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While we may all have our own opinions on whether News Corp’s iPad-bound newspaper, The Daily, is a boondoggle or simply before its time, I think we were all at least looking forward to seeing what it was like. People were curious about Virgin’s Project (though I haven’t heard a word about it since), and naturally want to know what it is that Rupert Murdoch has spent so much money on. We heard a few days back that it would be making its debut on the 19th (with Steve Jobs rumored to be in attendance), but it seems that wasn’t in the cards.

All Things D has learned (from a slip-up at an internal News Corp meeting, no doubt) that The Daily will not, in fact, be launching next week, but has been put off to an unspecified date, probably some time in February. And they blame Apple! The nerve.

Supposedly, The Daily was supposed to take advantage of a new feature in the Apple economy that would push new content automatically to your device or devices. Basically a pay subscription service, like a regular newspaper. But the word is that Apple’s not ready to go live, and they’ve caused News Corp to delay the launch until such a time as the feature is actually complete. Considering that can’t possibly take too long, the source of this information has shared that the delay is on the order of weeks, not months. Or at least, that’s when they’ll announce the next delay.

Paul thinks this thing is going to go down in flames. I’m not so sure, but I do know that the kind of person who buys an iPad is far more likely to be taking advantage of all the free content on the net. They don’t get up in the morning and pick up the Times from their doorstep. They pull their iPad off the nightstand and check their feeds.

That said, if they can even get 5% of the 8-million-strong iPad membership to pay $5 a month, that’s a triumph. It will depend on their opening move, however. If they’re smart, they’ll give it away for a good long time — 90 days, perhaps. If they can run on fumes for that time and then fill the tank when people find they actually like this little app, then they’re fine. But if they try to charge for admission up front, they’ll be high and dry.

Urban Green Energy — a New York City startup that designs and manufactures small wind turbines — has released and installed the first of its new, “hybrid” or wind- and solar-powered streetlights.

Designed for primary use in parking lots or over highways, UGE’s Sanya streetlights include a standard setup of the company’s 600 W Eddy wind turbines, along with a steel tower or pole, solar panels, lead acid batteries of the variety used in many cars, controls and light emitting diodes (LEDs) made by suppliers from Asia and the U.S. They can store up to 5 days of power, and can be customized to cast a particular color of light according to the product’s official webpage.

The UGE Sanya could take some business away from utilities by generating power from off-the-grid renewables for use in the pervasive, on-all-night streetlights. In many U.S. markets today, electric companies are the ones who actually install, maintain and power communities’ residential streetlights. This traditional business model has caused problems recently for various municipalities and utilities that serve them.

In Fayetteville, North Carolina (as reported by Andrew Barksdale for The Fayetteville Observer, N.C.) Progress Energy (NYSE: PGN) is threatening to turn the streetlights off, unless the town pays a bill over $100,000 there, or gives PE permission to charge monthly fees to customers it serves in the area.

It’s even worse in Lawrence, Kansas (as reported by Chad Lawhorn for the Lawrence Journal World & News). The city’s auditor, Michael Eglinski, believes the power company in charge of streetlights there, Westar Energy, is overcharging Lawrence for electricity it provides, failing to meter precisely, and worse is using woefully inefficient bulbs deliberately to boost sales.

Consumers can’t turn streetlights owned by utilities on or off, nor can they swap out old bulbs for highly efficient ones. The arrangement doesn’t feel fair to every resident. Utilities’ sympathizers, on the other hand, point out that they are responsible for things like repairing street lamps should a tree branch or car accident take one out, and incur other costs to keep cities safely lit.

The UGE Sanya streetlights could provide one benefit to utilities, though. Since they’re grid connectable, the lights can send excess power from the wind turbines and solar panels back through the grid. That helps utilities fulfill regulatory requirements to increase the percent of power they get from local, renewable sources.

Nick Blitterswyk, founder and chief executive of UGE, said more than 100 Sanya streetlights sold in the product’s month on the market. None of Sanya’s buyers so far have been utilities in the U.S. Queries have come from municipalities, retailers and hotels eager to illuminate their properties, cut electricity costs, and win a green public image.

A mechanical engineer at UGE, Mateo Chaskel, said that the constantly moving turbine technology in the lights should last twenty years, requiring just an annual maintenance check-up, barring natural disasters or accidents. Not including the batteries, the LED lights and other parts within should endure as long as the turbines, he said. He hopes they’ll reduce waste from spent bulbs, along with maintenance costs for companies, cities and utilities that switch to the Sanya.

The streetlights are assembled at a UGE facilitly in Asia, and shipped to San Francisco for distribution in North America. They usually qualify for a 30% rebate from the federal government. The city of San Francisco recently installed the hybrid lights as part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s sustainable civic center efforts. More recently, Chaskel said, they were installed in about five sites in Pusan, South Korea. They will soon be installed in lots and along city streets in: San Jose, Oklahoma, Ohio, the Virgin Islands, Australia, and Poland.

TCTV took a look at Urban Green Energy’s small wind turbines at the Consumer Electronics Show. Check out the clip, below!

Photo credits: traditional street light via Ecksunderscore and Sanya via Urban Green Energy

Earlier this week, we did a post on a new venture firm called Bullpen Capital, and if you checked out the CrunchBase profiles of the three founders you saw a pretty wide depth of experience.

Paul Martino has started four companies, most recently Aggregate Knowledge, and he was one of the first investors in Zynga. Duncan Davidson was most recently managing partner for the Leviathan-like VantagePoint Venture Partners, and founded several companies including Covad Communications– a DSL pioneer that went public and was valued as high as $9 billion. And Richard Melmon’s roots go back to the early Intuit days, through the legendary Regis McKenna, onto VisiCalc and eventually co-founding Electronic Arts. In a relatively young industry, those are some deep venture roots.

Apparently, their conference room table has seen about as much action. In a fun final segment we reminisce with the Bullpen guys. Enjoy!

Erick’s post listing AOL’s targets for Q1 made fascinating reading, even for a non-employee like me.

Just in case you missed it, between now and March, TechCrunch’s parent company will be concentrating on the following areas…

• Grow ad sales revenue 20%
• Double homepage traffic
• 99.9% reliability for mail
• Double Patch Engagement
• Ads/Content Platform + Devil everywhere
• Recruit top talent
• Customize office around towns

The first six are all well and good, with “double patch engagement” being of particular interest to the company’s pirate employees. For me, though, the undisputed highlight was item seven: “customize office around towns”.

In case you missed the story, “towns” is some distracting corporate bullshit the company’s forward-thinking vision for grouping together otherwise disparate content categories. And what better way to demonstrate their commitment to the initiative than to customize an entire office around it?

Here, then, my contribution for TechTown…

You’re welcome, Tim.

Mobile QR platform ShareSquare launches in beta today with the announcement that they’ve already got 150K out of a 500K seed round under their belt, from angels Paige Craig, John Frankel of ff Assett Management, Jeff Miller and Roy Rodenstein of Hacker Angels.

In the same space as Likify and Mofuse, ShareSquare is a QR Code creation platform specifically for music and entertainment brands. With ShareSquare’s CMS, artists and promoters can deck out branded merchandise like posters, promos, flyers and even bumper stickers with QR codes corresponding to a custom HTML5 web app (see a mockup one for Justin Bieber, to the left).

Fans with a QR code scanner like RedLaser, can then scan the code to check out related content such as MP3s, music videos, contests and, eventually, make purchases.

The ShareSquare CMS also allows realtime placement and by media (i.e. billboard vs. poster vs. sticker) tracking analytics for QR codes as well as something ShareSquare founder Mattias Galica calls “Like Lock,” where fan Facebook “Likes”unveil special access to prizes and exclusive content. Content is monetized through ads.

On a trial run for six weeks, ShareSquare has been working successfully with Hollywood agencies and studios like William Morris Endeavor and Disney. A QR campaign for artist Mitchel Musso reached 2,500 posters, 10,000 packaging stickers and over 181 shopping malls nationwide.

Gallica explains the challenges of the space,“Only geeks recognize what a QR code is. The big challenge in the space is that QR codes have a ton of things that you can do with them. Sharesquare is disciplined enough to focus on two verticals.”

Indeed, taking the entertainment route might be a winning move for the L.A. based company which will also be doing band leaderboards at SXSW, “We’re looking to see what the next couple of months brings us,” says Galica.

Readers interested in taking us ShareSquare on their 500 free invite offer can register here, using the code TCRN500.

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On Tuesday Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, and Google fired H.264 from Chrome. The tubes are heated up with analysis of these two seemingly unassociated events, and I figure I’ll mash them together into a counter-intuitive scenario. The unifying driver: Tuesday’s new iPhone 4 announcement from Verizon.

We hear lots about Android these days as a million tablets bloom at CES. But the world we’re hearing about is the one where Apple lives in a one-carrier model. It’s a Model T world where you can have any color as long as it’s AT&T. Every day people walk into any other carrier store and walk out with Android, because they don’t know the difference. Contrary to the pr, the Android sell to the broad market is not about Open v. Closed, or store v. market, or any of the direct feature comparisons.

That’s because the features are comparable, the experience is similar, the sell is based on stepping up to the iPhone experience whether it’s called Kleenex or Cheerios or the supermarket knock off. The knock off becomes the brand. But in doing this jujitsu, Google has created a climate where the knock off is vulnerable to attack if the rules that got them there change. Google having given the carriers a reasonably indistinguishable knock off to sell, Apple can now safely drop the exclusive wedge for disintermediating carrier profit margin havens such as tethering and IM and eventually VoIP.

Snap. Verizon offers iPhone 4. Forget the slight redesign, forget the lack of multitasking between data and voice, forget the pricing models for unlimited, tethering, and video chat over 3G. Now the store brand is competing directly with the actual iPhone. Naturally the pent-up demand by Verizon contractees will blow out the overall numbers. But much more importantly, Apple is free to ship an iPhone 5 across the board, where existing contractees can be marketed to with bundled services, i.e. the new TV, the new Enterprise, the new Office. One device, with the carriers battling for the most attractive rendering of services.

This is where we switch over to Google’s H.264 move. Faced with ship or get off the pot, Google will do whatever it needs to do to establish its platform as a unique and valuable proposition. With H.264 store brand adoption over 50%, Apple has reached the point where its Flash blockade is no longer painful to the majority of iOS users. With a broad non-exclusive base opening up, Apple is free to blow out the market unless something radical is done — destabilize the inevitability argument around Flash-is-dead by a weird combination of OpenFUD and brute force. Never mind that it tells its developers and Chrome adopters to never believe a word Google says about its motivations and reliability of partner strategy.

In effect, Google is broadening its mission statement from “What’s good for the Web is good for us” to “What’s good for the Web and bad for Apple is good for us.” At best, it’s Google water-testing VP8 to gauge its patent liabilities; at worst it’s a weak signal if they reverse course. It suggests a certain thin-skinnedness over the Verizon deal and its bandwagon implications, and underlines the alacrity of the timing (over the next two months) within which Chrome will be crippled. And the short term fix is to continue to support Flash as a way around having to download another plug in. The weird thing here is that this begins to feel like a Google version of a Silverlight play, starting with video and Chrome and then marching through the other browsers via YouTube.

Silverlight is seen by some as the reason Bob Muglia was sent packing, most likely by Steve Sinofsky consolidating power to succeed Ballmer. Muglia and Ray Ozzie were surprisingly in synch around using Silverlight as a stalking horse for embedding Windows in an uber Web OS, disagreeing (or subtly agreeing) only over the timing of the transition. While Ozzie owned the vision and strategy, Muglia owned the execution and a rising revenue base in the Servers and Tools Business. The black helicopter noise suggests Muglia was undermined by the retrenchment around Silverlight he surfaced in an interview with Mary Jo Foley, but here again Apple’s Verizon deal around iPhone 4 and a Verizon iPad threatens Microsoft much more directly by accelerating iOS and damaging both Windows Phone and the MIA Windows tablet.

Just as with Android market success, Ozzie and Muglia’s success at destabilizing private cloud margins for servers and the increasingly irrelevant and collaboration-free Office platform in order to save the company has created an Azure economy that needs to be managed by a new breed of president, or by Ballmer directly. Google has moved way past Microsoft in mobile, and now Apple is moving back out in front of both. Ironically, Ozzie leaving cut Muglia’s legs out from under him, as his P&L looks good compared to everybody else but Sinofsky’s.

In the Ozzie/Muglia era, Microsoft learned how to speak a newer language of openness and resolve to move forward into the cloud. In the Sinofsky/Ballmer era, they get to keep the cloud because they have to, and try and manage their way out of the collapse of their enterprise channel before Office is pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, a new generation of store brand social workers are using a new message bus, with Apple driving the innovation curve around a realtime set of dynamic objects. FaceTime, AirPlay, the Mac AppStore, the Twitter realtime Mac app, and so on.

Once again: Verizon capitulates on behalf of the carriers to Apple. Google, flush with having educated the market across the carriers about the superphone, suddenly shows weakness and collapse of trust messaging by trying to damage Apple via a phony open source/standards gambit. Microsoft, flush with barely being all in on the cloud, fires its cloud chief to appease the old guard’s Ballmer heir by completing the Silverlight coup, papering over its mobile collapse, and rolling back to the state Ozzie had rescued them from. iOS wins 2 out of 3 phone sales, 4 out of 5 tablets, transforms its Mac OS to the new iOS mobile AppStore, and competes head to head with Google and its old Microsoft model. Thanks, Verizon.