Yahoo appears to be quite serious about openness and promoting third party content and applications on their massively visited home page. Today they’re announcing the addition of an eBay widget to the new Yahoo home page, which is still being tested with just a subset of Yahoo users. The widget will be added to the My Applications dashboard area on the left.

eBay users can use the widget to monitor buys and sells, check recent bids and get reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also search listings without leaving Yahoo.

Yahoo, like AOL, has made a subtle but important shift in their home page strategy. In the old days the home page linked out to other Yahoo pages, or advertisers. Now they’re willing to provide content that users want on the home page, no matter the source. The fact that users can access this eBay widget, presumably without eBay paying a sponsorship fee of any kind, shows Yahoo is willing to put users above revenue (in the hope that happy users will mean more revenue down the road).

By the way, Yahoo sure does love Southwest Airlines. Every screen grab they supply the press with has a big fat Southwest ad in it.

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Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.

In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.

Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.

The complete breakdown is below.

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

CEO Jeff Lawson says that while other web telephony services exist (like Asterisk, an open source project), these technologies tend to be very complex and difficult to use, even for experienced developers. Lawson says that Twilio is looking to commoditize these phone services by making them much more accessible to developers, by introducing a set of very intuitive commands. The API primarily consists of 5 commonly used phone actions (Say, Play, Record, Dial, and Gather a phone number), each of which behaves exactly as you’d expect it to. That Rick Roll app we heard a few days ago? Here’s the code (for you non-programmers, this is pretty basic stuff):

Lawson showed me a number of other impressive examples, including a project that he said managed to replicate most of GrandCentral’s features in only around 15 lines of code. A number of organizations have already started using the API to build their own applications, including a non-profit that has now automated hundreds of calls that used to take staff hours to make.

Twilio is adopting the cloud-service model, with no contract required and flat fees for calls depending on the number of minutes used and the number of phone numbers needed (developers can also scale their needs based on demand, so they don’t have to worry about their servers crashing). And while the Rick Roll app was created with the service, Lawson says it was just a pre-launch joke, and that safeguards are in place to prevent any future applications from making annoying phone calls.

Twilio isn’t perfect - it doesn’t yet support voice recognition, which is a key component in many telephony services (though this feature will be released in a future version). But it is very cool, and will probably be very popular among developers. Don’t be surprised if this one gets snatched up soon by a cloud service provider like Rackspace or Amazon (my money’s on Amazon - CEO Jeff Lawson was a Product Manager for AWS).

There are a few of other startups trying to make phone services more accessible to developers, including Skydeck, which we covered here.

Twilio Web Service API for building Voice Applications

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: voice applications)

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For all their mesmerizing graphics and adrenaline fueled gameplay, it might come as a surprise to non-gamers that many of today’s most popular computer games are bogged down by downtime (I should know - I spent the better part of 1999 mining virtual ore in Ultima Online to become a master blacksmith, and enjoyed about 10 minutes of it). MMOs like World of Warcraft see epic battles punctuated by hours of wandering mostly empty wilderness, while FPS games often punish gamers for dying by making them sit out and watch their comrades go at it until the beginning of the next round.

Today GotGame is giving these gamers something to do during these bouts of boredom. The company has released Rogue, a web browser based on WebKit and Adobe’s AIR platform that integrates directly into most of today’s popular gamers, allowing users to swap between their game and the web with a single hotkey. Gamers will be able to check their Email, listen to Pandora, watch Hulu videos, or casually browse the web at their leisure, jumping back into the game within seconds whenever they need to (the browser supports opacity, so it’s easy to tell when you need to swap your attention).

It’s possible to accomplish similar multitasking by placing games in ‘Windowed’ mode (which doesn’t make them take up the full screen), but this makes games prone to crashing and poor performance. Conversely GotGame says that Rogue should run perfectly fine with most games, and should only slightly affect performance (though the effect will increase significantly if you watch Flash-based movies like Hulu).

While it may seem counterintuitive to non-gamers, GotGame Rogue is a great idea - I would have loved to have had it during my gaming years (instead I was forced to sit a TV next to my computer monitor). Provided the app is as stable as GotGame claims, it will probably do very well. Other players in this space include Xfire, which offers an in-game application for socializing with other gamers.

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Last I heard about Leapfish (this was a couple of years ago), they ran a useless but fun tool that provided you with a free appraisal for your domain name based on a variety of ratings and criteria. Now they’re back with an equally useless tool, this time without the fun part.

The company just revamped itself under the ownership of California-based DotNext, morphing into what they refer to as a “multi-dimensional information aggregator,” which is actually nothing more than yet another meta search engine. You know the kind: sites that pull together search results from real engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo and attempt to differentiate themselves by adding tabs for meta-searching images, videos, Q&A, blogs, and so on. Leapfish also displays a number of static, non-customizable widgets on their homepage for the latest news, weather reports, and a stock market summary, which is a kind of step backwards from all the start page personalization efforts we’ve seen over the years.

The company is actively contacting potential advertisers to buy keywords for top positions in their search result listings for a flat fee—typical registration fees are reportedly around $1000 and there’s a yearly renewal fee of 5% of the amount spent —which would give them a “lifetime” guarantee for a top slot for that keyword, but they also get the opportunity to resell it later to another advertiser. Of course, this is only beneficial if Leapfish becomes big, and the chances for that are slim.

The premise of meta search engines is that the aggregation process digs up the most relevant results across different sites and technology platforms, all on a single page. What I want to know: if these meta search engines (and boy, are there many) deliver significantly better results or a greater experience than a Google’s or Yahoo’s core search technology can on its own, then why doesn’t everyone flock to them instead?

The answer: people don’t want to get as many search results as possible and they don’t care about how large the unindexed part of the internet is, let alone what they might find on this so-called “invisible deep web.” All they want is a quick, convenient way of obtaining decent information from a source they know and trust. Or do you honestly visit Search.com, Dogpile, Zuula, Fazzle, Clusty or Mamma.com to get what you need? (I can go on with this list forever, but ask Mark Cuban about how much that last one is worth).

Don’t get me wrong: I see the value of startups trying to improve search and driving innovation both on a technology and a business level, and I’m sure some will be able to compete and carve out their piece of the market. In fact, I hope some of them will. Because no matter what your opinion is on human-powered search, semantic search, vertical search, or social search engines, you have to admit several companies in that space are trying to push the envelope, often drawing attention from the big guys or keeping them honest at least (see yesterday’s announcement about Yahoo Glue, for example).

For me, though, wanna-be search engines like Leapfish don’t clear that hurdle.

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Live Current Media, a Canadian company which is in the business of developing, operating and monetizing premium domain names, has raised a little over $1 million through a private placement. The money comes from Live Current’s own management team and a couple of outside investors, and is expected to be the first part of a private funding which could total up to $2 million in the next 15 days.

Live Current, which changed its name from Communicate.com earlier this year, is a publicly traded company (OTCbb:LIVC). The investors paid 65 cents per unit, a premium of 38% to yesterday’s closing price of 40 cents.

The company acquired YCombinator startup Auctomatic in March 2008. A month after, it was time for a far bigger deal: it signed a $50 million deal to obtain the exclusive online rights to official content from the Indian Premier Cricket League. (Live Current owns Cricket.com and operates IPLT20.com, the official site for the league). When we reported on the deal, we wrote:

It is a pretty big commitment for Live Current Media, a domain-name company with revenues of $9 million last year and a net loss of $2 million. The Canadian company is basically betting its entire $51 million over-the-counter market cap on this deal.

And that was before the economic meltdown. Now, Live Current is being forced to sell up to six of its premium domain names, including Communicate.com, Brazil.com, Vietnam.com, Indonesia.com, Malaysia.com, Canadian.com and GreatBritain.com, hoping to fetch a combined total of $6 million to $10 million. It could turn into a fire sale or worse, deadpool tag for the company, unless they can convince some outside investors that they’re able to turn the ship around.

Most of Live Current’s revenue, which was nearly $2 million for the quarter ended September 30, comes from its Perfume.com operation. But with a gross profit of $352,435 and expenses of $2,343,285, those numbers aren’t going to do the trick.

Live Current CEO and Chairman, Geoffrey Hampson, said in a statement:

“This financing, in addition to the expected proceeds of the previously announced sale of up to six non-core domain names, is consistent with management’s strategy to ensure that sufficient cash resources are available to meet our obligations through the end of 2009 while minimizing dilution for existing investors.”

Only time will tell if the cash resources are sufficient enough to keep the company afloat.

(Hat tip to DomainNameWire)

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

FanIQ, a sports site that focuses more on entertaining its users than bogging them down with the stats and opinion pieces found on the likes of ESPN, has had a landmark year. The site launched in 2006, but hasn’t really hit its stride until now: since January, the site has grown by over 2000%, recently hitting as many as 2.4 million unique users and 1.5 million registered members. These figures pale in comparison to the larger sports sites and popular fantasy leagues, but the rate of growth is very impressive nonetheless.

FanIQ differentiates itself from other sports sites by offering a set of casual games and community features alongside more traditional sports headlines. To encourage participation, the site has a points system that rewards users who write blog posts and play the site’s integrated trivia game. These points are just for show (though CEO Ty Shay says that many users are still intensely competitive about them), but in the future the site will offer virtual goods and other rewards in exchange for points.

The site has raised around $3-5 million in funding (the exact amount was not disclosed), with investors including Vantage Point Ventures, Peter Thiel, Paul Martino, Keith Rabois, and Jeff Fluhr. Other startups in this space include Open Sports (which has a similar web portal) and Watercooler and Citizen Sports, both of which design sports oriented applications for social networks.

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Real Girls Media, a San Francisco-based online publishing company specializes in—you guessed it—social communities for women, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding led by Meredith Corporation, which took a minority stake in the company. RGM, which was founded in 2006, had previously raised $6 million in Series A funding from 3i and WaldenVC.

The agreement adds Real Girls Media Network’s traffic (which comes primarily from flagship community site DivineCaroline) to Meredith’s network, which the company claims increases Meredith’s unique visitors to an admirable 15 million uniques each month. Meredith and Real Girls Media will combine their ad inventory and sales forces, Meredith has a new way to distribute relevant content to their target audience, plus they get to use RGM’s proprietary technology platform for advertising.

Sounds like a mother-daughter thing to us.

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly report on U.S. online advertising revenues. For the quarter, they estimate online advertising revenues were almost $5.9 billion ($5.865 billion, to be exact), which is an 11 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago and a 2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008.

If you look at the graph above, you can see that online advertising revenues have been pretty much flat all year long.

And remember, these numbers are just or the U.S. The global online advertising picture might be worse. Just tallying up the worldwide online advertising revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL—as I did a few days ago—suggests that annual growth in the third quarter was higher at 18 percent, but the sequential growth was slowing down faster at only 0.6 percent over the second quarter of 2008.

If these trends continue, the fourth quarter could see an actual decline in both U.S. and global growth.

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Mufin, a powerful music recommendation engine that actually works, has launched to the public. We last covered the site in early October, when it opened in a restricted private beta.

The site, which was created by the same organization that created the now-ubiquitous MP3 file format, uses an advanced algorithm to ‘listen to’ songs and identify similar sounding tracks based on over 40 characteristics. Such automated systems are very hard to pull off (which is why Pandora, another music recommendation engine, uses human experts), but in my testing Mufin had fared surprisingly well.

Since we last wrote about it, Mufin has introduced a Facebook widget that allows users to get song recommendations from within their friends’ Facebook profiles. The site has also relased a plugin for iTunes, which generates playlists based on tracks in a user’s library (iTunes Genius does exactly the same thing, but it relies on metadata rather than an analysis of the music file itself).

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Will the music subscription business ever grow beyond its current niche? It looks increasingly doubtful. Today, eMusic announced that since it launched its current music subscription service in 2003, customers have downloaded 250 million songs. Apple’s iTunes, by comparison, has sold more than 5 billion songs since it opened the iTunes Store in April, 2003. That makes eMusic one twentieth the size of iTunes.

The way eMusic works is you pay a subscription of between $12 and $20 a month and then you can download 30 to 75 songs a month and keep them. You can also purchase songs above those limits, starting at $0.25 a track. eMusic has a catalog of 4.5 million songs, and is particularly strong in independent music. It currently has 400,000 subscribers, and the company expects to make $70 million in revenues this year.

That implies the vast majority of subscribers opt in for the basic $12 a month plan, which would net $57.6 million a year if that is what everyone paid. The difference can be accounted for by those people who opt for the more expensive land and additional downloads. And the best part of the business is that eMusic only pays the labels for the songs its customers download. So if someone doesn’t use up their allotment and only downloads 5 songs during a given month, eMusic pockets the money that would have gone to the labels for the other 25 songs they could have downloaded.

It’s a nice business because eMusic gets rewarded for customer laziness. And iTunes certainly needs competition, so I hope it keeps chugging along. But these numbers don’t bode well for the subscription music business ever rising up to challenge iTunes in any meaningful way.

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It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has gone by since we gave out those crazy gorilla awards to the best startup and product successes in Silicon Valley and around the world. Some of the photos from last year are here.

The Crunchies are back. We are once again partnering with some of our favorite blogs - thank you to co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat (click the links for their announcements). Thanks as well to 1938 Media, our video production partner (see their first video below in the comments).

The Awards Ceremony will be held on Jan. 9, 2009, 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco. The reception will follow and tickets will be released in December.

What we need from you right now: please nominate your favorite startups and products in fifteen categories. And remember, you’re judging them based on their 2008 performance. Nominations may be made until December 10, 2008 Midnight PST.

On December 15 we’ll begin the final voting process for the winners.

If you are a startup and want to encourage your users to vote for you, you can create a customized badge here.

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It’s not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent’s head against the corner post, but outside the ring it’s hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends.

Wrestlers aren’t stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That’s why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it’s not really a social network. It’s just a craptastic promotional vehicle. And some of those wrestlers aren’t so bright. But they are lonely.

Just because Mark Henry is the “world’s strongest man” doesn’t mean he doesn’t cry at night when all he has to keep him company is his pit bull, Theodore, and a can of beans. Or Zack Ryder. The poor guy might be a tag team champion, but when he goes home all he has to look forward to are watering his plants and watching reruns of Smackdown with his cat, Fluffy. Be friends with them. Don’t block them out of your life. They need you.

The only person who needs to be scared of these guys is Mark Zuckerberg. I sent Mark and Zack a message explaining that nobody is going to sign up to be their friends on the WWE Universe because everybody is over at Facebook. They didn’t respond so well to that news. Be scared Zuckerberg. Be very, very scared.

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Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit. It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-baseed virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites. Lively launched just last July. The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31, so we are adding Lively to the deadpool.

Lively just never took off, and was extremely far afield for Google. A post on the Google Blog explains the decision:

. . . we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.

We should have known something was up when we noticed that it didn’t work with Google’s own browser, Chrome. It’s Google Website Trends chart says it all. After an initial spike, it flat-lined. Hype can only go so far.

Maybe Google didn’t kill Lively so much as mercifully pull the plug. This is a good sign actually that Google is willing to weed out non=performing products. What else is being cut at Google?

What else should be?

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Yahoo Glue, a new search results page design that the company has been testing in India, is rolling out to the US market this evening. You can view it at glue.yahoo.com, although Yahoo says it is rolling out in stages, so sit tight if you don’t see it.

It’s also a little different than the Indian version, and includes a number of resources beyond simple search results. On a typical query, content from Wikipedia, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, blog search results (from Google) and YouTube videos are shown.

For the US, Yahoo is starting with a limited set of topics and using a two column instead of a three column design. They’ve also left out the search results altogether. In this example for Barack Obama, prominent links to Memorandum (a political blog aggregator) are also shown.

Yahoo says they won’t use Glue to replace search in the US. Instead it seems to be a useful content page that brings in data from lots of different sources on topics.

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The cutbacks continue, even at seemingly healthy startups. Social recommendation engine Strands let exactly 10 percent, or 14 people go (7 in the U.S. and 7 in Spain), the company confirms. Strands has raised a total of $55 million, still employs 125 people, and is hiring for other positions. It also just announced a mobile version for Nokia S60 phones.

Qik, which lets you stream live video from your cell phone, also laid off about 10 percent of its employees, which in its case amounted to five people. We got a tip that the reason for the layoffs is because the startup could not raise a $10 to $15 million round, but a spokesperson says that is not true and that we should stay tuned. We hope its not true because we love Qik. The company so far has raised only $4 million, but its investors include Marc Benioff and Marc Andreessen.

Also this week, Akamai is laying off 110 people (7 percent), KLA-Tencor is cutting 900 (15 percent), four people lost their jobs at Engine Yard (66 percent), and 7 at PC Magazine, which is ceasing its print edition.

We’ve added all of these to the Layoff Tracker, which is now up to 77,151 layoffs across 225 technology companies big and small.

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In other Mozilla news, Firefox and other Mozilla products hit a major milestone today with the one billionth download of add-on software for the browser. That feat took three and half years.

Many of those downloads are never used more than once or twice, of course. But there is no doubt about it that Firefox is major software platform. Just look at StumbleUpon, it was built on top of Firefox.

What is atop the current list of most popular add-ons? Adblock Plus, followed by a bunch of download tools. And let’s not forget Greesemonkey at No. 9, which is it’s own Web development platform.

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