, expect to feel a high frequency buzz from the direction of Redmond in the next few months. That’s the Windows 7 and Office group fearing the rise of a new juggernaut on low-cost computing hardware, ChromeOS.

ChromeOS may not be powerful, it may not play Far Cry and it may not run Microsoft Office but it’s a game changer. The underpowered laptops that limped along under Vista, XP, or 7 will fly under a new ChromeOS regime and thin-and-light laptops will fall below the vaunted $199 mark as the so-called “Microsoft Tax” – basically the small cost manufacturers pay for OEM licenses – disappears.