It seems a given that mobile social networking is going to be “the next big thing”, but squinting at tiny text is still a pain on today’s phones. To deal with this issue, Blabnote, a British startup that is currently in private beta, has created what may be the world’s first “vocal social network.”

To login to the network, you simply call Blabnote from your phone, which uses caller ID to match you to your profile. From there, you can vocally enter any number of commands. For example, if I wanted to create a group for TechCrunch fans, I might say, “Create Group called ‘Team TechCrunch’”. Members are added by saying something like, “add Mike and Mark”, and you can send messages to group members in a similar fashion.

Blabnote has no shortage of obstacles of overcome, to put it mildly. For one, the entire system is going to rely on voice recognition, which isn’t exactly a perfected technology. Imagine creating a very personal voice message and sending it to an ex-girlfriend on accident - the setup is ripe for disaster. And should you get sick of talking (and listening), you’re out of luck: there is no web management interface, though Blabnote says it will provide an API for third parties.

Blabnote could be a useful organization and notification tool for established groups, like soccer teams or clubs. But I have a hard time picturing a full-scale audio social network that could rival the likes of MySpace or Facebook.

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

It’s coming up on a year since the iPhone was released, and the second version appears to be just around the corner. So it’s a good time to check in with our readers and see just how many of you actually use the device.

Please take a second and let us know where you stand.

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

Epic Gillmor Gang today. Everyone went in with guns blazing over the data portability/ownership debate that has spilled out over the Facebook/Google scuffle. As the podcast ended the blog posts started rolling in.

Marc Canter, who I accuse of compromising his position as a thought leader in the data portability debate simply because Facebook is suddenly telling him everything he wants to hear, says that his position hasn’t changed (nevertheless, it has). Robert Scoble simply apologized for being on the wrong side of the issue, yet again. And Dan Farber, a Gillmor Gang regular who missed the call, picked up on the analogy to the founding fathers writing the Bill of Rights and wrote about it here.

All in all, the group seems to be in alignment after the talk. Data ownership is an important issue that cannot be left in the big co.’s hands. Because if it is, they’ll serve their interests first, and that will lead to more walled gardens.

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

Storyblender, which recently launched in private beta, is a new casual animation platform that will appeal to users who want customized movies in a hurry. If you’d like to try it out, you can grab one of 500 invites here.

The site is straightforward, which is a good thing because there doesn’t seem to be a tutorial yet. New users are presented with the video wizard that offers a number of pre-created movies that can be easily modified. Each movie is broken up along the bottom of the screen into brief scenes in a manner that will be familiar to anyone that has used a video editor like iMovie.

The site has hundreds of pre-rendered characters, backgrounds, music, and effects, which can be added to a scene by simply dragging and dropping. Nearly all of these have a distinctly comical look to them - the site doesn’t seem to offer “serious” movie making at this point. Instead, many of the backdrops and characters are better suited for video greeting cards (samples include “Party Time!“). Users can lend their own voices to clips, and they can import media from YouTube and Flickr. Members can share their movies with friends, who can modify them further if they wish.

Storyblender is competing with other animation sites like Fuzzwich, aniBoom, and JibJab.

Here’s one of the sample videos provided by the site:

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

Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica, we’ve confirmed. The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb). Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006). The acquisition price will not be disclosed, but our sources say it is in the $25 million range, which is what Condé Nast paid for Wired.com in 2006.

Effectively, Ars Technica is now part of Wired. Look for an official announcement next week.

This marks a new beginning for Ars Technica, which was originally founded in 1998 by Ken “Caesar” Fisher (based in Boston) and Jon “Hannibal” Stokes (based in Chicago). They, along with their 8 or so employees, will remain with the company as it is integrated into Wired Digital.

Comscore says Ars Technica has just 1.5 million monthly unique visitors and 4 million page views, but our understanding is that the actual number of unique visitors to the site is around 4.5 million. The audience demographic is very similar to Wired, although our sources say the overlap is relatively small.

This is also another lost customer for Federated Media Publishing, which sells advertising for Ars Technica (Digg left Federated Media last year to accept a very lucrative Microsoft deal that will pay out over $100 million over three years). CondéNet will now take over advertising sales.

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

Chicago’s Fox affiliate WFLD has launched AirFox Live, a mashup whose spec list reads like a technophile’s pipe dream. The site combines a helicopter, GPS, live video, and Google Maps to produce a realtime data stream of the network’s newscopter that serves as uniquely informative eye-candy.

Live video taken from the helicopter’s cameras are displayed alongside an embedded Google Map that shows its current location. It might not sound particularly riveting, but I had a hard time pulling myself away from the tiny red copter as it hopped around Chicago.

Unfortunately, the site is only active when the helicopter is in the air (technically you can watch it sit at Schaumburg Airport, but have fun with that). The only guaranteed time to see it in action is from around 5:30-8:30 AM CST during the network’s morning show, which probably isn’t going to be too exciting.

But AirFox will also be active whenever the helicopter is involved in breaking news, which is where its real potential lies. The site will add a new element of information (and excitement) to events like police chases and fires. Of course, the new technology will probably only appeal to residents of Chicago, but if the program is a success we can expect other affiliates to follow suit.

You can watch a clip of AirFox in action here.

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

Just over a week ago the founders of and five engineers from VoIP services provider Jangl left for Jajah after the company failed to find a proper suitor. Following their departure, it was unclear what would happen to Jangl’s assets and remaining staff. Now we hear from multiple sources close to the deal that Live Universe has agreed to acquire both.

This appears to conclude the Jangl saga that started late last fall. Around that time, Jangl’s board began telling the founders to pursue an acquisition strategy in lieu of raising more money. The board’s decision came even when the company had closed deals (some profitable) with several partners, including Plentyoffish and Tagged.

We hear there was a disconnect between the VCs, who had a more enterprise background, and Jangl’s executives, who were set on developing a consumer-facing brand. The founders, and Michael Cerda in particular, are said to have worked diligently to carry out the board’s marching orders. But despite many companies showing interest in Jangl, it struggled to find the right company for its exit.

An acquisition deal (apparently with WhitePages.com) came close but unraveled after the terms changed and became far less acceptable. With no apparent options left, much of the company’s staff was notified that they would probably have to find new work, and it was finally announced that Jangl’s founders were indeed jumping ship.

Just what Live Universe plans to do with everything they left behind has yet to be seen. I’m sure Jangl’s partners will be interested in hearing the fate of their agreements, if they haven’t already.

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

Google’s Bob Lee creates a much better image to go with our post yesterday about One Laptop Per Child and Windows teaming up.

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

ZYB, a mobile social network that we gave high marks to in August 2007, has been acquired by Vodafone for €31.5 million, or about $50 million. The company had raised just €3 million in venture capital.

ZYB was smart in how they built their service. At first they were a simple address book backup-to-web service. But they realized they had a very complete social graph from the data (who’s closer to you than the people you call frequently on your mobile phone)? So they launched a mobile social network on the back of the original service.

We’ve continued to write about ZYB in comparison to competing mobile social networks (an area we’ve taken a special interest in). Last month. ZYB acquired one of those competitors, Imity.

The press release is below:

Vodafone Announces the Acquisition of ZYB

16 May 2008

Vodafone* today announces that it has agreed to acquire 100% of ZYB, a privately-owned company based in Denmark which operates a social networking and online management tool enabling mobile phone users to back-up and share their handsets’ contact and calendar information online. The acquisition will be made for a cash consideration of Eur31.5 million.

The acquisition of ZYB is a further advance in the implementation of Vodafone’s Total Communications strategy which is delivering new revenue growth around fixed broadband, mobile advertising and a rich set of internet services that integrate the mobile and PC customer experience. ZYB fits into this strategy by enhancing the range of communications services Vodafone can provide to its customers.

ZYB is unique amongst social networking sites as it is designed with the mobile device at its heart, allowing customers to share information and messages between their friends and colleagues who are held in their mobile phone’s address book.

ZYB increases communication choices for customers enabling them to send messages and images from their PC to multiple mobile devices in their mobile community, as well as taking advantage of the functionality of an instant messaging service.

Pieter Knook, Internet Services Director for Vodafone Group, said: “Vodafone understands that the core of any customer’s personal and business network is the set of contacts they hold on their mobile phone.

“Using a web portal as a link between the PC and the mobile device, ZYB provides an interactive way for people to nurture, contact and develop their relationships with their most important friends and colleagues and builds links with those contacts’ wider networks. This is Web 2.0 in action.

“This acquisition is consistent with our strategy of delivering products and services which meet our customers’ total communications needs.”

Tommy Ahlers, CEO of ZYB, added: “I am delighted that ZYB is to join Vodafone, the world’s largest international mobile community.

“Vodafone and ZYB share the same vision: to create a new mobile experience that builds on the convergence between the mobile and PC – and one which works on both platforms.

“By joining a company with Vodafone’s global reach, ZYB has more opportunities to bring to the mobile a further advance to the rich and interactive communications experience which people already recognise via the internet on their PC.”

ZYB will remain based in Denmark and upon acquisition will be incorporated into Vodafone’s Internet Services Division.

* The purchaser of ZYB is Vodafone Europe BV, a holding company of Vodafone Group, based in The Netherlands.

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

The scuffle today between Facebook and Google has very little to do with user privacy and everything to do with user control. A huge battle is underway between Google, MySpace and Facebook around control of user profiles and, therefore, users themselves. And their three new products, Data Availability, Facebook Connect, and Friend Connect, are all designed to further that goal.

Internet giants know that the days of getting you to spend all of your time inside their walled gardens are over. So the next best thing is to at least maintain as much data about the user as possible, and make sure they identify with your brand while they are out there not being on your site. The most valuable information a user has is his or her identity (that’s why the big guys are so eagerly adopting the issuing side of OpenID so you log in with, say, your Yahoo account on other sites), as well as their friend list (valuable, plus users hate to keep redoing it all over the Internet) and other information.

The companies with the profiles (mostly MySpace and Facebook) know this. And they know that to keep users happy, and to stop them from entering in all that friend data into other sites, they need to make their data at least somewhat portable. Not too portable, mind you. That means they’d lose control. But just portable enough. That’s why they are launching their products, and that’s why they are being justifiably criticized by people like David Recordon, who says this is not real data portability.

Google is a little different. They don’t have a social networking presence in the U.S., so they are trying to get in the middle between the guys with the profiles (like Facebook) and the sites that want the data. Their Friend Connect product does just that, and makes them an important data middle man. That position can later be leveraged intensely. In fact, in many ways Google can become the most important social network without actually having a social network. Facebook, of course, doesn’t want this. And that’s the real reason why they blocked them today (although the rumor is that they two companies are talking tomorrow about some sort of compromise).

So when Robert Scoble wrote this evening that Google is in the wrong, I disagree. I think Facebook’s intentions aren’t to let users get data out of the network until Facebook is absolutely forced to do so, and then only on Facebook’s terms (see Facebook Connect). The fact is, this isn’t Facebook’s data. It’s my data. And if I give Google permission to do stuff with it, I’m damned well within my rights to do so. By blocking Google, Facebook has blocked ME. And that, frankly, kind of frustrates me.

Scoble has been on the wrong side of this issue before, when he tried to scrape his friend’s contact information out of Facebook and export it to Plaxo. In that case, it wasn’t his data and he didn’t have the right to make it portable. It’s MY data, once again, and only I should be allowed to make that decision. He thinks his new position shows that he gets the importance of privacy, but once again he isn’t thinking in terms of who really owns the data and should be allowed to make decisions around it.

Ultimately I hope that I can keep my identity, friend list, photographs, videos and everything else that constitutes the (de)Centralized Me at any service provider that I trust (meaning I trust them to protect that data, but never go against my wishes and try to keep it to themselves if that isn’t what I want), and just tell sites like Facebook and everyone else where to grab it.

So far, none of the services do that or have announced plans to do that. But someone will, eventually, and they’ll get very rich.

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

With LiMo’s recent announcement that Verizon had hopped onto their Board of Directors, things are starting to heat up between the LiMo platform and Google’s competing product, Android. Both are open-source Linux-based platforms, and both are aiming to rock the handset market sometime in the next year or so.

LiMo is Linux-based. Android is Linux-based. But they’re far from the same. Below, I’ll try to explain some of the key differences without going too heavy on the tech jargon. (Fiiine. It gets a bit heavy for a paragraph or two. But I’ll avoid it where possible.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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

He was pretty careful about what he would and wouldn’t talk about, but former Twitter Chief Architect Blaine Cook bravely faced the Gillmor Gang today to talk about the challenges facing Twitter, the feasibility of a decentralized Twitter competitor, and other Twitter related issues. The timing is perfect, as big media is starting to take notice of Twitter and its passionate users.

The most interesting thing Blaine said in my opinion was that as of late 2007 Twitter had just three engineers (including himself) and one operations guy. No wonder they couldn’t keep the fast growing service online.

Listen to the show here. A transcript will be up shortly.

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

Today Plazes CEO Felix Petersen gave us a peek at iPlazer, the upcoming iPhone client for the geo-tagging social networking site. The app will be available when Apple’s official App Store launches on June 10th. Plazes has been around for a while - it was one of the first companies to be covered on TechCrunch. Since then it has switched gears a couple of times, but it’s best described as Twitter with geotagging, points of interest, and social networking features.

Right now iPlazer seems like a combination of Twitter and Dopplr. The phone detects the user’s location through the iPhone API, then presents the user with a number of suggested descriptions (for example, opening Plazes from our office presented us with choices of “TechCrunch HQ” and “The Mansion”, both of which were assigned to the coordinates by previous visitors).

After choosing a location label, the user is prompted to send “activity” messages to their friends (it’s basically a tweet tagged with location information). These activity messages are compared by the server, and Plazes notifies you if you’re in the same neighborhood as one of your friends. You can get a feel for the app in the screencast below.

Plazes is also launching a new version of their main site, which will enter private beta next week. Most notable about the launch is the introduction of Twitter integration, which is strange because Plazes seems to mimic Twitter in some ways. For the time being Plazes stands to gain by allowing Twitter users to send geo-tagged tweets, but things may work out differently in the long term. The new version of the site also introduces a Dopplr-esque nearby friend notification system and support for iCal integration. You can request an invite here.

Readers may remember Felix Petersen as the guy who got busted by his own product. Petersen backed out of a speaking gig at a conference, telling them that one of his kids was sick, then proceeded to party at a different event (while Plazes told the world). The whole thing was overblown, but it was amusing nonetheless.

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

A source has informed us that Google plans to announce the replacement of its Mini Search Appliance with a new enterprise search solution called Hosted Site Search in the next few days.

We hear it will be a for-pay product that, as the name suggests, will allow businesses to search their websites and other data stores in the cloud. In addition to moving this type of search off-premise (the Mini sits behind the firewall), the Hosted solution will differentiate itself by automatically including organizations’ webpages in the Google index. This feature, however, is said not to affect anyone’s page rank.

Suppliers who help Google manufacture the Mini apparently have been told to reduce their shipment forecasts for the product because it will be shelved soon. The shift in strategy is also understood as a response to Microsoft’s gains in the appliance-based search market.

The Mini is a less powerful version of Google Search Appliance, which can index millions of documents and 220 file types. The Mini, by contrast, can only search up to 300,000 documents and is therefore meant for smaller businesses.

It’s not exactly clear what this decision means for the enterprise search industry, but it won’t be surprising if Google does indeed come out with a cloud-based solution.

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

One thing Citi analyst Kevin Mahaney didn’t know about earlier this week in his very optimistic sales estimates for the Kindle: Jenifer Aniston is apparently a fan. At least, that’s what it looks like in the picture above published by US Weekly (that is the first time and also the last time that publication will be mentioned here on TechCrunch, promise).

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

Next month GigaOM will hold Structure 08, a conference centered on the changing face of computing infrastructure. The event will discuss the wave of cloud computing technology that has been driving a revolution in web applications and has started to overthrow the notion of conventional servers.

Structure 08 will feature a workshop on Google App Engine, along with keynote presentations from Werner Vogels (Amazon), Greg Papadopoulos (Sun), and James Crowe (Level 3). You can see a full schedule here.

We’re giving away five tickets to the event, so leave a comment telling us why you’re too financially impaired to pay for a ticket and we’ll pick the best responses.

Structure 08 will be held on June 25th at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. TechCrunch readers who register by May 20 can get a 10% discount on registration here.

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

One Laptop Per Child will ship a special version of Windows on their low cost laptops for poor children, the two companies announced this afternoon. Previously the laptops, which to date have been tested in a number of countries, ran only Linux. Trials of the Windows version of the machines will begin in June in “key emerging markets.” OLPC is also working with third parties to port its user interface, called Sugar, to Windows, and is hoping to have a machine with dual boot options to allow “users” to choose between operating systems.

There are no financial terms being disclosed, although it wouldn’t be dumb to assume that not only is the software being supplied for free, but Microsoft made a healthy donation to the organization as well. The last thing Microsoft wants is for anyone who’s computer literate to think that a world without Microsoft Windows is possible.

On the upside, though, the pain of having to deal with Windows crashes may make some of these kids excellent technical support people over time. They’d just get lazy with Linux being so stable all the time.

If it isn’t obvious from what I’ve written above, I’m not impressed. OLPC is in danger of becoming a celebrity cause rather than a real attempt to bridge the digital divide. My guess is Linux worked just fine as an operating system for these machines.

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

More details on Facebook’s banning of Google Friend Connect from the Facebook API earlier today. I spoke with Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Google’s Director of Engineering David Glazer about the banning to get a fuller picture of the conflict.

Here’s an example of how Friend Connect (more details) works in practice. A third party site may want to add social elements to their service. They can integrate with Friend connect and allow users to sign in. Those users choose a social network where they keep their profile (Orkut, Hi5, GTalk and, until today, Facebook) and log in via the social network’s API. They then become “members” of the site, using Google’s terminology. If any of their friends from their social network also become members of that site, those friends are shown on the site and you can interact with them. To see it for yourself, click “log in” at the top of this sample site, IngridMichaelson.

Kelly says the issue comes down to the fact that Google Friend Connect users don’t have control over data pulled from Facebook. In particular, Facebook is concerned that they have no relationship to the end site where the data is presented (in the example above, IngridMichaelson). Instead, Google has inserted itself as a middleman in the process.

Also, Kelly says, once permission is granted to share data, the user has no way to revoke that permission from their Facebook account. Facebook has a privacy control panel that lets users set and change privacy setting over time, including the removal of applications. With Google in the middle, Facebook has no way to stop the flow of data to these third parties.

Google’s Glazer counters that they have a very effective method for unlinking to a site that a user has given permission to, so users will be just fine. In the screen shot below, Google gives an option to “Unlink” the specific social network from the site (on right) or change the data that’s shared from the social network (on left). Kelly is correct that you can’t trigger the unsubscribe from Facebook.com, but Glazer says that’s because Facebook’s API has no way of telling Facebook about the third party site the data has been passed off to.

Glazer says that they have been in “constant contact” with Facebook over the Friend Connect product, and are still trying to work with Facebook to get access to the API again. But Facebook has their own competing product to Friend Connect, called Facebook Connect. The longer the ban, made under the banner of protecting user privacy, remains in place, the stronger Facebook’s position will be competitively. My guess is they’re in no hurry to get through this conflict any time soon.

The fact is that Google is taking perfectly adequate steps to protect user privacy with their Friend Connect product, and it is a useful product for users. After talking with both sides, it seems to me that Facebook is relying on a very convenient catch-22 to stay out of Google’s network. They are the ones in control of their own API functionality, and they could add features that fix this problem. Until they do, there’s nothing Google can do to remedy the “problem,” and the walls around the Facebook garden get ever higher.

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

Last month we ran a brief post introducing Spellr.us, a service that monitors websites for spelling errors. Little was known about the site at the time - all we had to go by was a teaser splash page. The site has finally entered a private beta, and it shows a lot of potential. For those looking to try it out for themselves, you can grab one of 150 invites here.

Spellr.us monitors webpages by running site-wide spell checks at regular intervals. Results are presented as snapshots of pages, with errors highlighted in bright boxes (a mouse-over displays suggested corrections). Members can also choose to have errors sent to them in RSS feeds - a feature that will be especially handy for large sites that make frequent posts. Besides the visual snapshots, Spellr.us can list misspelled words according to their frequency across the site. This means that words like TechCrunch or Flickr, which are commonly used but aren’t in the dictionary (yet), can be quickly found and added to a custom dictionary.

I ran TechCrunch.com through a trial run, and the results were promising. Error flagging worked very well, with different colors to distinguish between possible errors and obvious typos. And the site’s main dashboard, which links to each error, made navigating across hundreds of pages surprisingly painless.

Unfortunately the site is still very much a beta, so we won’t be implementing the service any time soon. Custom dictionaries don’t work yet, and the system doesn’t offer any way to omit user comments from the search (we wound up with over 20,000 flagged errors because of this, though we made a few mistakes ourselves…). Spellr.us says that all of these features will be introduced by the general release. Grammar checking is also on the horizon, though a concrete date hasn’t been established.

Other players in this space include web tool supplier NetMechanic and TextTrust, which uses a combination of human and automated spellcheckers.

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

CrunchGear’s Doug Aamoth is currently liveblogging from the Apple Store on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. The line is now a mile long and growing. Yes, folks: This is a line to go into an Apple store in Boston. They’re not even announcing a 3G iPhone. More as we get it.

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