Office Snapshots has posted a picture of the clever sign hanging on the door of Twitter’s old office. The sign was posted by the office’s current inhabitants, customer service startup Get Satisfaction.

Twitter switched offices in early July, and the move seems to have done them well. Since then the service has been unusually stable, with relatively few periods of downtime - though this may be on account of the functionality that seems to be slowly disappearing.

Update: Get Satisfaction’s Thor Muller comments that in celebration of Twitter’s increased reliability, the sign has been updated:

Credit: monstro

Thanks to Jason Moser for the tip.

The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset - all of which are part of this batch and have launched already.

TicketStumbler

TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”.

People and Pages

While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place.

MeetCast

MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity.

CO2Stats

For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today.

Youlicit

Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google.

Job Alchemist

Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, and a new job affiliate network called JobSyndicate that launches today. Publishers can place JobSyndicate’s widgets on their sites and earn half the bounty set by employers when visitors click through and get hired.

Frogmetrics

Frogmetrics isn’t a pure web venture: the company wants to place touch screens in restaurants, stores, and other brick and mortar establishments that can be used to collect customer feedback on the spot. The devices ask customers a few questions at the point of sale about their experience and can collect contact information about customers to generate leads. The information gathered across physical locations is aggregated and analyzed for trends and other statistics.

Snipd

Snipd appears to be another web annotation service, one that allows users to “snip” page content such as images, videos, and text to share them with others and save for later. These snips are also used to generate so-called heat maps of pages that help users find the best content on a page. The service has yet to launch.

BackType

BackType is a search engine for comments that crawls the internet for blogs and indexes their user generated content regardless of the platform (WordPress, Moveable Type, etc). These comments are not only keyword searchable but can be followed by author, allowing you to keep track of what your friends are saying online.

Facebook’s controversial and widely-disdained Beacon service, which it originally introduced in November, has led to the company behind slapped with another class action lawsuit. The suit alleges that Facebook never sought user approval before collecting personal information, and was also keeping tabs on people who weren’t even signed up for Facebook.

The class action lawsuit was filed on August 12 in the California Northern District Court, and includes the following passages (you can see the full text below):

“The Beacon program sent information regarding specific user transactions on Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliates’ websites to Facebook regardless of whether the user was a Facebook member or not. Thus, no consent was sought, nor was any consent obtained from persons who utilize the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiiliate’s website who were not Facebook members…”

“It was deceptive because, in almost every instance, the information sharing was contrary to the stated privacy policies of the Facebook website and every other Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate that had signed up for the program.”

A number of Beacon affiliates besides Facebook are named in the suit, including Blockbuster, Fandango, Hotwire, Travel Inc, Overstock, Zappos, and Gamefly.

Beacon’s launch last November was quickly met with waves of criticism, as users were automatically signed up for the ad system. Facebook eventually change its policies to make the ad system opt-in (effectively killing it for most people), but the damage had already been done. Earlier this year, a woman sued Blockbuster for sharing her rental choices with her peers.

Beacon hasn’t been Facebook’s only privacy misstep. The social network instituted a system earlier this year that added images of a user’s friends to some advertisements, confusing and upsetting many users. Our own $25 million suit against Facebook for the unlawful use of Michael Arrington’s likeness to endorse shoddy products is still pending.

Yesterday Y Combinator backed CO2Stats announced the launch of a fully functional version of their emissions measuring service for websites. The launch comes nearly a year after the release of a prototype widget that was designed to test the market and gauge user response. The idea eventually attracted enough press and positive feedback for the founders to take their service and calculations to the next level.

CO2Stats makes a website “green” by calculating its environmental footprint and buying green power (i.e. wind, solar) elsewhere on the grid to compensate. The service calculates not only the energy used to power a site’s server, but also the power used by client machines visiting the site. It turns out that visitors actually consume more power than the servers themselves.

The methodology for calculating energy consumption is extremely rigorous, as it must be for something like this to be accepted. The system takes into account geographic location of a site’s servers and visitors, time spent on a site, client device type (mobile, laptap, etc), and even the size of the page window on the user’s screen.

Sites supporting the service sport a clean energy badge that, when clicked on, displays CO2 emissions resulting from visitors, servers, and the network, along with a breakdown of the fuel types used to power the site and where the power was generated.

CO2Stats charges a flat rate that is dependent on the cumulative amount of power they spot their clients. This ensures that sites aren’t punished for peaks in traffic, and makes the idea more attractive to sites with a large userbase. The service could make it big if it becomes standard practice for companies to maintain a “green” web site. Electricity generation required for information and communication techologies is currently responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions, and this number is only growing. Current clients include Gazelle, and a number of environmental awareness sites.

AppJet, the Y Combinator-funded startup that lets users build web applications from their browsers, has opened a new set of lessons that guide novice users through the basics of programming. The lessons focus on JavaScript, one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and have been written to be accessible to students who have never programmed before.

Co-Founder Aaron Iba says that the lessons will likely take a new programmer a few weeks to work through at a moderate pace, depending on how much time is spent on the interactive demos (each lesson provides a fully functional program that can be modified). There are currently 24 lessons available, with more on the way. After skimming through the first few lessons, I managed to put together a program slightly more complex than “Hello world!”, which you can find here.

This online school is significant because it offers a very low barrier to entry for novices who are looking to get their feet wet and start programming. Nearly every programming tutorial requires some kind of software prerequisite, be it a downloaded client or a server, which can be both expensive and difficult to set up for a new user. Conversely, AppJet requires no software, allowing users to edit, debug, and run code through a browser interface. Because of this low barrier, AppJet may well see an influx of new students who they can convert to regular members.

Besides the lessons launching today, AppJet offers web developers a way to create and host web applications free of charge. The site appeals primarily to users in the long tail, who may not want to spend money on a web server just to host a number of small applications that are only accessed once in a while. Iba says that since its launch in December, AppJet has seen over 1900 applications published, with another 4000 under development (though many of these will likely never be completed).

The web is teeming with user reviews on everything from movies to VC firms. But with so many detailed opinion pieces available, getting to the bottom line can be difficult.

Today sees the launch of PhrazIt, a site looking to cut through the noise by offering users a tag cloud related to various topics on the web. Rather than employing a traditional star or numeric system to rate a topic, PhrazIt uses brief words or phrases no more than 30 characters long.

Once a user has chosen a topic on the site, they’re presented with around 25 tags that have been entered by other visitors. You can either add your own description, or you can click on one of the existing tags (the most popular tags will grow in size, allowing users to summarize a topic quickly).

One of the biggest drawbacks to PhrazIt is that all tags in the cloud are pulled from submissions from the site itself. Instead of searching through popular review sites like Amazon or Rotten Tomatoes, PhrazIt relies on user-submitted data. This works well enough for popular topics (like Batman, seen below), but it makes searches for less common topics a waste of time.

PhrazIt is the first company to launch from the DreamIt Ventures early stage startup incubator, which is similar to Y Combinator. The incubator is currently working with its first “class” of eleven startups, and will have its first exhibition day in early September.

I complain about my email inbox problems endlessly, and even performed a major purge a couple of days ago that wiped out over 23,000 unread emails. I don’t know what the solution is, but I think it may ultimately involve an admin of some sort despite my stubborn hope for a software solution to make things right.

While I wait for that startup/admin to fix my life, Philip Kaplan (my partner in my second best April Fool’s joke ever) (here’s the first) has built a cool new service that I will likely use in the meantime called HitMeLater.

HitMeLater is simple. Forward any email to 24@hitmelater.com and it will send it back to you 24 hours later, putting it on the top of your inbox pile. You can change the number of hours to anything you like, up to 1,000 hours ahead (3@hitmelater.com sends it back three hours later). Alternatively, put in a day (Wednesday@hitmelater sends it back the next Wednesday). If you send it something it doesn’t understand, HitMeLater sends back a polite email message saying “We’re not sure what you want.”

If you’re like me you rely on flags to remember which emails to go back to, but they often get buried and are left unattended. From now on I’ll forward stuff I need to deal with but not immediately to Sunday@hitmelater.com, my slowest email day.

Twitter says they’ve stopped sending SMS updates to Twitter users in the UK because of the high cost of sending those messages. US, Canada and Indian users can still opt to receive messages via SMS.

Twitter says that a single user, capped at 250 received SMS messages per week still costs them $1,000 per year in SMS fees. They don’t have that problem in the US and some other countries because they’ve been able to negotiate service fees that max out after a certain point.

“We’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach” they said in the blog post.

Next up: a revenue model.

UPDATE: See TechCrunch UK for more UK reactions to this move - it’s not pretty…

iPhone application development house taptaptap has published sales figures for the first month of sales for their two AppStore applications, bringing further insight into overall sales volume and figures for the online store. The two applications developed by the company are WhereTo, an application that provides a more general GPS interface to the iPhone with location-based services, and Tipulator, a simple tip calculator.

WhereTo retails for $2.99 in the store and 24,094 copies were sold in the first month - netting the company just over $50,000 in revenue after Apple took their cut (it currently ranks #69 on the top paid application list). Tipulator retails for 99 cents, and sold 3,168 copies which resulted in just over $2,200 of revenue (it is currently unranked). The table below outlines overall sales volumes and revenues for each application:

taptaptap AppStore sales and revenue numbers for US sales, month 1

The resulting net profit and sales figures are good for a small company that has developed one application that is relatively sophisticated, and another that is very straight forward and simple but yet still brings in $2,000 a month. There is definitely great revenue potential for developers of iPhone applications, as users of the AppStore and the iPhone in general are more likely to pay for applications. Integrating with iTunes makes the process simple for the user, but for the developer poses a challenge as all applications must be submitted to Apple and must meet their approval.

We should also note that while both of these applications have done well, their download figures unsurprisingly pale in comparison to those of Facebook and Tap Tap Revenge, both of which have over 1 million users. The real money in the App Store may well lie in monetizing these free applications, be it through integrated advertising or downloadable content (though it remains to be seen what restrictions Apple will place on this kind of strategy).

Does this picture remind you of your office a little too much? It may be time to check out the latest job listings on CrunchBoard. Here’s a sample from the past week:

• VP of Network Management
  Technorati - San Francisco, CA
• Software Developer
  Wikimedia - San Francsico, CA
• DHTML/AJAX Web Application Developer
  Oracle - Redwood Shores,CA
• Product Manager
  MySpace Mobile - Beverly Hills, CA
• Database Developer
  MySpace - Beverly Hills, CA
• New Initiatives Group Web Developer
  TripAdvisor -Newton, MA
• Senior Lead Developer
  Microsoft - Dublin, Ireland

We’re looking for someone who can do graphic design on a project basis as TechCrunch50 approaches, so if you are interested send an e-mail to Dan Kimerling and make sure that your subject line reads “Graphic Designer”. We are also looking for a Ruby Developer to work on CrunchBase at the TechCrunch HQ in Atherton, CA.

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

Oy, man. Now we’re talking Kippahs! In honor of our Birthday, VanityKippah just offered us six kippahs to give away, two each from their Obama, McCain, and “Dontcha Wish Your Kugel was Crispy on Top Like Mine” lines.

Not so much into the kippahs? We’re giving away items all day for ten days, so pop on by to check them out.

How do you win? Read more…

This has to be some kind of record - a startup launching a public beta on the day it said it would. Wuala, the P2P ’social grid storage’ startup from Switzerland, launches its public beta tomorrow at www.wua.la. Users will be able to simply click on a button on the site to start the service (it’s a Java app). That’s it. You can drag-and-drop stuff into it for file backup, photo and video sharing, or making files available publicly.

Here’s a more detailed description, from our post on the company last month:

The underlying core tech behind Wuala is based on research conducted at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). The files are held in tiny encrypted pieces distributed across the “Wuala Grid” of users, and mirrored on Wuala’s servers - so you don’t have to rely on other users being online to access your data. Users start with 1 GB of storage but can get as much as they want, either by trading idle disk space or by buying additional storage. You start off with 1GB of free storage, and then if you want more, you can make more space available on your own hard drive for other Wuala members. But users don’t have to trade storage - you can buy extra storage, like 100GB is 100 Euros. All files are encrypted on the user’s computer and the user chooses who gets access to which folder. No one else - including Wuala - gets to see the files. None of the fragments of files from other people stored on your computer are executable. Unlike Web storage, you can drag and drop files into Wuala on or offline.

Wuala competes in the storage space with Xdrive or Box.net, but it has a number of significant differences. The files are held in tiny encrypted pieces distributed across the “Wuala Grid” of users, and mirrored on Wuala’s servers. Unlike Web storage, you can drag and drop files into Wuala on or offline. TechCrunch UK broke the story about Wuala back in October last year. Last month, the site offered a sneak preview to the public.

NBC is lame. I’m sorry. They are making it really hard to watch videos of the Olympics anywhere but on their site. That would be fine with me, but as a user with an older Mac, I’m shut out. Their video only works on Windows machines and Intel-powered Macs that support Silverlight 2.0. Yes, I am bitter. And yes, I need to upgrade my computer. (Admitted lameness on my part). But I’m sure NBC could have made some backup video available in a more common format such as Flash or Quicktime. Microsoft, however, sees this as a unique opportunity to showcase Silverlight and got the exclusive.

The mobile version of the site is a little bit better. At least there I can see video highlights of the games, even on my iPhone. (And why can’t I see this on my regular computer again?). But these are only select highlights. I don’t want the commentary, I just want to see the full footage.

But top marks goes to Skyfire, whose mobile browser renders not only Flash videos, but Silverlight ones as well. (It also handles Ajax quite nicely, but that is a different story). You can go to the regular NBCOlympics video site on your phone and watch all 2,000-plus hours of video footage.

Skyfire is available only on Windows Mobile (natch) and on Nokia S60 phones in private beta. (We have 100 beta invites for the first readers to sign up here with the code “Crunch”).

So in order to watch the Olympics full-throttle on the Web, I need to do it with a mobile browser that is still in private beta. Here’s a video of what an NBC Olympics video looks like on a Nokia phone running Skyfire:

Qik, the startup that allows users to stream live mobile video from their cell phones, has released an application that allows users to use the service from their 3G iPhones. Unfortunately, the application isn’t available through Apple’s sanctioned App Store, so users will need to jailbreak (hack) their iPhones to use it. And because Apple has yet to enable video capture on the iPhone, we probably won’t be seeing a “legit” application any time soon.

Last week Qik released support for iPhones running the old (1.1.4) firmware, which was made obsolete by the 2.0 software that was released in July and gives users access to Apple’s App Store. This new release also supports the older iPhone, but users won’t be able to stream over the slow EDGE network.

The following instructions are included in the company’s blog post:

You can get Qikking with the iPhone 3G (and earlier models running iPhone OS 2.0!) by doing the following:

1. If you have not already, you’ll need to sign up at http://qik.com/sign_up and receive an SMS from us to activate the application.
2. Launch Cydia.
3. Go to the “Sections” tab at the bottom and scroll down to “Multimedia.”
4. Under Multimedia, you will find Qik. Tap on it then select “Install” at the top right, then in the same spot tap “Confirm.”
5. Now you will see Qik get installed. You may hit the “Return to Cydia” button at the bottom or just quit Cydia when it is done installing.
6. You’ll now notice a “Qik” icon on your home screen - Go ahead and launch it.
7. As long as your initial signup SMS/text message is still in your inbox for the first launch, your account will be linked to your device.
8. Make sure you have 3G service or are on WiFi (edge is not sufficient enough to stream video) before you begin broadcasting.
9. Hit record and enjoy Qik!

San Francisco startup Dipity has created a new product called Archaeologist, which provides an interactive view into any topic as seen through Digg. The product allows users to enter a keyword and view a timeline of related articles that have received considerable attention on Digg. Users can view results for any topic, from Apple to Dark Knight.

This is the latest of several mashups Dipity has done with popular websites. Others include YouTube and DayLife.