Romania din Spania

Here’s a rumor that won’t go away - Facebook has been quietly searching for a partner to take over their year and a half old classified listings application, and may relaunch as early as the end of December.

According to our sources, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a number of classified sites earlier this year (the same model they are using for Facebook Music).

The obvious partner is Oodle, which began powering Walmart Classifieds earlier this year. We’ve heard thin reports that they in fact have won the contract.

Whoever powers Facebook Classifieds has a big hill to climb. Competing with Ebay (and their Kijiji) and Craigslist isn’t trivial. The original thought was that social networks were great for classifieds because you the buyers and sellers know each other. But Facebook’s current classifieds system shows anemic listings - the Silicon Valley network, for example, had a total of ten new listings added yesterday. And for those who’ve forgotten, Microsoft launched their own classifieds site based on MSN friends and private networks (like businesses), and it went nowhere.

Part of the problem is the limited functionality of the existing classifieds system, which allows a short listing, a picture and communication via Facebook’s messaging system. Better software may mean more listings (although the bare-bones and massive Craigslist is a clear exception to that rule). Oodle, or whoever wins the contract, may also bring lots of listings from their other networks.

If Facebook gets this right there is a potential for lucrative advertising dollars - people looking to buy stuff are easy targets.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

This guest post is written by Matt Rutherford, Web Strategist and technology producer for Charlie Rose. Matt focuses on the macro themes affecting the internet and the wider world.

In an intimate interview with Charlie Rose on PBS tonight, and available here, Stanford professor Larry Lessig reveals some profound views on copyright, remix culture, and the new hybrid economy that is emerging.

In particular, Lessig speaks out against the abolitionist movement growing against copyright:

My real fear is that the last 10 years have unleashed a kind of revolutionary attitude among the generation that will take over in 10 years. And it will be hard for them to distinguish between sensible copyright legislation and the kind that we’ve got right now. So my real fear is we’re going to lose control of this animal… I just want to reform [copyright] to make it make sense.

A reform of copyright is clearly overdue. We require a new form of regulation that takes into account the ease and speed of digital distribution and appropriation. Every week, books cross my desk clamoring for this change - some of which are certainly worth reading. And as Lessig explains on the show, it’s counterproductive to continue to criminalize kids for file-sharing, remixing and recreating with content. Copyright was established to encourage creativity, not stifle it.

Cultural Roots

Lessig thinks on a macro time scale. For him, the emerging “read-write creativity” seen on YouTube and elsewhere is actually a return to our natural cultural roots. Historically, man has always absorbed and re-created culture – the symbolic retelling of stories and re-interpreting of songs on the front porch. It is only the emergence of mass media in the last century that caused us to accept a passive relationship with culture.

What’s so extraordinary about the last four years is that they’ve demonstrated that the technology of the internet is giving us a chance to go back to the way culture has been from the beginning…Only the 20th century was a deviation from this. But from the beginning of culture, it was a normal thing for people to be able to create and recreate the most important parts of culture that were around them.

As evidence of this, Lessig cites the numerous Charlie Rose remix videos that are floating around the web.

I’ve seen some of these Rose remixes, and they are enormous. They’re fantastic. But I would hope, you know, eventually you could be in a position to say I want to encourage this, please. Please do it.

A lot of these remixes also come across my desk. In the spirit of research, here are a few of the best so far: Beckett, Kung Fu, nuclear weapons. They’re all superb. And yes, we do encourage this. As Lessig says, Please do it.

Hybrid Economy

There remains the fundamental question of how a ‘new’ copyright can maintain revenue. After all, despite the ease of pointing out the flaws in the current system, it’s quite another matter to propose a viable alternative. Lessig sees the solution, in part, coming from a new hybrid economy, one that combines the traditional commercial economy with sharing economies seen in Wikipedia, YouTube and elsewhere:

Businesses have begun to realize that the world is in part divided between commercial economies like buying and selling books, and sharing economies like Wikipedia where enormous value is produced for nothing, people are doing it all for free. The most interesting thing I think we’ve seen though in the last five years is the development of a hybrid economy where commercial entities are trying to leverage value out of these sharing economies or vice versa, sharing economies trying to leverage value out of commercial entities. And this hybrid depends upon the commercial entity showing the proper respect for the creation in the sharing economy, and giving space to it, encouraging it so that the sharing economy can produce enormous value that is beneficial to the people inside, and also to the commercial business.

Lessig’s Big Idea

Lessig concludes the interview with his ‘big idea’. It is an inspiring, and elegant reminder that we are in the midst of an unprecedented social change. Just as the Gutenberg press facilitated the spread of the Protestant Reformation, fundamentally altering the course of Western civilization, so too is the internet beginning to spark tectonic changes, the breadth of which we don’t yet have the historical perspective to grasp. As Lessig explains:

I think the big idea, as every big idea is, is just one amazing step beyond where we are right now. And I think you think about the Obama campaign, something like Wikipedia, something like the stuff that’s going on on the Internet, the kind that I think of as read write culture. What it really is doing is reviving the sense that people can do something. Not the passive couch potato politics or couch potato culture, but that they can do something. We’re close to making it really effective. I think the next cycle, what you’re going to see in the way politics functions, will be unrecognizable, even from today. But when we’re there, it will be a revival of ideals, aspirations about democracy that will surprise us. The cynicism that we had in the 20th century will look very 20th century.

Larry Lessig’s interview on Charlie Rose was first broadcast on Friday 11/21/08 on PBS, and is available in full or in clips: Larry Lessig (full segment), Larry Lessig (clips). Matt Rutherford can be reached at matt@charlierose.com.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

When Apple started running the anti-Vista commercial (above) mocking Microsoft for spending $300 million on Vista’s own ad campaign instead of on fixing its problems, I called it hypocritical:

Apple’s advertising budget is also pretty massive. I mean, I see more Apple commercials on TV than ads for Barack Obama. Apple is on track to spend more than $3.5 billion on SG&A (selling, general, and administrative expenses) for its fiscal year that ended September 30. How much of that was spent on advertising? I don’t know, but 10 percent doesn’t seem unreasonable.

It turns out that I underestimated Apple’s advertising budget. Lindsay Blakely at Bnet (a former Business 2.0 reporter) found the actual numbers in a subsequent SEC filing. In its 2008 fiscal year that just ended last September, Apple spent a whopping $486 million on advertising. (In fiscal year 2007, it spent $467 million, and in fiscal year 2006 it spent $338 million).

Half a billion dollars on marketing. No wonder I think Apple products are so great.

Update: Microsoft spends more on advertising across all of its combined businesses than Apple does, but its Windows business is what competes most directly with Apple. Microsoft’s total advertising budget across all of its businesses, including Windows, Office, Xbox, and all the enterprise stuff, was the following (from the 10K): “Advertising expense was $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion, and $1.2 billion in fiscal years 2008, 2007, and 2006, respectively.”

Microsoft’s fiscal year ends in June, so these numbers do not reflect the $300 million Vista campaign. But that would have eaten up 25 percent of Microsoft’s entire ad budget for any of the previous three years.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Tomorrow, YouTube will be showcasing its first live stream as it broadcasts its YouTube Live celebration, which will bring together a host of celebrities, musicians, and notable YouTubers for a massive event in San Francisco. The show will be streamed on YouTube beginning at 5 PM PST, and will include performances from Katy Perry, will.i.am, Joe Satriani, Tay Zonday (the Chocolate Rain guy), and a number of other musicians. I’m personally looking forward to a special appearance from the Mythbusters team.

YouTube hasn’t yet made any announcements regarding a livestreaming service for regular users (which would pit it directly against services like Ustream) but it won’t be surprising if we hear from them tomorrow about the company’s upcoming plans. We first heard about possible streaming functionality back in January, and later confirmed that it would be coming some time this year.

YouTube’s Chris Di Cesare says that the event may be the first of a series of annual live-streamed get-togethers celebrating the year in viral videos. We’ll have another post tomorrow with some of the highlights.

Update: There have also been rumors that the event will actually be powered by Ustream or another third party.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

A 17 year old named Eric Calisto is about to learn a valuable lesson in dealing with disappointment. He’s asking Google to use a logo that he created on their site on December 2, his birthday, and he’s urging people to call, email and fax Google with their support.

Not going to happen.

But he may make a few dollars on those ads.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

In partnership with the LeWeb conference, in Paris on December 9th and 10th, we are going to be giving away one ticket to the TechCrunch reader who leaves the best comment about why they want to go (and includes a contact e-mail address). We are also excited that LeWeb’s organizers are offering TechCrunch readers a 20% discount Thank You LeWeb

Without our sponsors TechCrunch would not be possible. Accordingly, we want to thank the following sponsors for their support.

RackSpace a provider of managed hosting solutions

MediaTemple TechCrunch’s exclusive hosting provider, and a worldwide leader in managed hosting solutions across all major platforms

eBuddy a webware meta instant messaging client with over seven million users

IronScale the world’s first fully automated dedicated managed hosting solution

Perflect the makers of PSD2HTML and other solutions to turn design documents into W3C compliant XHTML

Davison a product design and engineering firm

Seesmic the video micro-blogging service that powers video commenting on TechCrunch

Conduit, the makers of the Crunchbar, and other toolbars

ServePath the maker of GoGrid, the world’s first multi-server control panel that allows you to deploy cloud server networks in minutes

Code42 the makers of CrashPlanPro, an automatic backup solution

MailPronto a hosted e-mail solutions provider

TechCrunch also is happy to announce two new sponsorship opportunities. First, CrunchGear is publishing a Holiday Gear Guide, which is the perfect way for your company to reach people as they research their purchases this holiday season. Second, we are now offering a full banner (468×60) on TechCrunch’s RSS feed, which has over 1.2 million subscribers. If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please e-mail Dan Kimerling

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Every time I scroll through my list of ‘Friends’ on Facebook, I inevitably come to the same (somewhat depressing) conclusion: I have absolutely no idea who many of these people are. This is mostly my fault - my standards have always been pretty low when it comes to accepting inbound requests, and I never kept up with assigning them to appropriate Friends Lists. But there’s also the fact that Facebook doesn’t do much to automatically differentiate between friends and acquaintances (while it does filter your News Feed based on who it thinks you’re interested in, there isn’t a way to automatically generate a list of “good friends” versus everyone else).

Meezoog, an Israeli startup backed by veteran VC Yossi Vardi, is looking to help differentiate between acquaintances and close friends. Today the company has launched its own social network at Meezoog.com that attempts to determine how strong the connections are between users by analyzing their relationships on other sites across the web (it also asks you to manually input your relationship with each friend, but this isn’t required). The site presents a number of “paths” connecting you with each friend in a manner similar to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, that helps users determine the degree of “social trust” they have with each user. At this point it’s too early to tell how well the system works, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Besides its social network, Meezoog also plans to offer Facebook and OpenSocial applications that allow users to estimate the nature of their connections with their friends, even if they aren’t on Meezoog’s network. This cross-network analysis is probably the company’s best shot at success - while Meezoog may be able to establish its standalone social network in some regional areas, it will have a very hard time directly competing with established networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Other companies have tried to do similar social connection strength mapping, including Linking Universe.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.

As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.

Where does it go from here?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

If you were intrigued by BitGravity’s Multiview product that allows viewers to choose from six different camera angles as they watch an event, check out episode 177 of Diggnation today at 3 pm PST.

The regular “director’s cut” will be shown at at Diggnation.com. The customized version will be available here on the Revision3 website.

We’ve got a few screenshots of today’s show (actually, we’ve seen the show, but we can’t post it here, you’ll have to watch at 3 PM).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

When most private companies reach 500 shareholders, they trigger an SEC rule which effectively treats them like a public company and requires them to some of the same reporting requirements. Google ran into this issue just before it went public. Now Facebook is quickly reaching that same threshold as it continues to hire and allows employees to sell shares to outside investors.

But in a letter dated October 13, 2008 (embedded below), Facebook’s lawyers argue that rule should not apply to Facebook because most of the shareholders are employees. The SEC granted the exemption.

So Facebook can keep issuing both restricted stock and options to new employees without fear of triggering the (costly) reporting requirements. As long as most of those shares stay inside Facebook, the company should be all right. But if enough employees take advantage of its program allowing them to sell shares to outsiders, and the number of outside investors grows beyond a handful or a few dozen, the SEC might want to revisit this decision.

Facebook Letter to SEC - Get more Legal Forms

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yahoo has been rumored to be selling Paris-based comparative shopping site Kelkoo for some time now, and it appears that they have found a buyer. Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million.

The company has been sold to a UK-based private equity firm called Jamplant Ltd (update: here is a profile of the fund) for something less than €100 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.

Ex-Kelkoo CEO Pierre Chappaz announced the news on his blog (in french), and a copy of the internal email announcing the acquisition is below.

The company has lost much of its momentum since the Yahoo acquisition in the face of significant competition.

The email is below.

Hello Everyone,

It has been since summer since I gave you update email. I have waited because there are so many things nearing launch that I thought it best to wait till they had happened to give the update. Firstly, I would like to end the speculation from the last few months about the future of Kelkoo. Both Toby and I have announced that we were exploring strategic options for the business. One of the options that Laila and I were exploring, in fact pushing for, was to find it a new home for Kelkoo. I am pleased to announce, today, that we have done just that!

The new owners of Kelkoo are a UK based private equity company called Jamplant Ltd funded by several angel investors, and in their own words: “Jamplant Limited is very excited about the price comparison space, and being able to help Kelkoo continue its rapid growth. Philip Smyth, Chairman of Jamplant, believes that with our backing, Kelkoo should be able to accelerate its growth much faster as a standalone company . We are looking forward to working with the highly experienced and established management team at Kelkoo” Laila and I are also very excited about this new phase in the history of Kelkoo, accelerating the growth strategies we have put in place over the last year, and exploring new opportunities for all of us.

So, what does it mean to our daily lives as Kelkoo employees? We will carry on with the great work already in process. This is due to the fact that many people have been working hard behind the scenes to ensure a very smooth transition out of Yahoo! Today at 3pm GMT (4pm CET), we will schedule a video all hands for Kelkoo staff. Please ask any questions that are on your minds to Sasha ( —— ) before the meeting, we will do our best to answer during the broadcast.

I also want to update you on the things we are delivering on our top 3 priorities. Out of the new organization of Kelkoo last October, the Country Managers and the Exec Team have spent time thinking about and stretching our expectations of Kelkoo. That resulted in the following mission statement (slightly altered with the help of our new marketing director, Bernard):

Ø Kelkoo will be integral to the online retail experience by completely satisfying the needs of our users, helping them to find and discover what and where to buy. In doing this, we will ultimately deliver more buyers to retailers than any other site.

To achieve this, we have all been pushing on delivering on the following priorities:

* Fix the Search
o (Convergence) which has seen the launch of Search 5 in France and Netherlands and is currently showing nearly - - - % uplift on revenue per visit
o (Comprehensiveness) we have finalized the agreement with - - -, are working with them to
* Give more noticeable value to users thru creating Kelkoo Club
o - - - launched in all countries in July
o - - - launched in some countries in September
o Cash-Back launched in beta in the UK yesterday, and will launch in FR next week
* Build the Brand
o We have kicked off our own version of project Goldmine , to study and understand our customers and their needs. We have appointed three agencies to help us with the project, which should complete by the end of February. An exciting part of this project will be to interview some employees on “what is Kelkoo”, and feed that back to the business priorities we will establish over the next 6 months.

So you can see, that we are delivering more and faster than ever in our history. Laila and I are proud of the work that has been done so far, and believe that the future of Kelkoo is really bright.

In closing, I feel that it is important to thank Yahoo! for all the investment and work that has gone into Kelkoo and our employees over the past 4 years. To list all of the people we will miss would take an age, but in particular, I would like to thank Toby and Jonathan Wolf for making the new chapter possible.

Regards,
Glen & Laila

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Some apps wander around the wilderness for a while until they can find the perfect home. For Evernote, that home is the iPhone. The note-taking, picture-capturing, voice-recording, handwriting-recognizing universal memory service has been under development for years and launched last February in private beta on the PC. But it wasn’t until May 29 that it debuted on the iTunes store as an iPhone app. That’s when it started to take off.

Now Evernote has 512,000 registered users, who have created 13.8 million notes. In addition to the iPhone app, Evernote offers its service thorugh a PC client, a Mac client, a Website, and other mobile devices. The iPhone app is the most popular, being used 57% of the time. It is followed by the Web (51%), the PC client (32%), the Mac (28%), and other mobile clients bring up the rear (8%). These numbers add up to more than 100 because nearly half of all users access the service via more than one app.

The PC and Mac clients are the most fully-featured, yet it is the iPhone app that gave Evernote its critical mass. Perhaps that’s because the iPhone app lets you take pictures using the camera, append a note and save it to your Evernote page, where it is archived and searchable. It is more difficult to capture memories with a laptop.

Here is Evernote’s Elevator Pitch:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Color me impressed with this one: Prague-based 360 Cities, a network of ‘Virtual Reality’ photographers promoting high-resolution spherical imagery, has integrated its portfolio of stunning 360° panorama shots into the Featured Preview Layer for Google Earth.

A collection of the panoramas just became visible automatically to every user of the free 3D earth visualization software, and the rest of the 360cities database, which is nearly 10,000 spherical images strong, has been added to the Gallery in Google Earth as well. Some of these are breathtakingly beautiful: check out this shot of the Berlin holocaust memorial, or the inside of this Iranian mosque, or this market place in Gambia, or the Cuban corner bar I embedded below.

I love seeing people outside of Google doing their best to enhance the Google Earth experience, although it must be said that the company is doing its part too. Recently, they made it possible to visit Ancient Rome in 3D.

Note: this only works with the latest version of Google Earth (4.2), which features the new PhotoOverlay format. You can download the KMZ file here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I took some shots of 2.2 in action. The walking directions would have been great for the past two weeks - I've had so much trouble using car-based GPS in walking/biking cities. Streetview is also great for cities like New York but it's very limited right now - there was no information for Paris, for example. The podcast download is also really nice to have. An impressively end-user-oriented update by Apple this time around.

We’ve received two reports tonight of users having their email notification settings on Facebook deleted. They were notified at login that there was a problem, and told to head over to the Notifications page to reset them.

At least one user is angry about it. The other (Simon from Ozmota), who sent the screenshot above, was more contemplative. He suggests someone simply forgot to back up a table before implementing an enhancement. I checked my account, and it’s fine.

Whatever happened, it’s a small embarrassment. The kind you see with young startups all the time. And Facebook, despite its massive growth, is still a young startup.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Bucket tests and experimental products are one thing. But to mess with the real Google search is serious stuff. Why did they do it?

Google’s overall search share has grown substantially this year (and all other years since it went live). Their share of search advertising dollars is likely even higher.

The changes Google made to search today certainly make it more interactive and social. I can now write comments on search results, and read comments from everyone about TechCrunch (or anything else - see the awesomely useful TechCrunch comments in the image below, along with my votes on each) and vote them up or down. I can move search results around on the page - up, down, or off the page entirely. I can also add other URLs into search results.

In fact. Google paid Wikia Search the highest compliment possible today. They copied most of their features.

So, why did they do it?

In their blog post, Google says they’ve created a way to customize search results, and share (via the comments). They say they are striving to improve the search experience, and giving people tools to make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.

My guess is they’ve made the changes to see what kind of data they get, and how it can be used to make their overall search results better. So when Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches,” I think they’re only being half-truthful. All this data, in aggregate, will certainly be used to improve Google search results in general.

The worst part of the new stuff is you can’t turn it off. Once you click “Yes, continue” you’re in. And as far as I can tell, you can’t get back to the good old Google that worked just fine.

Google, I’m begging. Please pull a Lively and get rid of this thing fast.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn’t a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo’s Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the beta announced to the public back in January.

Where as the public beta can be found at beta.m.yahoo.com, our tipster dug up the new version by instead navigating to beta2.m.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, it seems we weren’t supposed to see this just yet; within a half-hour of us reaching out to Yahoo! for comment, the page had become password protected - but not before we snagged a couple screenshots.

The screenshots you’ll see below are what you’d see on an iPhone - on most other handsets, the new beta will look more like the current standard mobile front page: white backgrounds, light image use, etc. The visual changes of the iPhone version from the first beta to beta 2 are somewhat minimal - at least, they’re much less extreme than the jump made between the current m.yahoo.com and the first beta. They’ve decreased the gloss on the gradients, but have rounded out the corners. They’ve also added in a spot for advertisements above the fold, which I don’t remember being there before.

More notable than visual tweaks, however, is the addition of Yahoo’s oneConnect and onePlace. oneConnect brings in the notifications and updates from your e-mail accounts (Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo) and social networks (Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Twitter, Dopplr, and a bunch of others), and allows you to update your status at all appropriate sites in one quick swoop. onePlace is a similar all-in-one concept but for general information, squeezing together news, weather, stocks, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and more.

Both oneConnect and onePlace were announced as downloadable applications in the first quarter of 2008, though it seems that an iPhone version of oneConnect is the only thing to have made it out thus far. This is the first time we’ve seen a browser based version of either.

Oh - and if you’re curious as to what Yahoo had to say on the matter after they locked it up tight: they’re “constantly working on innovations” but they have “nothing to announce anytime soon.”

(I’ve removed a bunch of the status updates from image 2 to keep it from making this page absurdly long. Click the image for the fullsize version.)

[Thanks Matt!]

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

When we announced the 7 finalists of the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge two weeks ago, we dubbed Yieldex an “online ad optimization engine for Web publishers”. It’s time to take a closer look at what that means, because the company has just been awarded the top prize in the contest, bringing home $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in services credits plus an investment offer from Amazon.com.

Yieldex, not to be confused with similar service YieldBuild, has a solution for managing ad inventory, enabling Web publishers to allocate advertising campaigns more efficiently by forecasting overlapping inventory and predicting how ads are going to deliver. All in all, it seems like a nice solution to hmm … yield more revenue out of premium ad inventory, but I’m left wondering if ensuring optimal ad campaigns isn’t something that’s baked into most ad serving solutions already, or at least should be? I mean, it’s one of the core reasons for using an ad serving system in the first place, right?

Amazon.com annually rewards the most innovative US startup built on its cloud-computing infrastructure, and they get hundreds of applications every year, so there must be something about Yieldex that made them the winner.

So, congratulations to Yieldex and its founders, which consists of industry veterans from Matchlogic and NetGravity (check out CEO Tom Shields’ blog post on winning the award). The prize comes in addition to a previous, undisclosed seed funding round from Sequel Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Woodside Fund.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Orb, a $9.99 iPhone application that should be familiar to home networking buffs, is available now and will stream music from your home computer, photos, and live television from a TV tuner card - all over the Internet. It can even stream input from a webcam to your phone.