Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

We had huge response yesterday and I’m pleased to report that it was a rousing success. Today is the final contest and it’s a big one. It’s open to entrants worldwide, so even if you live in Brussels or Burkina Faso, feel free to enter.

The details, again: HP and Dolby would like to give you one of three HP Pavilion dv6t Select Edition laptops complete with Blu-Ray player and Dolby Advanced Audio. Here are the details:

To celebrate HP’s recent launch of its new Pavilion laptops all of which include Dolby Advanced Audio for providing stunning audio, Dolby is giving away three Ultimate Dolby PC Entertainment Packages for enjoying surround sound entertainment. Included in each package:
· HP Pavilion dv6t Select Edition with Dolby Advanced Audio and Blu-ray playback
· The Hangover and Star Trek on Blu-ray featuring Dolby TrueHD loseless audio
· Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus with Dolby Digital 5.1 Creator – the ultimate tool for creating the perfect movies and videos
Dolby Advanced Audio gives new Pavilion users a personal surround sound experience with any set of headphones and will enhance their music, movies and games with a suite of technologies designed to provide the best listening experience from their PC.

What do you do to win? It’s so simple even a child to could do it.

Two months after its launch, there are no shortage of RSS readers for the iPad. But I’ve tried most of them, and still find them all lacking in some way. In fact, the one I’m still using the most is not optimized for the iPad at all — Reeder. As we noted back in March, with the 2.0 launch, Reeder finally brought an excellent RSS app to the iPhone. And shortly, it will be bringing an iPad-native experience as well.

The app was submitted to the App Store for approval three days ago, the developers noted on Twitter. That means we should expect it any day now. It will be a separate app from the iPhone version and will carry a new, slightly higher price, $4.99. But judging from the pictures below, and one stellar preview from MacStories, it will be worth it.

Below, find some screenshots of what it will look like. One nice touch is that sets of feeds can be drilled into using the pinch gesture, similar to the way you unbundle pictures in the iPad’s photo app. It’s also worth noting that if you have a blog and want one of the big favicons to appear, you should put a 120×120 apple-touch-icon.png file on your server.

TechCrunch has always been a distributed company. we have employees and contractors all around the world – Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Japan, China, London, Brussels (lol), Paris and Tel Aviv. I think one of the CrunchGear guys lives in Detroit or Reno, but I’m not sure and WE try not to associate with them much.

But our headquarters has always been in Palo Alto, the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. For the first four years of TechCrunch, since June 11, 2005, we worked out of my home near Palo Alto, California. That was a great place for our small company, and the commute from my bedroom to “the office” was about ten feet. We threw some epic parties there, the biggest topping 600 people (remind me to tell you the story about the drunk venture capitalist who lost his keys and slept on my couch – keys were in his pocket it turned out). And the occasional entrepreneur would occasionally break into my house and post video of the experience.

But that all ended in early 2009 when the city of Atherton decided they didn’t want TechCrunch in their neighborhood any more – citing some obscure regulations about how having fifteen cars in my front yard just wasn’t reasonable. So we moved the company down the road to downtown Palo Alto, in a beautiful little building on Lytton and Bryant.

But we knew it would be short term. As nice as the building is, it lacks some essential structural reinforcement that effectively turns it into a death trap in an earthquake. So they’re tearing it down and we needed to find a new home.

And boy does the Palo Alto business real estate market suck right now. Our rent would be doubling for a space the same size but not as nice. Meanwhile, San Francisco is less than half the cost of Palo Alto right now for office space. And most of our team actually lives in San Francisco anyway.

So as of next week we’re moving. Our new building is at 410 Townsend . We’ve doubled our space and have a massive new video studio to build out TechCrunch TV. The train station is two blocks away, an easy way to get back down to Palo Alto.

We’ll have an event at our new place shortly. I’ll even fly down from my secret undisclosed location in Seattle to attend. See you soon.

If you spend any more than a few minutes a day on the Internet, you’ve probably already heard the story of Giorgio G.: Upset with AT&T about his iPhone eligibility dates, he e-mails the company’s CEO. A few days later, he e-mails again for a different (albeit related) matter. Within a few days, AT&T responds… with a threat to send him a formal cease & desist letter unless he stops e-mailing the CEO.

‘Twas the voicemail heard around the blogosphere. Within a few hours, just about every gadget-oriented blog and news network had mentioned it, none of them too happy. Undoubtedly looking to save a bit of face in the situation, AT&T has publicly apologized to Giorgio.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Yesterday I showed you some of the new features of the new Windows Live Essentials Suite. What I liked best: a nice Animoto-like movie clip creator and a new tool called Photo Fuse that lets you take a bunch of less than perfect pictures and easily create a new picture with the best parts of each. Photo Fuse in particular is something I’d use constantly to create better group photo shots – see the video and examples I included in that post.

The new suite doesn’t launch for a few weeks, but if you’re a Windows user we can get you in on June 16. The first 100 people to email their full name, Windows Live ID and an alternative email address to [email protected] will receive access. Make sure to log in and out of your Windows Live ID before emailing to ensure it’s an active account.

In the wake of the backlash it faced following its announcements at f8, Facebook has been doing everything it can to reinforce its message that it cares deeply about privacy. Last week it rolled out new “drastically simplified” privacy controls, making it easier to quickly adjust your settings. And today the site is launching a new Page dedicated to Privacy and Facebook, which it says provides users with a “living resource” for learning about and discussing these issues. This comes in addition to a rewritten privacy guide and video tutorials that walk users through the new settings.

All of this is very welcome — education is essential to helping users stay safe online. But it strikes me as something that users should have seen before the privacy overhaul last December, when they were ushered into using ‘Everyone‘ as the default sharing setting for updates.  And again, before they were automatically opted-in to Instant Personalization. These new resources may help concerned users stay informed, but most people aren’t going to take the initiative to look at them. In other words, the damage may already be done.

Jack Dorsey’s Square is trying to graduate from cool party trick to global game changer. So far, the mobile payments service is far from the mark but it’s making progress. Since its launch, Square has delivered roughly 50,000 devices, according to Dorsey. The founder of Twitter has been a diligent ambassador, traveling to several parties and conferences this year (like last week’s TechCrunch Disrupt) to demo Square and answer questions on security, usability and how the tiny device will make money. Dorsey may seem like the patient salesman but he has serious ambitions for Square that include global domination.

In its current form, Square caters to a limited market. For the uninitiated, Square turns your mobile device into a credit card scanner, using a reader that fits into your audio jack and Square software. The device and the software are free, but Square takes a small percentage of each transaction (2.75% plus 15 cents for swiped transactions). As of today, the program only works on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Nexus One and Droid, but it will reach other mobile devices soon. Although anyone can use Square, its largest demographic is expected to be small US merchants, who need to find a low cost solution for credit card transactions. That slice of America represents a huge opportunity, according to Dorsey, he estimates there are roughly 30 million US merchants who make less than $100,000 per year, of this group only 6 million are currently processing credit cards— the remainder, or 24 million, are all potential Square customers.

Despite all the potential, the future of Square is uncertain, given the fiercely competitive world of mobile payments. Beyond the bevy of mobile payment providers who indirectly compete with Square, its closest rivals VeriFone and Mophie have showcased their own card readers in the past year. That doesn’t seem to faze Dorsey who is trying to position Square as a global mobile payments provider that will offer a wide variety of solutions, beyond its iconic Square reader:

“The next obvious move for us is Canada. But it really has to be tailored to the culture. Different cultures use different technologies for payments. Japan for instance is using all NFC, Near Field Communication Technologies, all over Africa you’re seeing a lot of SMS usage for mobile banking and mobile payments. Our desire for Square is to be completely payment device agnostic and network agnostic and really work with whatever the culture is using predominantly. Here in the US its plastic cards, as we start going to other markets, like Europe, and to India and to Asia, we’ll be taking on more and more different technologies.”

If Dorsey has his way, Square could be huge, or rather, the Twitter of mobile payments. As he explains above, he wants to create a new set of technologies that will allow Square to design tailored solutions for several foreign markets. A credit card reader is only a fraction of the picture. In our video interview, Dorsey did not give a time line for his grand ambitions, but in the near term, he’s focused on accelerating Square’s US adoption. He says it’s vital for the business to reach a critical mass in payers within the next six months. Can Dorsey’s Square conquer America and then take on Canada, Europe, Asia? It’s a tall order, but I wouldn’t bet against the man behind Twitter. See our full video interview with Dorsey above.

We’ve written about digital music startup Rdio a bunch in the past, starting from when we found out Kazaa, Skype and Joost founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom were involved in setting up and funding the business through their investment firm Atomico Ventures.

We noted how they were silently assembling a killer team, and took notice when an early iPhone app landed in the App Store that nobody was able to access yet.

This morning, the company finally unveiled its strategy for the first time, and opened up a preview version of the service to users in the United States on an invitation-only basis. We had a chat with Friis, CEO Drew Larner and COO Carter Adamson about the idea behind the service, the business model, future plans and some history.

Adamson explained to me that Rdio was born out of necessity. The founding members of the company looked around the digital music space and saw a lot of shortcomings on the market, specifically in terms of pricing strategies, portability, seamless playback and social sharing abilities across devices and issues with music discovery.

Rdio aims to solve all those problems with one single service and two fixed pricing plans.

Time is ripe now, they claim, because of the increasing proliferation of capable smartphones, more stable and faster networks worldwide, people getting accustomed to all-you-can-eat pricing models and paying for applications, and so on. We’ve heard that before, of course, including from many startups who’ve tried their hand at bringing music sales and distribution into the digital age – and most have failed spectacularly in doing so.

Most of the coverage of Rdio’s launch was focused on its subscription-based model. Basically, you can gain access to more than 5 million songs online for $4.99 a month, or $9.99 a month if you also want to be able to access your music collection from your mobile device. Apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry are on the way, with an Android version also scheduled for release ‘very soon’.

The service is being launched in the US first, then Canada, the UK and parts of Western Europe later on. Management is hopeful that the international roll-out will be carried out largely before the end of this year, but declined to discuss specific launch dates.

What’s been left out of most coverage is that Rdio also doubles as an à la carte store that could potentially rival Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store. That means you’re also able to purchase individual songs and albums through Rdio and download them to your computer.

It will be interesting to see if Rdio can stand its ground against juggernauts like Apple and Amazon, but also other Web giants like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Microsoft and eventually, Facebook. Not to mention the likes of Rhapsody, Spotify, Pandora, Napster, MOG and We7.

If Rdio fails and becomes another Joost rather than another Skype-like story, it won’t be because of lack of content. The company has licensing deals in place with the world’s largest music labels – EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group – along with a number of independent aggregators of digital music.

But the unique thing about Rdio, Larner and Adamson told me, is the social element. Users will be able to not only stream and download songs, but the whole experience revolves around activity streams, which is core to the service and enables people to discover music through what their friends are listening to and buying. There’s also some basic integration with social networking services like Twitter and Facebook.

Rdio also offers recommendations much like iTunes does with Genius, by algorithmically learning which music you like to listen to. Users can also discover music by browsing category rankings and playing artist-based radio channels, which serve tunes from similar artists as well.

Also compelling is that Rdio offers a small desktop app that serves as a basic music player but also scans a user’s iTunes and Windows Media Player history. That way, Rdio can check if the music you play on your computer is available through their service based on metadata and build your catalog based on your history, so you don’t have to start from scratch. This only takes seconds, Adamson explained.

I asked Friis if he took any lessons from his Kazaa days, which notably are almost a decade behind us. Surprisingly, he told me that the relations with key people from the music industry, which he developed throughout the whole litigation process and namely the settlement procedures, were key in getting Rdio off the ground in the first place.

In many ways, it seems like they wouldn’t have been able to seal the licensing deals that are in place now and are needed for Rdio to become a sustainable venture if it weren’t for Friis and Zennstrom’s history with Kazaa and the music labels. Funny how that goes.

Friis also took a lot of lessons away from Joost, the failed online video venture that the pair started a couple of years ago. The two businesses can not really be accurately compared apples to apples, Friis says, but he did learn a number of interesting things from the whole adventure, which he wouldn’t get into further because it would take him too much time.

Friis told me that he will divide his time between Rdio, Skype and other commitments, but that he has been and will remain closely involved with product strategy and more aspects of the business. Zennstrom will focus more attention on Atomico Ventures, although both he and Friis have personally invested in Rdio along with the (undisclosed amount of financing) that was contributed by Atomico.

Expect a full review and more screenshots of the Rdio service soon.

Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara have figured out a formula for selling low-margin goods online and shipping them overnight to customers. The two entrepreneurs have built Diapers.com into the largest seller of diapers and other baby products on the Web. Diapers.com is on track to bring in $300 million in revenues this year. Now the two are getting ready to launch a new e-commerce site, Soap.com..

It will sell much more than just soap. When it launches in July, Soap.com will offer 25,000 products—daily essentials ranging from cleaning supplies to toothpaste. By the end of the year, it will offer 60,000 different products, all at the same price you’ll find at Target or Wal-Mart, and about 25 percent less than at a typical drugstore, with free overnight shipping for orders of $50 or more. The overnight shipping is key because when you run out of toilet paper you can’t really wait around three days for your order to arrive.

The parent company, Quidsi, raised $30 million last year which they’ve been using to prepare for the launch of Soap.com. It will use the same warehouses and facilities that Diapers.com uses, and the same back-end inventory, logistics, and shipping software. The company recently moved to new fully-automated warehouses on both coasts, and now has 2.5 million square feet of warehouse space ready and waiting. “All the robots are in place,” says Bharara. They will pick and pack your soap and get it to you by the time you take your morning shower, or at least by the time you get home from work.

Here is a cool video showing how those robots give Quidsi a competitive advantage:

It was eight years ago that Ghyslain Raza slashed his way into our hearts with his Star Wars Kid video. Sadly, Raza suffered from severe bullying and abuse for his video and eventually ended up in a psychiatric ward for children. However, his video was seen 1 billion times and multiple thousands of geeks came immediately to his defense. While those must have been the worst years of his life, things are now looking up.

He and his family sued the kids who leaked the video for $250,000, settled, and that seemed to be the end of it. Now, however, Ghyslain just became the president of the Patrimoine Trois-Rivières, a heritage society dedicated to conserving his hometown in Quebec. He’s also working on law degree at McGill in Montreal.

Raymie Stata, Chief Architect at Yahoo has been promoted to the role of CTO and Senior Vice President, according to a post on Yahoo’s corporate blog. Stata will replace former CTO Ari Balogh, who left the company in April.

Stata joined Yahoo in 2004, and has led a number of significant tech initiatives across the company from re-imaging its technology stack, to spearheading search and advertising development work and architecting the company’s private cloud.

Prior to joining Yahoo, he founded Stata Laboratories, which he sold to Yahoo in October 2004. Prior to founding Stata Labs, Raymie worked at the Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center, where he contributed to the AltaVista search engine. He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and has collaborated with the Internet Archive.

Stata will report to chief product officer Blake Irving. Stata recently participated in TechCrunch Disrupt, where he served as a panelist and awarded Art.sy with the Rookie Disruptor Award. It’s nice to see talent actually staying at Yahoo, considering the growing number of executives and early employees have left over the past few months.

In-stream advertising network Ad.ly, which launched last year, is moving beyond just advertising on Twitter today. The startup just announced a deal with MySpace to allow the social network’s members to insert in-stream ads in their activity streams. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ad.ly, which will continue to advertise on Twitter, links up advertisers with users and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the user’s tweet streams with full disclosure. Ad.ly’s recently launched self service platform platform enables Advertisers to connect with any user who signs up for Ad.ly’s service. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The publisher then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly.

Beginning today, MySpace publishers can visit this site on the network to sign up with Ad.ly and create a profile. Once registered, publishers can decide which messages from advertisers they want to support and Ad.ly will deliver the approved messages into the activity stream, similar to the arrangement with Twitter. MySpace feels that Ad.ly is a prime opportunity to allow others, particularly musicians, filmmakers and celebrities on the network, to monetize off of their stream.

This isn’t the first time that MySpace has inserted ads into the stream. The social networks began inserting ads in-stream earlier this year. But the deal with Ad.ly is one of the first with a third-party in-stream ad network. It’s interesting that Ad.ly has engaged in a formal deal with MySpace (where we’re assuming there is money exchanging hands). We’re assuming that Twitter doesn’t have a similar monetization deal Ad.ly but after COO Dick Costolo’s announcement last week, this may change.

Costolo addressed Twitter’s long-term strategy and updated TOS last week, which was thought to ban in-stream ads and affect in-stream ad networks like Ad.ly. However, Ad.ly was quick to respond that their service does not violate Twitter’s TOS and will continue to operate as is. Ad.ly founder Sean Rad echoed these sentiments to me, saying that the new TOS do not affect Ad.ly.

Regardless of where Twitter goes with banning ads in the stream, Ad.ly is wise to diversify its network beyond Twitter, which seems to be figuring out its own monetization and advertising strategy. And armed with $5 million in new funding, Ad.ly should be ready to improve its product with new features and iterations.

Google confirmed reports from yesterday that it acquired Invite Media, a bidding exchange for display advertising. Google did not disclose the amount of the deal, but Peter Kafka at MediaMemo pegs it at around $70 million (update: one investor calls that amount “inaccurate,” but can’t disclose the true amount. The company raised a total of about $5 million in two rounds). Today on the DoubleClick blog, Google explains what the startup does:

Invite Media has developed technology that enables advertisers and agencies to use “real time bidding” to buy display ad space, and to optimize display ad campaigns, across multiple advertising exchanges, all in a single interface.

Google is a big proponent of realtime bidding. Its search keyword advertising is priced based on an auction model. Invite Media brings auction pricing to display ads by giving advertisers a mechanism to ” tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data.”

Last year, DoubleClick launched its own Ad Exchange, which will work now work hand-in-hand with Invite Media’s technology. There is no doubt that Google wants to take the best parts of paid search ads and bring those economics to the world of display advertising. The question remains, however, whether auctions benefit the advertisers or publishers more. It all depends on how much bidding there is for a specific ad slot. My guess, though, is that there is so much inventory that market pricing will have the effect of pushing average CPMs down because there is no scarcity when it comes to online advertising.

YouTube has become an integral tool for political campaigns across both national and local levels. And Google moderator has also been used in a variety of ways to host community town hall meetings. Today, Google is launching a 2010 Campaign Toolkit and an upgraded Google Campaign Toolkit.

The toolkits aim to provide political candidates with the resources to successfully use both YouTube and other Google products to engage constituents and citizens. On YouTube, campaigns will have access to features like a Politician channel (which allows campaigns to brand their channel and upload longer videos), Google Moderator, and analytics tool YouTube Insight. The toolkit also includes paid advertising campaigns, such as in-stream ads and Promoted Video. The Google toolkit shows how products in the Google Apps family like Docs and Gmail, can keep staff and volunteers connected.

The offerings are sure to be particularly useful for politicians and candidates who are running for office in the coming year. Long-winded politicians should love the fact that video time limits are longer than normal, and they can run the same 15-second and 30-second TV ad spots in YouTube. President Obama notably used YouTube for both his campaign efforts and now within the White House. The White House also uses Google Moderator and App Engine.

European music startup Spotify has all its “ducks lined up” for a U.S. launch, we’ve heard from multiple sources. It has servers ready to go in the US and, crucially, users already there, even though it has not yet officially launched. It fact it has 30,000 users in the U.S., according to the chatter coming out of the Stockholm tech scene where the company has its main development arm. But these users are being kept quiet.

So why isn’t Spotify launching in the U.S. right now?