TechCrunch:- When I think of Blackberry users, I think of accountants, lawyers and anyone else who wears a tie and carries a briefcase. MySpace users, sorta the opposite. But there must be some significant overlap, because 400,000 people downloaded the MySpace Blackberry application in the last week, says MySpace - it was launched on November 12. Both RIM and MySpace say this is a record - no other application has been downloaded so quickly onto Blackberry devices, and MySpace has never had an application on any platform be downloaded as often.

Ajaxian » Front Page:- A little Friday fun here from Jacob Seidelin. He has added FlickrBrot to his other fun fractal examples of the past. FlickrBrot commemorates the birthday of Mandelbrot himself: Today is the birthday of Benoit Mandelbrot. About 30 years ago he pulled a bit of mathematical beauty out of his head that would make him father of what [...]

TechCrunch:- YieldBuild, an ad optimization platform that helps users manage multiple ad networks and position advertisements on their webpages, has launched its self-service program to the public. When we last covered the company, YieldBuild was still in private beta and only sites with more than 500,000 monthly visitors were eligible to participate. Now, web publishers of any size are welcome to join, and the installation process has been streamlined to require only a few snippets of JavaScript. YieldBuild helps publishers maximize their ad revenues in a number of ways. To begin, the publisher ties their accounts from Google AdSense and similar services to their YieldBuild account. Next, they designate a...

TechCrunch:- We'd noticed an increasing number of people emailing on a large-scale bucket test (a product change tested on just a percentage of total users) that Google has been conducting for months - adding a Digg-like voting feature to search results (which also changes the ranking) as well as user comments. Tonight, Google apparently said "what the hell" and turned it on for everyone. The changes are called SearchWiki, and are a dramatic departure from Google's streamlined, algorithm-rules approach to search. It takes features from Digg to allow users to...

TechCrunch:- Content Delivery Network BitGravity is testing a new product they're calling Multiview (at least internally) that delivers up to six different synchronized high definition video streams at once. The viewer sees the normal view but can click on any of the other views at any time, and audio is obviously synchronized. The result is this: the viewer is put in the producer's chair, and can switch camera angles at any time. Why would you want this? I'm speculating, but an obvious use is sporting events. Instead of watching whatever is on screen, viewers could watch particular players instead. And if a particularly interesting play happens, users can switch cameras to see it from different angles.

ReadWriteWeb:- Google put on a full court media push tonight for a major change the company is making to its search experience. According to the Official Google Blog and a very unusual email the company sent out to press, a new feature called Google Search Wiki will launch soon.

TechCrunch:- When we first wrote about Genwi a year ago, it was a social feed reader with content feeds that could be organized by different categories (blogs, news, videos, music, podcasts) and shared with your friends. Today, it is relaunching with a completely new design that takes into account what your friends are doing across the Web as well. You can think of Genwi as a combination of Google Reader and FriendFeed with sophisticated search, auto-categorization, and filtering features. As before, Genwi is a super RSS feed reader. It suggests feeds by category, or you can add your own (via search or by importing an OPML file from another reader). You can also invite your friends by giving Genwi permission to match its members to your contacts in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn,...

ReadWriteWeb:- It's clear now that the Web has once and for all replaced TV's role in the music business. Yesterday Guns n' Roses released their very long awaited album Chinese Democracy via a colorful MySpace page. Then today NPR announced that they will offer an "Exclusive First Listen" to the new albums of two music legends - Neil Young and Paul McCartney. In late September NPR had a similar arrangement for Bob Dylan's latest album. Younger musicians are flocking to Web platforms such as Imeem and last.fm to promote their music. For bands still under the radar, all the afore-mentioned sites cater to them - but also small sites like

TechCrunch:- Yahoo appears to be quite serious about openness and promoting third party content and applications on their massively visited home page. Today they're announcing the addition of an eBay widget to the new Yahoo home page, which is still being tested with just a subset of Yahoo users. The widget will be added to the My Applications dashboard area on the left. eBay users can use the widget to monitor buys and sells, check recent bids and get reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also search listings without leaving Yahoo. Yahoo, like AOL, has made a subtle but...

TechCrunch:- Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update. In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice. Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come...

TechCrunch:- Every once in a while we come across a company that seems to have a giant bullseye on it for acquisition, with a great product, viable business model, and a talented team. Twilio, a startup that has created an intuitive API for a variety of telephony services, is that kind of company (it also managed to Rick Roll my boss). The startup has developed a simple API with pay-as-you-go pricing that allows developers to quickly implement phone services into their applications, opening the door to a number of services that were previously only accessible to the small sliver of engineers trained in the dark magic of phone calls. Twilio is launching today in private beta, and TechCrunch readers can grab an invite

ReadWriteWeb:- Walter Mossberg, who has been reviewing technology since 1991 for the Wall Street Journal in his weekly "Personal Technology" column, is convinced the companies that succeed in this type of econaclypse, as AllThingsD has dubbed the economy, will be those that focus on innovation. "It has been my observation that while things do slow down in bad times, they don't stop," Mossberg said. Speaking to a packed room this week at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City CA,...

TechCrunch:- For all their mesmerizing graphics and adrenaline fueled gameplay, it might come as a surprise to non-gamers that many of today's most popular computer games are bogged down by downtime (I should know - I spent the better part of 1999 mining virtual ore in Ultima Online to become a master blacksmith, and enjoyed about 10 minutes of it). MMOs like World of Warcraft see epic battles punctuated by hours of wandering mostly empty wilderness, while FPS games often punish gamers for dying by making them sit out and watch their comrades go at it until the beginning of the next round. Today GotGame is giving these gamers something to do during these bouts of boredom. The company has released Rogue, a web browser based on WebKit and Adobe's AIR platform that...

ReadWriteWeb:- Crowd Science is a new tool that allows web publishers to gather demographic data. We're using Crowd Science currently on ReadWriteWeb - you may have already come across a pop-up invite and filled out the survey. If you haven't, that's because it's done randomly. So if you do get the Crowd Science pop-up, we'd love it if you filled in the demographic survey. The data from this survey lets us know more about our readers, which helps guide us in our topic selection and so on. Plus of course it enables us to get sponsors and ads that are highly relevant.

TechCrunch:- Last I heard about Leapfish (this was a couple of years ago), they ran a useless but fun tool that provided you with a free appraisal for your domain name based on a variety of ratings and criteria. Now they're back with an equally useless tool, this time without the fun part. The company just revamped itself under the ownership of California-based DotNext, morphing into what they refer to as a "multi-dimensional information aggregator," which is actually nothing more than yet another meta search engine. You know the kind: sites that pull together search results from real engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo and attempt to differentiate themselves by adding tabs for meta-searching images, videos, Q&A, blogs, and so on. Leapfish also displays a number of static, non-customizable widgets on their homepage for the latest...

TechCrunch:- Live Current Media, a Canadian company which is in the business of developing, operating and monetizing premium domain names, has raised a little over $1 million through a private placement. The money comes from Live Current's own management team and a couple of outside investors, and is expected to be the first part of a private funding which could total up to $2 million in the next 15 days. Live Current, which changed its name from Communicate.com earlier this year, is a publicly traded company (OTCbb:LIVC). The investors paid 65 cents per unit, a premium of 38% to yesterday’s closing price of 40 cents. The financial performance isn't looking that great, however (more after the jump).

ReadWriteWeb:- According to a report by Wired's Meghan Keane, YouTube is testing stereo sound as a default option for videos and is also offering very high quality HD versions of a small selection of clips. We weren't able to find a lot of videos that were encoded in the 720p HD format, but it is important to note that this is different from the 'watch in high quality' option YouTube already offers, which only features a resolution of 480x360 and which doesn't look half as good as the 720p option. It would not surprise us if Google was adding these options to give professional content producers and TV networks more of an incentive to upload their content to YouTube instead of using Google's competitors.

ReadWriteWeb:- The ways young people use the internet everyday are transforming learning in ways that adults often fail to understand but represent major new opportunities that need to be taken advantage of by supportive educators. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Casual_Internet_Use_Is_Good_for_Kids';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';That's the conclusion of a major new study by 28 researchers over three years released today by the University of California at Berkley and the MacArthur Foundation.

ReadWriteWeb:- In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well - a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.

TechCrunch:- Senor Gruber has uncovered a trick inside Google's Mobile app that uses an undocumented method to access the iPhones proximity sensor. In normal situations, the iPhone proximity sensor - the little thing in the top of the iPhone that knows when you have it up to your face - can be turned on or off. When it's on and you place the phone up to your ear the screen stops responding. When it's off, the sensor does nothing. This is key because no information is passed during this on or off toggle. There is no way to tell if the proximity sensor has been triggered.

ReadWriteWeb:- When we first reviewed Mufin, a music recommendation service that is entirely based around algorithms that can automatically detect the similarities between different songs, we only gave it a pretty average review. Since then, however, Mufin has greatly improved its service and added Facebook and Myspace applications. The most interesting new product, however, is Mufin's iTunes plugin, which brings Mufin's recommendation engine to your own iTunes collection and allows you to create automatic playlists based solely on the musical similarities between the songs.

TechCrunch:- FanIQ, a sports site that focuses more on entertaining its users than bogging them down with the stats and opinion pieces found on the likes of ESPN, has had a landmark year. The site launched in 2006, but hasn't really hit its stride until now: since January, the site has grown by over 2000%, recently hitting as many as 2.4 million unique users and 1.5 million registered members. These figures pale in comparison to the larger sports sites and popular fantasy leagues, but the rate of growth is very impressive nonetheless. FanIQ differentiates itself from other sports sites by offering a set of casual games and community features alongside more traditional sports headlines. To encourage participation, the site has a points system that rewards users who write blog posts and play the site's integrated trivia...

TechCrunch:- Real Girls Media, a San Francisco-based online publishing company specializes in—you guessed it—social communities for women, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding led by Meredith Corporation, which took a minority stake in the company. RGM, which was founded in 2006, had previously raised $6 million in Series A funding from 3i and WaldenVC. The agreement adds Real Girls Media Network's traffic (which comes primarily from flagship community site DivineCaroline) to Meredith’s network, which the company claims increases Meredith’s unique visitors to an admirable 15 million uniques each month.

TechCrunch:- The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly report on U.S. online advertising revenues. For the quarter, they estimate online advertising revenues were almost $5.9 billion ($5.865 billion, to be exact), which is an 11 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago and a 2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008. If you look at the (awfully blurry) graph above, you can see that online advertising revenues have been pretty much flat all year long.

Ajaxian » Front Page:- YUI and Google Most everyone knows that Google has really stepped up to the plate by helping many JavaScript library projects host their builds on the Google AJAX Libraries API. Apart from providing a central distribution point for these libraries, the bandwidth cost savings alone go a long way in helping frameworks service there users in [...]

ReadWriteWeb:- Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.

TechCrunch:- Mufin, a powerful music recommendation engine that actually works, has launched to the public. We last covered the site in early October, when it opened in a restricted private beta. The site, which was created by the same organization that created the now-ubiquitous MP3 file format, uses an advanced algorithm to 'listen to' songs and identify similar sounding tracks based on over 40 characteristics. Such automated systems are very hard to pull off (which is why

TechCrunch:- Will the music subscription business ever grow beyond its current niche? It looks increasingly doubtful. Today, eMusic announced that since it launched its current music subscription service in 2003, customers have downloaded 250 million songs. Apple's iTunes, by comparison, has sold more than 5 billion songs since it opened the iTunes Store in April, 2003. That makes eMusic one twentieth the size of iTunes. The way eMusic works is you pay a subscription of between $12 and $20 a month and then you can download 30 to 75 songs a month and keep them. You can also purchase songs above those limits, starting at $0.25 a track. eMusic has a catalog of 4.5 million songs, and is particularly strong in independent music. It currently has 400,000 subscribers, and the company expects to make...

ReadWriteWeb:- Whenever there is a conference or event, there's a secondary bit of action taking place behind the scenes: the backchannel. Here, the attendees are live blogging, twittering, posting photos, and streaming live video about what they're seeing on stage or in and around the venue. Twitter has always been the microblogging platform of choice in this scenario, but starting today, they just might have new competition from Brightkite, the mobile social networking service that's making a name for itself among the early adopters.

ReadWriteWeb:- These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.

Ajaxian » Front Page:- PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   $(window).load(function() {   $("#example").liquidCanvas(     "[shadow border gradient] => roundedRect{radius:50}"); });   This is an example of Liquid Canvas, a new library from Steffen Rusitschka who created ShadedBorder and RUZEE.Borders. Liquid Canvas is a JavaScript library which allows you to draw inside an HTML canvas element with an easy yet powerful description language. Automatic generation of HTML canvas elements [...]

Ajaxian » Front Page:- Via Myk Melez comes word that Firefox 3 supports HTML 5 web protocol handlers, which I had not realized before. These are really nifty: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto",                                   "https://www.example.com/?uri=%s",                             [...]

Ajaxian » Front Page:- Mark Pilgrim is back telling us what is new in the world of HTML 5 and focuses on changes with the video tag and API: The big news this week is a major revamping of how browsers should process multimedia in the <audio> and <video> elements. r2404 makes a number of important changes. First, the canPlayType() [...]

ReadWriteWeb:- The current economic climate is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive year-long implementations of behind-the-firewall software look to be behind us.

Ajaxian » Front Page:- Regardless of whether you’re in the Google camp or in the Microsoft camp, I think it’s a fair statement to say that these differences of viewpoint accurately reflect each company’s core strength and focus: Google wants the browser to grow to subsume the desktop; Microsoft wants the desktop to grow to subsume the [...]

TechCrunch:- It's hard to believe that nearly a year has gone by since we gave out those crazy gorilla awards to the best startup and product successes in Silicon Valley and around the world. Some of the photos from last year are here. The Crunchies are back. We are once again partnering with some of our favorite blogs - thank you to co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and

ReadWriteWeb:- In an economic environment where a number of companies are stumbling, it's important to remember that sometimes even Google makes bad decisions. Such would be the case with Lively, a browser-based virtual world environment - and purported Second Life killer - that Google launched this summer to great fanfare.

TechCrunch:- It's not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent's head against the corner post, but outside the ring it's hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends. Wrestlers aren't stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That's why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it's not really a social network. It's just a craptastic promotional vehicle. And some of those wrestlers aren't so bright. But they are lonely.

ReadWriteWeb:- Editor's note: we're currently running a series of 'Sponsor Posts', focused on use cases and business stories. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

TechCrunch:- Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit. It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-baseed virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites. Lively launched just last July. The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31, so we are adding Lively to the deadpool. Lively just never took off, and was extremely far afield for Google. We should have known something was up when we noticed that it didn't work with Google's own browser, Chrome. What else is being cut at Google?

ReadWriteWeb:- This May Yahoo! started testing an "all in one" search product called Yahoo Glue in India. It's a really cool service that tonight becomes available to US users of Yahoo.

TechCrunch:- Yahoo Glue, a new search results page design that the company has been testing in India, is rolling out to the US market this evening. You can view it at glue.yahoo.com, although Yahoo says it is rolling out in stages, so sit tight if you don't see it. It's also a little different than the Indian version, and includes a number of resources beyond simple search results. On a typical query, content from Wikipedia, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, blog search results (from Google) and YouTube videos are shown. For the US, Yahoo is starting with a limited set of topics and using a two column instead of a three column design. They've also left...

TechCrunch:- The cutbacks continue, even at seemingly healthy startups. Social recommendation engine Strands let exactly 10 percent, or 14 people go (7 in the U.S. and 7 in Spain), the company confirms. Strands has raised a total of $55 million, still employs 125 people, and is hiring for other positions. It also just announced a mobile version for Nokia S60 phones. Qik, which lets you stream live video from your cell phone, also laid off about 10 percent of its employees, which in its case amounted to five people. We got a tip that the reason for the layoffs is because the startup could not raise a $10 to $15 million round, but a...

TechCrunch:- The ‘iPhone killer’ label (which I hate using – BTW) as been thrown around since the first touch-screen device hit the market after the original iPhone was launched last year and, unfortunately, nothing has been able to live up to the hype. Both consumers (you) and techies (us) have been eagerly awaiting the launch of the Storm in the hopes that it would knock down the iPhone a peg or level the playing field. I don’t want to dash your dreams, but the Storm is not on par with the iPhone. It is, however, the closest device available on the market today to compete with the iPhone, but that’s not saying much. Imagine the iPhone being on top of a mountain with the rest of the touch-screen devices at base camp. The Storm sits atop all the rest, but it’s still at base camp. Video after the jump.

TechCrunch:- In other Mozilla news, Firefox hit a major milestone today with the one billionth download of add-on software for the browser. That feat took three and half years. Many of those downloads are never used more than once or twice, of course. But there is no doubt about it that Firefox is major software platform. Just look at StumbleUpon, it was built on top of Firefox.

TechCrunch:- Make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. While doing that take a look at our new Crunchboard Service and Sales Directories. They are a great way to connect with the start-up community. Click through for some of jobs posted in the past week.

TechCrunch:- Today, the (for-now) non-profit Mozilla Foundation released its financial statements for 2007 (embedded below). Revenues for the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser were up 12 percent to $75 million, with search-related royalties from Google accounting for 88 percent of the total, or $66 million. (Another $2 million or so came from other search engines). Those revenues come from Mozilla's portion of the search advertising revenues generated by the default Google search box in the Firefox browser. Google's overall percentage of Mozilla's revenues is even bigger than it was in 2006, when it accounted for 85 percent. And that proportion may continue to grow over the next three years, as Google just

TechCrunch:- Chinese Democracy, the first new Guns N' Roses album since 1991, debuts tonight at 9 PM PST exclusively on MySpace Music, where fans can listen to it for free. Well, actually it debuted on BitTorrent a while ago, but we're not talking about that. Also, the band has previously released two songs, Chinese Democracy and Better, to radio stations and music sites in the past couple of weeks. But tonight is the big debut, and for most people it will be the first time they hear the music. It will be available in 25 countries: US, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Turkey, Poland, India, Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan.

TechCrunch:- 2007 person-to-person music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and movie/television piracy continues to grow, says a new study. And all that free promotion didn't cost them a penny. At least, that's how Techdirt sees it. And I agree. Instead of embracing what might be the largest free marketing giveaway in the history of the world, the music labels instead sue their customers. And ask the social networks for handouts. Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached....

ReadWriteWeb:- Mozilla today announced that it has served its 1 billionth addon download since they started keeping track of these downloads in 2005. digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Mozilla_One_Billion_Addons_Served_Here_Are_Some_of_the_Best';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Currently, Mozilla's users are downloading close to 1.5 million addons every day.