Another day, another regulator seeking to shut down Uber. At least that’s what it looks like, this time in Chicago.

The city’s Business Affairs and Consumer Protection department (BACP) last week issued proposed regulations that would essentially prohibit car services from using electronic devices to measure time and distance to determine fares when picking up and charging users. And since Uber is all about using mobile phones as a way to not just hire black cars on-demand, but also to determine how far they traveled and what a rider’s fare should be, that means that the new regulations, if accepted, could mean a shutdown of Uber’s black car service in Chicago.

Uber goes into more detail about the proposed rules on its blog, but the two important sections are Section 1.10.a, which would prohibit any “mechanical, electronic, or digital meters/equipment to measure and calculate passenger fares based on distance and/or time traveled,” and Section 1.10.c, which would brand any car that used those devices as “an unlicensed taxicab.”

The problem, according to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, is that Chicago limo services already charge by time and distance today — mainly by looking at a watch or at the odometer. The difference in what Uber provides is that its app makes the experience more accurate and transparent.

“The taxi industry has decided to pull out every weapon they have to try to crush Uber in Chicago,” Kalanick told me. Early last month, the company was sued by Chicago taxi and limousine companies in the city. It also received some minor citations from the BACP on the same day the lawsuit was filed, Kalanick said. But the new regulations pose the biggest threat Uber has faced in that city.

“The laws as they are in Chicago are very innovation-friendly today,” Kalanick said. “What they’re proposing are un-innovation-friendly rules. It’s not clear what good they’re trying to accomplish.”

To combat the move, Uber is urging its riders to email their comments to the BACP, telling the agency to “Remove the No Measured Rates Provision (PPV Sec. 1.10)” from its proposed regulations. It’s also asking them to contact local officials with the same request.

It’s not clear how effective that campaign will be, though public outcry in both Boston and Washington, D.C., stunted proposed bills and regulations that would impinge on its operations in those markets.

There’s a company that people have been buzzing about for some time called ToyTalk, which was founded by former Pixar CTO Oren Jacob. He was also previously an EIR at August Capital.

A video was released today showing off what the company is working on and it’s pretty awesome. Basically, it’s a talking teddy bear that uses artificial intelligence and scripted voices utilizing the iPad.

The video is short, but it’s our first look:

ToyTalk calls itself a “family entertainment company,” and it wants to “create entertainment powered by characters and conversation.” Last week, I told you about a new iPad app by Alicia Keys, which led me to think about how the television no longer acts as the “babysitter” for kids growing up these days. In fact, the iPad and other technological advancements that are more interactive are starting to take over.

Not only could this be a huge space for ToyTalk to conquer, but given Jacob’s pedigree, he could do some amazing things with licensing characters from companies such as Disney, which just purchased Lucasfilm and the Star Wars series.

Teddy Ruxpin 2.0 it would seem, with Apple helping to drive the technology. That’s pretty awesome.

We’ve reached out to Jacob to hear a bit more on what the plans are, but until then, you can sign up for details when they become available on ToyTalk’s website.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

We’ve seen a few companies rally behind the victims of Hurricane Sandy, and today Airbnb joins the fold.

The peer-to-peer home sharing startup has decided to waive all of its fees for both hosts and guests in Sandy-affected areas. They are also encouraging hosts to lower prices and take in refugees who may be without power, water, or a home at all.

Airbnb said in a blog post that there are more than 20,000 listings within affected areas. According to the startup, those include New York, the Hamptons, Providence, New Haven, and Atlantic City.

One of those 20,000 listings is Shell, a host who lives in Brooklyn. She’s offering all of her rooms for free to those who might need a refuge from a dark, chaotic, and partially powerless lower Manhattan. “She provides an example of how we can all help,” the blog post read.

Airbnb will not charge any fees for trips booked with a starting date between October 31 and November 7. There are various stipulations and such to the offer, which can be found here.

Airbnb is a service that takes a leap of faith, by the guest and especially by the host. But speaking as an occasional host myself, each reservation that goes without a hitch restores a bit of my faith in humanity. This just reaffirms the brand.

Here’s the blog post in its entirety:

Hurricane Sandy has affected millions of people. But it has also provided an invitation to share our space in truly meaningful ways.

Shell, an Airbnb host in Brooklyn, is offering her five guest rooms to stranded travelers and locals – for free. She provides an example of how we can all help.

There are more than 20,000 Airbnb listings available in affected areas. Airbnb is waiving all of our fees for these spaces. We encourage our entire community to help anyone who has been left stranded or in need because of the hurricane.

The fee-free traveling and hosting applies to both guests who book and hosts who accept new bookings that start between October 31 and November 7 in New York, the Hamptons, Providence, New Haven, and Atlantic City. (The max trip length is seven nights.)

If you’re an existing host in an affected area and can help, please consider lowering your price. You can do this in your account settings.

If you are in a position to share space, please consider listing your space so others might find you.

We started Airbnb so that what’s most inspiring about people and their spaces could be shared. Thanks, Shell, for providing this inspiration for our global community.

Hello, Great White North! We are officially out of tickets for the Northern Meet-ups, our flights and hotels are booked, and we’re raring to meet all of you in Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago. For more information head over to the individual event pages (Detroit, Chicago, and Toronto); if you’ve signed up be sure to show up early because we’re expecting a packed house at each one.

To recap, we’re holding the events at Toronto’s Steam Whistle, Detroit’s Hockey Town Cafe, and Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center, and more TechCrunchers than ever before will be in attendance. Here’s the whole roster: Jordan Crook, John Biggs, Matt Burns, Colleen Taylor, and Darrell Etherington, Romain Dillet and Elin Blesener.

Apparently we chose a Chicago venue that is a bit out of the way. The space is awesome, but a bunch of readers indicated it’s hard to get to. Uber heard your cries. Enter the promo code, ‘TCNOVCHI12′ in the app or at Uber.com, and you’ll receive $10 off black car rides to/from the event. For more information, check out uber.com/chicago or tweet @Uber_CHI.

Free Stuff

The fine folks at New Relic have agreed to give every attendee of our Northern Meetup Series a free Nerd Life t-shirt at the door. So cool! Not going? For the next few days, you can get one for free too, just by following this link and enter the promocode TCTEE on signup (feel free to share the code) and when you start monitoring your web app using their FREE monitoring service, they’ll send one to you – no strings attached. They are on a mission to fuel the nerd economy – be part of the nerd movement!

The most important thing? We have some great sponsors. They stepped up when few others would and for that we’re grateful. Here they are:

Partners
Ford is loaning us some cars to ride around the lonesome north.

And our other awesome sponsors:

Demo Startups

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” this week hosts a first-time founder and entrepreneur who began his career as an engineering student at two of the country’s finest universities and played baseball for his college team, after which he worked at one of the country’s largest technology research and product companies before enrolling in and dropping out of business school to work on building a company in Silicon Valley.

David Lieb, the co-founder and CEO of Bump Technologies, has been focused on mobile since he dropped out of the MBA program at the University of Chicago to build this company. Since then, Bump has been growing (in terms of downloads) and drives a lot of sharing of photos and contacts among users, especially during weekends. Before starting Bump, Lieb finished engineering degrees working with robots and joined Texas Instruments, where he worked with algorithms. The timing of Bump couldn’t have been better, with the rise of the iPhone and their innovative use of sensors drove them to enjoy great growth.

If you’re working on a mobile application that deals with location, watch this video. In this discussion, Lieb and I focus on a new product launched by Bump Labs, called “Flock.” The idea behind flock is to create mobile software that helps tie a user’s social graph to their the phone camera to enable easier, passive photosharing at events among friends.

Underneath the Flock service, it turns out, is a whole debate around the challenges and opportunities around mobile applications that provide services while running in the background, or what can sometimes be referred to as “passive” applications. Lieb details out the size of the opportunity — something he’s keenly aware of given the install base of Bump — as well as the challenges, everything down to the fact that mobile installations are hard and consumer education around the GPS indicators can scare off users (for battery and/or privacy reasons) even when the phone isn’t logging location. Specifically, we discuss the new iOS background location APIs, the ability to tie social networks to the application software from the operating system, the different states the GPS sensor can enter into, what battery drain really means, and the burden of communicating all of this to the end user.

Microsoft has made a deal with China to offer Windows Azure in the country. The deal is ballyhooed as a landmark agreement but, at its core, represents something that only the Chinese government can love.

The agreement with the municipality of Shanghai shows how China will begin rolling out more cloud services to China. That’s further reflected in a deal to license Microsoft technologies to 21Vianet, which will work with regional providers to provide Windows Azure services to local datacenters. 21Vianet bills itself as the largest carrier-neutral Internet data center services provider in China.

Cloudcamp Co-Founder Reuven Cohen has spent a good part of the past few years in China. He recently sold his company, Enomaly, to Virtustream, a provider of software and services for enterprise customers extending to the cloud.  He said to me in an email today that the Microsoft deal represents all that is wrong with the cloud computing and Internet business scene today in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

What they are really saying is it meets the demands of the Chinese government. The reality is Microsoft has ‘most likely’ had to agree to provide core Azure source code and full unfettered access to any Azure user data and traffic hosted in China.

Cohen makes the point that to do business in China you have to create a series of “rather ridiculous” joint ventures or exclusive licensing deals with local municipalities to have any chance of succeeding:

This doesn’t even begin to describe the convoluted series of hoops that local Chinese companies that may want to use the service will need to jump through to actually use it. Yes, Please fill out a Chinese only language forms, sign on dotted line, mail, on paper no less, and this is just to get started.

What’s striking is how Microsoft couches its news — by wrapping it with all the marketing language that comes with the cloud: It’s good for customers — blah, blah, blah. Microsoft did not reply to requests for comment in time for this post to be published.

The Microsoft deal has no real value except for giving Microsoft a beachhead in China. There is nothing here that says outside businesses can use Azure as an endpoint for conducting business. That leaves the China market exclusively and another example of a quarantined and separated business venture within the great firewall.

Let’s be real here. Microsoft has made a deal with the Chinese government and the ones to benefit are not the users at all but the Chinese powers that control how technology is distributed, managed and surveilled in the PRC.

Facebook added a search box to its App Center today, but what it might do next is more interesting. Facebook could soon let developers pay to buy search keyword ads in the App Center search typeahead, similar to the specific name ads in its site-wide search typeahead. And if App Center goes beyond the typeahead and launches a search results page, it could host full-blown AdWords-style search ads.

First the actual news. Previously, there was no way to search in Facebook’s App Center. The best approximation was searching in the site-wide search engine which would pull up app profile pages in App Center as results. Today Facebook added an internal search typeahead to App Center that lets you search for apps by name or by keyword like “fitness”, or “cars”. There’s no results page, though, just a drop-down of options.

That sets the stage for ads within App Center. This prediction falls right in line with Facebook’s strategy to become the leading source of app discovery outside of the official Apple App Store and Google Play marketplace — where no ads appear. It believes that with social recommendations and quality ratings based on how often people actually use an app, it can help us find apps better than simple ranked lists based on downloads.

Along with organic discovery, though, Facebook is getting serious about paid discovery. That’s a huge industry where developers pay massive sums to appear in ad networks and drive installs.

Facebook dove head-first into paid discovery the last few months. On October 17 it officially launched its mobile app install ads in the news feed that link to the app stores. In September it also launched Sponsored Results ads in the site-wide search typeahead. These let developers choose a competing or similar app, and when it’s searched for, their app or Page shows up above it in the search typeahead. There’s no keyword ads, though.  Devs have to pick a certain Page or app they want to be advertised next to.

Those work fine but there’s a missing piece. If someone’s browsing the news feed they might not be in the mood to download apps. And if they’re searching for a specific app, ads for competitors might just be a distraction. But when people are on Facebook’s App Center they’re clearly trying to discover apps, and when they make a keyword search for something like “puzzle game,” “tower defense,” or “photo editor,” they’re open to suggestion about which app to download.

That was a lot of build up, but essentially what I’m saying is that Facebook’s App Center is ripe for search keyword ads that either show up in the App Center search typeahead or as full entries on an as-yet-unlaunched search results page. Devs could pick a keyword, bid a price they’re willing to pay, and Facebook could show the ad from the highest bidder in the typeahead or results page, just like Google AdWords.

That bidding competition could make this a huge revenue driver. Think how many tower defense games or photo editor apps might all vie for those keywords, bumping up successful bid prices and earn Facebook lots of money.

There’s plenty of App Center traffic to monetize. It launched in early June and by mid-August had 150 million monthly visitors. As of the beginning of October it had 220 million, showing rapid growth. No need to ignore the other 780 million Facebook users either. Facebook could easily bring keyword ads to its site-wide typeahead results, even if someone searching for “photo editing” outside of the App Center might be looking for a local business.

Investors surely want Facebook to break into all-out web search advertising, but that’s going to take time. It needs an all-out web search engine first. No, Facebook’s little-used web search integration with Bing doesn’t count. It’s buried, offers nothing unique, and Facebook has to split the revenue.

App search on the other hand is something special that Facebook already has humming. It’s got qualified leads, ample traffic, a model proven by Google, and a huge base of developers/advertisers to tap. Those could make App Center keyword search ads a staple of paid discovery budgets, a portal to the growing app economy, and a new way for Facebook to rake in the cash.

Apple’s share of mobile web traffic rose 5.96 percent between September and October, thanks no doubt to the introduction of the iPhone 5, and likely also helped by the shipping of the 4th generation iPod touch. Apple controlled 65.38 percent of the traffic advertising network and research firm Chitika saw across the millions of devices it monitors on any given day, and share dropped pretty evenly among other manufacturers, though Samsung gave up the most ground.

Apple had previously lost share in September, going from 65.03 percent to 59.42 percent of all traffic measured. Samsung enjoyed the largest growth of any individual manufacturer during that same period. RIM got a surprise bump this time around, with the highest growth besides Apple between September and October, rising 1.29 percent on the back of increased PlayBook browsing.

Chitika predicts that Google will come on strong with additional gains now that the Nexus 7 updated devices and Nexus 10 are going out into the wild. The iPad mini and iPad 4th generation could also make a significant impact, since they ship to customers and wind up in stores beginning this Friday, November 2. Apple has been staying relatively stable in terms of share over the past year, save for the dip in September and sharp jump now in October, but an entirely new iOS-powered device entering the lineup could shake things up considerably.

It’s that time of year again when we start taking nominations for the sixth annual Crunchies Awards, the Oscars of startups and technology. Once again we are co-hosting the awards with GigaOm and VentureBeat and we will return to the beautiful Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Last year was our first year at the Davies and it was the best Crunchies yet. I know we say it every year, but this year really will be even better as we have many new surprises to entertain you in the works. The event will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013.

Who will be there? Well, that’s where you come in. Nominate the most deserving startups, founders, and investors across 20 categories from Best New Startup to Founder of the Year to Sexiest Enterprise Startup. We are taking nominations until 11:59pm PST on December 6, 2012. You can nominate one company or person per category per day, but otherwise can nominate as much as you want. (You can read all the rules here).

Who do you think will make it this year? Instagram, Square, Fab, Airbnb, Pinterest? Who is the best angel investor? Who is the best CEO? What is the most impressive technology achievement of the year? You tell us. Nominate your favorite companies, products and entrepreneurs now. Details and full list of categories (with last year’s winners) are below:

The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA

7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.

Tickets will be released in batches starting next week.

Nominations open: Thursday, November 1st
Nominations close: Thursday, December 6th at 11:59pm PST
Finalists announced: early January

Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact [email protected].

For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

List of Categories:

Best Technology Achievement (2011: Siri)
Best Collaborative Consumption Service (New for 2012)
Best E-Commerce Application (New for 2012)
Best Mobile Application (2011: Evernote)
Fastest Rising Startup (New for 2012)
Best Content Discovery Application (New for 2012)
Best Design (2011: Path 2.0)
Best Bootstrapped Startup (2011: Imgur)
Sexiest Enterprise Startup (New for 2012)
Best International Startup (2011: Peixe Urbano)
Best Education Startup (New for 2012)
Best Hardware Startup (New for 2012)
Best Time Sink (2011: Words With Friends)
Biggest Social Impact (2011: Twitter)
Angel of the Year (2011: Reid Hoffman)
VC of the Year (2011: Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz)
Founder of the Year (2011: Jack Dorsey)
CEO of the Year (2011: Jeff Weiner)
Best New Startup of 2012 (2011: Pinterest)
Best Overall Startup of 2012 (2011: Dropbox)

Check out additional event coverage from our partners: GigaOm and VentureBeat.

Google is today announcing mobile support for its Google Wallet checkout service, which expanded to include micropayments for web content earlier this month. At that time, Google said it would allow online shoppers to purchase premium digital content, ideally priced under $1.00, which also included a 30-minute money-back refund. Today, Google is expanding its service yet again to an area that makes even more sense: mobile shopping.

It’s fair to say that Google Wallet hasn’t really gained traction in terms of being an NFC-enabled service for making mobile payments at point-of-sale out in the real world, but frankly, no digital wallet provider has won the mobile payments battle yet. That’s why it’s notable that Google Wallet is now expanding its focus in order to become a more comprehensive digital payments platform which could rival incumbents in this space – like PayPal, for example.

With today’s update, Google says that Google Wallet now supports mobile e-commerce websites which have adopted Google Wallet as a checkout option. Indeed, this is an area that’s still a major pain point for many online retailers. All too often, checkout functionality on mobile isn’t optimized for the small screen, or sometimes, the pages themselves are mobile-friendly in terms of their design, but the checkout process still steps users through so many form fields that the process becomes time-consuming and cumbersome for small keyboards and touchscreens. Google says that currently, 97% of mobile shoppers abandon their carts for this very reason.

Now Google Wallet offers an alternative. On sites supporting Google Wallet, users can just click the “Buy with Google Wallet” button, login to their Google account, and complete the order. OK, it’s a few more taps than one (it’s three), but Amazon’s got that patent, right? If anything, the experience Google describes sounds the most like PayPal’s Express Checkout option for merchants.

To use Google’s service on the mobile web, you will first have to set up your account with Google, add your credit and debit cards, enter in your billing and shipping address details, and other payment information. You can also set up a default card for future purchases, so you don’t have to pick which card to use at checkout.

Launch partners for Google Wallet on the mobile web include 1-800-Flowers.com, Rockport.com, and FiveGuys.com (at select locations). Others in the works are Finish Line, MovieTickets.com, Seamless, and SwimOutlet.com. To get started, users can create an account here.

Also worth noting: in late October, several tech bloggers discovered that Google Wallet was teasing the “next version” of the service on its homepage, which included a sign-up form asking if users owned an Android, iPhone, or other device. That same messaging appears today on the Google Wallet homepage. But that being said, it makes sense that as Google shifts Google Wallet’s focus from only being an Android-only service for NFC payments (it works on Sprint, Virgin Mobile, and more recently MetroPCS phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, LG Viper, LG Optimus Elite, and HTC EVO 4G), Google may consider how to better address the needs of iOS users in this space. For example, an obvious next step would be for Google to launch a complementary iOS app for the setup, monitoring and management of users’ Google Wallet account to spur increased mobile adoption outside of the Android ecosystem.

The story sounded far-fetched: OLPC researchers, working with a team of technicians in Ethiopia, created a special “hut” covered in solar panels where the children of a few distant towns could go to recharge some toys they were given. The toys were boxed Motorola Xoom tablets and every child between the age of four and eight got one. The researchers were expecting the children to play with the boxes and potentially open them in the first week. Instead they turned them on in less than an hour and a few months later were modifying the settings and singing ABC songs. It was, at once, a triumph of technology and of the human capacity to learn.

The hut became a focal point for the town’s children, and the kids loved their tablets so much that they slept with them. One kid would learn how to launch a Disney movie and the others would follow. Another kid learned how to unlock the built-in camera. It was a form of viral education that we see, under the surface of many childhood interactions, every day. They learned without learning.

We first heard this story last week in Boston when we were touring the MIT Media Lab and it sounded too good to be true. The thought that children cut off from education by dint of their physical location were able to learn, without teachers, the rudiments of English and how to manage a complex tablet device, was wild. Luckily MIT’s in-house magazine, Technology Review put together a very nice story about the project and I have to say I’m impressed.

I’ve been down on the educational value of “throwing” electronics at kids for years. However, this example of a positive outcome is inspiring. Sadly, these children would presumably have no education at all if they didn’t receive these tablets and the fact that they far surpassed the researcher’s expectations proves, categorically, that modern technology has moved from the realm of the technical to the realm of what can be called conversational. I’m reminded of William Gibson’s comment on going to the movies for the first time.

Reading a book, he wrote, was hard. It required years of education and training and a concentration that many children don’t possess. But, thanks to advances in technology, he and every other child can understand a film, or in this case, a tablet. The skills needed to open a Xoom, turn it on, and play with it have been subsumed deep within the technology. In short, the tablet hides complexity so completely that anyone with a finger and a good head on their shoulders can learn from it. This is a triumph but it is double-edged. On one hand it creates a grave disconnect between the nuts and bolts of the OS and the user, and on the other hand it encourages projects like the Raspberry Pi which aims to bring the bare metal back into computer interaction.

Teachers are important. Technology, thankfully, can replace some of their skills. I doubt that dropping a dozen tablets on a remote village in Ethiopia or – and this is true – rural Georgia is the end of our responsibility to these children. It is, however, a promising beginning.

Read the rest of the piece here. Being down on OLPC is fashionable recently, but it’s clearly working.

Not wanting to be outdone by South Korea and others, which mandated the use of digital textbooks by 2015, earlier this year the FCC and the Department of Ed released the Digital Textbook Playbook to help accelerate digital textbook adoption among American schools. According to a recent report from the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), it’s not a matter of if this transition will happen, but when.

Since its launch in 2009, Inkling has been on a mission to reinvent publishing for the mobile, digital era by building engaging, interactive learning content from the ground up for the iPad. Initially focused on higher ed, this year Inkling has been expanding its scope, moving into consumer-facing titles and continuing education, along with making its content available on other platforms like the Web.

Today, Inkling continues that expansion with the release of the “Inkling Library,” an online store that will feature curated digital eBooks from a range of genres and proposes to serve as a one-stop shop where consumers can find hobby and interest-specific learning materials. According to Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis, the library is akin to Amazon for illustrated learning content and will feature 300 titles from categories like Travel & Adventure, Food & Drink, Arts & Photography, Music, etc.

The eBooks were built from the ground up as a way to showcase the Inkling digital publishing platform, meaning that each copy comes with stuff like advanced search, the ability to sync across iPad, iPhone and the Web, glossary terms, interactive guided tours and slideshows, high-res images and social notes. The content comes from publishers like Frommer’s and O’Reilly and includes some of the “For Dummies” series now owned by Wiley. The average price of the titles is about $9.99, with the option to purchase chapters for $0.99 and up.

By the end of the year, MacInnis says, Inkling hopes to have 400 titles published to the library, with some of that content being exclusively created for Inkling, some of it familiar and published already (like “For Dummies”) and some of it augmented for the library — but all of it intending to demonstrate what’s possible now in the digital textbook market — for both indie and established publishers.

In February, Inkling launched Habitat, a cloud-based, cross-platform publishing environment that essentially allows any publisher to create digital-first titles or migrate their existing, paper-based content to digital. In a way it was a reaction to Apple’s release of iBooks 2, but instead of being a platform that allows anyone to create digital textbooks, it focused on professional publishers, giving them an easier way to make their catalogs digital, rather than having to spend millions to develop the technology themselves.

MacInnis says that the move has finally allowed Inkling to start generating real revenue, as partnerships with publishers like McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley have led to growing production of digital e-books. Inkling has been able to gain particular traction among medical students, as titles from the big publishers are now used in 150 medical schools worldwide and will be in 900 campus bookstores this fall. Overall, college students from more than 4,000 schools have purchased Inkling’s titles, which the founder says has started to expose it to a new set of students that had never heard of it before.

The company followed Habitat with the launch of Inkling 3.0 this summer, which brought its eBooks to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, with the Inkling Library, the company is starting to put the pieces together of a substantial digital publishing and distribution platform, offering both education-specific content as well as consumer-facing titles that are available on the Web, your phone and the iPad.

MacInnis believes that, while Inkling faces competition from the giants of both technology and publishing, specifically the likes of Apple and Amazon, they are trying to solve the easy problems, rather than tackling the hard stuff. Publishers want an industrial-grade tool they can use to digitize their content — that actually goes beyond a simple text-to-digital port — on top of distribution channels.

The CEO thinks that, as of now, it’s one of the few to focus on digitizing how-to and hobby content. And by helping publishers and authors get their content to appear in Google results, Twitter streams and on general consumer sites, it’s going to help accelerate what has, up to this point, been fairly slow textbook adoption.

The Inkling Library is now live on the company’s homepage. Find it here.

We first met Summly, an application that summarizes news stories algorithmically, and its “boy genius” founder Nick D’Aloisio back in mid-2011. At that time, the London-based D’Aloisio was 15 years old — just barely old enough to legally have a Facebook account — and Summly, then called Trimit, was something he’d hacked together in his spare time.

A lot has changed since then.

Summly is now a full-on company that has raised more than $1 million in funding from a star-studded group of investors including Li Ka Shing’s Horizons Ventures, Betaworks, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Brian Chesky, Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga’s business manager Troy Carter (along with many others.) The now 17-year-old D’Aloisio (his birthday is today) has put his formal studies on hold to focus full-time on Summly, which has six staffers and a partnership with SRI International, which pitched in with its machine learning and natural language processing expertise.

And today sees the launch of the latest, most fully-featured version of Summly for iPhone, an app that claims to “dramatically improve the mobile news reading experience.” It’s certainly a crowded space, but D’Aloisio and his investors are confident that this offering has an edge.

D’Aloisio stopped by TechCrunch while he was in San Francisco earlier this month, so we had the chance to have him give us a hands-on demo with Summly and talk about the new funding. Watch the video above to see Summly in action and hear D’Aloisio talk about why Summly is different from the Flipboards, Instapapers, and Pulses of the world, why cash-strapped news organizations will actually welcome Summly rather than shut it off, why he decided to jump into the business world now rather than wait until after high school, how Summly plans to make money of its own, and more.

Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

Laying out four Benjamins to replace an accessory that comes for free in the box with your phone seems, I don’t know, totally and completely stupid.

But after listening to my favorite music through this in-ear headset for the past month, I can confidently say I’d drop $400 of my own cash on a pair without remorse. The only tear I’d shed would be for all my other in-ear headphones, which would go unused forevermore.

The headphones in question: Logitech’s UE 900. They’re the new flagship audiophile earphones from the venerable Ultimate Ears brand, and they’re just as awesome and perfect and beautiful-sounding as you’d expect from a $400 headset.

Ultimate Ears became well known for making custom in-ear monitors (IEMs) and noise-attenuating ear plugs for musicians to wear on stage. Professional IEMs usually require you to have custom molds made of your ears, and the results are super-fancy, but expensive. Later, with the iPod explosion, the company found a way to distill the essentials of its pro-level in-ear design into a non-custom consumer model. Its UE-5c and TripleFi 10 models basically defined the early consumer IEM market, and they are still some of the most well-regarded IEMs among audiophile consumers. (I had a pair of TF10s that I recently retired from service after several years.)

Now, Ultimate Ears — which has since been acquired by accessories giant Logitech — has worked up a new design for its latest flagship in-ear. Like previous in-ear monitors, this one takes many cues from the pro-level models before it. If you want a pair of pro-level IEMs, but you don’t want to pay out the nose for the privilege, this will get you remarkably close for “only” $400.

The UE 900 uses a unique four-driver design: two balanced armature drivers for the low-end, one for the mids and one for the highs. The result is some truly glorious sound, supremely rich from one end of the audio spectrum to the other. The bass is heavy and direct. Mid-range frequencies are perfectly represented, and the chiming highs are only slightly tempered at the very, very top end.

The clarity? I was totally floored every single time I hit “Play.” In my testing, I listened to songs I thought I knew by heart, and I was able to hear details I’d never picked up on before. Whenever I listen to really nice headphones, I can’t resist the temptation to throw on The Beatles. So imagine my embarrassment when I heard Paul and John whistling in the background during “Taxman” for the first time. Or all the bass string noise in “Come Together” — how could I have missed that the first two thousand times? But there it was. Pink Floyd Animals? I listened to it twice. Oh, and Karajan’s reading of The Ninth with the Berlin Philharmonic? As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures.

I got so carried away during the first session, I kicked back on my bed and didn’t get up again until I had completely run down the battery on my iPhone.

The 900s come with a nice jewelry-style box, a polishing bag, two cables, two adapters, and a full complement of tips to find the correct fit: five sizes of rubber tips and three sizes of Comply foam tips. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

This level of clarity and drama of course has a lot to do with the quality of the drivers, but it has just as much to do with the fit. Logitech ships the UE 900s with eight in-ear options for obtaining the best seal: silicone tips ranging from size large all the way down to size XXS, as well as three different sizes of Comply foam tips.

The in-ear fit these require is not for everyone. And just putting the things in properly takes some practice. Like other high-end IEMs, the first few inches of the cable extending out of the ear pieces is made of “memory wire,” a coating that stiffens the cable and lets you bend it into different shapes.

You actually position the UE 900s upside-down, so the cables leave the bodies through the top. Holding the body, you wrap the stiff part of the cable over the top of your ear, then tug it snug and push the rubber tip into your ear canal. This configuration is weird if you’re not used to it, and as a lifelong glasses-wearer, I’d rather not have to futz with memory wire. But the UEs have the most comfortable over-the-ear cable system I’ve encountered yet — certainly preferable to the rigid plastic cable guides you get with some IEMs.

When properly fitted, Logitech says the UE 900s will give you a full 26db of noise isolation. I trust this claim — I listened on city buses, while walking the streets at rush hour, and while at my desk in the bustling office, and I have no complaints about the level of isolation.

The totally immersive experience is enhanced by the braided cabling, which produce only a minimal amount of noticeable noise as it rubs and bumps against your clothes. Because the cable ends run down the sides of your neck, you can wear the main cable across the front of your shirt, or down your back, which is better for runners. An optional collar clip helps, too, by keeping the cable tucked to whatever piece of clothing works best.

I listened to the UE 900s through a couple of headphone amps — a Total BitHead and an Apex Butte — and they were of course even more impressive and huge-sounding. But they were primarily made for mobile use, and they are sensitive enough that you won’t need an amp. Just plug them right into your phone. The default cable is bright blue, as seen on other UE gear, and has a three-button remote that works with iPhones and iPods (though it acts janky on Android phones, a troubling trend I’ve noticed on almost every headset I’ve tested this year). Each pair ships with an alternate, remote-free black cable, and they’re easy to swap out.

There are a lot of things you could spend $400 on. A world series ticket, a couple of car payments, the tasting menu for two at Alinea (sans wine pairing). But if you love hearing music beautifully represented without distraction, and you crave that level of audio perfection all the time, everywhere, Logitech’s newest Ultimate Ears are some of the best mobile headphones you can buy.

Your friends or loved ones may pick on you for spending so much. But if they do, just shove these in your ears and go to your happy place.

WIRED Sounds like a double rainbow is shooting directly in your ears. More isolating than a social disease. The audio quality is stunning enough to make the high cost seem reasonable. Practical, even. Nice storage case with gobs of box candy.

TIRED Intrusive fit is not for everyone. Price crosses the “don’t tell the spouse” barrier and enters “burn the receipt” territory. Unless you’re a Seattle Mariners fan, electric-blue housing accents and cabling are unappealing.