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Google is known for its spare, clean search homepage. A single search box, two buttons, and 28 words or less. Contrast that to Bing, which features a beautiful new background photo every day. Well, now you can add your own background wallpaper image to Google search.

Google is starting to roll out a new feature today which allows users to upload images from their computers or a Picasa Web album to personalize the search homepage. Call it Bing-envy, or just a case of Google loosening up its design strictures. But Google is going from spare minimalism to anything-goes design. Actually, opening up the design palette to users is more MySpace than Bing. But it is not the first time Google introduced user-controlled design option to one of its products. Gmail, iGoogle, and Chrome both have their own selection of themes, for instance.

People live in these products, and cosmetic features like this one perhaps make some users feel more at home. So go ahead and put up a crazy frog photo or a picture of your favorite beach at sunset. Ooh, I’m getting the warm and fuzzies already!

Stock analysis startup Trefis has raised $1.6 million on funding from Village Ventures. The startup had previously raised $550K in angel funding in 2008 led by Timothy Weller, CFO of Enernoc and former CFO of Akamai, Bob Johnson of the MIT corporation, and Semyon Dukach, former president of the MIT Blackjack team.

Launched last fall, Trefis breaks down a stock price by the contribution of a company’s major products and businesses. The site lets you tweak your stock predictions by adjusting variables in a company’s business model, depending on how you think different segments of the company will perform. These predictions are plotted out on attractive interactive charts, which can also be embedded as widgets and shared.

The company is also launching a pro version of Trefis, which includes access to in-depth financial content for about 25 companies in the consumer sector (Example: Walmart, Coca Cola, P&G, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Ford etc.). Trefis Pro includes daily insights across both consumer and technology sector companies, as-well-as advanced privacy features for price estimates (i.e. you can hide your estimates from the community, which you were not able to do previusly). Subscribers to Trefis Pro, which will cost $50 per month, will also get free access to additional consumer sector companies as Trefis rolls them out. Trefis is also planning to launch pro planning content for other sectors like financial services, and healthcare.

When Diaspora set out to raise money to build an open Facebook alternative site, they had a pretty modest goal: $10,000. Of course, they were raising the funds through a less than traditional means — using Kickstarter, an online fundraising site. Still, they shot past that goal in 12 days. And within 20 days, they had raised over $100,000. Yesterday, the fundraising closed, the final tally: just over $200,000.

Obviously, the Facebook privacy fiasco played a huge role in the fundraising success. Diaspora pulled in money from a number of prominent people on the web — and, humorously, apparently even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. All told, nearly 6,500 people contributed money to the project — making it the largest Kickstarter project ever.

Now for the hard part.

While Diaspora has plenty of money, they have yet to make the actual Facebook alternative site. The four NYU students will now begin that process over the course of the Summer. As they wrote yesterday, “You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work.”

By September 2010, the team says it will release the first iteration of the project, fully open-sourced under the AGPL. Here’s the feature they say we’ll see:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

After that, the project will move back to New York City where they will begin work on building out their secondary ideas for the service.

When Diaspora started getting a lot of press, many critics were quick to point out that this group of kids didn’t actually have one line of code written yet and were trying to take on a site with nearly 500 million users. And the truth is that many of these open alternative sites fail against their bigger rivals. Still, it will be interesting to see what these guys come up with with the $200,000 now in their pockets. If nothing else, they have a great sense of timing.

The EVO 4G is a great phone with the notable drawback of its short battery life. But apparently a lot of you don’t care judging by the comments on my full review. Fine by me. Even though it doesn’t have the battery strength to make it through a day of moderate to heavy usage, there are still some serious advantages to this phone over others. Enough so that some buyers are probably going to camp out their Sprint Store this Friday. Here’s my top five favorite features so far, including a few I didn’t touch on at all in my review.

I’m one of the worst ‘task managers’ you’ll ever meet. There are thousands of services out there that would make my life way easier, that I either don’t know about or that are too complex or too simple for my taste and needs.

So when I got pitched by an entrepreneur in between sessions at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference about a “new breakthrough cross-platform task management product”, I was skeptical. Five minutes later, I was sold.

Enter Producteev, which is launching said new product – dubbed Producteev Two – today.

Here’s what I love about it: Producteev Two lets users capture tasks, email-based action items or schedule deadlines using whatever communication channel they prefer. The product, which is free for up to 3 individual users, connects to a myriad of popular communication tools, including IM services like Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger as well as Twitter and Facebook.

No longer need I feel forced to visit a web application to save and manage tasks, unless I choose to do so. I can simply send a custom message to a dedicated email address, or quickly open a Gtalk IM window inside my Gmail account to create or assign tasks, and get notifications back through the channels of my choosing.

Better yet, a proper Gmail Gadget plugs directly into Producteev Two so I can now quickly check and manage important tasks straight from my Gmail interface, which I tend to have open at all times anyway. There’s also one for iGoogle. Just great.

There’s even some sort of social gaming aspect to the product. One feature, Producteev Academy, enables users to win badges for different activities, such as completing the most tasks. Don’t worry: it can be turned off.

In addition, the company this morning announced the launch of Producteev Two for the iPhone, which is also free. The mobile app works offline, syncs in the background when the user goes back online and supports push notifications. It’s currently being reviewed by Apple’s team of app scrutinizers, but should be available soon (screenshots below).

On Producteev’s roadmap: a desktop client for Mac, which will be available later this month, and an API. Amazing stuff for a company that’s raised less than $1 million in early-stage funding.

Fresh off the closure of its acquisition by Google, mobile ad network AdMob is officially launching an iPad-specific SDK to allow app developers to use the network’s ads within their apps. The SDK was previously in beta but is now available to the public.

AdMob says that the SDK is unified across all devices running the iPhone OS, which makes it much easier for developers, who can can download one binary for development across all Apple iPhone OS devices – iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The new also SDK supports two ad formats in native iPad applications: text & tile ads and image ads. Both of these ad formats are available in the three IAB standard ad sizes: 300×250, 728×90, and 468×60.

AdMob has already signed on advertisers to create advertising campaigns for the iPad; currently Amazon.com is currently running a campaign promoting their Kindle for iPad app. AdMob is relatively late to roll out a iPad-specific SDK, competitors Millennial Media, Medialets, Mobclix, and Greystripe have all created ad formats for the device.

The network is also praising the “creative potential of iPad ads using HTML5,” even building demos of ads using HTML5 technology, which rivals Flash, to show off the innovative formats.

This is interesting considering the whole Apple-Flash war, tablet battles and where AdMob’s parent company Google falls into this. At Google I/O conference a few weeks ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to position the search giant as Flash’s friend. Of course, it should also be interesting to see if the rumored Google tablet will support Flash and if AdMob will change its tune if this is the case.

Bing Maps is now helping you find the healthiest cities in the U.S. with a new app, Bing Health Maps. Microsoft is mashing up data from the Department of Health and Human Services to visualize what parts of the country are healthy or not so healthy by state and county.

You can select a state and a Community Health Indicator, which includes Birth Indicators (low birth weight, premature births, births to women under 18); Death Measures (homicide, lung cancer, stroke) or Health Risk Factors (obesity, smokers, high blood pressure). You can also see what percentage of the population of a given county are reporting the answers to the questions to give you an accurate view of the statistics.

The data visualization of the app is really compelling if accurate. For example, in Cook County, IL, you’ll find that 22 percent of the population is reporting obesity as a health issues, that 13.3 percent of births in the county are premature, and that there is an average of 28.1 cases of breast cancer per 100,000 people.

The map will include all the counties within a state and your can click on each country to get information for a specific community. It’s similar in theory to Google’s Flu Maps feature, which maps flu levels across 121 cities in the U.S.

OExchange, a simple specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, was introduced today by a number of online service providers and social networks. The open link-sharing protocol has gained support from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg, Instapaper, StumbleUpon, Clearspring Technologies and a handful more.

So what’s it all about?

OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences.

A number of these services, like Google Buzz and Instapaper, have already implemented the protocol, which together with others such as OpenID and OAuth intends to making sharing content on the Web completely open. OExchange is licensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement – you can get the specs here.

Chris Messina, Open Web Advocate at Google, has this to say about the new protocol:

“The key to increasing the amount and quality of sharing online is smoothing out the user interaction. By simplifying the underlying mechanism for cross-site sharing with OExchange, people can focus on what they’re sharing, rather than how.”

Do you agree that there’s a need for an open URL sharing protocol (which companies like Twitter and Facebook seem to doubt, since they’re not supporting it)?

Google is buying advertising technology startup Invite Media in a “$70 million range” deal, reports MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka. We’ve pinged the Mountain View company for confirmation but have not heard back yet.

Kafka has confirmed the story with multiple sources, who also said Google intends to keep Invite Media running as a stand-alone unit. At a later time, it would be integrated into its DoubleClick for Advertisers product, he adds.

Update: Google responded with this canned statement: “Although we’re always talking to various companies about a variety of things, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation.”

Invite Media is an ad technology company founded in April, 2007 in Philadelphia out of the University of Pennsylvania. The startup, which is headquartered in New York City, builds and operates what it refers to as a “universal buying platform” for display media, called Bid Manager.

This platform allows buyers to optimize online campaigns in real-time across multiple inventory sources, including Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Additional features include the ability to access third party data providers directly through the same central interface, gain reporting and analytics on key metrics, and build an internal “exchange practice” around a fully self-service platform.

Since February, its platform supports full real-time bidding and self-service integrations with ad networks AdBrite, AdMeld and PubMatic.

The company claims Bid Manager gives media buyers access to over 12 billion highly-targeted impressions per day through a single central interface.

Invite Media raised money from investors such as First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, and strategic angels, but it’s unclear exactly how much.

Watch for updates.

TechCrunch50 demopit company Image Space Media (formerly Picad Media) is launching AdStart, a self-service product that allows marketers to create targeted in-image ads. The ads can then be served on Image Space Media’s in-image ad network of more than 4,000 publishers.

ISM’s ad network, which recently launched an analytics offering, helps publishers monetize images on their websites with ad overlays. Its proprietary technology allows for audience targeting and matches ads to the most appropriate images available. With AdStart, advertisers can now create text based ads on both a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand (CPM) impression level. Once the advertiser creates their text-based ad campaign, they set their bid price and fund their account using a credit card or PayPal with a minimum of $5.00 for prepaid accounts. The ads immediately begin running as overlays on contextually relevant images across the Image Space Media Network.

ISM says that beta testing results have been relatively successful. The CTR on the ISM AdStart campaign for The Intuitive Learning Company was more than 7 times higher than a Google Adwords campaign for the same product. COO Kevin Tung has told us that CTRs for in-image ads are higher than average rates for normal display ads, which he says range from .2 % to .3%. He adds that CTRs depend on size and dimensions of the ad itself.

The startup also recently raised $2.9 million in funding from New Atlantic Ventures, Ridgeline Capital, and Michael Gordon and brought on a new CEO last year, Jesse Chenard, who Tung actually met at TechCrunch50 in 2008. Image Space Media faces competition from GumGum and others.

Layar is today unveiling the latest iteration of its Reality Browser product (3.5), starting with an Android version with an iPhone 3GS app update scheduled for later. With the new version of the browser, users can now easily discover and experience Augmented Reality without the need to enter a search query or open a specific layer.

This means users can instantly see the most interesting content nearby upon launching the browser, effectively turning it into a potent location-based search and discovery service with an augmented reality element attached to it rather than the other way around.

Fresh off an announcement of a strategic investment from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, mobile payments platform Boku is taking its mobile strategy one step further by launching an in-app mobile billing library for Android.

The Boku Payments SDK allows developers to monetize any Android app with in-app purchases via carrier billing. Boku, which just launched last year, doesn’t require users to have a credit card or bank account to make a micropayment. Users enter their cell phone number, reply to a text message and then all virtual charges are automatically charged to the user’s monthly cell phone bill.

Boku’s SDK allows for a one-tap purchase process in more than 60 countries over 200 carriers worldwide without a user login or password needed for purchase. Boku authenticates the transaction and deals with the carrier billing as well. It’s incredibly easy for consumers because they don’t have to deal with the hassle of entering credit card information on their phone.

While the iPhone has supported the idea of In-App purchase for a bit over a year now, Android hasn’t adopted this yet. But as the Android platform becomes more heavily used by consumers, payment companies like Boku stand to profit from in-app purchases. PayPal just launched its Mobile Payments Library for Android, which allows consumers to make transactions without ever leaving the app.

Of course, the potential obstacle to the adoption of Boku are the high fees that mobile carriers charge to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the publisher or developer). Boku told us last June that different cell phone carriers charge varying fees that range between 10% to 50% of the purchase price, which is a hefty amount in transaction fees. But Boku is steadfast in its commitment to remedy this issue. Ron Hirson, Boku’s marketing chief, says the company is ramping up negotiations with carriers to lower these fees.

As I stated above, the barrier for Boku’s system will be the high carrier fees that will be passed on to developers. But if this can be negotiated, the sky’s the limit for mobile payments as an attractive payments platform. Coincidentally, competitor Zong also announced the availability of its payment service for developers this morning. It looks like the two will duke it out for Android developers who want to start monetizing off of their apps. That is, until Google rolls out In-App purchase support for the Android platform