Category: Tech news

Do you remember the Disintegrator that shot 40 rubber bands per second? Well how about a rubber band gatling gun that shoots 100 bands a second? It will cost you $500 but if you have money to burn or are just crazy then it will be perfect for you.

The unit weighs nearly 20 pounds and even has varying length barrels for different size rubber bands. It comes with it’s own stand so that it can be used as a turret (can you say arduino hack to turn this into a sentry) and works off of crank power.

Just keep in mind that at $500 you could go out and buy a real gun but if you live somewhere where guns are frowned upon this is perfect for you.

[Rubber Band Gatling Gun]

Rubber Band Gatling Gun originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/09/14.

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You knew it was bound to happen. Ever since Apple announced the new redesigned iPod nano everyone has been referring to it as a watch and now you can turn it into one. I’ve been using the new nano for about a week now and love it. It’s perfect for the gym and it really motivates you to reaching that 10,000 step-a-day goal, and with this wrist watch band from Incipio this might make the perfect all the time watch.

Keep in mind that you will have to change your ipod daily and be okay with hitting the sleep button every time you want to check the time. If your okay with all that then you can pick them up in a variety of colours for $24.99 and they should be ready to ship sometime in October.

[Incipio Linq Nano Watch Case]

Nano Watch originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/09/14.

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You by now already know who Ben Heck is. We have featured his awesome mods time and time again here on tech.nocr.at. Ben now has his very own internet TV show. The Ben Heck Show started airing yesterday on element14 and is pretty cool. In his first episode, Ben builds an Xbox controller for a gamer who only has one hand and starts work on his Xbox 360 laptop mod which will be stretched out over a few episodes. Definitely a must watch.

[The Ben Heck Show]

Ben Heck Show Is On The Air originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/09/14.

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Warren Buffet is famous for telling people they should only invest in businesses they understand. A corollary to that is that a company should be able to describe in simple terms what they do. Even if what they do is really technical and complicated.

Why? First so employees and investors can get on board and help the company get where it wants to go. But it’s just as important that your potential customers know what you can do for them. And just because you offer a product to businesses or developers instead of everyday consumers doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep things simple.

We see startups all the time that we don’t understand. I used to think I was just in over my head. But over the years I’ve met CEOs who can explain the most complicated technology in relatively simple terms via analogies or use cases. Those that can’t aren’t doing their job.

Not to pick on SimpleGeo, but I will. A developer I know emailed me this Quora conversation this evening where another developer was asking what the heck SimpleGEO does:

In simple terms, what can I do with SimpleGeo? “An infrastructure for all location data” seems so vague. As a developer, exactly what can I do with it?

SimpleGeo CEO Matt Galligan responds:

Here’s the simplest that I can get it: Our new API docs.

http://simplegeo.com/docs/

Fact is, there’s a lot that we do, and a good amount of it is behind the scenes. But our new API docs should provide a quick understanding of our current capabilities. Though there’s a lot more on the way.

Go ahead and click on that link, read a few things and then come back here and tell me if you know what SimpleGeo does. Here’s what that other developer said to us in the email:

they’re an impressive team and i’m sure it’ll be interesting to see what they do. while i didn’t ask this question i’ve often wondered WTF simplegeo offers. i took a look at their initial APIs and while i’m very comfortable with geo i couldn’t figure out how they were useful. these new ones are def more interesting.

in any event, you’d think a co-founder could rattle off a few simple use cases vs pointing someone at developer docs. it often feels like there’s too much of this highfalutin talk in the valley.

I totally agree. We’ve covered SimpleGeo enough to have a good understanding of what they offer, but if actual developers are out there scratching their heads, there’s clearly a problem.

“This Fall, we’re launching kick-ass tools for developers to index, interpret, and consume data connected to a location” says the company on its home page. How much better would that be if there were a few use cases or examples of exactly what a developer could do with these tools?

This isn’t really about SimpleGeo though. It’s a problem that pervades Silicon Valley. Sometimes people think that a simple description of a product means there isn’t much there. But really it’s the opposite. You have to be able to distill down what you do in a way that your customers can easily understand the value proposition. It’s hard, but it’s also a business necessity.

So whether you’re SimpleGeo or Yahoo, figure it out. And tell the world.

Imagine if Jonathan Ives, the designer of the Mac and the iPhone, walked out of Apple one day before its world developer’s conference? Well that’s the kind of impact of the resignation today of Anssi Vanjoki, who has announced his departure one day before Nokia World, the company’s major annual event. Vanjoki was widely seen as being the potential ‘Steve Jobs” of Nokia – a product obsessive who could get things done. There’s no sign he’s left for another job and the short press release contains no words of thanks from colleagues. Wow.

Vanjoki only recently (as in, July July) became the company’s Mobile Solutions leader – the one guy that was poised to knock heads together and turn Nokia back into a major smartphone player against the iPhone and Android. But no more.

If you think about all the things people search for on Google, “God” has to be pretty high up there, right? I mean, since the dawn of man, people have been searching for the meaning of life and its creator, so what better way to do that than with a search engine? But divinity apparently has nothing on cheap domain names.

When you try to do a search for “God” with the new Google Instant feature, it predicts that you’re going to type in “Godaddy” instead. If you hit a space after the “d”, it thinks you’re looking for “God of War”, the popular videogame. So the only way to actually search for “God” with this new Google Instant feature is to hit the search button.

To make Google Instant work, the search giant looks across all queries to find the most popular ones and then predicts what it thinks you’re going to type and auto-populates the results based on that. Clearly, both “Godaddy” and “God of War” are more popular queries on Google — something that is either humorous or sad depending on your level of religiousness.

Also kind of humorous is that “Godaddy” isn’t really the name of the company, it’s “Go Daddy” with a space (though the domain is of course godaddy.com). Also interesting is that a Go Daddy is a heavy Google AdWords user, and so the first result for the “God” query is a sponsored link for Go Daddy.

Go Daddy itself is currently in the process of looking for a buyer. Perhaps if they started touting the fact that they’re ranked higher than God in Google, they’ll get even more than the $1 billion+ price they’re expected to go for.

[thanks Alex]

The rumors were true: after months — years, even — of speculation, YouTube is preparing to launch a full-fledged live streaming platform, enabling its content parters to stream their video directly to users in real-time. This will put the service in direct competition with the likes of Ustream, Justin.tv, and Livestream.  We recently caught screenshots of a live streaming option in the wild that YouTube only made available to its politics-oriented channel CitizenTube. Obviously it has much bigger plans for the feature.

Beginning Monday morning and running through Tuesday night, four select YouTube partners — Next New Networks, Howcast, Young Hollywood, and Rocketboom — will be streaming live footage on YouTube (you can see a full listing of what they’re broadcasting in the widget above. But don’t get too excited just yet: this is only an alpha test, and YouTube will be taking the live streaming functionality down after the two-day trial. However, the company has confirmed that it plans to eventually offer live streaming to all of its content partners (it may just take a while to get there).

Live streams will only be available on YouTube proper (you can’t embed it in widgets yet), and YouTube won’t be archiving the footage, either. But it sounds like both of these features will be coming down the line. One key feature that will be active are comments — the four content providers will be able to respond to user feedback in real-time.

One important thing to note: YouTube’s language throughout the briefing was all about Partners, not the millions of ‘normal’ YouTube users. This isn’t surprising — there’s obviously a big infrastructure hurdle involved with streaming content from so many people, but, more importantly, there’s also a greater risk that someone will stream a suicide or something similarly awful.

The news has been a long time coming. Way back in February 2008 YouTube cofounder Steve Chen said that live video was on its way, and that it was slated to launch late in 2008. Obviously that didn’t happen, but the company has gradually been ramping up its live streaming efforts. In November 2008 it streamed a special concert to 700,000 concurrent viewers, but it relied on third-party CDN Akamai.

YouTube further bolstered its live-streaming efforts throughout 2009 and this year, with streams of a U2 concert, Presidential speeches, and the Indian Premiere League. YouTube’s political blog/channel CitizenTube has also featured live streaming.

However, with the exception of CitizenTube, all of these live streams have been one-off events — the new platform will eventually be available to all partners, presumably whenever they want to use it. Another key change involves the platform’s infrastructure. For at least some of these live-streamed events, YouTube has relied on third party CDNs (it won’t confirm which ones). Conversely, YouTube Live will be running on YouTube’s own CDN network. The company says that this two day test isn’t a load-test per se (they’ve been running those internally), but that it wants to make sure things run smoothly in the wild.

I spoke with the producers of Rocketboom, one of the four partners involved with this week’s test, to see what they thought about the platform’s debut. They’re obviously excited, with three shows planned: two tomorrow and one Tuesday evening. One show will be mimicking the morning shows seen on ‘regular’ TV, and another will be similar to a typical evening talk show.  The web TV company has prepared multiple cameras, video switchers, and other equipment that it doesn’t typically need on a day-to-day basis — and they also say that getting prepared for a live show involves much more work than their typical web clips. Still, despite the increased workload associated with Live, Rocketboom says that it hopes to continuing offer live content in the future, likely on a weekly basis.

If you are watching the MTV Video Music Awards right now, chances are that either you or someone you know is also Tweeting about it. Some trending topics on Twitter right now are “lip synching” (Oh, Bieber) and “Drake better win”. But if you want to supplement your watching during commercials, open your laptop and point it to the MTV VMA Twitter Tracker. It is a gorgeous visualization of VMA-related Tweets created by MTV, Twitter, and the excellent folks at Stamen Design (who have also done visualizations for Digg and Crimespotting sites).

As of this writing, there are 1.3 million Tweets about the MTV VMAs in the past three hours since it started. The Twitter tracker ranks artists by number of Tweets per minute. At one point, Taylor Swift was dominating with 3,517 Tweets per minute, followed by Kanye West (3,009) and Lady Gaga (857). It changes all the time, obviously, depending on who is on stage.

When you go to the VMA Twitter tracker, you see pictures of the top four most-tweeted about artists with a cascade of little gray bozes falling over their faces. Each box is a representative Tweet, which you can click on to read. For example, here is one I found on the tracker by @HipHopSince93:

Thanks to my Ex I’m pretty familiar with Taylor Swift. (Not that I wanna be).

Thumbnails along the top of the tracker let you click on down the line to other artists. All in all, it is very entertaining, almost more so than the VMAs themselves.

Google is buying Israeli startup Quicksee, also known as MentorWave Technologies, for an estimated $10 million, reports Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The startup has raised $3 million from Ofer Hi-Tech and Docor International Management.

Quicksee makes 3D video tour software that can be pinned on a Google Map. It results in an effect similar to what you can see in Street View on Google Maps, allowing the viewer to pan around and see a panoramic image of a location. Except that the panoramic images do not require expensive 3D cameras mounted on top of a Googel vehicle. Anybody can create one with a regular video camera and Quicksee software.

Google has not confirmed the acquisition or what it plans on doing with the team and technology, so this is just speculation. But the technology could allow Google Maps to accept geo-tagged, 3D panoramas uploaded by consumers. If you think Street View, which is shot by Google employees, creates new issues of privacy on the Internet, wait until consumers start uploading their own street views or who knows what else. Although 3D views inside buildings could be a nifty new feature for Google Places allows businesses to self-upload.

Mike Elgan criticizes Google for being condescending in a recent column on one of the dead tree IT rags. His first point is that Google PR exec Gabriel Stricker started off a recent press conference with a quip about how fast paced Google innovation is:

He said that the reason Google holds events like this one was that “we hear from a lot of you that with the kind of breakneck pace of innovation that we go through at Google, it’s nice for us to kind of let you catch your breath.” He went on to tell the audience that they would “hear from our Search rocket scientists in a second who will hold your hand through the latest and greatest of what we’re up to.”

So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?

He backs up his point with recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt on what users want Google to build, and on privacy issues.

So first off this looks to me like an example of media mass manipulation I wrote about recently. At first blush, knowing how the whole press game works, Elgan is pissed off at Google for something or other and wrote this post.

But even if it really is something that’s been nagging him for some time, I just don’t see it. Google is far less arrogant than they were even a few years ago. And even I, possibly the most sensitive and defensive person you’ll ever meet, don’t see Elgan’s examples as condescending in any way.

Remember when Google blackballed CNET in 2005 for posting information about Schmidt?

That was a year after they went public, when companies are typically at their peak of arrogance. And boy was that a condescending thing to do.

More recently I’ve seen a Google that’s been humbled by droves of engineers leaving for Facebook and Twitter, a Google humbled by China, and a Google generally terrified of an upcoming decade where they may not be the center of attention on the Internet.

The Google I’ve seen recently is a humble Google. A Google that appreciates press more and that seems more willing to consider change. Most of the arrogance I see is across town at Facebook, which is exactly what I’d expect from a company on the rise.

It’s a pretty hard and fast rule that whenever a headline asks you a question, the answer will prove to be “no”. Take, for example, today’s headline on UK tech news site, The Register: “Is US prudishness ruining the internet?”

With that rhetorical hook, Jane Fae Ozimek wonders out loud whether the dominance of sites like Facebook – which famously banned (briefly) photographs of breastfeeding women – means that we’re all soon going to struggle to enjoy the majesty of human biology.

She also shares the tribulations of one Helena Hewitt, “instigator of art and fashion project “’Fetish Rocks’ who was “twice forced to rebuild her Facebook group from scratch following anonymous complaints”. And what of the “pro-cannabis campaign group ‘Just Say Now’ [banned] on the grounds that its use of an image of a cannabis plant breached its rules on endorsing smoking products.”? Or Apple’s censoring of the iBoobs app? Or Google’s refusal to screen an ad for the ‘Australian Sex Party’ (or ‘Earls Court’ as its known in London).

What indeed?

Ozimek goes on to liken the digital export of American neo-Victorianism to the similar dominance of the US over European cinema, but in the end her argument peters out. She mentions the censoring of adult services on Criagslist but also admits that, post-unification, the East German’s taste for public nudity was cause for consternation amongst West Germans. Solid conclusions draws she none, settling on the no-shit proposition that “the less powerful often finds its values rewritten to some extent by the more powerful”. Her overarching thesis is clear though: America is prudish, America controls the most popular internet services, ergo America is making the Internet prudish.

Two days I wrote a column here on TechCrunch about how I love America’s first amendment, but how it doesn’t apply to private websites. It’s too soon for me to cover that ground again. And yet, as I read, and kept reading, Ozimek’s post, looking for the smoking – uh – gun that never came, I found myself getting more and more irritated, and more keen to defend my adoptive home.

America’s prudishness is a European meme that irks me almost as much its cousin: the “American’s don’t understand irony” meme. This is the same America that brought the world The Onion, The Daily Show, Tom Lehrer and Mark Twain.

The truth is that big American sites do censor content, sometimes hilariously so: this week Microsoft booted a kid from their XBox Live platform when he mentioned on his profile that he’s from Fort Gay, West Virginia (he is). But here’s something that’s also true: eight years ago, I created a website, called ‘Think Of The Children’ which parodied the media hysteria (at the time) over alleged paedophiles living in our midst. A few days later, my hosting company – Host Europe (note that second word, no Americans there) – closed the site down after the police contacted them to say they’d received complaints from people who were offended. In America that level of police interference simply couldn’t happen (at least not without a first amendment shit-storm).

As for the question of whether American standards are more prudish than British or European ones, how about when – two years after the Think Of The Children incident – the BBC very generously wrote about The Friday Thing, a satirical weekly email I used to edit. And then a week after posting the story, they removed the link to our site because we’d added a story to the front page, titled “Fuck Off Mr Chips” (slightly broken link: here). The editor at the BBC was very apologetic but explained, “our audience don’t like that word.”

And therein lies the point. It’s not that America is more prudish than Europe, it’s that big companies – or websites or news organisations – are more prudish than small ones. It’s a choice those services willingly make: censoring words, images and ideas which fall outside the lowest common denominator boundaries of the majority of their millions of users. It doesn’t matter whether those users are America or British or Belgian or Martian – very few people will abandon a publication or a site because of content that *doesn’t* appear, but millions might because of what *does*. It’s the media version of the old corporate maxim: no-one ever got fired for saying no.

The reason why American sites appear more prudish has to do with availability bias: America is home to the vast majority of the largest sites in the western world. If Facebook were based on London it’d be just as censorious as the BBC. Same goes for Google or MySpace or YouTube or any other mass-market property.

But here’s what’s heartening about America. Unlike Europe and particularly the UK, the US isn’t hamstrung by draconian libel laws (especially not after title 28 of the United States Code was amended to prevent US courts upholding foreign libel verdicts), nor can the state interfere with free speech (EU law is supposed to grant similar protection to citizens of member states, but no one appears to have told the police in those states). As a result, American entrepreneurs are much more free to create sites in response to market demand rather than government pressure (as Mike points out here, even the Craigslist decision was a popular one, not a legal one).

For every Facebook group that gets closed down, there are a thousand active Tumblrs full of hardcore porn (trust me, if breast feeding’s your thing, you’re golden). For every YouTube there’s a Redtube; for every Google, there’s a Chilling Effects.

American has come a long way since Lenny Bruce. Today, more than most other countries in the world, the USA boasts both extreme freedom of choice when it comes to “offensive” content and also a population big enough to render even the most offensive speech commercially viable. Indeed, “Prudish America” may have introduced linguistic atrocities like “restroom” and “vajayjay” to the popular lexicon but the land of the free also gave us – and popularlised through sites like Urbandictionary.com – the “nip slip” and the “camel toe”, not to mention two girls one cup (made by a Brazilian but popularised through American sites and TV shows) and snakes on a motherfucking plane.

If US dominance of the Internet is having any effect, it’s in spreading those choices to the rest of the world: widening the range of ways in which everyone – no matter where they live – might choose to be offended. God bless it for that.

A few months ago, I wrote about why I believed that Russia’s planned “science city” was destined for failure, in my BusinessWeek column. I predicted that it would follow the path of the hundreds of cluster development projects before it. Political leaders would hold press conferences to claim credit for advancing science and technology; management consultants would earn hefty fees; real-estate barons would reap fortunes; and as always happens, taxpayers would be left holding the bag. You don’t read about the failures of tech clusters all over the world, in countries like Japan, Egypt, Malaysia, and in many regions of the United States. That’s because they die slow, silent deaths. And that is the way nearly all government-sponsored innovation efforts go.

Given my scathing criticism, I had expected the Russian Federation to declare me persona non grata. Instead, I got an urgent call from Ellis Rubinstein, president of the New York Academy of Sciences.  He said that the Honorable Ilya Ponomarev, head of the high-tech subcommittee of the Russian State Duma (Russia’s parliament) had asked the academy to prepare a detailed report on this subject. And they wanted my input. Ellis also asked whether I would accompany his team to Russia to discuss the issue.  I wasn’t sure if this was an elaborate scheme to have me locked up in a Russian gulag, but I hold Ellis in such high regard that I agreed.

The Academy prepared an excellent report that explained how Israel, Finland, Taiwan, India, and the United States achieved success in building their technology industries.  The report also made high-level recommendations on how Russia could achieve similar success. Earlier this week, I accompanied the authors of the report to Yaroslavl, Russia, to an event called the Global Policy Forum. This event, billed as the “Russian Davos”, was hosted by President Medvedev himself.

To my relief, the Russians didn’t have a dark cell in a labor camp waiting for me. But they did spring a terrifying surprise: at the last minute, Ponomarev asked me to give a talk—in the plenary session—on how Russia can build a Silicon Valley.  The 500+ attendees included seven heads of state (including Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Lee Myung-bak of Korea), two former Presidents, several finance ministers, some Russian Governors and Duma members, and, from the U.S., our Chief Technology Officer and our Ambassador to Russia. If that weren’t enough, they told me that the session was being broadcast live on two TV stations. And seated directly behind the podium where I was to deliver the speech were Presidents Mbeki of South Africa and Abdul Kalam of India, and a former vice-premier of China.

I started my talk by stating, quite bluntly, that I don’t believe that there is any way that Russia will ever be able to build a Silicon Valley: it lacks the requisite networks and culture of entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and openness. But Russia isn’t alone—even Boston’s Route 128, which was once a rival to Silicon Valley, lacked these ingredients and so bit the dust. And no other region in the world has been able to replicate Silicon Valley’s success.

Is there hope for Russia to build a different type of innovation/R&D hub? Yes, definitely. But Russia will need to start leveraging its own strengths to build a unique capability. It is home to some of the best engineers and scientists in the world. Unlike in the U.S., where they are called geeks and nerds, in Russia engineers and scientists are often considered national heroes. And Russian parents still encourage their children to study mathematics and science. That’s why Russians routinely win global science and engineering contests such as the recent challenge that NASA posted on Innocentive.

I know from my own experience the quality of Russian engineering talent. In 1991, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I hired 48 engineers in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, to help solve a problem that the most expensive consultants on Wall Street couldn’t—to reengineer legacy systems. The Russians were creative, able to think outside the box, and willing to challenge authority—the key characteristics needed to achieve innovation (read this piece for details of how I built a technology company based on Russian-designed technology).

But Russia has many challenges. Foreign investors are discouraged by rules of law that fail to match countries such as the U.S. and Western Europe; bureaucracies are confusing and cumbersome; corruption is rampant and is even seeping into the education system; powerful oligarchs dominate key industries; and secrecy in R&D is the norm. Until these problems are fixed, tech entrepreneurship simply can’t flourish.

Even when these problems are fixed, building a science park and adding some venture capital won’t lead to innovation. A lot more is needed. Here is my advice to Russia:

1. Teach entrepreneurship, not just to university students, but also to experienced workers. Like their American counterparts, Russian entrepreneurs primarily come from the workforce: they have ideas for technologies that can be built, and when they get tired of working for others and want to build wealth, they develop the motivation to start companies. What stop them is the lack of knowledge on how to do it and fear of failure.  Programs like Kauffman Foundation’s Fasttrac can teach the fundamentals of starting companies.
2. Have President Medvedev provide a vision for the grand challenges that Russian society faces and ask entrepreneurs to help solve them. Let the entrepreneurs know that they should expect to fail at least two or three times before they achieve success; or very simply: that  it’s okay to fail.
3. Open the doors. From 1995 to 2005, 52% of Silicon Valley tech companies were founded by immigrants.  These foreign-born workers brought diversity and new ideas with them. They caused Americans to work harder and think smarter. And they helped give the U.S. its huge global advantage. But because of flawed immigration policies, future generations of entrepreneurs are now leaving the U.S. in droves. Take a page from Chile’s book—invite them over and offer some incentives. Russia doesn’t have the proximity to the U.S. or the climate advantage that Chile does, so this will be harder. But it may be able to attract some of the graduating students and skilled workers who are returning to Eastern Europe and South Asia.
4. Take advantage of the Patent-Free Zone. Over previous decades, very few western companies have bothered to file patents in Russia or in the other countries whose economies are now growing rapidly. As I explained in this piece, there is a huge opportunity to freely use the wealth of proven intellectual property that has already been created. Russian engineers and scientists can be solving problems for most of the world—in fields such as solar power; electric cars; mobile technologies for the poor; disease eradication; medical devices; and food processing. They can combine all sorts of technologies to produce solutions that patent restrictions prevent from being easily being created in the U.S. Any breakthroughs will ultimately benefit the patent owners when licenses are obtained for use in the West.
5. Connect Russia’s engineers with their counterparts in the U.S. The Russian government should create the resources needed for American tech companies to find and hire the right Russian talent. It may even want to subsidize salaries for the first year or set up a fund that invests in Silicon Valley startups that hire Russians. This is a win—win: American startups here get desperately needed seed funding and talent, and Russians gain experience and knowledge of markets and establish valuable contacts.
6. Invest in capacity-building networks such as those being developed by The New York Academy of Sciences. The academy has created an alliance of research universities and academic medical centers which are linked to industry. It has enrolled more than 6000 doctoral students and post-docs and built about 25 multi-institutional communities of researchers and students in multi-disciplinary fields. These could be linked to similar Russian networks.

Imagine the good that can come from stronger ties between the engineers and scientists of all nations: new innovations, solutions to world problems, and more jobs and economic growth.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa  is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwaand find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

We’re back with another episode of TechCrunch TV’s OMG/JK, the weekly show that features fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and myself discussing the latest developments in tech news.

We had a brief hiatus last week (I spent four days and four nights wandering around the desert), so we have a lot to talk about: Apple finally got around to handing down its 10(0) App Store commandments, Google reinvented the search experience, and iTunes got its very own social network.

Check out the links below for more background on the topics we’re discussing:

• Apple Opens App Store To “Other” Development Platforms, Publishes Review Guidelines
• Thou Shalt Not Chatroulette Or Russian Roulette: The Best Of The App Store Rules
• Google Instant: It Searches Before You Type
• Google Instant Coming Natively To Browsers “In The Next Few Months”
• The iTunes Ping Social Question: Follow, Friend, Or Lurk?
• Ping Is Apple’s iTunes For Everything

The Chinese aren’t exactly prone to emotional outbursts in front of Western reporters. In China, if you insult a business partner in the press, there’s likely a calculating reason behind it.

Witness the latest volley by Alibaba.com’s CEO David Wei towards Yahoo, which owns 40% of the parent company for his Chinese ecommerce powerhouse. “Why do we need a financial investor with no business synergy or technology?” Wei said to Bloomberg on Friday.

Indeed, the idea that Yahoo and Alibaba have a “strategic partnership” has been stretched pretty thin since those days back in 2005 when Jerry Yang and Alibaba founder Jack Ma walked the grounds of Pebble Beach and negotiated a deal by which a small Alibaba would take over Yahoo China, in exchange for Yahoo getting 40% of the Alibaba Group. But now, without its own search engine, any idea that Yahoo would give Alibaba a strategic advantage is laughable, Wei said.

It’s not the first time Wei & Co. have mouthed off to the press about their largest shareholder: Eight months ago Alibaba executives called Yahoo “reckless” for backing Google in its fight with the Chinese government. Meanwhile, Yahoo has criticized Alibaba for Yahoo’s plummeting search marketshare in China, publicly flirting with the idea of selling the property off.

What’s going on behind the scenes? In short, Jack Ma wants Yahoo out of his company, but Yahoo knows it would be crazy to sell before two of the most lucrative divisions of Alibaba, Taobao and Alipay, go public. And according to several sources close to both companies Carol Bartz is making a tense situation worse. Bartz has been widely criticized for Yahoo’s lack of stock appreciation, revenue or traffic growth during her almost two-year tenure as Yahoo CEO. But if things continue on this course, business professors may look back at see her biggest failing was squandering the relationship with Alibaba.

First some background: The Alibaba deal allowed Yahoo to moonwalk away from the kinds of thorny censorship issues Google and other US properties have had to deal with in China and still profit off the country’s runaway Internet growth. Alibaba spun off Alibaba.com into a $10 billion (77.69bn HKD) public company, and has two phenomena in the wings: Taobao, an eBay-like marketplace with 170 million users, that dominates 80% of China’s ecommerce market, according to several reports. Taobao’s marketplace is already 70% the size of eBay and is growing at a clip of 70% a year. Then there’s Alipay, which is the PayPal equivalent in the country, with over 300 million users and annual growth of nearly 100% per year. Alipay’s annual transaction run-rate is a staggering $64 billion. Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. estimate that Taobao could be worth another $10 billion and Alipay could be worth nearly $5 billion.

Of course none of these businesses has much to do with Yahoo’s core business, and Yahoo China has withered away amid Alibaba, Taobao and Alipay’s success. Even before Yahoo got out of search, there was little real strategic relationship between them but it was one hell of a lucky move, financially speaking. Say what you want about Yang’s tenure as CEO, he excelled at managing the relationship with Ma, and is still on the board of Alibaba Group. Whether savvy or blind-luck, the deal is also helping keep Yahoo’s stock afloat five years later. Research firm Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. says that as much as 85% of Yahoo’s stock price is attributed to the value of Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba, going so far as to call Yahoo an Asian Internet play…. that also has a US business.

By some analyst accounts, the Asia business is the one area where Yahoo is killing its Valley competition. So you’d think that Bartz would be bending over backwards to make sure the relationship is going well, right? Wrong. Sources close to Yahoo and Alibaba say that when Bartz entered the job two years ago, she didn’t reach out to Ma or Wei and when Ma finally came to Sunnyvale to meet with her, she dressed him down in front of his management team criticizing what Alibaba had done with Yahoo’s China portal. Said one person close to the Alibaba side of things, “She displayed the diplomatic skills of a donkey.”

Forgive the mixing of animal metaphors, but that’s called strangling the golden goose. Bartz was hired to be the “anti-Jerry” – direct, decisive and not mincing words. I’d argue that’s what the coddled, complacent US operations of Yahoo needed. But hard-charging, successful Alibaba didn’t need a lecture from a party they already resented giving such a sweetheart deal to five years ago. You think Bartz can be untactful on stage with Michael Arrington? Imagine her in a delicate Chinese negotiation. Yowza.

It’s led to an ugly marriage between the two—which has become more evident as Alibaba’s team continues to speak out about the lack of strategic value to the relationship. It’s clear Ma wants the relationship severed, and it’s increasingly coming up in Yahoo’s meeting with Wall Street analysts. The more Bartz angers the Alibaba team and criticizes the Chinese government, the more ammo she gives Ma to drive a wedge between the two and even potentially force a sale if it’s deemed to be a poisoned relationship. It’s not too late to wake up, lavish praise on Ma –whether it’s genuine or not– and focus on the US business.

For Yahoo’s part, it has told analysts the tax hit it’d take on the transaction is the biggest barrier, but considering how much of Bartz’ compensation is tied up in boosting that stock price and how much of that stock price is being kept afloat by Alibaba, I can’t imagine tax implications are the only reason Yahoo is loathe to sell.

As far as Wall Street pressure to sell-or-not-to-sell, sources say there are two camps. Some buyers who bought Yahoo shares when the Microsoft takeover was in the offing, are looking for something—anything—to boost the stock from the moribund $13-range. A several-dollar-per-share dividend would be better than nothing, some Yahoo bears feel. But to most people, selling off Alibaba’s stake before Taobao and Alipay go public would be tantamount to throwing in the towel and scrapping Yahoo for parts.

It’s hard to know what Bartz is thinking here. I’ve always been a fan of her no-nonsense, no-sacred-cows style, but if she wants to keep Yahoo from being cheap takeover bait, she needs Alibaba and needs Ma. She might even- gasp!- be able to learn something about building a consumer Internet powerhouse from them. As the tension keeps growing and Alibaba executives keep sounding off, Yahoo will have to decide once and for all if it is a franchise worth saving or simply worth more split into pieces.