Category: Tech news

Media General this morning announced that it plans to extend part of its Yahoo advertising sales partnership to all of its network-affiliated television stations by the end of 2010, thus self-reportedly becoming the first member of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium to do so.

The move comes after completion of a pilot program in four of Media General’s television markets.

Media General said it will expand the program to eight additional television stations later this month and will continue in the four pilot markets: Birmingham, Ala., Columbus, Ohio, Mobile, Ala. and Greenville/Spartanburg and S.C./Ashville, N.C.

Media General has been selling Yahoo Display advertising in five markets, including newspapers and TV stations, since 2007. The company says it generated $7 million in Yahoo revenues at its newspapers in 2009, and that it estimates that amount will grow to approximately $10 million this year.

The sale of Yahoo! Display advertising by the company’s television stations is expected to increase Media General’s total Yahoo! Display revenues by approximately 50 percent on an annualized basis.

(Via press release)

Is it Christmas?

Motorola and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion have just jointly announced that they have entered into a settlement and licensing agreement that ends all outstanding worldwide litigation between the two companies.

The financial terms of the agreement include an up-front payment and ongoing royalties to Motorola. Further terms and conditions of the agreement will remain confidential.

According to the press release, Motorola and RIM will “benefit from a long-term, intellectual property cross-licensing arrangement” going forward. The agreement involves all parties receiving cross-licenses of various patent rights, including patent rights relating to certain industry standards and certain technologies, such as 2G, 3G, 4G, 802.11 and wireless email.

In addition, the parties will transfer certain patents to each other.

Motorola sued RIM in the beginning of this year, accusing the company of illegally using Motorola’s patented technology since 2007, after expiry of the agreed licence period.

The issues related to a proprietary wireless technology owned by Motorola pertaining to Wi-Fi access, user interface and power management.

Motorola had gone to the US International Trade Commission to try to get imports of RIM devices banned, in addition to a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Texas. Motorola was seeking an injunction banning RIM products in the United States.

Just 3 weeks ago, RIM also settled a patent dispute with Prism Technologies over authentication software used in BlackBerry devices for an undisclosed amount of money.

Next up, Kodak? (which has also charged RIM with patent infringement)

UK-based startup Shoply wants to allow anyone to sell anything online. The company offers free SaaS that allows people to sell their goods in an online marketplace, with their own storefront and website.

The idea behind the site is fairly simple. Shoply aims to compete with eBay and other marketplaces by not charging setup or listing fees. Shoply makes money by charging a small transaction fee, which is 6 percent of a total transaction, on all purchases made through its platform as well as through monthly subscription plans for premium packages. Payments are made via PayPal.

Shoply also lets sellers integrate their virtual shops with social networks like Twitter and Facebook, allowing people to Tweet products out and use Facebook Connect to push updates. The ambition is to create a virtual shopping mall of sorts, where users can come to Shoply and try to find an item by doing a keyword search in the marketplace. And Shoply handles the SEO for the shop owners. The idea sounds great in theory, but it may be a challenge for Shoply to attract seller who already have an established base on Amazon, eBay and even Etsy. At the moment, Shoply has under 30 shops on the site. I think for the startup to start standing apart from these established competitors, it may have push a more disruptive model, such as such as that of marketplace on Facebook. Shoply’s founder Liad Shababo says that the site currently offers this functionality, which will compete with fellow Facebook marketplace Payvment.

Today’s the big day. TechCrunch turns five years old. And oh, there’s a huge football – no, not ‘soccer’ – event kicking off in South Africa too.

Many of you will be missing the opening match(es) while you’re out celebrating our birthday and 5 years of change on the Web all over the world, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to catch up from your mobile phone, or look up what went down on the Internet when – or if – you make it back home.

Here’s our ultimate guide to how you can keep track of all things World Cup 2010 on the Web and/or through mobile applications. Sure, Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch Europe already posted a few pointers, and Nicholas Deleon from CrunchGear tried to compile an exhaustive list of websites, apps and podcasts as well.

But frankly, those guys are amateurs. I know you deserve better. So here goes.

(deep breath)

INTERNET GIANTS
————————————-

Microsoft

Microsoft has detailed its plans for the World Cup two days ago.

Bing Instant Answers aims to bring you all the latest details, the schedule, upcoming games, live scores group standings, and more. The results will show in the U.S. and 30 other countries (why not everywhere, we have no idea).

Redmond also lets you visualize the World Cup teams on Bing.

There is also a Bing Map App that will be displaying FIFA live data on Bing Maps, including team fixtures, results, news, photos, venues, a Photosynth hub for World Cup images, and a Twitter map that will display all of the World Cup related tweets.

Finally, Bing has released a South Africa Bing Map imagery update, so you can see the stadiums where all the games will take place.

Google

Google is making it easy to keep track of the schedule and groups – just run a search for ‘world cup’ and the basic info will be displayed right on top. Also, there’s a cute easter egg to be found at the bottom, just in case you weren’t aware yet.

YouTube sports a custom logo for the occasion (as does Google Search), and is shining a big spotlight on the World Cup on its homepage, too.

Google also announced earlier that there’s new Street View imagery around seven new football stadiums in South Africa (see them in 3D here).

Update: more from Google: a Chrome extension and an iGoogle Gadget. The company has also look at some internal resources to see what they could “uncover about the upcoming tournament and its global audience”.

Yahoo

The logo on the Yahoo homepage today is animated for the World Cup kick-off, and leads to the company’s sports vertical, where Yahoo will be keeping track of news, photos, videos, results etc. Yahoo is also featuring shortcuts to relevant links when you enter certain search terms (e.g. world cup schedule).

Yahoo has also launched a skinnable, themed toolbar (see Flickr) and has signed a deal with David Beckham to function as its brand ambassador and whatnot.

Facebook

Facebook today posted its ‘guide to the world cup’. The company is running a global competition to see which country has the most passionate football fans – you can check out the leaderboard here (Chile is winning right now).

Facebook also has some official broadcast partners that enable users to share status updates and comments while you watch the events live on TV by using Facebook’s Live Stream social plugin. Partners, by country, are listed in the blog post and here.

Also: polls, a heads up for charity 1GOAL, and a promotion of the EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars app, where you can build your own dream team and challenge your friends.

Other than that, Facebook is touting its Connect, Like, Share and Recommend features.

Twitter

The folks over at Twitter have added a custom World Cup theme to the gallery stable, and have put together a dedicated section where you can see a list of upcoming matches and more.

Evidently, you can go to the site to see Top Tweets, which are algorithmically selected tweets and retweets about the World Cup that Twitter deems most interesting.

You can show your allegiance to one team using a special hashtag. Find out what it is for the country you’re cheering for, use it, and you’ll see the corresponding flag in your tweet. Click it, and you’ll be redirected to the special Twitter World Cup pages built for said country.

Finally, the suggested user list now boasts a special section for World Cup-related staff picks.

Fun third-party stuff: Tweetmeme’s World-Cup-News.net, Cuptweets and Kosmix’ Tweetbeat (see our earlier post).

AOL

They aren’t doing anything special as far as we can tell, but at least they have a special site section for the World Cup (powered by Fanhouse).

Opera

If you use Opera Mini, the company’s mobile browser, on your phone, head to sports.opera.com to find a special section on the World Cup.

Hitwise

Also worth noting: Experian Hitwise has shared some of its data related to World Cup search activity. Brazil soccer star Ronaldinho received the second-highest percentage of searches, with 5.63 percent, followed by U.S. soccer star Landon Donovan, with 4.24 percent. Spanish-language players dominated the top 10 results, comprising eight of the top 10 spots.

Yahoo’s World Cup 2010 site received the second-most traffic from World Cup search last week in the U.S. FIFA.com was first at 50%, with Yahoo second at 11% and Wikipedia third at 8%.

Hitwise also says U.S. searches for the term “world cup” have increased 216% in the last two weeks, and the number of terms with “world cup” increased 226% over the same period.

JibJab

Ok, not an Internet giant, but gigantically funny: personalized your own little JibJab football match video.

SPORTS SITES
————————————-

Yes, plenty of news and sports sites will feature World Cup coverage in articles, photos and videos. But these are some of the sites we think will be most interesting to visit during the next few weeks of football craziness:

FIFA.com

The International Federation of Association Football, commonly known as FIFA, should be prepared for the wave. Its main website evidently is all about the World Cup today and in the coming weeks, and it’ll be the main source of information for many, many people scouring for information on the Web. It also helps that most of the major search engines are including links to the site in their custom search results.

Tip: register and log in to personalize the experience.

Nice touch: a Twitter-like live stream of information and links.

Yahoo Sports

We mentioned it before, but Yahoo’s Sports vertical has a dedicated section on the World Cup where you’ll find news, photos, videos of the event and more. Also, a fantasy football game.

Goal.com

Quote: “Almost three years on since the first match of qualification. 204 teams. 848 matches. 2337 goals. And it’s finally come down to this.”

Yes it has, and Goal.com is ready for the flood of news and information hungry visitors. Here’s a direct link to World Cup coverage.

SB Nation

SB Nation, a fast-growing network of fan-centric online sports communities also features a special World Cup 2010 section.

You might also want to check out Fantator, which keeps sports fans everywhere updated on what is happening in all the matches.

MEDIA SITES
————————————-

ESPN

ESPN has a special World Cup 2010 website. Everything you need to know is and will be on there, and you can play the World Fantasy game to enhance the experience.

Others

Evidently, most if not all media organizations all across the globe are reserving special sections on TV, in print and online for the World Cup 2010. We’re sure you know best which local publisher will be providing the best coverage in your country, so we’re going to let you decide that on your own damn self, but here are some of the more familiar names:

BBC, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times, CNN, The Sun, NBC Sports, ITV.

MOBILE APPLICATIONS
————————————-

IMHO, the Goal.com application is top of the bill. Apps are available for Nokia (S60 5th edition), iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile smartphones – get them by visiting http://m.goal.com/app directly from a mobile browser. Or just use your mobile browser to head to m.goal.com.

Here are some others, per platform, all of them free of charge.

iPod Touch / iPhone

– ESPN 2010 FIFA WORLD CUP (iTunes link)
– AP 2010 World Cup Coverage (iTunes link)
– World Football Live! (iTunes link)
– SOUTH AFRICA 2010 TRACKER (iTunes link)
– many more, just search for ‘south africa’ or ‘world cup’ from the App Store

Android

– WORLD CUP NEWS (AndroLib link)
– World Cup Essentials (AndroLib link)
– The Sun FOOTBALL – WORLD CUP (AndroLib link)
– AP 2010 WORLD CUP COVERAGE (AndroLib link)
– again, many more, just run a search for ‘world cup’ from Android Market on your handset

BlackBerry

South Africa on BlackBerry (link to BlackBerry App World webstore)

Nokia

– AP 2010 World Cup Coverage (Ovi Store link)
– Football.co.uk World Cup 2010 News (Ovi Store link)
– The World Cup App (Ovi Store link)

Windows Mobile

World Cup Application (via WMExperts)

FOOTBALL VIDEOS SITES
————————————-

Ready for it?

FootyTube.com, Videosoccer.net, Mysoccerplace.net, Oleole.com, Givemefootball.com, Soccerclips.net, video.football.co.uk, Goalsarena.com, Footy-boots.com, Goalvideoz.com, Mightyfootball.com, Footballclips.net, 101greatgoals.com, Football-spot.com, Footballtube.com, Timesoccer.com, Footballwired.com, Goaljunky.com, Thefootballtube.com and Footballvids.org.

We hear some of those, as well as Roja Directa and Iraq Goals, will be live-broadcasting some of the games, but we didn’t tell you that.

PODCASTS & RADIO
————————————-

Sirius XM is broadcasting all the games of the World Cup live, so listen in.

The Guardian also has a free podcast, World Cup Daily, that CrunchGear says will absolutely be worth downloading.

They also say World Football Daily is another great (but not free) podcast that will be bringing the thunder during the tournament.

Also check out ESPN’s Soccernet World Cup Podcast, The Independent World Cup Podcast and that of the Daily Mail (and here’s some more if you’re not satisfied yet).

Bonus: “How to organise that World Cup pub crawl” via Drinksin.com.

Ok, what did I miss? (Not that I’ll be updating this post, I’m too psyched for the opening match that’s about to start – but at least people will find more useful links in comments).

Also, I say Spain is going to win the tournament. You can quote me on that.

Betting on another team? Get over to Smarkets and let’s see what your bets are worth.

Audience measurement firm comScore has released its May 2010 U.S. Search Data report, and it shows continued market share gains for Yahoo and Microsoft.

Yahoo and Bing/MSN each added approximately 60 bps and 30 bps to 18.3% and 12.1%, respectively. Google is down, claims comScore, declining approximately 70 bps for the second consecutive month to 63.7%.

But that’s not the whole story, and investors need to caution when interpreting the data as presented by comScore, say analysts.

Gleacher & Company’s Broadpoint.AmTech puts it this way:

While these numbers are correct on an apples-to-apples basis (in the sense that certain types of searches – e.g. contextual shortcuts and slide-shows – are being counted consistently across properties), the trending data for which we think comScore is most useful shows a different picture.

J.P. Morgan has this to say about the reported numbers:

User interface changes continue to cloud the picture. Google, Yahoo! and MSN all made notable changes in April and May, according to comScore. As such, numbers may not be directly comparable to past months.
…
We think more months of data under the new methodology could clarify matters.

Update: comscore’s Cameron Meierhoefer addresses the issue in a blog post (via Business Insider).

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/comscore-says-itll-fix-search-share-measurement-now-that-yahoo-and-microsoft-are-gaming-it-2010-6#ixzz0qYUGHvgw

We’ve detailed how Yahoo has boosted its search market share with these ‘tricks’ last month.

When adjusted, backing out Yahoo and Bing/MSN’s use of contextual shortcuts and image slide-shows from both May and April, Broadpoint.AmTech estimates that Yahoo’s share actually declined roughly 30 bps month over month in May to 16.6%, while Microsoft Sites’ share was flat at approximately 10.8%.

Google, after a small data collection adjustment to the April data (namely a change in how Google handles searches with typos), appears to have gained roughly 30 bps of share in May to 66.4%, says Broadpoint.AmTech. However, Google’s domestic core search market share was 63.7% in May, down slightly from 64.4% in April, J.P. Morgan claims.

According to the reported data, total US core search volume increased 11.2% year over year in May, an acceleration from 5.3% growth in April, adds J.P. Morgan. However, adjusting for the impact of user interface changes, the firm estimates search volume was up roughly 7%.

Today, Apple has begun emailing iPhone app developers to let them know they’re now accepting iOS 4-compatible apps in the App Store. Just as it does each time before a new OS launches (such as earlier this year with the iPad OS, which was iPhone OS 3.2 — yes, it’s a little confusing), Apple wants to make sure it has apps to show off when the new OS hits on June 21 (three days before the iPhone 4 launch).

And this launch is important because it brings the ability for third-party applications to run in the background for the first time. Earlier today, Pocket-lint noted that “massive delays” were expected for multitasking apps. But there were two major problems with this report. First, it seemed to suggest that the iPhone 4 was the key to multitasking. In fact, it is iOS 4 that brings the ability to multitask, and it brings it to the iPhone 3GS and latest generation iPod touch as well. More importantly, they noted that “in our initial testing, only Apple apps, like the Clock, Mail and Safari, can multitask. That’s it!” Um, that’s because there are no third-party apps available yet that have this built in. That’s exactly why Apple is sending out emails that they’re going to start accepting them now.

Here’s my favorite line from the Pocket-lint story, “When we spoke to a number of developers, that aren’t keen to be named in this article for fear of backlash from Apple, they all confirmed to Pocket-lint that, for any app to take advantage of the new multitasking features, it will have to be updated.” Uh, yes. That’s exactly what Apple has been saying all along. I’m not sure what backlash a developer would face for pointing that out.

FUD aside, developers can begin submitting these iOS 4-compatible apps now. And from what I’ve heard from developers, it’s not that hard to do. In fact, a number of them got apps up and running in time to work on the demo units Apple made available after the WWDC keynote address on Monday. For example, here’s Pandora running in the background. Foursquare was working as well, as were other apps.

But it’s not all good news for developers. When Apple makes a call for these new, specific applications, they usually shove other ones aside to make sure the can approve these special ones in time for a launch. We saw this with the iPad launch. Based on what we’re hearing from some developers now, it appears that regular (non-iOS 4) apps are seeing approval wait times that are longer than normal already.

[Thanks Noah]

The problem with Twitter is that it is too noisy. Filtering the signal from the noise is still too burdensome. The founders of search engine Kosmix think they have an answer with a new product called Tweetbeat, which they are unleashing in a preview version designed specifically to filter all the Tweets about the World Cup soccer tournament. Tweetbeat ingests the entire firehose of 65 million Tweets a day, and spits out only those about the World Cup which are it deems to be the most popular and important. It tries to capture everything from news to teams, players and fan shout-outs.

What’s more impressive, though, is that along the left-hand side are flag icons of 32 teams. When you click on a flag, you see Tweets only about that team. You can follow only Brazil, England, Nigeria, or whatever team makes you want to cover yourself with body paint. The name of the team or “World Cup” doesn’t even have to be in the Tweet. Tweetbeat recognizes individual player names such as Cole or Maradona, nicknames, teams, even stadiums, and it delivers all of these Twets in realtime. A slider at the top allows you to adjust the speed at which the stream flows down the page. Next week, Tweetbeat will be available as an iPhone app and desktop widget, and sites like MySpace plan to use the data in their own widgets.

Some early findings from the day before the first game begins (of English-only Tweets):

• Overall, the World Cup is the most popular category on Twitter in the past 24 hours after Justin Beiber.
• England is getting the most Tweets, with 40 percent more than any other team, followed by the U.S. Brazil is fifth (remember, in English), and Paraguay is dead-last in popularity on Twitter.
• The most popular players on Twitter are  Joe Cole, Wayne Rooney, and Lionel Messi (again, if Kosmix analyzed Portuguese Tweets, I’m sure it would be a different story, but I am still kind of surprised Rolando didn’t rank higher).

Under the hood, Kosmix is applying its core semantic search technology to Twitter’s firehose of Tweets to categorize them instantly. Kosmix has created a taxonomy of the Web which spans more than 10 million topics and their relationships. It doesn’t rely on hashtags or keywords, but on relationships, influence, and trending clusters. Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman explains:

To determine whether a tweet is part of a trending story, Tweetbeat creates real-time clusters of tweets, based on semantic similarity. The tweets in a cluster are about the same story. We then rank stories using a combination of many different real-time signals, including the number of tweets, the influence scores of the people who have tweeted the story, and the rate at which the cluster is growing (i.e., “story velocity” and “story acceleration”).

We use a variety of signals to compute a real-time influence score for every active twitter user. The score depends not only on static factors, such as number of followers, but also on dynamic factors, such as retweets and who retweeted. So, being retweeted by an influential user makes you more influential.

He calls this influence score “Krank.” Kosmix is applying these techniques right now to the World Cup teams and players as a showscase of what its technology can do, but later this summer it will release a full version of Tweetbeat across all topics.

Comcast’s Tunerfish is opening to the public today; and debuting a deal with HBO for their show True Blood. Tunerfish, which was demoed at TechCrunch Disrupt a few weeks ago, was incubated by the Plaxo team (Comcast acquired Plaxo in 2008) and is led by former Plaxo VP of Marketing John McCrea.

Tunerfish allows people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice in real time. Much like Twitter does for tweets, Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends (in the last hour, 24 hours, etc.), which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with. The site also encourages people to check-in to shows on both its web-based app and iPhone app, much like you would in Foursquare or Gowalla.

Using Tunerfish, True Blood’s fans will have the opportunity to earn “Truebie” and “Maker” badges by Tweeting on the site while they watch and influencing their friends to do the same. Tunerfish will use these check-ins to determine and reward loyal fans with the badges.

HBO’s is also launching a True Blood Twitter Microsite, which allows True Blood fans to Tweet and access live conversations about new episodes while watching them on TV. Called Bloodcopy.com, the site will feature weekly Twitter “hosts” that will live Tweet during each episode initiating conversations, interacting with fans and facilitating giveaways. The microsite was built using Twitter’s @anywhere technology.

Well, that was fun. If you tried to access TechCrunch any time in the last hour or so, you probably noticed that it wasn’t working at all. Instead, you were greeted by the overly cheery notice “WordPress.com will be back in a minute!” Had we written that message ourselves, there would have been significantly more profanity.

The cause of the downtime is still being determined; we’re waiting for more details from WordPress.com, the hosted blogging platform that is home to over 10 million blogs. We’re hosted under their VIP program, as are other large sites like GigaOm and some of CNN’s blogs. As far as we can tell, all 10+ million blogs hosted by WordPress were affected by the downtime.

Needless to say, we’re pretty upset. WordPress has a fairly reliable track record overall, but it was only a few months ago that WordPress suffered their worst downtime in four years, when all hosted blogs were down for around 110 minutes. At the time, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote on the company’s blog that he hoped “it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again”. It’s been less than four months.

We’re awaiting further details from the WordPress team (we expect they’ll have an update on their official blog shortly).

Update: Mullenweg responded in the comments below with some more details:

As you’ve noticed, we’ve brought the vast majority of blogs back, including yours. We’re currently working on bringing back the rest (including GigaOM), we have to verify their options data first, then the home page, then stats. However if you’re back already like TC is everything should work as normal.

The cause of the outage was a very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs.

Mike and team at TC: you guys have jinxed us, but we still love you. These past two rapid-fire incidents have been cringe-worthy and painful, and I’m sorry they both happened shortly after your switch to VIP.

Tomorrow, TechCrunch turns five years old. We’ve grown up with the Web over that time from a one-man hobby in Michael’s home to an expanding media outfit of almost two dozen full-time staff around the world. Since all of you won’t fit in our new offices in San Francisco (as much as we’d like to invite you, especially the commenters on MG’s posts), we thought why not let readers throw their own parties around the world.

A couple weeks ago, with the launch of Meetups Everywhere at our Disrupt conference in New York, we started with about 50 Meetups. Quickly, that grew to 150, then 250, and now the number is at more than 350 TechCrunch Meetups from Bangalore and Jakarta to Johannesburg and Miami Beach. More than 4,000 readers will be celebrating with us, and you can join them.

Check out the nearest city with a TechCrunch Meetup, or create your own. The biggest Meetup right now is in American Fork, Utah, with 372 people all going to a BBQ, followed by San Francisco (333), New York (164), and Bangalore, India (137). Come meet me at the one in New York City, or TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher in the UK.

These Meetups are more about you, and how much the Web has changed in the past five years, than it is about us. Just think about it. Five years ago, Facebook hadn’t yet graduated from colleges. YouTube, Twitter, and Foursquare didn’t even exist. TechCrunch was writing about Web 2.0 startups, but now we don’t even use that term anymore because the entire Web has absorbed those concepts. It is social, programmable, and increasingly mobile. Every site with an API is a potential platform that can be mashed up to create new sites and apps. That’s just the way it is.

If you are an organizer of one of the 350+ Meetups, thank you. Here are some things you can do. Take plenty of photos and videos, and upload them to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, or YouTube. Tag everything #tcmeetup. Stream live video from your meetup, you can set up a free channel on Livestream, and we will be streaming on the New York City party on this TCMeetup channel.

Get people on video answering these questions, and we’ll pull together the best answers in a highlight video:

• What technology can you not live without that did not exist five years ago?
• What will the Web look like five years from now?
• What kinds of startups will create the most wealth over the next five years?
• Why do you read TechCrunch?

Let’s get down to business. The World Cup begins tomorrow, June 11, 2010. The tournament kicks off with hosts South Africa against Mexico at 9:30am ET/6:30am PT on ESPN in the U.S. (International readers: you’ll have to consult your local listings.) Consider this post a general how-to on making the most of the tournament. Mobile Apps, helpful Web sites, podcasts, etc. Woo~!

Moments ago, a rare single letter domain name was auctioned off live over the Internet. The domain name is E.CO, and it was sold through Sedo for $81,000, as reported by several industry blogs.

All proceeds from the first .CO domain auction goes to a charity of the buyers’ choice.

The seller, .CO Internet, which operates the .CO top-level domain, will soon be announcing the winners of the auction, but we’ve learned the names of the buyers ahead of time.

Lonnie Borck from B52 Media and Uri Kerbel from Bookmarks.com have both won the charity domain auction, and are keeping the name of the charity they’ll be donating the money to private.

The E.CO auction was held live at this week’s Internet Week conference in New York City. The last hour of bidding, which concluded at 4:10 pm Eastern Time, was also simulcast at both the Internet Retailer (Chicago) and TRAFFIC (Vancouver) shows.

We’re told over 10 countries were represented, and over twenty people bid on the domain name – a record number for any single domain auction. Visit e.co to learn more about the auction.

The successful auction marks a second interesting event for .CO Internet – just yesterday Twitter debuted a new service with the name t.co.

Digg founder and CEO Kevin Rose will be leaving his popular Diggnation show, we’ve heard from a source. This has not been confirmed by Kevin, but we believe it’s accurate. Revision3, which hosts the show, has not yet returned our request for comment.

The show has been “aired” since July 1, 2005 and regularly attracts 200,000 or more viewers. It is the most popular show on Revision3, although new shows like Penn Point are starting to bring in real mainstream talent.

Why is he leaving? We’re speculating, but his new job as CEO of Digg may be keeping him too busy to make time for the show. Or maybe it’s just that after five years he ready to focus on something new.

It’s not clear if cohost Alex Albrecht is staying with the show, or if it will simply shut down.

Update: Rose says via Twitter that he will leave the show at the end of this year.

Update 2: Revision 3 says Kevin will be there at least through the end of the year (perhaps they think they can change Kevin’s mind): “Every year we sit down and think about what the next year of Diggnation should be. Those decisions have not yet been made, however Kevin and Alex will remain hosting the show through at least 2010 . We will also be announcing an exciting new video project of Kevin’s on Revision3 in the coming months.”

During the last World Cup in 2006, Twitter had just a few thousands users. Now they have 125 million users sending 65 million tweets a day — and 65% of those users are outside the U.S. As such, they’ve created a special section on twitter.com to highlight this year’s version of the sporting event that brings the world together.

This section highlights the key matches coming up as well as top tweets from Twitter accounts affiliated with soccer in some way. Notably, each World Cup matchup will get its own page and live-updating tweet stream about that particular game. For example, here’s South Africa vs. Mexico.

But the coolest thing may be the way you can show your allegiance to one team using a special hashtag. Twitter only hints at this feature, but as you can see, employees are already using it. In this tweet from Twitter’s Vitor Lourenço, he’s clearly rooting for Brazil, and you can see the Brazilian flag in the tweet. How did he do that? Simply use the hashtag “#BRA”.

Twitter also has new special backgrounds for the World Cup that members can decorate their profiles with. It’s also worth noting that “England and Spain have banned Twitter usage by players during the World Cup,” according to Twitter.

Update: Also cool, the country flags link back to the special Twitter World Cup pages built for that country. For example, see my tweet here and click on the U.S. flag.

Back in fall 2008 — an eternity by mobile standards — I wrote about a fun little iPhone chess game called Chess With Friends. The game hit the App Store at a time when there were at least fifteen similar apps on the market, but it had one key differentiator: it tapped into the iPhone’s network effect to let you challenge your friends at a time when the vast majority of applications ignored the iPhone’s Internet connection. Eight months later, the small company behind Chess With Friends released the next game in the series, a Scrabble-like app that has since gone on to become a smash hit. It’s called Words With Friends. I sat down with brothers Paul and David Bettner, two of the founders of ‘Words‘ development house Newtoy, to get the back story on how the game grew to such popularity and where they’re going next.

The premise of ‘Words‘ is simple: you fire it up and are playing a Scrabble-like word game against one of your friends in seconds. There’s no single player mode — the entire experience is built around multiplayer. And that formula has proven to be golden: the app now has over 1.6 million daily active users who average a full hour of playing every day. It has been on Apple’s top grossing list for four months running and serves over 1.5 billion ad impressions every month.  Between the freemium ad-supported app and the paid version (which sells for $2.99), the game is making quite a bit of money, though the brothers wouldn’t get into specifics.

Newtoy got its start after Microsoft decided to shut down Ensemble Studios, which was developing a now-defunct game for the Xbox 360 called Halo Wars. The brothers, who were Ensemble employees, were asked to keep working on the game anyway but they declined and decided to start their own indie studio. Newtoy was founded in September 2008 and shipped Chess With Friends that November. The game was pretty straightforward, allowing you to invite your friends to play an asynchronous chess game (you make a move, they make their move at their convenience, and so on). At the time I said that the app “longed for push“, because users had to manually check in on the game themselves to see if it was their turn — they couldn’t get the push alerts that iPhone users receive today.

Chess With Friends did fairly well by 2008 standards, but it was hardly the hit that ‘Words‘ later went on to become. Still, it was popular enough that the Newtoy team had to devote more time than they would have liked to ensure their servers could keep up with demand. Their followup game was put on the back burner.

Finally, in July 2009, the studio released Words With Friends. At the time they had no idea it would become a hit — they took a small $200K seed round from friends and family and started working on an ngmoco title called We Rule (which they didn’t own full rights to) to make sure they could keep paying the bills. As they worked on We Rule, Words With Friends did fairly well but wasn’t exactly surging.

And then John Mayer happened. On October 5 2009, Mayer tweeted that Words With Friends “is the new Twitter” (the Newtoy guys say they didn’t have anything to do with it). The application promptly surged in popularity, and has since ridden on its inherent virality to grow to where it is today — as more players signed up, they’d tell their friends to join so that they could play each other (remember, the game is multi-player only). The Bettners say that the application had already started to hit an inflection point in growth before the Mayer tweet, but there’s no doubt that he gave it a major push in the right direction. The ‘With Friends’ series has now seen 6.5 million downloads.

Of course, Words With Friends was hardly the first such word game on the market, so how did it catch on?  The Bettners chalk this up to the user experience.  Whereas the official Scrabble iPhone app forced users to trudge through a few menus before they could access its multiplayer features, Words puts your multiplayer games front-and-center. You can boot up the app and be in a game in just a few seconds, which the Bettners say is key.

Success has come with a few hurdles, though, namely that Newtoy has to deal with a massive number of moves every day (players have cumulatively made over 1 billion moves). In some ways, this has held Newtoy back. Anyone who has played Words With Friends can probably tell you that adding friends in the game is a pain — instead of hooking into Facebook Connect, users have to manually type in their friends’ aliases, which is the sort of mechanic you might have expected a few years ago but feels woefully out of date now. There’s no Facebook application or web presence of any kind, so you have to make all of your moves from an iPhone or iPad. And the game isn’t available on any other mobile platforms like Android.

When I pointed out these shortcomings to the brothers, they repeatedly responded “We know! We’re working on it!”. I couldn’t get a hard timeframe out of them, but it sounds like Facebook Connect will be coming first, followed by some kind of web app, with an Android version at some point in the not particularly near future (lame). But the brothers also point out that Apple is planning to release GameCenter, a social gaming network that is being built directly into iOS, which should be even easier to use than Facebook Connect.

Looking forward, the Bettners say that they have more games in the works as part of the ‘With Friends’ franchise, and they’ll be able to nudge their current userbase toward the new apps.  When I pushed for more details on these games they declined, explaining that they’re “sort of like Apple when it comes to new games”.  I think they’ve still got a ways to go when it comes to secrecy though — I doubt Apple would have agreed to talk with me in the first place.