Startup2Startup, a popular invite-only Silicon Valley networking event, held its 7th get-together last night, bringing 140 entrepreneurs together. The event is the brainchild of Dave McClure, the venerable startup angel investor who recently joined Founders Fund, and the event sponsors include some of the top VCs in the valley.

The monthly event consists of a dinner, with an invited speaker or two giving a presentation followed by moderated table-by-table conversations (plus healthy lobby chatter before and afterwords). Startup2Startup brings together three types of startup people: startup rookies and students; entrepreneurs and startup veterans; and investors and experienced corporate employees. See the photo set of the night’s activities and introductory video below:

Part of the event’s success has been the ability to pull in big names to speak, including Chad Hurley, James Hong, Naval Ravikant, Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, Reid Hoffman, Matt Cohler, Paul Graham, and Jessica Livingston.

The featured speaker last night was Amy Jo Kim of ShuffleBrain, who gave a great presentation on the psychology and practices behind successful games and how to apply them to web apps. Showing how gaming principals make many popular sites work (with a case study on YouTube), Kim’s talk gave practical advice applicable to any social media site. Here’s the slideshow:

The table conversation allows the startup “rookies” — defined as being a part of their first startup (or not yet part of one) and having raised less than $1 million — to ask whatever they’d like about business, make connections, learn from veterans, and meet investors. My tablemates at last night’s event included Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare, Matt Cutts from Google, and founders from various startups including Apture, Foodzie, techVenture, Life360, among others. Each table brings a good mix of first-time founders, people itching to do a startup, investors (typically both VC and Angel), seasoned entrepreneurs, and a moderator. The conversation is generally open, engaging, and off-the-record.

February’s speaker will be Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path and Google fame. The price of the event is $40 for the invited rookies, but we’ve procured five free tickets for TechCrunch readers. All you have to do is 1) be a startup founder, rookie, or wannabe and 2) leave a comment below explaining why you want to go. We’ll pick the best five submissions and send the winners to the event.

UPDATED:: Here’s the entire video of the event:

The 2008 Rails Rumble, a competition for Ruby on Rails coders, saw 131 web applications launch into the wild this past weekend. The quality of the applications increased dramatically this year, turning the competition into something of a startup hyper-incubator, with the goal of producing apps that not only win votes but become sustained products.

The rules are simple: you, along with up to three hacker friends, can’t start coding until midnight on Friday and you must finish by midnight on Sunday. All code is loaded into private GitHub repositories and all apps are deployed onto Linode virtual servers (both of which are provided for free by sponsors). And as the weekend draws to an end, your (hopefully) functional app will become frozen for testing and voting by anyone on the net.

The apps that dominated this year’s Rumble (the second ever held) relied a lot less on developing their own “network effect” than last year’s. Many were built around Twitter, and there were a number of project collaboration apps as well. The participants were also significantly more professional and thrived on the pressure to get a real product off the ground. Around five apps out of 90 total from the 2007 competition are still around today, including last year’s winner Tasty Planner. The Rails Rumble team, a volunteer organizing committee led by Nick Plante and Darcy Laycock, expects that number to grow significantly this year.

While the 2008 Rumble was Rails-specific, Plante hopes to host more events and potentially different types of competitions. He says the behind-the-scenes work done this year was primarily concerned with building “a turn-key solution for hosting a coding competition,” including registration and voting infrastructure. This year’s competition also made a big push for OpenID; it was not only required for registration and voting, approximately 95% of competition apps integrated the standard as well.

Here are some stats from the event:

• Last year: 324 participants on 140 teams. 90 teams qualified (successfully created an app).
• This year: 529 total participants on 231 teams. 131 teams qualified.
• 22 solo teams, 28 teams with two members, 27 teams with three people, 54 teams with four people
• 14355 total commits to GitHub (avg 112 per team).
• 245257 total Lines of Code (not including Rails)

Want to get involved? Voting for 2008 Rails Rumble begins now. Here’s how it works: signup to vote and get 10 random app invitations. If you cast votes, you’ll receive 10 more, and so on. Winners of this year’s Rumble will get (among lesser prizes) a mint-condition 1986 Chuck Norris Undercover Agent Action Figure (“Chuck Norris does not sleep…He waits”). So check out some of these apps, vote, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Update: More information has been released here.

Tomorrow Mozilla will launch a new geotagging project called Geode into Mozilla Labs that promises to leverage your physical location to enhance your overall browsing experience. More details will be provided in an official post tomorrow, but this is what we know already:

Geode is a Firefox add-on that understands location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content.

For example with Geode, a user who is looking for restaurants while they are out of town will be able load up their favorite review site and find suggestions a couple blocks away and plot directions there.

It’s unclear how Firefox actually intends to determine a user’s location, especially since Mozilla doesn’t have a mobile browser that could provide GPS data. How web apps are supposed to leverage the plugin is also yet to be seen.

Geode joins the recently announced Labs projects Ubiquity and Snowl. We’ll post more details as soon as we get them.

After a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male-oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville.

The video’s a bit dark, but it’s enthusiastically delivered and straight-forward. Here’s the pitch:

As Eric describes further in the comments of the pitch:

…the options for challenges are endless as they can be user created or supplied by someone like the staff at Be The Better Man, some examples would include who can do the best Christopher Walken impression? Do you have the most bad ass beerpong table? What is the best song for the summer?

Now a Christopher Walken impersonator contest — that’s something I’d like the internet to do right. When they launch this fall, BeTheBetterMan.com faces some tough competition in their space, including the star-backed iBeatYou and video-focused Strutta.

Let us know what you think of this pitch in the comments.

Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.

Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.

We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.

Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date.

Apture

Apture is a startup trying to bring “depth to the web” with contextual popups that require no browser plugin. The product’s blog integration provides a very visual and intuitive way of navigating CrunchBase entries. Here are some examples (click on the little book icons to the left of the links): YouTube, FriendFeed and Evan Williams. Also, check out this video they compiled:

Zemanta

Zemanta, a blogging enhancement tool that launched back in March, recently integrated CrunchBase so that publishers can easily slurp in extra information like company logos into their posts.

Zemanta’s product integrates closely into blogging platforms such as WordPress, and it helps to semantically link up parts of your post with sites from around the web (CrunchBase now included). These guys have been on our case (and rightly so) to release an API for a couple of months now, so it’s great to see their implementation go live. They even offer their own API which takes plain text as input (say, a blog post), and spits out correctly disambiguated CrunchBase entities.

You can check out a demo of their product here.

Flash CrunchBase

Nicolás Parziale has created a very cool flash app inspired by They Rule that visualizes the graph of connections throughout CrunchBase. You can start with a company (such as Digg, shown below) and then flesh out different parts of the graph with your mouse. You can even input any two companies, causing the app to crawl the web and visually display all of the connections between the two.

Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic‘s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. Here are the stats for WordPress.com over the last year:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

This growth is also seems significant versus WordPress.com’s main competitor, Typepad. Comscore numbers put US numbers at 20.9M uniques for WordPress.com against 7.2M on Typepad.com, and internationally 97.8M vs. 16.8M. Here’s the Compete graph (which only measures US traffic):

And for WordPress.org (the self-hosted, open-source version), Mullenweg announced today that there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs in the wild. This figure is based on real data (not sampling), similar to Mozilla accumulating browser stats. Downloads from WordPress.org went over 11 million since last summer (up from 2.8 million the year before), thanks to over 11 new WP releases.

The focus for 2009? Easier upgrades. Their growth, Mullenweg says, is not dissimilar from other popular products (he mentioned Microsoft, OSX, iPhone, Facebook platform as examples), and believes that good platforms need good self-updating systems. Automattic has a three-prong strategy for better updates: better community awareness, working with webhosts, and adding automatic upgrades functionality to WordPress. Mullenweg envisions the upgrade process to work just like Firefox: one-click, with a list of plugin and theme incompatibilities generated. WordPress.org’s plugin directory (and a recently-launched theme directory) will help make this possible. Many new features are also in the pipeline, including the much anticipated BuddyPress, but that a clean update system will remove one of the biggest thorns for WP users.

Also up for 2009 is better security. Their most recent release, 2.6.1, was an optional update (no security patches), which is a nice departure from their previous, critical ‘dot’ releases. WordPress has received a lot of flack for this recently: they were given a 2008 Pwnie for Mass 0wnage for numerous vulnerabilities that led to mass hacking.

Since we relaunched the property five months ago, we’ve focused on accumulating and structuring the world’s most useful data about technology. And we’ve worked to make this data available in a variety of ways. For example, we’ve aggregated funding rounds and acquisitions, and we’ve built out maps and advanced search. This next step – opening up our data completely so that anyone can use it however they want – is not only logical but central to our mission as well.

The CrunchBase API is read-only and uses JSON for output. There are no developer accounts to sign up for and no throttling of requests. Just point your
browser to a special URL like this one (or curl it from the command-line), and you’ll receive pretty-printed JSON of all the data found on a normal page. The data includes company descriptions, geocoded office locations, acquisitions, executive boards, competitors, and much more.

API requests also include the permalinks (URLs) of other entities on CrunchBase that can be used to navigate across the database. While the API is released in beta, we’re versioning it so that integrations won’t break when we make changes.

We are still finalizing our data policies and terms of use, but we’ll be publishing all content under the Creative Commons Attribution License or something very similar, which means third parties are free to use it with attribution and a link back to CrunchBase. We’ve also made available some CrunchBase images (logos, iPhone icons, etc) for those who want to acknowledge us more visibly.

We’re really excited to see how the API gets used, so please let us know what you come up with.

You can follow CrunchBase on Twitter for updates about the API and other features (or just to give us a shout-out). We’ve also started a CrunchBase Blog where we’ll post regularly. And if you hate unstructured data as much as we do, come join us: we’re looking for a talented Ruby hacker.

Update: We’ve implemented several new features for the API: see the CrunchBase blog post here.

We’re proud to announce today a slew of new improvements to CrunchBase, our directory for information about the tech startup ecosystem.

Maps

Company and financial organization headquarters are now geocoded and locatable on an interactive map using the Google Maps API.

Say you’re checking out Yelp and want to see just where the company is located and what other startups are nearby. You can click on the [map] link next to Yelp’s address and its headquarters will show up among its 50 closest neighbors, including Kongregate the building over and Slide just a few blocks away.

Furthermore, you can now browse by City, State, Zip Code, or Country. Or choose an arbitrary location and map all of the results within a certain range (e.g., all the startups within 10 miles of Sydney, the 165 companies in Manhattan, or the VCs on Sand Hill Road).

We are also now tracking multiple offices for some of the larger organizations (see Sequoia Capital).

Advanced Search

Our new advanced search capabilities really capitalize on CrunchBase’s structured wiki format. In addition to simple keyword search, users can now search companies, financial organizations, and people by indicating special criteria to which they want results to conform. Now you can, for example, search for all companies founded after 2004 with at least $50 million in funding that have been featured on TechCrunch.

What’s great about structured data is that it’s so easily aggregated. We have lists for all the funding rounds and acquisitions in CrunchBase, each of which is sortable in various ways.

And with advanced search, you can drill down into specific results – even when geography comes into play. For example, you can make a query for all companies within 5 miles of London that have been acquired since 2004. Or all people under the age of 30 who’ve been a part of successfully acquired companies. We’ll continue to improve our search capabilities, so please leave any requests and suggestions in the comments.

Jobs

We’re now showing CrunchBoard job listings on company pages. You’ll now see, for example, that Digg is hiring. With this additional functionality, and our LinkedIn API integration, we hope CrunchBase will become an ever-more important research tool for job seekers.

Milestones

Milestones is our newest and most experimental feature on CrunchBase. It was inspired by our writing team, which receives many press releases with titles like “Service X hits the 1 Million user mark,” or “Company Y hires new CEO.”

While these news items don’t always make TechCrunch’s front page, we wanted a place to highlight them in CrunchBase, so we created a lightweight data type called Milestones. It’s pretty simple: each milestone has a date, description, and source (if available somewhere on the net).

We hope to create a useful timeline of events for every company and product. Here are some of Twitter’s recent milestones:

And as before, CrunchBase is all about community participation. Not only do we add data to the system ourselves, but we encourage everyone else to contribute as well. Notice any missing or incorrect data? Just hit the “Edit This Page” button in the top-right of any profile page and submit your requisite changes. Companies, financial organizations, and people can also be added from the homepage.

Expect to see more community features soon as work to give contributors a greater presence on the site.

As Ruby on Rails devotees converge upon RailsConf 2008 (and the simultaneously held un-conference CabooseConf), performance startup FiveRuns is launching TuneUp, a “social” debugging tool for Rails applications.

The TuneUp plugin tells you specifically where a RoR app is running slowly. If you’ve coded a few ridiculously inefficient database queries, it’ll point out just which ones.

But debugging is not always so simple, so TuneUp does something sorely needed in a world dominated by Google searches for programming answers. A reporting mechanism sends your reports to TuneUp’s site for review by others. Each report, or “run”, contains your complete Rails configuration, the entire execution path of a request, and the overall execution time. When you publish these runs, other programmers and team members can diagnose your problems and offer potential fixes.

TuneUp has the potential to get rid of long posts on Ruby forums detailing programmers’ configurations, exact SQL queries, etc. Over time (if FiveRuns structures it correctly), TuneUp may form a great pool of knowledge with common programming issues and bugs – and their answers.

FiveRuns belongs in the quickly growing category of Rails applications supporting other Rails applications. New Relic, Heroku, and Engine Yard are others in the category that have recently raised big venture rounds. FiveRuns itself has raised $9 million total from Austin Ventures.

See the video below for a screencast of TuneUp.

For now we thought we’d show a teaser – below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 until today. The data isn’t 100% perfect as we’ve been grabbing it only once per hour, so a headline that was up for less than one hour may not be counted. But in terms of tracking the most popular bloggers, the data is meaningful. Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Clarification: This list doesn’t take into consideration authors who write for multiple publications.

Full list is below:

Last night, Google announced App Engine, a hosted web application platform. We’ve now tested the service directly by writing and deploying a test application called appengine.crunchbase.com—a HotorNot popularity contest for startups. Our experience with building and launching an app is below.

Google promises developers two things with App Engine: to reduce the time from writing code to deploying it on a web server, and to leverage Google’s massive infrastructure. We decided to write a simple app on the platform, deploy it, and get some traffic to really see how easy App Engine is.

Getting Started

Looking at the developer documentation, App Engine boasts a powerful API. The platform comes with a Python scripting runtime, static file serving capabilities, easy and tight integration with Google user accounts and email services (obviously a big play), simple access to a powerful persistence engine with queries and transaction support (aka a really good database), near real-time site monitoring and statistics, and the promise of consistent high performance and essentially linear scalability.

Despite its potential power and underlying sophistication, App Engine was surprisingly easy to get started with. Now, being Ruby on Rails guys, the fact that the only currently supported language is Python was a bit humbling. Still, the SDK provided by Google proved dead simple. Our first application was contained within a single Python script, making the path the code was taking to produce responses very clear. We incrementally added features: first accepting input from the users through forms, then storing and retrieving that data using the provided persistence API, and finally breaking out the user-facing web page code into a proper Django template.

The App

The web app we came up with is super-simple, shamelessly self-promoting, and easily game-able. It’s a one-page voting site using company logos slurped in from CrunchBase, our main project. The app has only two requests: one for rendering the page, the other for recording a vote (one GET, one POST request). The first real issue was getting our initial data, some URLs and names, into the database. While we later found that Google provides a slick bulk-update tool, we got going with a simple action that manually parsed our comma-separated values into the database. Another thing we wanted from the service was it to be served from our own domain. By default, Google hosts all App Engine projects on your-project.appspot.com (think blogspot), but they do offer domain services through Google Apps, which was pretty painless to setup if you just want App Engine functionality.

Deployment

The SDK provides a server that emulates the App Engine platform, making it possible to easily develop applications locally that will later deploy to Google’s cloud. Once we had a presentable first app coded up and tested locally, we deployed the app to Google’s server easily from the command line. This was particularly compelling; we’ve spent hours or even days deploying web apps to comparatively trivial servers.

Overall, the process from sign-up to deployment took about 4 hours, with the vast majority of that figuring out what we wanted to do and remembering how to do things like sort arrays in Python (we also spent an embarrassing 15 minutes on some poorly formatted hidden HTML fields). The rapid prototyping of the app and the ease of deployment is clearly the real power of App Engine right now. The scalability of App Engine is exciting but elusive; most apps won’t need it for a while. It’ll also be interesting to see how truly scalable it is, considering the linear scaling efforts on Amazon EC2. The redundancy and ease of deployment should be the immediate attraction for developers.

Try our app out: appengine.crunchbase.com.

Mark McGranaghan took the lead on coding for the site and contributed heavily to this article.

Update: Looks like our app was a little bit too popular:

Update #2: Back up now. Great success!

Scalr is a recently open-sourced framework for managing the massive serving power of Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. While web services have been using EC2 for increased capacity since Fall 2006, it has never been fully “elastic” (scaling requires adding and configuring more machines when the situation arises). What Scalr promises is compelling: a “redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling” network, or a nearly self-sustainable site that could do normal traffic in the morning, and then get Buzz’d in the afternoon.

The Scalr framework is a series of server images, known dully in Amazon-land as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), for each of the basic website needs: an app server, a load balancer, and a database server. These AMIs come pre-built with a management suite that monitors the load and operating status of the various servers on the cloud. Scalr can increase / decrease capacity as demand fluctuates, as well as detecting and rebuilding improperly functioning instances. Scalr is also smart enough to know what type of scaling is necessary, but how well it will scale is still a fair question.

Those behind Scalr believe open-sourcing their pet project will help disrupt the established, for-pay players in the AWS management game, RightScale and WeoCeo. Intridea, a Ruby on Rails development firm, originally developed Scalr for MediaPlug, a yet-to-launch “white label YouTube” with potentially huge (and variable) media transcoding needs. Scalr was recently featured on Amazon Web Service’s blog.

I’d argue that Scalr makes Amazon EC2 significantly more interesting from a developer’s standpoint. EC2 is still largely used for batch-style, asynchronous jobs such as crunching large statistics or encoding video (although increasingly more are using it for their full web server setup). Amazon for their part is delivering on the ridiculously hard cloud features, last week announcing that their EC2 instances can have static IPs and can be chosen from certain data centers (should really improve the latency). But for now, monitoring and scaling an EC2 cluster is a real chore for AWS developers, so it’s good to see some abstraction.

The iPhone SDK event isn’t the only live blogging event today (though it did successfully bully HP Labs out of a morning timeslot), CG is live at a big event held at HP Labs, one of the biggest research organizations in the world. Looks like what’s on the docket is a big re-organization: with focus going towards more products and fewer blue sky efforts. But we’ll see.

2:57pm: Q&A over. Now to see some demos!

2:55pm: What ideas are going to get killed? 150 down to 20-30 — HP is not saying which. Currently reviewing which to get the axe.

2:48pm: How much research is productized? Some examples of things that have come out: Inkjet printer. Dynamic smart cooling. Data compression technology. Large digital printers. “With these changes, we hope to see a lot more, and a lot quicker.” Setting up an internal review board for funding and betting. Sounds scary.

2:45pm: Q&A starting. First question: any cost-cutting? They say no. Just a refocus. Second question: Why less blue sky? Aren’t they afraid of throwing out the next XEROX? They say they’re still focusing on publishing.

2:45pm: David Letterman routine over. Conclusions: 1) Build a low cost infrastructure — or perish. 2) IT is the business. 3) Speed is everything.

2:42pm: 1) A merger is taking place between business intelligence and the web. Not just for CEOs and teams of analysts anymore. Example: predicting price of DRAM. Used BRAIN (system they wrote, presumably open) to predict price. No idea what’s going on with this.

2:37pm: 2) crowd-sourcing is going mainstream — changing the rules of the game forever. exponentially lower cost. reputation systems ensure quality. implication for numerous industries. Look for Fortune 100 adoption of crowd-sourcing. Letterman would be so proud at this point. Entire value chain, from idea to product, is now delivered via the internet. all the engineers, attorneys, graphic designers (aka their crowd-sourced Logoworks site they bought a year ago), will be sourced from the internet. Hopefully not Bloggers.

2:35pm: 3) 1+ billion users now have the tools to produce all types of media. Foodsville is the example. Talking about how foodies can get really old books with BookPrep (sp?)

2:34pm: 4) Connectivity-centric computing has come. Content will sit in the cloud. Hard drive becomes temporary storage. Devices are “fungible”. I don’t believe that’s a word. Services you care about will come to you.

2:33pm: 5) location + persona + timing == richer, more dynamic experiences.

2:32pm: David Letterman Top Five. Let me say that again: he’s doing a David Letterman Top Five list for EaaS. Says international crowd won’t get it.

2:31pm: Cloud Service examples: Snapfish, Tabblo, HP Upline, Cloudprint, Logoworks, Cloudview, SaaS for BTO

2:31pm: Foundations for EaaS (everything as a service): Smarter devices. More intelligent networks. Next-Gen Data Centers. Software

2:29pm: HP wants a seamless experience across all devices. Searching needs to be done for you, not by you. Not sure if this means search engines, but just assumptions should be made about you to tailor things for you.

2:28pm: Robison: Then: assume computers are pervasive. Today: assume that the internet is pervasive. A huge mosaic of Web 2.0 icons floating on screen.

2:25pm: CTO Shane Robison is on. Talking about “Then and Now Challenges”. Then: connecting devices. Now: connecting users to good services. Then: I.T. is about productivity. Now: Collaboration. Then: CIO maintain control. Now: end users control the reins. Era of “Everything as a Service”

2:20pm: Prith Banerjee hands off to CEO Mark Hurd. “We do R&D. Most others just do D.” Making few, bigger bets. “We’ve got a great team. Total HP team effort, not just Labs. We’ll be a lot more transparent about the research we do. “

2:19pm: “The plan sharpens the focus of labs.”

2:15pm: Technology Transfer office also launches today, aka an internal Start Up Incubator. Basically, this takes their lab nerds, adds on some product managers, and bring in some management, and then try to make it like an internal startup incubator.

2:14pm: IdeaLab.com launches today. Website that will allow researchers and customers to take a peek at all HP Labs research. Live right now. They want developers to add onto their stuff. Customers to download and give feedback. Apparently trying to get some integration their StumbleUpon, MySpace stuff seen.

2:13pm: All the partnerships, work is all focused on the five areas before. Funding students’ summer research who will hopefully be channeled into HP Labs.

2:12pm: HP Labs is renewing in investment in partnerships: VC, startups, universities, government agencies, and other companies. “We realize that not all the smart people work for HP Labs”. Three aspects: HP Labs research program with unis, enterprenuer-in-residence program, and HP IdeaLab (website).

2:11pm: Sustainability. Dynamic power cooling. Brief mention here. Led by a thermo-something researcher.

2:10pm: Intelligent Infrastructure. Missed this one. Taking a photo.

2:09pm: Content transformation: “Transforming content – from analog to digital, from device to device, from digital to physical product”. Aka, giant awesome printers. Apparently we saw one in the lobby. I didn’t.

2:06pm: Dynamic Cloud Services: “Developing services that are dynamically personalized – based on your location, prefernces, caldendar, and communities”. Example: take a picture, put it on a cloud, access it anywhere on the mobile. CloudView, I think it’s called.

2:05pm: Information explosion: “Developing a better way to acquire, analyze, and deliver information so it can be acted on.” FaceBubble, here in PaloAlto, is one. I’ll be able to check that out after the conference.

2:04pm: Five New Themes: Information explosion. Dynamic cloud services. Content transformation. Intelligent infrastructure. Sustainibility. All labs to be led by technical people. Lab rats. Nerds. NEERDS.

2:02pm: High-impact research. Open Innovation. Technology transfer. That’s what’s on the screen right now! (Don’t ask me what it means).

2:00pm: 600 researchers in 7 locations. Bristol, Japan, China, India, and Russia. Hundreds of Phds, thousands of patents. Touting how sick nasty their researchers are…. This new plan regroups into about 23 newly formed labs.

1:59pm: Changing to about 1/3 blue sky, 1/3 applied, 1/3 advanced product research. Less Blue Sky.

1:59pm: “We’re going to re-focus our efforts into 20-30 big, big projects.” “Big Bets”. Down from about ~150 small projects.

1:57pm: Prith Banerjee takes the field, six-months onto the job, director of HP Labs.

1:55pm: “Only a handful of companies today that are dedicated to having a research arm in-house.” None can address issues all the way from Moms to CEOs. “That’s what differentiates us.”

1:55pm: “We’re going to address some of the most challenging issues facing consumers.”

1:52pm: They’re going to show us some of actual stuff today post-conference, hands-on. Lots of photos then.

1:50: Still jumping around in the video showing off what’s going on in each of their labs. Pretty well-produced video. Looks like it’s wrapping up now. “We’re not just seeing the future… we’re making the future.”

1:48: Press release says that HP today is ‘sharpening’ focus with the Labs.

1:45: Starts on the dot. Pretty HD video projection going on with lab rats talking about data centers.

1:43: Sitting down. Press conference starts in 2 minutes.

Yelp is also boasting some impressive stats: 8.3 million uniques in the past 30 days and over 2.3 million reviews (with the 1 million mark being reached on May 2007) (these are internal Google Analytics stats that the company shared with us). Yelp is in a competitive space with InsiderPages (acquired by Citysearch), and YellowBot. The real competition, though, will eventually be Google Local and Yahoo Local.

With this latest round, DAG joins previous investors Max Levchin ($1 million, Summer 2004), Bessemer Venture Partners ($5 million, Q4 2005), and Benchmark Capital ($10 million, Q4 2006). The company has now raised a total of $31 million. Revenues are rumored to be sub $10 million/year.

Instapaper is a cool new service taking bookmarks back to basics. If you come across some websites that you want to read but are too busy to do so, you can click on an Instapaper browser bookmarklet and then return to the Instapaper website later to read them. Think of it as Del.icio.us stripped of any tagging or social features.

Instapaper is a side project of Marco Arment, lead developer at Davidville, which produces the very popular micro-blogging service Tumblr. Here is Marco’s premise for the site:

You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.

You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.

Instapaper has a very simple design; you don’t even need a password or email address to use it. When logged into Instapaper, your links are sorted into three groups: Unread, Recently Read, and Recently Skipped. Buttons on the side help you sort links between the groups. Clicking one of the ‘Unread’ links automatically pushes a site down into the ‘Recently Read’ feature.

Instapaper also plays nice with the iPhone, featuring an optimized interface and the now-obligatory customized web clip.

We’ve covered two other similar bookmarking services recently: WebMynd and ControlC.

[ via John Gruber ]

EveryBlock launches today as a geographically-filtered news and data aggregation service for San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. The site attempts to answer one deceptively simple question: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” For EveryBlock, it boils down to three types of information: geographically-relevant news and blog entries, civic information, and “fun from across the web.”

“Hyperlocal” is the buzz-word for this service. Among the data aggregated are geo-tagged images from Flickr, lost/found items from Craigslist, and cafe reviews from Yelp. While EveryBlock aggregates plenty of data from web services such as these, it’s particularly focused on surfacing data managed by the government: liquor licenses, restaurant inspections, and crime reports for example.

To get a taste of EveryBlock’s power, you can check out a map of all photos taken recently in Downtown San Francisco, a list of the vehicles stolen in Chicago, or even a log of the graffiti recently cleaned up in Brooklyn. While EveryBlock does not yet provide an API, RSS feeds for specific neighborhoods are available.

The team of four behind EveryBlock is led by Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the popular Python framework Django. Holovaty is also behind chicagocrime.org, a “freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago.” EveryBlock is funded by a $1.1M, two-year grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a competition for making local news more easily obtainable.

EveryBlock competes directly with Outside.in. Yahoo’s OurCity, while still beta and only covering cities in India, has many similar features as well. Also see YourStreet.

Pleo is a new $350 ‘life form’ dinosaur robot created by Ugobe. Unlike all the robot dinosaurs I know (e.g. the WowWee Roboraptor), the Pleo is not remote-controlled. It’s ‘self-aware’. It ‘evolves’. It’s also not very badass. This thing, in a very mass-appealing kind of way, is a puppy.

As for the innards: pretty standard. A bunch of touch sensors for caressing, a speaker in the mouth, binaural mics in the ears, some light sensors, and a camera. It’s got a SD card slot and a USB port for, presumably, uploading sweet dance moves. It comes with a plastic leaf that it gnaws on. Pleos can also go multiplayer via IR and when brought together will snuggle and stuff.

Practically, I think this is a perfect fit for the Sony Aibo owner crowd. It’s wayyy cheaper (Aibos were retailing for $2000 before they were axed), it’s got the same sensors, and it’s pretty playful (it freaked the crap out of the TechCrunch dog). One downside is the rubber skin, which is pretty good-looking but not great to pet. Unlike the Aibo, however, the dinosaur comes standard two batts. Most importantly, Ugobe has made this thing just plain animate, and not in an awkward way.

But can you hack it? Pleo runs something called ‘Life OS’ and has a scripting language ‘loosely based on C’. They say “you will be able to modify Pleo’s behavior using scripting, but not the underlying Life OS.” So, basically, no soccer-playing Pleo’s anytime soon. Besides, it wouldn’t be very good. The camera ‘detects light from dark’ and ‘can track a moving object’, but the resolution or shutter speed, unfound, are probably not great. The legs only have two degrees of freedom and so it maxes out hobbling around. But all in all, for $350 bucks, the Pleo is a fine coffee table robot.