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I caught up with Bob Kimball and Peter Kellogg-Smith, respectively the chief executive and VP of emerging products at RealNetworks, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Like most people, I knew Real mostly from their media player and their former subsidiary Rhapsody (they still own 47 percent of that business), but I must admit I was only vaguely familiar with their other activities.

Kimball pointed out to me that the media player currently represents merely 10 percent of Real’s business, with the majority of revenues actually coming from products and services it provides to mobile operators worldwide and its booming casual gaming operations (already a $111 million business and growing).

At the Congress, the company, which significantly downscaled operations last year, previewed its new digital media management service Unifi. It hasn’t publicly launched yet, so I won’t elaborate too much about it, but suffice to say I think it could easily become a great, popular product, if they can get the pricing right.

Expect a full review of Unifi as soon as it launches.

Lots of hullabaloo about Apple’s iOS subscription product. The basics – everyone pays 30%, you can’t charge more on the iPhone for the product than you do on other platforms, and you can’t link out from the app to the browser to handle subscriptions without Apple being in the middle. It’s not even clear that apps will be able to just post a message telling people to create an account from their computer and then come back to their iPhone and use the app.

That’s all well and good for apps that have zero marginal costs. But for some content providers, specifically the music streaming services like MOG, Rhapsody, Rdio, etc., this is crushing. It effectively pushes them off the iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices. They’ve been keelhauled.

That’s because they don’t have 30% margins to begin with, the labels and publishers take somewhere around $8 of the $10 subscription fee. We saw Rhapsody balk at Apple earlier today. On Wednesday morning, we hear, most of the online music streaming services will be issuing a joint statement condemning the policy.

Does Apple’s move violate antitrust laws? The Wall Street Journal seems to think probably not. Of course, if Apple now launches their own music streaming service, that may change. Apple will be the only company that doesn’t have to pay Apple’s 30% subscription fee, so they’ll be the only company that can offer a $10/month music streaming service without losing money on every user.

How does this all play out? We hear the music labels are torn between waging an all out legal war against Apple and just capitulating and lowering their fees enough to keep the streaming services in business.

The problem isn’t that Apple is asking for 30%. It’s that the apps can’t charge more to cover those costs. In the end Apple may get what they’re asking for, but if they do it will only be because the labels cave and because Android has gained so much market share that Apple may be able to effectively beat an antitrust action.

Paperless billing is one of those things that is slower to take hold than it should, but it just seems inevitable that is how we all will be receiving our bills sooner or later. One startup trying to speed along the paperless era is Doxo, which just raised a $10 million. The Series B financing was led by Sigma Partners, with previous investors Mohr Davidow and Bezos Expeditions participating.

Thomas Layton, the former CEO of OpenTable from 2001 to 2007, also invested and is joining Doxo’s board of directors. Greg Gretsch from Sigma is also taking a board seat. This round brings the total raised by Doxo to $15 million since it was founded in 2008. As I described the service last year:

Doxo is a cloud-based service which works in tandem with existing paperless billing systems, but aims to be much simpler and appealing for consumers. It will be a single place where all your most critical transactional records (bills, statements, explanation of benefits) will be stored on your behalf. And you can be notified any number of ways, via email, mobile apps, SMS, and so on.

Businesses pay about $10 a year per customer to send paper bills. Doxo aims to greatly reduce that cost, and gives consumers one place to manage all their paperless bills. Companies offering Doxo as a billing option include Sprint, Kansas City Power & Light, and Puget Sound Energy. The service is still invite-only, but if you want to try it out enter the code “techcrunch” here.

Something unusual happened last Friday night at Bar Basic here in San Francisco. When I walked in, the entire room was fixated on on a screen above the bar, which displayed what looked like a musical game but wasn’t karaoke. The game? Roqbot, a unique iPhone app that allows you to yes, pick the music playing at a bar. Like a combination Pandora and traditional jukebox, Roqbot allows you to control the tunes without getting up from where you’re sitting.

The inspiration for Roqbot came when one of the co-founders got frustrated using the jukebox at a bowling alley — Every time he had to walk across the bowling alley he would miss his turn. Roqbot, which shares the space with jukebox networks TouchTunes and eCast, is the first startup that I’ve seen experimenting with bringing social music to real life businesses like bars and cafes. Up until now plenty of people have deployed this concept for private settings, but no one has touched public because of the many challenges involved.

Co-founder Garrett Dodge says Roqbot isn’t actually competing with jukeboxes, but with iPods. Playing an iPod at a cafe or a bar has its disadvantages, namely that the staff gets tired of listening to the same music day in and day out (anyone who has ever worked in a store knows how hellish this can be around Christmas-time) and that customer requests are never heard. There is also the legal issue of music licensing fees when playing personal music in a public setting.

With Roqbot you can check in at a participating venue as well as publish your checkins and music picks to Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm and Facebook. You can select a song to play using Roqbot credits that you can buy with Amazon, Paypal or your Credit Card through your phone. The app offers you a comprehensive list of popular music to choose from, including some that will please the cranky indie music snob you’ve dragged along. If you’re having trouble deciding what to play you can pick from curated lists like “Highest Rated of all time,” “Most Played of All Time” and yes “Top 80s.”

Participating venues have their own dashboards within the app and aspiring DJs can navigate through “Now Playing” “Next Up” “DJs” and “Specials” homescreens. On the “Next Up” screen, a Digg-like interface allows you to thumb up and thumb down songs, increasing or decreasing people’s DJ ratings with each vote (and it gets heated). Likewise people can vote your picks up or down, which affects your own DJ rating as well as your position in line. For extra Roqbot credits you can set your musical picks to “Priority Pick” which moves them up in the queue.

“We’re going beyond checking into a venue,” says founder Garrett Dodge, “Now you can actually checkin and do something useful.” True. Roqbot also gives away all the equipment for free to venues, including the entire catalogue of five million fully-licensed songs (one of the co-founders has a background in IP law and one of their advisors used to be the CEO of Sony Music).

The Roqbot beta can be downloaded from the iPhone, but can only be used at Bar Basic in San Francisco which I highly suggest if you’re in the area. Dodge plans on launching the alpha for both the Android and iPhone platform in March, offering it for free to people planning parties at SXSW. Roqbot is currently bootstrapped.

Image: voteprime

A company called Audience Productions has filed to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and are selling $10/share preferred stock to people who want to invest in the movie they’re creating.

The movie is called “Lydia Slotnick Unplugged“:

“Lydia Slotnick Unplugged” is a comedy about an up and coming executive at a hip music TV network. When Lydia’s dream job becomes available, it’s a toss up between her and a skater-punk named Gator. Their boss favors Gator because he’s worried that Lydia’s lost her edge. So, Lydia decides to prove that she’s still got it by revealing the gritty story of her idol, legendary 70s rocker, Graham McGuiness. Graham has spent the past 30 years in a fog of alcohol and self-pity. He’s trying to find that elusive lost chord to become successful again. In a frantic race to uncover Graham’s past, Lydia learns an incriminating secret, which would make perfect material for a top-rated show. But she has to decide whether to use it to secure her promotion or destroy the evidence to save the reputation of her idol.

Sound good to you? Then you’ll definitely want to invest. Because the movie will only be made if they raise the full $8 million. Your minimum purchase is 2 shares, for $20.

Here’s what you get – your money back + 7% if the movie makes a profit. Any profit over 7% is shared 50/50 between the investors and the people behind the company. If the movie makes less than $8 million, all of it goes back to the investors.

Don’t expect a free ticket to see the movie, though. From the FAQs: “Do I get to see the completed movie for free? No. A distribution arrangement will preclude such a large number of complimentary tickets or DVDs.” You also won’t be allowed on set, but you will get to download clips of the movie.

Also note that the stock won’t be listed on Nasdaq or any other exchange, so you won’t be able to sell these shares very easily once you’ve invested.

Applying to startup programs these days is a little like applying to colleges. There are so many of them, it is hard to decide which ones to try to get into. TechStars wants to streamline that process, at least for founders applying to any of the 20 or so accelerators in the TechStars Network. The TechStars Network was recently launched as part of the White House’s Startup America initiative to spur entrepreneurship.

TechStars wants to create a unified startup application for all the seed accelerators in the TechStars Network. This would be an online application which would allow entrepreneurs to apply to multiple startup programs within the network. Presumably the different accelerators would compete for the best candidates just as colleges compete for the best students. And startups that don’t fit into one program may find a home in another with less friction.

The development of the universal application is being by a Kauffman Foundation grant of $200,000, and it will be made available to other startup programs not part of the TechStars Network. That means other startup programs such as Y Combinator or the Founder Institute could end up using it if they want.

In my previous post about Apple’s new subscription plans for the App Store, I offered up three possibilities. With the move, Apple is either: brilliant, brazen, or batsh*t crazy. But reading over the comments on that post (admit it, you did — it’s okay, I do too, sometimes), you might think there was a fourth option: evil.

To those who have followed tech news for any extended length of time, this is a familiar refrain. Company X changes something, therefore Company X is “evil”. Over the years, this has been true of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. But no company has seen this vitriol to the extent of Apple over the past few years. And curiously, it seems correlated to their meteoric rise in power and profitability.

But if Apple is really evil — or at the very least, if several major moves they’ve made over the past few years have been evil — shouldn’t the opposite be true? Shouldn’t Apple be losing a ton of customers who are fed up with their cruelty and inhumane torture of developers, users, and the world in general? Makes sense, right?

Welcome to reality, conspiracy theorists, loons, and occasional TechCrunch commenters.

This latest maneuver by Apple, and several other of their recent “evil” moves, can actually be explained quite easily. Apple isn’t out to trick everyone and eventually screw them over. Instead, Apple has perfected the art of making money.

To some, that will still seem evil. Hell, to a few that will likely seem synonymous with evil. But that’s an extremely myopic view of things.

The absolute key to Apple’s ability to make money is the ability to make products that customers want. This includes both their tangible hardware products, the software that runs on them, and the underlying infrastructure that fuses it all together. And that includes things like the App Store, which today’s latest change affects. Apple makes good products that people want, so they make a lot of money. The two are absolutely tied together. If they didn’t do the former, they wouldn’t get the latter.

To be clear, I’m not convinced that the subscription changes announced today won’t backfire against Apple — that was the point of the previous article. But given Apple’s recent track record, there’s every reason to believe that they won’t. Further, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Apple is making a smart bet here.

Apple is betting that the allure of being tied into their incredibly efficient iTunes payment ecosystem (along with its 100 million + accounts tied to credit cards) will outweigh the downside of having to pay them a 30 percent fee. The same 30 percent fee they currently take from the thousands of app developers collectively making billions of dollars off of the App Store. And the same 30 percent fee they currently take for all other types of in-app purchases.

You don’t hear those developers complaining about Apple’s cut. But this situation is different because it’s a de-facto change in policy. Actually, wording in their app guidelines has suggested for some time that Apple would move to filter all purchases made on their iOS devices through their in-app payment system. They just hadn’t enforced it until now.

But now that they have a system in place to do that, they’re going to do it. For many developers, this is a harsh reality. But is it evil?

Regardless of what I write or what anyone else says about this issue, here’s the actual situation: if this is a mistake, people will reject it. Both users and developers will have the chance to vote. But they won’t vote with their mouths. They’ll vote with their wallets.

If Apple is in the wrong here, developers will stop developing for iOS (a privilege which they pay Apple $99 a year for on top of the 30 percent app sales cut). And customers will stop buying iOS products. Those two factors will amplify one another. And the Apple ecosystem will wither.

There’s simply no reason for developers to develop for a company that is evil to them. And there’s no reason for customers to buy products from a company that is evil to them. There are other options out there. And those options will only continue to sprout. And people will walk away from Apple.

But allow me to state the obvious: with all the other “evil” changes Apple has made, this hasn’t happened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Apple has continued to sell more and more of their products and their ecosystem has exploded into a juggernaut.

Apple is so “evil” that they have more users than ever giving them more money than ever. Either the entire world is brainwashed or most users interpret these maneuvers as a part of Apple’s overall goal to make products that are consumer-friendly. Which, again, in turn, makes them money. A lot of it.

You could certainly make the case that the subscription changes could harm consumers if Amazon or Netflix or other developers decide to pull their apps from the App Store. That’s exactly why I’m not sure this won’t backfire (would Amazon really be okay giving Apple a 30 percent cut?!). But on paper, the main change to push for streamlined in-app payments is a big time benefit for consumers. And if the others play ball, that’s all the consumers will see: yet another system developed by Apple that is better than every other system out there.

And that’s exactly why the inevitable antitust talk (that has actually already begun!) is for the most part ridiculous. This is a free market that both developers and consumers are free to walk away from — and towards a competitor.

A number of people today seem to believe that Apple’s move will force companies to raise their prices by 30 percent across the board. That would be totally ridiculous, completely unacceptable, and worthy of an antitrust inquiry. But why on Earth would they do that when they can just put their products on Android or BlackBerry or webOS?

Looking ahead, the more I think about it, the more I think that may be the one (potentially) big vulnerability in Apple’s plan. The requirement that prices must the the same or less than they are elsewhere on the web might have to be altered eventually. But that will only be the case if rival products by competitors fail to produce an paid app ecosystem to compete with Apple’s.

But again, that would not be a case of Apple being evil. It would be a case of them building a natural monopoly similar to the way Google has done that in search.

Still, natural or not, just like Google, Apple would then have to be careful about what policies they implemented. With great power, comes great responsibility, and all that. But we’re not there yet. It does look like competition is coming — and fast. And so Apple should be allowed to implement the changes to their ecosystem as they see fit. The market will decide if they’re the right ones or not.

And that really is the key to all of this. It’s so obvious, but so many seem to be looking past it. Apple is not the great dictator of the world. We’re all free to not buy their products and to use other ones. But despite all the bluster about Apple being “evil” over the past several years, this has not happened. And it’s because they’re not evil. They’re simply a free market machine churning out great product after great product thanks to (and not in spite of) many of the policies they put in place.

But that could all change tomorrow. We’re in control, not them. Welcome to reality.

[images: New Line Cinemas]

Early-stage VC Javelin Venture Partners has closed a second, $105 million fund. The firm expects to use the money to fund around 20 companies over three years in seed and Series A rounds ranging from $500K to $3 million, and will reserve some of the funds for subsequent rounds raised by these portfolio companies.

Javelin was founded by Noah Doyle and Jed Katz, both of whom have experience as entrepreneurs. Doyle founded online loyalty program MyPoints.com and was an executive at Keyhole (which was acquired by Google and became Google Earth). Katz founded Rent.net and Move.com. The firm initially got its start in May 2008, and then relaunched in April 2009 with a fund size of $75 million (it’s now raised a total of $180 million).

Katz and Doyle say that they’re often asked how they differ from so-called “super angels” and explain that they can participate in later-stage rounds that angels typically can’t. But they say they’re different from typical VC firms because they’ve been entrepreneurs much of their careers and that they tend to “run at an entrepreneur’s pace” in terms of reaching decisions quickly. (Of course, many other VCs have entrepreneurial experience and will make similar claims). Katz and Doyle also say that they tend to be very involved with their companies, as opposed to just swinging by for board meetings.

The first Javelin fund has had one exit so far: Scout Labs, which was acquired by Lithium Technologies for $20-25 million last May.

How much pricing power exactly does Apple have over publishers desperate to figure out a digital strategy that results in paying subscribers? A hell of a lot—at least that is what Apple is betting with its new subscription billing service. Apple is taking a 30 percent cut of all digital subscription revenues. Just take a moment to think about that for a second.

Up until now, Apple took a 30 percent cut of one-time purchases in iTunes. So the 30 percent number doesn’t seem strange, at least not to consumers. What do we care how the money is split up as long as we all of these digital goodies are affordable? But publishers and other media companies with subscription businesses (cough, Netflix, cough) care very much. Apple is saying if we deliver a paying customer, we will take 30 percent of their subscription dollars in perpetuity as long as they consume your media on our devices.

You could argue that iTunes is the new digital newsstand, and so it deserves a cut. True, it does deserve something, but let’s compare what Apple wants to take with what a real newsstand collects. Typically, magazine companies take as much as 75 percent of the cover price of a magazine sold at a newsstand, which shows who has the pricing power in that relationship. But that is on a per-issue basis. The newsstands are merely lead generators which get people to sample magazines and newspapers before a portion of those people convert to paying subscribers. The newsstands don’t get anything extra for helping to bring in a new subscriber, forget about an ongoing cut of the subscription fee. Of course there are services that deliver subscribers to publishers, but even they don’t get an ongoing cut of the subscription. It’s more of a lead-gen type deal.

Apple is now telling media companies to forget about the way they’ve been doing business for decades. There are new rules in its digital newsstand. And, while some big publishers like might try to hold the line or go over to Android, in the end if consumers decide they want to read digital magazines on their iPads, they may have no choice but to do what Steve tells them to do.

And that could kill their business. Not only would they be handing over a substantial portion of their revenues to Apple, but they get virtually no data in return—data about customers. It’s that credit card data they use to do their consumer marketing and sell those readers to advertisers. So yeah, there’s going to be lots of resistance to Apple’s subscription scheme. No wonder the antitrust knives are already out. In the end, the old guard will fight it as long s they can, while new entrants with nothing to lose will build readerships on the iPad. It’s probably never been a better time to start a digital magazine.

Correction: An earlier version of this post reported that magazine publishers collect 95 percent of newsstand sales, which came from a source at a magazine publisher. After this figure was questioned in comments, I went back to my source who admitted he was wrong and suggested that for a large publisher with clout 70 to 75 percent was a better figure. Some commenters say it is closer to 50 percent, which may be true for smaller publishers. Nevertheless, these only apply to single issue sales—the equivalent of a paid download in the App Store—not ongoing subscription fees.

Photo credit: Susan NYC

Israel has had an amazing track record of producing startups and raking in returns– better than most countries many times its size. The problem is the returns have fallen off dramatically in the last ten years as industries Israel excelled at have become mature. Meanwhile, it’s failed to generate many big consumer Web hits, aside from MyHeritage and a few others.

I’ve traveled to Israel several times and met dozens of entrepreneurs, investors and startup boosters. In my experience, there are generally two kinds of Israelis: Those who blindly talk up everything Israel, going rabid if you dare point out the obvious decline in returns, and those who have a clear grasp of the country’s strengths and weaknesses and actively play to the strengths to combat the weaknesses.

Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum are the latter. They have no illusions about the challenges to starting a big tech company in Israel, as industries have changed and globalization has shifted many VCs’ focus to bigger, sexier markets like India and China. But they still believe in their country’s entrepreneurs. TechCrunch last heard about Golan and Nissenbaum in 2007, when they sold their Q&A site Yedda to AOL. Now, the two are launching a new micro-VC firm called Lool in hopes of filling a gap in the Israeli funding market, and help entrepreneurs with a good idea get a little further.

Lool is Hebrew for “crib” or “hatchery” and the idea is that this will be more like an incubator, heavy on the mentoring. And Nissenbaum an Golan have the cred to mentor. Nissenbaum was the former country manager for AOL Israel, and before Yedda he co-founded and sold a company called SmarTeam. Golan has been a Web developer since the mid-1990s and is well liked in the Israeli scene. Both have been active angel investors, funding or advising 15 companies.

Index’s Saul Klein is an adviser to the firm and calls it “Israel’s first credible micro VC.” “Increasingly this talent is looking to work with experienced entrepreneurs who have been there and done that,” Klein said. “Yaniv and Avichay have real entrepreneurial, product and general management credentials, they are very embedded in the community and they have great access to the US.”

Like a lot of micro VCs in the US, the firm is focused on Internet and media and expects most of its companies will have rapid exits of less than $50 million. The firm will provide seed and series A funding and a lot of added services like discounted legal and accounting services and in-house product and user experience experts. “We’re trying to create unfair advantages for the companies in our portfolio,” Golan says. Lool will focus on helping a handful of the best companies it can find.

It’s a dramatically different approach from Israel’s most famous angel investor Yossi Vardi who’s more of a Ron Conway-style investor, coming in very early and spreading his investments widely and providing less one-on-one time with each entrepreneur. As the Valley has shown, a rich startup ecosystem can support both.

Anyone who reads my posts regularly knows I’m not a big fan of funds set up just to help companies flip. I don’t buy that they’re sustainable long-term in what has always been a hit driven business. But like it or not, these quick flips have become the bread and butter of Israel’s Web scene, and Internet companies are what aspiring entrepreneurs want to build, whether the country has a good track record at it or not. I applaud these guys for taking a new approach and working to make entrepreneurs more successful at the game they want to play.

Notice that everything’s seemed kind of unusually quiet in the blogosphere all day ? From lagging tweets to the emergence of the new “@anywhere boosh” blank screen (“Fail Whale without the Whale”) error, it seems to me at least like the sundry unspecified  Twitter issues on the loose this morning and afternoon are actually CAUSING a slow news day. While the delay on the tweets was thankfully resolved a short while ago, users are still reporting the blank page error.

The problems are affecting both the website and clients. Some 3rd party client users are also noticing interesting tweet crawling errors and the clients crashing altogether, like this random cluster of tweets at the bottom of a Tweetdeck search for tweets from @Mediagazer performed by Atul Arora. It’s unclear if all the problems are related.

While Twitter says it’s working on fixing the issues and that the blank screen has only appeared for a small number of users but wouldn’t comment on any specific cause. It seems like, at least from the timing of complaints, that the situation is ongoing. I’m seeing reports coming from outlets as diverse and mainstream as The Washington Post and The Village Voice that something’s rotten in the state of Twitter. In fact I just got the screen image above while searching for tweets to include in this post. It’s not just you.

Update: Users are also pointing out that the “You can still access old Twitter for a limited time” link is now dead and redirecting here. Could these issues be preliminary signals of an impending move entirely over to New Twitter?

@davewiner
Dave Winer

What is @anywhere boosh and why am I getting redirected there?

February 14, 2011 11:43 pm via webRetweetReply

@danstar88
Danielle

okkk when i just pressed 'home' on my twitter page it took me 2 a blank page called @anywhereboosh…

about 16 hours ago via webRetweetReply

@paidContent
 

Sorry for the errant tweets, folks. The Twitter API and some filtering went awry. We're working on it but the flood should be over.

February 14, 2011 9:10 pm via TweetDeckRetweetReply

@ricmacnz
Richard MacManus

.@benkepes I agree, but a UX issue is solvable. TweetDeck is attempting it, what's to say Twitter itself won't follow soon too.

about 17 hours ago via TweetDeckRetweetReply

Since AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post, we know many of you have been looking for signs that TechCrunch has adopted our new editorial overlady’s approach to SEO. This seems like as good a time as any to assure loyal Why Is This News? viewers that we will never – ever – stoop to such cheap linkbaiting tricks, no matter what financial incentives we’re offered to do so.

And so to this week’s episode, where we talk about the impact of Justin Bieber – and his new movie, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (3D) – on social media and celebrity.

Video below. Also, does anyone know what time the Superbowl starts?

Late last year we broke the news about the upcoming Facebook Phone project, which sparked a media frenzy as the social network claimed this to be wrong, only to later admit that it did exist (the explanation being that there was no ‘Facebook Phone’, but that there are many Facebook Phones). Last week we got a video demo of one of these devices: the Android-based, INQ Cloud Touch. And today HTC announced its own Facebook-branded phones. But this is only the beginning.

Today Facebook announced on its blog that we’ll be seeing many similar integrations over the coming months:

In addition to these new phones from INQ and HTC, you’ll also be seeing similar deep Facebook integration on dozens of other devices over the course of this year. Some manufacturers will be highlighting Facebook as a part of their phones’ on-screen interfaces, and others will use our brand as an element of the device hardware itself.

The Facebook functionality on the INQ devices include single sign-on (you won’t have to keep reentering credentials for various applications, because it will use your Facebook account) and links to popular features like Chat and Places. The HTC devices actually have a Facebook hardware button.

However, while these devices will all feature prominent Facebook integration, we’re also hearing that Facebook continues to work on a different and more exciting project: a ‘social’ version of Android that includes much deeper Facebook integration throughout the OS, stripping out Google’s apps in favor of its own. In other words, Facebook could have its own mobile operating system in the not-so-distant future.

In the same space as Buzzillions and Viewpoints, a new consumer review aggregator SearchReviews unveils itself today, allowing users to tailor searches to its over 40 million consumer reviews for over 4 million products from 1,011 retailers like ebay, Sephora, Walmart, Amazon and Zappos. User reviews are increasingly becoming akin to a form of UGC advertising and SearchReviews is attempting to take advantage of this by launching what is by far the largest searchable review hub available to consumers.

SearchReviews is also available on iPhone and Android, allowing customers to access information about products in store with the scan of a barcode in addition to manual search. Curious in-store searchers can scan a code and/or look for the name of a product or service like a Canon Printer and drill down even further into specific attributes like star rating, source, location and specific key words with a tag cloud. You might find yourself confused without these further refinements as the quantity of reviews greatly outweighs the quality.

Says founder Ankesh Kumar on the ambitious goal of being a one-stop shop for reviews, “A little prepurchase research goes a long way as it brings all available reviews together in one place, so consumers don’t have to wander from site to site or sort through a jumble of irrelevant information.”

Sometimes SearchReviews can seem like a jumble itself: The app is missing some crucial elements including geolocation and the ability to search by date and specific store. Also reviews like the following for the iPhone weren’t particularly useful on the web version. I’m hoping that these kinks can be worked out in subsequent updates as the ultimate utility of being able to pull up customer reviews is huge .

SearchReviews is aiming adding 2 million reviews each week and hopes to hit 100 million reviews in 2011. The company is bootstrapped with $350K in funding from Kumar who demonstrates how it works below.

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