When Cory Booker became Mayor of Newark, New Jersey in 2006 he made it a priority to fight crime in the city. Gang members took his pledge so seriously that they planned to assassinate him just before taking office.

To show his dedication, Booker lived in some of Newark’s most dangerous neighborhoods, well before becoming mayor. He continues to live in a blighted neighborhood today.

In 2007 three young adults were killed execution style in a Newark schoolyard (a fourth person survived being shot and knifed in the face). Security cameras at the school weren’t working.

Booker used the incident to launch Community Eye, a project that uses high quality security cameras and a gunshot detection system to monitor an eight square mile crime-heavy area of Newark. The cameras have night vision, record in high definition video and stream wirelessly to a nearby police station, where officers can control the cameras, zoom in on areas, etc. The gunshot detection system can triangulate on gunfire immediately after firing, and can automatically move cameras to monitor the area. Police are able to respond immediately.Community Eye now has over 100 cameras in place, and the gunshot detection system is going online soon.

We spoke to Mayor Booker about the system via telephone earlier this week and asked him about the effect on crime rates, privacy issues and how he plans to expand the system. Listen to the discussion below or at TalkCrunch. The full transcript follows.

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Over a year has passed since Google completed the acquisition of feed massaging and hosting service Feedburner, and today some users now finally have their feeds hosted on what appears to be Google’s servers and infrastructure. At Techcrunch we have always been big fans of Feedburner, and their widgets and RSS subscriber counts have adorned almost all of our sites since their first days. At some point in the past 12 hours, the feed URL at feeds.feedburner.com began to redirect to feedproxy.google.com. Our subscriber count widget dropped to displaying a zero count for a few hours while the domain change took place.

It appears that only select feeds have been migrated, mostly those with higher subscriber counts. This would indicate that Feedburner has turned to Google to assist with serving the load on high-traffic feeds. Over at TechcrunchIT I recently wrote about the problems that some acquired companies have experienced at Google. The proprietary software and hosting stack at Google can often lead to a slowdown in development, an often long migration phase and in some cases death for the acquired company or product. Feedburner has avoided these problems by remaining largely independent of Google since the acquisition, but at some point they have turned to pappa bear for assistance with handling load and we are seeing the results of that today.

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In yet another case of widgets going crazy and causing havoc, a bug in Sitemeter has caused a large number of websites and blogs using the free web analytics tool to fail loading for users of Internet Explorer. Users of Google’s Blogger were amongst the first to report experiencing problems with sites running Sitemeter at 6pm pacific time on Friday. The problem has since been partially rectified, although some 16 hours later and without a notification or official response from the company either via email or on their blog.

Sitemeter proudly displays a list of the most highly trafficked sites running their service on their homepage. The sites include the entire Gawker Media network, the gossip blogger PerezHilton and the popular political blog DailyKos. We verified that all of these sites were failing to load in Internet Explorer, with nothing more than a blank page and a response in the form IE error window indicating a connection issue with sitemeter.com. The issue also affected our own Techcrunch France blog, which resorted to removing the sitemeter code as the only solution. The browser error indicates that the problem was with the Javascript code that is included in each page.

Uptime monitoring services such as Netcraft did not report any downtime for these sites, since the issue was Javascript and browser-specific rather than a broader HTTP connection issue. The main sitemeter website remained operational, while hundreds of bloggers posted about the problem and our tips mailbox filled with links and complaints on the issue.

Back in May, Michael wrote about how our own issues with widget providers on Techcrunch affected the performance and uptime of this site, and how having a provider not communicate such issues makes matters worse. There is no real reason for a widely used service such as Sitemeter to go down, as there are solutions available (such as using an IFRAME) where a fault in embedded code can be bypassed and at least allow the remainder of the page to load. Worse still, there is no real reason as to why, after 16 hours since the problems surfaced, there is no official word from the company despite the level of noise from users and visitors to the sites who have embedded the service.

Update: Turns out that this was the result of a bug in Internet Explorer, which the Sitemeter developers didn’t account or test for. The technical details and a description of the bug involved are here. Does this still mean that Sitemeter are to blame, or are we about to see the backlash shift to Microsoft because of a known bug and a developer not testing.

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A week ago, I put together a roundtable about the upcoming mobile platform wars between the iPhone, Google’s Android, and older platforms like Nokia’s. One thing I discovered as I was organizing the event was that it was really hard to find anyone developing Android apps other than the 50 people who won the Android Developer’s Challenge. (We tried to get someone from Android on the panel, but Google declined to participate).

Most of the 20 CEOs, developers and VCs on the roundtable were more interested in the iPhone, Nokia, and other platforms that actually exist as something other than a software emulation. Their attitude seemed to be: Show me the phones.

Pandora CTO Tony Conrad went even further, saying, “I need Android like I need a hole in the head.” To which Michael responded: “As soon as it launches, you are going to be kissing Google’s ass and you are going to be launching on their platform.” Here’s a clip with Tony and Michael going at it:

Another debate was whether the iPhone is really anything new. AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui (in T-shirt) argued that it indeed represents a fundamental shift because it is the first time most people are actually using the mobile Web, regardless of how long it’s been around. (This was basically the premise of the panel). Skydeck CEO Jason Devitt (in striped shirt) pointed out that the existing mobile Web is already a fairly large market, citing a figure of $700 million spent on mobile games alone. Devitt, though, is old-school (he previously founded Vindigo), and even he admits that he doesn’t browse the Web on most phones other than the Phone:

[More videos after the break]:
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When Thoof launched in July 2007 a lot of people gave it a good chance of success despite the fact that it was entering into the dreaded personalized news space. Sure, the market was littered with failed startups, but Thoof was founded by former Revver cofounder Ian Clarke, and was well backed by Austin Ventures, Ron Conway and others.

Thoof aimed to deliver tailored news by looking at what you click on, and nothing else (vote buttons and other tools weren’t a true indicator of intent, Clarke argued). From our first post on Thoof:

Thoof determines what you like based solely on what stories you click on to read. Asking for specific feedback, like voting or rating of stories, is too much to ask of users, Clarke says, noting that only a very small percentage of people who watched videos on Revver ever actually rated them. By analyzing what you tend to click on, Thoof will return results that it thinks you are more likely to click on than others. The result, over time, is a perfectly tailored news page for an individual.

The site peaked in October, but by January the wheels were coming off the car. We heard at that time that the company would continue to limp along and see what happened. But in the last couple of days the site has been redirected to Reddit, and Clarke officially moved on to another project in April.

We’ve asked Clarke and Austin Ventures for a comment, but it’s pretty clear Thoof is in the deadpool, joining competitors like Searchfox (deadpool, assets acquired by Yahoo), Findory (deadpool), Spotback (change in strategy) and Feeds 2.0 (no idea what their status is, site is live).

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Barack Obama’s campaign has posted a blog post announcing the launch of its official account on Scribd, the online document repository. The page, which can be accessed at http://scribd.com/barackobama, will serve as a resource for documents related to Obama’s policy, along with official statements.

Y Combinator-funded Scribd is a “YouTube for documents” that allows users to upload an array of filetypes that are converted to a Flash format viewable on most computers. The document viewer, called iPaper, can also be embedded in web pages. Since its launch in 2007, Scribd has seen explosive growth, and now claims to see nearly 20 million monthly unique visitors.

Scribd’s inclusion in the Obama campaign isn’t surprising given the candidate’s adoption of web-centric services like Twitter (his official account has over 52,000 followers). In contrast, opposing candidate John McCain has admitted to not being particularity tech savvy, though as we noted in our endorsements for the candidates, his policies will matter far more than what web 2.0 services he’s fond of.

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Social Gaming Network, a startup behind a number of popular social network games, has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to create a Facebook game to raise money for, of all things, planting trees. SGN has created a game called “Space Movers: The Bloom Initiative”, and will donate up to $50,000 of the game’s advertising revenue to the cause. You can check out the app by going here.

The game itself plays almost exactly like Bejeweled, with a few goofy characters and icons that all fit under a vague “nature” theme. And while the gameplay may not be too original, the game has high production values, with a full soundtrack and animations.

The partnership is the latest in a string of unconventional promotions we’ve seen from developers on social networks, who are going to great lengths to increase exposure and help their games “go viral”. Last month Slide partnered with VH1 to to promote its application alongside a marathon of reality shows.

SGN focuses on games that include social interaction, and claims 1.1 million daily active users across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and hi5, with a reported 54 million application installs. The company has raised some serious cash, with over $20 million in funding and investors including Jeff Bezos. Zynga, its closest competitor, recently closed a $29 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, and has raised a total of nearly $40 million.

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This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He has been widely recognized for pioneering innovation with honors such as the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the SDForum Visionary Award, Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, and being ranked No. 7 on the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT survey by eWEEK.

For almost ten years now, we have been witnessing a decisive shift from client-server software to software as a service. Google, eBay, and Amazon.com established the value of multi-tenant internet applications in the consumer market, and salesforce.com, Google, and others have been proving that this same multi-tenant model is winning in the enterprise as well.

This shift to Web-based applications has generated two powerful waves so far. Now, we are seeing a third wave—one that we are calling Web 3.0—and it may prove to be the most significant and disruptive yet to the traditional software industry.

While the world doesn’t need another buzzword, I feel that both the emerging generation of entrepreneurs and developers, as well as traditional software ISVs, need to grasp the enormity of Web 3.0 and its potential to create change, disruption, and opportunity. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service.

To put Web 3.0 into perspective, we need to look at all of the major waves in the history of the Web. They are not defined by distinct periods of time, but are best seen as overlapping waves of adoption.

Continue reading on TechcrunchIT…

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Earlier today we reported that Amazon had acquired AbeBooks, an online retailer of rare and used books from independent publishers.

AbeBooks held a major (although not majority) stake in a site called LibraryThing, where the literati can list their favorite books and discuss them. Coincidentally, Amazon has put a reported $1 million into Shelfari, one of LibraryThing’s direct competitors (which also include GoodReads, BookJetty and many others). So it might not be surprising to see Amazon try to join the forces of these two modestly sized startups.

But if the history between LibraryThing and Shelfari is any indication, we’re more likely to see Amazon either place its bets on one and divest its shares in the other, or simply maintain a minority investment in both.

Tim Spalding, the founder of LibraryThing, has publicly denounced Shelfari for using dirty marketing tactics such as astroturfing blogs and spamming inboxes. And he hasn’t minced words or backed down from his charge that Shelfari is a “bad actor”, having repeated Gawker’s description of Shelfari as “basically social networking rapists” and criticized Shelfari’s attempts to fix its invitation system.

While Shelfari has publicly addressed the charges of astroturfing (calling it the “unintended work of an unexperienced but well-meaning intern”) and spamming (the unintended result of “explosive growth” and a poorly designed user interface), it hasn’t used its own corporate blog to lash back at LibraryThing. And since most of this drama occurred nearly a year ago, it’s possible that any bad blood as been surmounted. But factor in the fact that these two startups are based on opposite ends of the country (Shelfari in Seattle, Washington and LibraryThing in Portland, Maine), and it appears unlikely that Amazon’s acquisition of AbeBooks will result in any consolidation of the book-centric social networking space.

In any case, Spalding has publicly asserted that LibraryThing will continue to operate as an independent entity, sending only anonymized user data back to AbeBooks. When reached for comment, he did say that he was open to selling the same type of data to Amazon, but he insisted that he would never sell “core user data” to Amazon and that he really doubts anyone “will propose marriage” between his company and Shelfari.

Josh Hug, co-founder and CEO of Shelfari’s parent company Tastemakers, said he had no specific comments about the AbeBooks-Amazon deal, but he did say that “Amazon has been a very supportive investor and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them.”

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