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If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of stuff, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.

They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all–I’m not saying that–but they’re also touchy as heck. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last
Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I was giving away a Droid X sponsored by a company called Rebtel and they wanted me to post it on CrunchGear and TechCrunch and ask people to comment to win.

Read more…

By now everyone has seen the first official trailer for the Facebook movie. While there’s no question that there’s a lot of talent behind it, I’m actually quite surprised that it looks good. But that’s just my opinion. What does someone portrayed in the movie actually think of it? Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has weighed in on Quora.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Moskovitz takes some exception to what was included in the movie versus what was left out. For example, he’s never even met the Winklevoss twins, who play heavily in the film’s plot. Instead, Moskovitz wishes the filmmakers would have included more of of the other people in each co-founders’ lives that supported them at the time. Yes, there’s a reason Moskovitz made Facebook and not movies.

He also calls it “cool to see a dramatization of history.” But his money quote is this:

A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.

Moskovitz makes it seem as if he’s read both the book and the script of the film and takes exception to the attacks on CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Still, he thinks the trailer actually shows some of Zuckerberg’s more positive qualities.

“At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is,” Moskovitz concludes. “And the Ad Board *does* owe him some recognition, dammit,” he jokes (a reference to the end of the trailer).

I had a theory about today’s Apple iPhone 4 Press Extravaganza. Apple was just too eager to get all the press that cares about Apple stuff into one room at the same time on one day’s notice. They were either going to (1) get Steve Jobs to hypnotize everyone with a reality distortion field “there is no problem” and have them walk out dazed and confused but with vague warm feelings towards Apple. Or (2) they gathered all the press to one place to simply kill them. It was 50/50 in my book. Apple went with no. 1, probably based on a coin flip.

There were two key messages from the event. The first message is that there is no iPhone 4 antenna problem. All phones suffer from this, and the iPhone is a superior phone. The second message is that even though there is no problem Apple is going to give everyone a free bumper that will make the non existent problem go away.

Anyone not in a hypnotic daze will clearly see the conflict between the two statements. If there is no problem, no fix is needed. If a fix is needed, by definition there was a problem. Jobs never did address the disparity in the Q&A session following the presentation.

We grabbed our own MG Siegler and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber when they returned to the office for a debriefing video. The uncut version is above. We did do some creative editing to get Gruber to say that the iPhone is the worst phone on the market, but he didn’t really say that, as you’ll see from the longer video above.

Siegler and Gruber struggled repeatedly to apply logic to the debate and eventually threw up their hands in despair. But still they believe that Antennagate doesn’t exist, but that it is perfectly reasonable and generous for Apple to apply a fix (free bumper) to the non existent problem.

At the end we just tried an intervention. It’s a first step towards recovery.

Two days ago I wrote about a thermostat you can adjust from your phone, and today Allure Energy announced another twist on the idea. The company connects your thermostat to a BlackBerry or iPhone app that tracks how far you are from home and adjusts your thermostat accordingly. Think of it as a location-based service for interacting with your thermostat.

When you leave in the morning, the system calibrates your home’s thermostat so you don’t waste energy while you’re away. Likewise, it senses when you’re on your way back, returning the temperature to your perfect degree of cozy.

“We are doing for home energy management what TiVo did for the VCR,” CEO Kevin Imes said in a statement. The technology could attract those who find programming their thermostat too much of a challenge or hassle. The company says the system could increase energy savings by up to 30%.

Server downtime is a fact of life for most web administrators, and there’s no shortage of products and software that make it easy to monitor when something has gone awry. Of course, an inbox full of urgent emails telling you your server is frying isn’t too helpful when you’re sound asleep.That’s where PagerDuty, a startup that launched a year ago, is looking to help. Today the company is announcing that it has received funding from Y Combinator; it’s also forged a deal with monitoring platform CloudKick, is launching an API, and is losing its beta tag.

PagerDuty lets you set up and prioritize alerts for an entire team, with the ability to send SMS and voice messages along with the standard email alerts. And if a team member isn’t responding, the system can automatically escalate the alerts — for example, if an email isn’t answered quickly, an SMS could be sent a few minutes later, and so on. Another option is to start alerting other team members if someone isn’t responding. The service also lets you set up on-duty calendars, allowing you to alternate who you want to alert first depending on the date.

PagerDuty isn’t the only solution for receiving alerts about your server status — just about all server status software offers email alerts; some offer SMS as well. And there are also plugins available for some open-source software that add some of these features. That said, the PagerDuty team says that it’s a pretty involved process to implement these features, and they have a few that the others dont.

For one, they offer two-way SMS (you can respond to an SMS alert with a message saying you’re on the case). And it’s also SaaS, whereas other solutions generally involve uploading and installing the software yourself. Another SaaS service that offers some similar features is Wormly.

The process for getting PagerDuty working with your system varies a bit depending on your setup. If you’re using Nagios (which is quite popular), PagerDuty offers a plugin that should work seamlessly. The service also recently launched an API feature that lets you use any service that can make an API call. And if that isn’t an option, you can just have your monitoring system send alert emails to PagerDuty, which can in turn send SMS/Voice alerts according to the rules you’ve set up.

Pricing for PagerDuty runs $12 a month for a single user, and runs $300/month for a bigger team (there are also custom plans for large organizations).

PagerDuty was founded by ex-Amazon employees, who say that as engineers they were using a similar system that was built in-house (they say that other large companies like Google have also built similar systems). They’re hoping to serve the large number of smaller businesses who could also benefit from less downtime, but don’t have the resources to build tools of their own.

There is no Antennagate.

Well, that’s not true. But what Jobs called Antennagate at today’s press conference is more than just the design flaw in the iPhone 4 they insisted was a non-issue. It’s a design flaw with the entire way the issue was handled — by them and by us. The feeding frenzy around the iPhone 4 has been a months-long affair, for a combination of two reasons: one, that Apple has a unique position in tech coverage, and two, that controversy generates traffic. The result is outrage, confusion, expenditure, flamewars, and everything else that’s been happening online since the launch.

Sorry about that. We’re not perfect.

Continue reading…

On July 13, three days ago, France launched France.fr to give the world a multilingual website with information about the country. It shortly went down. And stayed down. Today we checked back in to see how the little site was doing. Not so well, it turns out.

This is more than a mild embarrassment for France’s senior government official overseeing the Internet, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. When the site launched she tweeted out “Lancement aujourd’hui du portail officiel de la France dans le monde” (“Today’s launch of official website of France in the world”). She’s been rather quiet since then.

We’ll let you know if/when the French government is able to make the site live. If the country’s experience with building aircraft carriers is any indication of their ability to build websites, we should see it limping along sometime in 2013.

Bonus link: click the flag.

Update: Huh. they did manage to change the site is down message though. It used to say it was a victim of its own success, or something similar. Now it says, roughly “The team France.fr regret not being able to help you find the gate of France. We are currently facing a problem configuring our servers. We have undertaken an audit of all systems to allow us to reopen as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and very quick!”

A few weeks ago Microsoft sent us the new Xbox 360. No note or explanation, just a another random box delivered to our address. It’s been sitting here unopened and no one in the office seems to want it. So, we’re going to give it away. This is the new slim version that’s Kinect-ready.

There’s also a bunch of additional stuff that came with it, we’ll send all that to you, too (see photo below).

Here’s how you can win: Just “like” (fan) the TechCrunch Facebook page and/or the TechCrunch Google Buzz page and then do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours.

Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages. And we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt. The contest ends at noon California time tomorrow (Saturday). Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll randomly select a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details.

Yelp has one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, but its Android app is catching on too. Launched last December, the app is approaching one million downloads and activity on the app is picking up like crazy due to a recent upgrade that adds the ability to check into Yelp locations and Tweet them out or share them on Facebook. The number of active users is growing 50 percent week over week, according to Yelp.

Across all mobile phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Android), Yelp has 2.5 million active users a month. The vast majority of those are still on the iPhone. And while, this is only a small fraction (7 percent) of the 34 million monthly unique visitors going to the Website, mobile users account for 27 percent of Yelp’s local searches. CEO Jeremy Stoppleman tells me that mobile is Yelps’ “fastest area of growth.”

With 2.5 million active mobile app users, Yelp has slightly more active mobile users than Foursquare has total registered users, and it is definitely moving into Foursquare’s territory with its check-ins and recent addition of badges, dukedoms, and kingdoms. And while you can broadcast your check-ins to Twitter or Facebook, Yelp does not let you check into Foursquare from its apps.

The game mechanics are definitely driving usage, but one thing you can’t do on Yelp’s mobile apps is post reviews! “It would just be annoying if the average review had punctuation errors and was obviously written on the phone,” explains Stoppleman, “so we added quick tips instead.” I predict he will have to bend and let mobile reviews take over. I’ll be sure to ask him about his stance at our Social Currency Crunchup on July 30, where Stoppleman will be speaking along with Google VP John Hanke (who heads up Google Places, Maps, earth, and local search).

This is odd. Skype, which has offered an iPhone application for quite a while and recently released a version that gives users the ability to make calls over 3G, has vanished from the App Store. This is especially strange because Skype was recently featured on stage during the debut of iPhone’s OS 4.0, which will allow for the application to run in the background. We reached out to Skype about this and were told that they’re currently investigating:

We’re not seeing the Skype app in the App store. We’re very eager to get to the bottom of this, and I can tell you this has nothing to do with our Verizon deal. The Skype for iPhone app and the Skype Mobile app on Verizon Wireless phones have co-existed.

Update: Skype says that this is due to the fact that they just uploaded a new version of Skype for iPhone 4.0 which had “some difficulties” and that they’re working to fix it:

Today, Skype just submitted a new version of its iOS4 build to Apple. In the process we encountered some difficulties. Skype will work quickly to get its current Skype for iPhone app back up as soon as possible.”

Update 2: Alright, looks like it’s back.
There’s still a page on Skype’s official site that details the application’s features and doesn’t give any indication that the application is being killed off. But Skype’s mobile site oddly omits any mention of it — it only talks about BlackBerry and Android devices from Verizon. We’ll update as we learn more.

Thanks to Will Shanklin for the tip

Haiti is still struggling to recover from the 7-point magnitude earthquake that struck on January 12th. The natural disaster disrupted everything there, including the systems that keep water clean, garbage away from homes and farm land, and people (let alone habitat and animals) healthy.

Despite an outpouring of donations and promises to help from international nonprofits, shelter, food and medical care are still hard to find and hard to deliver in Haiti, according to recent reports from the United Nations. A new website — HaitiAidMap.org – aims to increase the efficacy and visibility of U.S. non-government orgnizations relief efforts on the ground in Haiti, though.

It maps NGO projects in country, updates them in real time, and makes information about these searchable by category, location or the NGO’s name. The site was created by InterAction, a Washington D.C. based alliance of 192 poverty-alleviating NGOs, in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center. It is sponsored by FedEx.

The president and chief executive of InterAction, Samuel A. Worthington, says he was inspired to use mapping innovation for NGOs originally while working on a special report for former president Bill Clinton about the relief efforts following the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 that killed 230,000 people across 14 countries.

“We wanted to apply lessons learned from the Tsunami immediately following the earthquake in Haiti. One of the first things we did was to establish an NGO Coordination Office there, associated with the United Nations, to ensure better coordination among nonprofits with the UN-system and Haiti’s government both. [We] clearly needed to know where the NGO community was working at all times. A map had been done after earlier hurricanes, but it was static, a sheet of paper. Given the size of the engagement, we needed better data,” he says.

InterAction began working on the pilot site in February. Geo-location software makers FortiusOne and open source tech consultants Development Seed built the site using GeoIQ and OpenStreetMap technology.

HaitiAidMap.org allows NGOs to link their databases (which can be as simple as Excel spreadsheets) to the site. It renders all of their data about in-country projects on a single, easily readable, interactive map. The projects are searchable by name, location, or “cluster,” through check boxes, drop-down menus, and the interactive map itself. (There’s no search field, however.)

Clusters, or categories of relief work include things like: shelter and non-food items, water sanitation and hygiene, protection or health.

Clicking on the map, it’s easy to learn things like: large central cities such as Delmas, Port Au Prince and Carrefour have more than 100 water sanitation and hygiene relief projects, while the Southern city of Port Salut has just two. Yes, Port Salut was further from the epicenter of the earthquake. But it was still damaged badly enough that many of its communities still lack necessities, and electricty though temperatures this summer have routinely ranged above 100 degrees Fahrenheit there.

Because HaitiAidMap.org aggregates NGOs’ data, relief workers and philanthropists can use it to identify where there may be a gap in services, and thus where their help is needed.

InterAction, Worthington says, has a broader goal for its mapping project: “We want to be able to map all U.S. non-government organizations’ projects globally, to see all of their billions of dollars of work around the world. By harmonizing data, and providing this mapping tool that’s linked to the databases of NGOs, starting with members of InterAction, we think we can do this within the decade.”

Eighty-one InterAction members are involved in Haiti relief efforts, and about 50 have projects operating there.

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UPDATE: Batch if tickets is sold out. Check back again next week.

We’re releasing another 100 tickets now to our July 30 summer party at August Capital. Act fast if you want one, these things sell out in less than an hour.

If you don’t get a ticket, don’t email me begging for one. Come to our Social Currency Crunchup earlier that day instead. A ticket to the CrunchUp gives you entry to the party afterwards.

We’ve got a great lineup of startups and investors ready to explore the rapidly growing realms of social commerce, the local Web, Geo, and game mechanics.

• Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Google VP of Product Management John Hanke (who is in charge of Google Places, Google Maps, Google Earth, and local search) will discuss how the Web is taking over the Yellow Pages for local businesses and how mobile is accelerating that trend.
• Groupon CEO Andrew Mason will explain what’s behind the explosive growth of social buying talk about how the online coupon business is changing with News America Marketing president Chris Mixson.
• Twitter product manager Shiva Rajaraman (who runs @earlybird), Foursquare’s biz dev dynamo Tristan Walker, and CityGrid Media’s Kara Nortman will discuss how social media and commerce can go hand-in-hand.
• Tapulous founder (and now Disney Mobile exec) Bart Decrem and SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar will talk about what makes social and mobile games addictive and how game mechanics are filtering beyond games to other types of products.  You can see the full agenda here

Summer Party Details:
July 30, 2010
5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park CA
Get Summer Party Tickets Now @ Eventbrite: $30. Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferrable, based on availability.

And while the summer party is always a lot of fun, we encourage you to spend the whole day with TechCrunch and join our Social Currency CrunchUp at Stanford’s amazing Arrillaga Alumni Center. We have an amazing line up and lots of fun surprises still to be announced. Trust us. And you get expedited fast-pass entry into the summer party at August Capital.

About the Social Currency CrunchUp:
July 30, 2010
9 am – 4:00 pm
Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University
326 Galvez Street, Palo Alto, CA 94305
Get CrunchUp-Party Combo Tickets Now @ Eventbrite: $295 INCLUDES admission for one (1) to the August Capital party and expedited fast-pass door entry. You DO NOT need to purchase a separate August Capital Party ticket if you purchase a CrunchUp ticket. Tickets are non-transferrable, based on availability. Capacity limited to 500 attendees.
All details here.

Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozzo for sponsorship opportunities and help support our summer tech fest.

Contact Laura Boychenko to request a press pass.

Since its launch, BlueSwarm has raised more than $172 million for fundraising campaigns, with the vast majority of those funds directed towards political election campaigns.

The startup, which is a platform that leverages social media tools to attract and track donations, has wooed many politicians, including several gubernatorial candidates like Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker, Wisconsin’s Tom Barrett and California’s Meg Whitman. Whitman, who has already invested a decent portion of her personal fortune into her campaign, has also amassed more than $20 million through BlueSwarm.

Now, it’s time for BlueSwarm to do a bit of fundraising on its own.

Although far from $172 million, the startup has raised an $800,000 angel round from a collection of individual investors, including Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen. Originally founded in Boston in 2009 by Erik Nilsson, the company is also decamping for Silicon Valley. Last week, BlueSwarm officially moved its headquarters to Palo Alto as part of its larger expansion plan and a growing need to attract top tier talent in social media and consumer software development.

Political fundraising is going through a dramatic transformation.

Traditionally, politicians have heavily relied on sophisticated fundraisers who bundled donations from a network of wealthy patrons.  Now, with varying degrees of success, politicians are becoming more web-focused to take advantage of social networking channels. One of the most notable examples is, of course, President Obama’s 2008 campaign. By developing a sharp online portal and tapping into Facebook’s power, the candidate raised roughly half a billion online from 3 million donors and some 6.5 million donations— most of those donations were in increments of $100 or less.

BlueSwarm, along with its competitors, are trying to facilitate this evolution by creation a platform to help politicians connect with small and large donors and ultimately, transform those donors into fundraisers. BlueSwarm is a program that lets any campaign manage and track all online donations, recruit new fundraisers and review their progress.

There is also a Facebook app, which allows anyone to sign up to donate for your campaign and promote the cause within their social circle. The idea is to create a tree of donors and fundraisers that constantly expands, as people use their personal connections to pull in their friends.”The key is that I get my personal brand on it before it gets to you…and then it becomes a personal request,” says Dave Boyce, BlueSwarm’s newly minted CEO.

According to Boyce, BlueSwarm is processing more and more transactions — the number of contributions doubled in the second quarter from the first quarter.

The company says the platform is currently being used in 50% of US Senate races and 30% of gubernatorial races, in addition to many local races. However, despite the high volume of transactions, the amount of revenues is still fairly low because BlueSwarm only takes a 2.9% cut.

In order for the team of 12 employees to expand and turn profitable, the platform will need to see a major growth in transactions. US political campaigns, which form a $3 billion annual market, currently serve as the backbone BlueSwarm’s business. Thus, BlueSwarm will need to aggressively expand in other markets, such as university and alumni giving organizations, to get a major lift in volume. Boyce contends, it’s a matter of when, not if, “We’re just entering those markets now, we’re in a dozen conversations with universities, three of whom are saying they want to go live this summer,” Boyce says. “Universities in the US raise $30 billion a year, so it’s 10 times larger from a market size.

Full interview above.

Boyce also joined us, along with angel investor Chris Sacca, for our daily episode of TechCrunch NOW. We discuss a PR roadmap for Apple and those hilariously odd The Social Network trailers.

Ministers from France, Germany and the UK are calling for the EU to cut its carbon emissions by 30% on 1990 levels by 2020, arguing that failure to reach the goal will have long-term economic consequences. The current target is a 20% reduction from 1990 levels.

The officials say increasing the target will help create jobs in clean energy sectors and help keep the EU competitive with China, Japan and the US, each of which is investing in green technology and sustainable energy. The US has set a goal of reducing 2005 greenhouse gas emissions 17% by 2020.

Renewable power sources such as wind and solar made for more than half of all new electricity capacity added in Europe and the US last year, according to a report from the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21).

This chart from the European Wind Energy Association that the EU as a whole has been on target to meet its 20% carbon emissions goal, though it might need to ramp things up to reach 30%:

(You can download the original PDF here.)

This is good news for green tech, and supported by the continued growth of sustainable energy investments worldwide, despite the economic downturn.

The iPhone 4 may be available to the general public, but the police investigation into the leaked device that Gizmodo purchased last spring is still going strong. Now there’s been a new development: the EFF reports that the San Mateo District Attorney has withdrawn the warrant it used to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house last April, when it confiscated multiple computers, hard drives, and other electronics.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that Gawker has reached an agreement with investigators. Chen’s materials will be returned, and Gawker/Chen will be voluntarily handing over materials deemed “relevant to the case” by a court appointee.

The seizure of these possessions was quite controversial — the EFF said it was illegal and should have been protected by California’s Shield Law. When I called the District Attorney about the case in April, I was told that the investigation was on hold as these issues were considered, and that Chen’s property was sitting in a warehouse untouched. It’s apparently been sitting there for months. At the time, I noted how bizarre the series of events were:

When I asked if it was typical for the DA to evaluate the relevance of these shield laws after removing evidence, Wagstaffe did concede that it was unusual. Which makes the situation extremely od d— it should have been readily apparent that Gawker would defend its actions using this shield law defense, why put the brakes on after the fact?

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Chen is in the clear. The EFF says that police could “attempt to subpoena the same material without running afoul of section 1524(g) and still proceed with their case.”

Document via EFF