Category: Tech news

Facebook has just filed a motion for expedited discovery in its case against Paul Ceglia, the man who is claiming that he holds a major stake in Facebook based on a contract he allegedly signed with Mark Zuckerberg back in 2003. There was plenty of initial skepticism around the case (who could possibly forget that they owned a major stake in one of the most successful companies of the decade?), but people starting taking it more seriously when Ceglia landed representation from DLA Piper, and a series of potentially legitimate email exchanges surfaced. Now Facebook is striking back, and it’s not mincing its words.

The document, embedded below, is a concerted attack on Ceglia’s character and criminal history. Facebook is asking the court to grant expedited, targeted discovery that would require Ceglia to produce the original contract between Zuckerberg and Ceglia, as well as original copies of their email exchanges. Facebook also wants access to all of Ceglia’s computers. Facebook’s argument is that with this evidence (or lack thereof), it can prove that Ceglia’s claim is fraudulent, which would render a full discovery process unnecessary.

To help support its claim that Ceglia’s case is fraudulent, Facebook hired private investigative firm Kroll Associates, which dug through Ceglia’s past. According to Facebook’s filing, Kroll uncovered more of Ceglia’s transgressions that allegedly include multiple incidents of land scamming in New York and Florida.

According to the filing, Kroll investigators presented the Director of the Polk County (Florida) Land Development Division with some of the documents involved with these land scams, and the Director stated that they had likely been doctored. The filing also details a wood pellet scam, whereby Ceglia would sell wood pellets that he never delivered.

The money quote:

“The fact that Ceglia has spent the past seven years a a hustler engaged in various land swindles and wood-pellet scams further highlights the fraudulent nature of his claims in this case. If Ceglia were in fact the owner of a substantial stake in Facebook, why would he have resorted to a life of crime?”

The filing goes on to detail why the contract with Zuckerberg that Ceglia previously produced is itself a forgery, citing Frank Romano, Professor Emeritus Rochester Institute of Technology, who says there are “significant inconsistencies between page 1 and 2 of the document” (“The Facebook” is only mentioned on page 1), including differences in page width and margins, type face, and spacing. Another quote from Romano:

Based on my professional experience and judgment, my opinion is that Page 1 and Page 2 of [the document] were printed at different times on different printers. This strongly indicates that, at least in part, [the document] is forged. Furthermore, all the references to “The Face Book” or “The Page Book” appear on Page 1. Thus, it is my conclusion that Page 1 of [the document] is an amateurish forgery.

There is much more beyond that — Facebook also does a point by point breakdown on why the emails between Zuckerberg are also fraudulent. And it says that “Zuckerberg has now declared under oath that he did not sign the contract attached to Ceglia’s complaint, and he did not write or receive any of the purported emails quoted in the Amended Complaint.”

Of course, even if Ceglia were completely telling the truth Facebook would likely try to undermine his character by pointing out his past transgressions. But given the extent of this attack, Zuckerberg’s sworn testimony, and Facebook’s confidence that the evidence will support its case, Ceglia’s lawyers certainly have their work cut out for them.

Mashape has a somewhat unusual backstory: The Italian startup spent two years looking for funding in its home country, only to be rebuffed at every turn. So, in 2009, it moved operations to Silicon Valley. The team found funding in less than three weeks. Granted, it was $100K, but it was enough to begin building a real service. Persistence, it seems, is key. (It also helps to have a great idea and position your business in a market that’s on the rise.)

As you may have noticed, APIs are all the rage these days. Twitter attracts 15 billion API calls per day, Google and Facebook were pulling in 5 billion per day as of last year, Amazon currently stores over 260 billion objects in S3, and Saleforce.com receives 50 percent of its traffic through its API. You get the picture. Mashape, which is going into private beta today, hopes to ride this API surge to victory through a marketplace makes it simple for developers to discover, distribute, and consume all things API.

Mashape, which was founded in November by Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Mike Zonca, aims to be a little bit Etsy, a little bit Github by building a unified, all-in-one marketplace where users can find, sell, distribute, and hack on APIs. The platform makes it easy to list any JSON API using its simple wizard and provide it to a community of developers just waiting to get hackin’. Plus, there are 5 auto-generated client libraries, including PHP, Ruby, Python, Object C and Java.

API consumers can use any API listed on Mashape via a single Developer Key and a standard interface, so that once you’ve learned how to consume an API on Mashape, you know how to consume then all. Developers can even test their APIs by using Mashape’s online Test Console.

At this point, Mashape is supplying more than 110 APIs, both published and private, and has tallied more than 22K API searches. The APIs in stock range from stuff that helps you get your homework done to music services and photo filters — and even more obscure APIs like “DNA manipulation” or a “Nitro accelerator”.

“We believe that APIs have no limits”, said Mashape Co-founder Augusto Marietti, “though I still have to figure out exactly what kind of API a ‘Nitro Accelerator’ is”. The APIs listed on Mashape are both free and for charge, and today the startup is launching a simple (and free) tool that enables users to monetize JSON APIs. Once a user has listed an API, they can set up billing with a single click. Users can choose monthly charges, give API call limits, and give a price per additional call. Pretty cool.

For a market consisting mainly of enterprise solutions, the startup’s addition of social layers to its marketplace will strengthen its API community and come in handy for startups and independent developers. By building a social layer on top of APIs, Mashape also hopes to address the discoverability and trust issue through the ability to see what your friends are using.

For all TechCrunch readers looking for a few coupons, go to Mashape signup on the homepage and insert your email address. You will be asked a question to which the answer is “var x”. Add the TC coupon, and voila!

For more on Mashape, check out the video below:

In the tech world, the phrase “gets better with time” is rarely, if ever, used. Hackers may be the only exception to that rule, and they seem to be on a faster learning curve than Facebook.

A video scam has been circulating on Facebook since Tuesday, tricking users into downloading and installing software by offering up a video of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. On Wednesday, hackers switched the bait to what was supposed to be a saucy video of Hayden Panettiere and Rhianna. Both video links actually lead to a website that attempts to install fake security software.

Read more…

As we heard yesterday Twitter is partnering with Photobucket to allow users to upload a photo attached to a Tweet directly from Twitter.com’s web and mobile clients. This, of course, is interesting considering the competition from the existing number of photo-sharing apps that are built on top of Twitter’s API. TwitPic, yFrog, Lockerz Photos (formerly Plixi), and others all now face competition from Twitter’s new photo-sharing feature. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos took a look at the current photo sharing space on Twitter, examining how and where people are sharing their photos.

While Sysomos took a snapshot of one day of photo-sharing on Twitter, the firm says that they did a sampling of others days as well and the results were similar. On May 30, 14.9% of all tweets contained a link. Of all the tweets from that day 1.25% contained a link to a picture from a photo sharing service, indicating that one-twelfth of all links shared are photos. On a busy day, Twitter users send around 170 million Tweets, so 2.2 million Tweets daily link to pictures from third party services.

Among the Tweets with images, the most popular services on May 30 to share photos with was Twitpic with 45.7% of the marketshare. The second most popular was Yfrog (29.3%), followed by Lockerz (17.4%) and Instagram (5.2%).

As Twitter continues to “fill holes” in their product, the company is encroaching on the territory that third-party developers have commanded for the past few years. It’s unclear how Twitter’s new photo-sharing service will affect third-party photo-sharing sites but taking a look at past cases of where Twitter has entered a market shows that these apps may be in trouble.

After Twitter started to develop and offer their own full-fledged clients, market share for third-party clients has definitely decreased.

As Fred Wilson advised startups last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, “Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch.”

During Paul Graham’s office hours at Disrupt NYC, one of the startups chosen to pitch to the Y Combinator co-founder was Emotely, a company that converts your smartphone into a wireless controller of web apps and games. Emotely Founder and CEO Francois Laberge was nowhere to be found, at which point TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington said that he remembered liking Emotely and that it was too bad, because he was “looking forward to hearing [Graham] give him advice”.

It was indeed a missed opportunity, but it turns out that Laberge had a good reason for not attending. We’ve since learned that Laberge and Emotely were busy being acquired by Brass Monkey, a company that makes software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and others, among them a more fleshed-out kit for turning smart devices into controllers.

Though the two companies are not yet sharing the full terms of the deal, it is clear that Laberge will be joining Brass Monkey as a member of the board as well as chief innovation officer, in which he will head the startup’s business strategy and HTML5 and mobile technology. The aqui-hire is a great fit for the two companies. Because Brass Monkey has a more fully developed controller-building SDK, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps, Emotely’s ability to build controllers using HTML5 for both the interface and communication layer (with HTTP and WebSockets) provides a killer complement. It essentially allows Brass Monkey controllers to hit web browsers without the need for a plug-in.

So what is this “Emotely” I keep going on about? The startup provides a technology that enables mobile apps to communicate with webpages without requiring installation or setup on a user’s computer. Laberge said that the app communicates at over 150hz, meaning that actions performed on the smartphone are sent to webpages in 1/150th of a second, 2.5 times faster than human perception of movement. Which means there’s little perceptible lag time between the phone and your computer.

While Emotely does require a user to have their phone on the same LAN connection as your computer, most people already have their phones and tablets on WiFi when they’re at home. Within the app, users can then choose from a series of controllers, some requiring payment and some free. And since Emotely is built on top of an SDK, users and developers can build their own controllers — and because Emotely’s controllers are webpages, anyone with basic skills can create and register them on the site to then appear in the app. So, if you’ve got a controller setup you like more than the ones Emotely offers, you can create your own. Pretty cool.

Emotely was designed to make Nintendo Wii-style multiplayer games, in which multiple gamers can play while sharing a screen. By linking a computer to a TV, users can play web games from the comfort of their couch, and since consoles like PS3 and Nintendo Wii employ browsers, it seems that Emotely is Trojan Horse-ing its way right into your living room experience, placing it in a great position to help speed the convergence of computers and TVs.

“Emotely adds HTML5 support at a time when web-based games are revolutionizing the gaming industry”, said Brass Monkey President and CTO Chris Allen, “Flash is no longer the only choice for creating sophisticated experiences that run in a web browser. Allowing developers to choose HTML5 as an endpoint broadens our reach tremendously”.

Considering that Emotely includes controllers for games, playing movies, music, collaborative drawing apps, and slideshows that utilize all the features of modern smartphones, like multi-touch, motion controls, geo-location, in-app purchasing, and cameras, the final product produced by the two companies has the potential to be a disruptive force for gameplay and development. It’s some exciting stuff.

For a glimpse of the technology in action, check out the video below:

When you’re looking for a new apartment, or a new place to live, there are quite a few sites you can turn to for real estate listings. There’s Craigslist if you’re feeling saucy, Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia, to name a few. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld pointed out last year, there’s room for competition in this market, and there’s potential for profitability. But not for a clone.

Real estate listings sites can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. It’s also hard to keep track of the places you’ve looked at without creating an external document or leaving sticky notes all over your computer screen, which is why Nestio is trying to be something akin to Tripit for the apartment search, rather than just another real estate listings app. Launching today in the app store, Nestio is a service meant to supplement listings sites by adding some much needed organization to your apartment search.

Thus, Nestio is an organizational tool for consumers to save listings from various listing service providers all in one place. Users send Nestio their listings, the startup adds a sleek interface, and then allow users to collect, collaborate, and find out additional information on any particular listing.

And like any good young startup in 2011, Nestio is hoping to deliver a killer mobile experience that goes beyond your average port from website to mobile. Obviously, when one deep in the apartment or home search, an intuitive interface with a full suite of tools really comes in handy, though I’m not sure how much of the initial apartment search happens on mobile devices. I always start at my laptop, but of course, once you find places you’re interested in, you get out there to see them live.

Thus, in a way Nestio, which is one of the eleven recent graduates of TechStars NYC class, is like your apartment search field journal. It adds functionality to the search process by allowing you to save listings from a host of supported sites, view and edit your saved listings, and add new listings you see for the first time on the go. You can also map out the location of the listings you save, and add notes and photos you snap on site to the listings. And all of this syncs up with your Nestio web activity.

Having a personalized dashboard of saved listings, with notes and photos, is a great feature, and I can really see that coming in hand during the search for a new place to live. Before launching Nestio, the Nestio team spent time doing its due diligence and found that consumers were accessing numerous sites in an attempt to find a new place to live. The biggest missing piece was that consumers struggled to make sense of all the listings, and they wanted a place to manage them all, instead of having to create spreadsheets and bookmarks, etc.

The mobile piece is huge for Nestio, and as the startup provides a supplement to the value of listing services like Zillow and Trulia, there’s something to be said for organizing and calming the frantic process that is the apartment search. The startup will also soon be adding the ability to share your apartment listings, notes, and favorite places and collaborate on the apartment search with your friends and roommates, which will add a social and collaborative layer to real estate searches that’s desperately needed.

Check it out.

Alexis Ohanain continues his coversation with Founder Stories host Chris Dixon by discussing some of his activities and interests outside of Reddit.

Highlights of their chat include Ohanian telling Dixon he considers Paul Newman, “the OG of social enterprise” and that Newman was the inspiration for Breadpig, Ohanian’s organization that creates “geeky things” and donates profits to worthy causes.  On his role as the Y Combinator ambassador to New York, where Ohanian mentors budding New York-based Y Combinator founders, Ohanian notes “you can’t spell New York City without YC” and on founding his angel investing firm Das Kapital Capital, Ohanian says he did it, “mostly so I can mess with the tellers of Bank of America—are you a communist?”

It is a breezy and entertaining episode where the two go on to discuss World of WarCraft, Everquest and an interesting guerilla advertising campaign deployed by the Y Combinator company Grubwithus.  The two conclude with Ohanian telling Dixon the key ingredient Ohanian must have before doing a start-up.

In the video below, Ohanian talks about “taking the agony out of travel search” with Hipmunk—where Ohanian serves as the marketing director, his mixed emotions about marketing and the power of word of mouth advertising.

In case you missed part I of Dixon’s interview with Ohanian you can find it here.

Prior episodes of Founder Stories with Soraya Darabi, Kevin Ryan and Christopher Poole are here.

Yesterday, Microsoft showed off Windows 8 for the first time, and it’s gorgeous (check it out in the video above). It’s also the biggest change to the look and feel of Windows since Windows 95.

Windows 8 is all designed around a touch interface, with tiles replacing icons and swiping replacing drag-’n-drop. Instead of a Start button that pops up at the lower lefthand corner of your screen, you are greeted with a grid of tiles as the new Start screen. The tiles also function as mini-apps, displaying realtime information and updates which might spur someone to launch an app. You can switch quickly between running apps with a flick from the side panel. And these apps can be written in HTML5 and Javascript just like Web apps.

With this new touch user interface, Microsoft is hiding the complexity of Windows, but that complexity still exists underneath. Whether or not this is a flaw or a feature is already being debated. Is Windows 8 as radical a departure as it appears to be for Microsoft, or is it simply a pretty shell? Microsoft, after all, has a legacy to protect and many users will not feel comfortable abandoning the familiar desktop metaphor. So Microsoft is not abandoning its old UI completely. It will still be available to anyone who wants to switch back to that more familiar mode, which still makes sense for most desktop and laptop machines with mice and keyboards.

Microsoft is very much responding to Apple with Windows 8, and they are doing so in a thoughtful way. If the future of computing is all about touch, then Microsoft is more than willing to embrace and extend that future. The issue here is that Microsoft seems to want it both ways. Windows 8 is being designed as a great touch interface, but with the old desktop UI as a fallback.

Contrast that with Apple’s approach, which so far has been to bring touch to new mobile devices (iPads, iPhones, iPods) with iOS, while keeping its desktop OS X operating system separate. Although Apple’s two operating systems may converge over time. We certainly see the beginnings of a transition to a touch interface on MAc desktops and laptops with OS X “Lion.”

So maybe Microsoft is ahead of the curve here by combining desktop and touch into one operating system for all devices spanning desktops to tablets. It will probably want to keep its desktop and phone operating systems separate for a while, but even those overtime will look more and more alike. Windows 8 already borrows some cues from Windows Phone 7, which is also tile-based and fairly elegant.

Yes, Microsoft is playing catch-up. And its chances of dominating the touch era of computing the way it did the desktop era are slim. But this is going to be a long game and it’s still early. Give Microsoft credit for realizing that the game has changed and adjusting its strategy so that it can still be a player.

News junkie? Smart enough to realize you should check multiple sources covering the same news item to absorb as much information about the topic at hand as you possible can? iPad owner, by any chance? If you’re like me and that results in three ‘checks’, you definitely need to give the new iPad app from Newsy a whirl.

A multi-source mobile video news provider, Newsy today debuts version 3.0 of its iPad application, which was first launched in April 2010.

The app, which I tested extensively yesterday, offers faster loading times and comes with a bunch of new features, including single tap Facebook sharing, the ability to create playlists and download videos, a refreshed news ticker and (long overdue) push notifications.

The company, which recently secured $1.5 million on top of the $2 million it raised last year, has also rebranded the look of its videos and logo.

Seriously, check it out, it’s a free app.

Even though we have to deal with 100-degree summers and 15-degree winters, hobos on the subway, and slow-walking tourists, sometimes it really pays off to be a New Yorker. Samsung’s highly anticipated Galaxy Tab 10.1 won’t hit stores nationally until June 17, but a few lucky New Yorkers, and possibly some smart-shopping tourists, will be able to pick up a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as early as June 8.

The 10.1-inch Samsung slate will only be available at New York’s Union Square Best Buy location, and according to Samsung, there will only be a limited quantity of the WiFi edition Galaxy Tab. Online and in-store pre-orders for the New York inventory will begin on June 8, as well. Unfortunately for the rest of the country, a plane ticket to the Big Apple will be your best bet to snag the early release Galaxy Tab 10.1.

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Push IO, a startup that offers a cloud-based mobile feature platform for developers has announced the acquisition of mobile app framework TapLynx from NewsGator. TapLynx will be re-released by Push IO this month with a series of new features. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TapLynx, which was developed by NewsGator, allows users with limited coding knowledge to easily develop iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps. Beyond just developing and publishing these apps, TapLynx allows users to monetize these apps through sponsorships, ads and download fees.

Push IO will be adding TapLynx’s service to its own fleet of mobile services that include push
notifications, in-app purchasing, data aggregation, and content delivery. Push IO says it will be adding both iAd support and in-app purchasing this month to TapLynx.

Bill Gross’ UberMedia has announced a $5.6 million investment from German media giant Burda Digital through its investment arm, DLD Ventures. This brings UberMedia’s total funding to $26.6 million.

UberMedia actually just raised a healthy $17.5 million earlier this year, so Burda’s cash is also a strategic investment. The company has made investments in Xing, Etsy, Glam and other well-known technology companies. UberMedia says the investment will be used to further the growth of UberMedia’s user base both in the U.S. and internationally.

Bill Gross’ strategy to monetize Twitter has led UberMedia to become the largest owner of Twitter clients besides Twitter itself. The company bought a number of clients over the past year, including Echofon, UberTwitter and others. Unfortunately, UberMedia was trying to buy popular Twitter client TweetDeck, but Twitter snatched up TweetDeck to keep it out of Gross’s hands. UberMedia’s says its user base has grown to more than 5,000,000 users in just over a year. Users of the company’s Twitter apps currently Tweet more than 200 times per second, representing approximately 13% of all traffic on the Twitter platform.

Besides over the TweetDeck deal, Twitter and UberMedia have also been at odds over another issue Twitter temporarily shut UberMedia’s Twitter apps down after claiming that UberMedia was violating its Terms of Service — a move that Gross said took UberMedia by surprise.

TweetDeck and Terms of Service aside, UberMedia clearly has a plan. The company has partnered with a variety of celebs, including Ashton Kutcher and 50 Cent, to offer customer Twitter apps and skins. Gross says that we can expect similar partnerships with celebrities in the future.

Where most slider phones have a keyboard, Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play sports Playstation controls. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

Mothers, lock up your gamers. The PlayStation phone has arrived.

And while it’s a bit on the chubby side, we think that, for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, big is beautiful.

You could almost call the Xperia Play the shorter, fatter cousin to the svelte Xperia Arc, which Sony Ericsson once described as the “world’s thinnest smartphone.” At .62 inches, the Play looks positively bulky compared to its Xperia-line relatives — a veritable Jan Brady to the Arc’s Marcia.

But Sony Ericsson had to make some trade-offs in size in order for the slide-out frame to hide the PlayStation controller underneath. If you’re a gamer, it’s worth it. We felt right at home with the familiar PlayStation controller configuration — D-pad on the left, with the square, circle, triangle and X buttons on the right.

And unlike other, flimsier slider phones, the plastic hardware isn’t chintzy. The Play still feels sturdy in hand, even in its open position, and most likely won’t break under the pressure of an excited gamer’s grip.

Instead of the centered joysticks found on a PS3 controller, two pressure-sensitive touchpads take their place. So rather than hog up precious screen real estate steering with your fingers on games that require touch-sensitive direction, you can use the two physical touchpads. It’s a nifty concept, and fairly well-executed. The games I played that utilize the pads were decent enough in reaction time, though I found the sensitivity a bit wanting.

The phone comes bundled with seven games, though only one was exclusive to the Play: Crash Bandicoot. It’s a PS One classic, and I was psyched to see it on the roster. But if I’m buying the long-awaited PlayStation phone, I want it to be running PlayStation games. Plural.

When I asked if Sony Ericsson would continue publishing PlayStation classics to the Xperia Play, the answer was cagey, though promising: “It’s the first step we’re taking down this path.” I’ve got my fingers crossed for a Twisted Metal port by the end of the year.

I actually enjoyed the experience of gaming on the Play. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was playing a game slapped onto a phone interface. It feels like a standalone portable gaming device. That’s no easy feat to accomplish.

Polygons rendered beautifully on the Play’s 4-inch capacitive touch screen, which was plenty big enough to view the games we played. I did wonder if I’d be wanting more screen surface area while playing a first-person shooter like Call of Duty (or if we really wanted to get old school, Doom) — but since those games aren’t available for the Xperia Play, it’s a moot point for now.

You might think the Play is underpowered, given that its processor is a single-core, 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, not the dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor found in many recent smartphone and tablet offerings. But that’s not the case: the Play ran games and rendered menu screens like a charm. We didn’t experience any noticeable lag while gaming, nor while running Google’s proprietary smartphone apps like Gmail or Calendar.

Oh, and did we mention that the Xperia Play is also an Android phone? Because it is, and not a shabby one at that. Over the five days we spent with the phone, Verizon’s network coverage was ample. From Seattle to San Francisco, we didn’t experience any dropped calls or have much of a problem finding a signal. One big bummer, however: The phone uses Verizon’s 3G network, not the newer, faster 4G network.

Like many other smartphones, it’s got two cameras — VGA on the front as well as a 5-megapixel back-facing brother — but they’re not the greatest. The few shots I took looked washed out, a bit grainier than I would have liked. But as far as camera phones go, they’ll get the job done.

But let’s be honest. Cameras aren’t the reason you’re buying this phone. It’s a gamer’s toy, and bells and whistles like front-facing cameras should be judged with that in mind.

Our verdict after a week with the Play?

Game on.

Wired: Unskinned version of Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) makes us happy. Sturdy hardware stands up to a frustrated gamer’s kung-fu grip.

Tired: Lacks 720p video recording capability, now a standard in smartphone releases. Wireless data is slower 3G standard, not 4G. Only one PlayStation title available at launch.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of iPhone, iPad and Android apps to choose from, and yet finding good apps is far from easy. App discovery and recommendations is a fertile niche where a few startups are fighting for mindshare. After being downloaded more than 2 million times, app discovery startup Appsfire closed a $3.6 million series A, led by French VC firm IDinvest. (Appsfire is based in Paris and Tel Aviv, and was co-founded by Ouriel Ohayon, who used to be the editor of TechCrunch France).

Appsfire crossed 1 million downloads in February, and then the 2-million mark in May. Ohayon says its various apps for the iPhone, Android, iPad, and kid’s apps is generating 3 million leads to app developers each month. Appsfire lets you share your favorite apps with your friends via the web, your mobile device, or Facebook.

Previously, in February, 2010, company raised a seed round from a group of French angel investors including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Google VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayer took the stage for an interview with our own Michael Arrington, where they discussed everything from Google’s mobile growth to Mayer’s investment strategy. A few minutes after the interview, I had the chance to ask her a few more questions about Google’s approach to mobile and local. It’s only been a few weeks since I interviewed Mayer about Google’s two pillar approach to local, but I still had plenty of questions.

The first thing I asked: what happens if and when Apple decides to swap out the Google Maps application that ships with every iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad in favor of something that it built in-house (Apple has confirmed that it’s working on an improved traffic database, and has also quietly acquired some mapping-related startups).

Unsurprisingly, Mayer mostly skirted the question — instead she pointed out how huge Google Maps’s audience is, with some 200 million active users on its Mobile products alone. She also mentioned some of the innovations that Google has made recently with Maps, including the new vector-based tiles that require 1/100th the data (the iOS version of Maps doesn’t take advantage of this feature).

Next, I asked if there were any technologies coming up that would help phones more accurately determine your location. Because while the Wifi/GPS combo works pretty well in most places, reliability takes a nose-dive whenever you’re in a dense city like NYC.

Mayer says that the Wifi hotspot database that Google has been building out will help with this, because it will improve over time. This is one reason why Google is going to be pushing users to explicitly check-in using Latitude — in addition to providing a new channel to engage with consumers, these check-ins also help Google improve its database. The system may not know your exact GPS coordinates, but if if someone with the similar signals previously checked in at In-N-Out Burger, there’s a good chance that’s where you are. Mayer likens the system to the powerful spell checker that often pops up in Google search.

Finally, I asked about serendipitous suggestions on mobile phones, which Mayer has previously said she’s excited about. Mayer says that she thinks we’ll see these “inside of a two year horizon”. The UI for what these suggestions will look like is still TBD, but it sounds like initially they’re be pronounced rather than subtle.