It’s Time For The Crunchies!

It’s hard to believe that nearly a year has gone by since we gave out those crazy gorilla awards to the best startup and product successes in Silicon Valley and around the world. Some of the photos from last year are here.

The Crunchies are back. We are once again partnering with some of our favorite blogs - thank you to co-hosts GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat (click the links for their announcements). Thanks as well to 1938 Media, our video production partner (see their first video below in the comments).

The Awards Ceremony will be held on Jan. 9, 2009, 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco. The reception will follow and tickets will be released in December.

What we need from you right now: please nominate your favorite startups and products in fifteen categories. And remember, you’re judging them based on their 2008 performance. Nominations may be made until December 10, 2008 Midnight PST.

On December 15 we’ll begin the final voting process for the winners.

If you are a startup and want to encourage your users to vote for you, you can create a customized badge here.

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Lonely Wrestlers Create Their Own Social Network

It’s not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent’s head against the corner post, but outside the ring it’s hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends.

Wrestlers aren’t stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That’s why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it’s not really a social network. It’s just a craptastic promotional vehicle. And some of those wrestlers aren’t so bright. But they are lonely.

Just because Mark Henry is the “world’s strongest man” doesn’t mean he doesn’t cry at night when all he has to keep him company is his pit bull, Theodore, and a can of beans. Or Zack Ryder. The poor guy might be a tag team champion, but when he goes home all he has to look forward to are watering his plants and watching reruns of Smackdown with his cat, Fluffy. Be friends with them. Don’t block them out of your life. They need you.

The only person who needs to be scared of these guys is Mark Zuckerberg. I sent Mark and Zack a message explaining that nobody is going to sign up to be their friends on the WWE Universe because everybody is over at Facebook. They didn’t respond so well to that news. Be scared Zuckerberg. Be very, very scared.

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Google Kills Lively

Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit. It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-based virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites. Lively launched just last July. The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31, so we are adding Lively to the deadpool.

Lively just never took off, and was extremely far afield for Google. A post on the Google Blog explains the decision:

. . . we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.

We should have known something was up when we noticed that it didn’t work with Google’s own browser, Chrome. It’s Google Website Trends chart says it all. After an initial spike, it flat-lined. Hype can only go so far.

Maybe Google didn’t kill Lively so much as mercifully pull the plug. This is a good sign actually that Google is willing to weed out non-performing products. What else is being cut at Google?

What else should be?

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Yahoo Brings Glue To U.S.: A Plethora of Aggregated Topical Third Party Content

Yahoo Glue, a new search results page design that the company has been testing in India, is rolling out to the US market this evening. You can view it at glue.yahoo.com, although Yahoo says it is rolling out in stages, so sit tight if you don’t see it.

It’s also a little different than the Indian version, and includes a number of resources beyond what India’s version of Glue offers. On a typical query, content from Wikipedia, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, blog search results (from Google) and YouTube videos are shown.

For the US, Yahoo is starting with a limited set of topics and using a two column instead of a three column design. They’ve also left out the search results altogether. In this example for Barack Obama, prominent links to Memorandum (a political blog aggregator) are also shown.

Yahoo says they won’t use Glue to replace search in the US. Instead it seems to be a useful content page that brings in data from lots of different sources on topics.

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Qik And Strands Each Trim 10 Percent Of Staff

The cutbacks continue, even at seemingly healthy startups. Social recommendation engine Strands let exactly 10 percent, or 14 people go (7 in the U.S. and 7 in Spain), the company confirms. Strands has raised a total of $55 million, still employs 125 people, and is hiring for other positions. It also just announced a mobile version for Nokia S60 phones.

Qik, which lets you stream live video from your cell phone, also laid off about 10 percent of its employees, which in its case amounted to five people. We got a tip that the reason for the layoffs is because the startup could not raise a $10 to $15 million round, but a spokesperson says that is not true and that we should stay tuned. We hope its not true because we love Qik. The company so far has raised only $4 million, but its investors include Marc Benioff and Marc Andreessen.

Also this week, Akamai is laying off 110 people (7 percent), KLA-Tencor is cutting 900 (15 percent), four people lost their jobs at Engine Yard (66 percent), and 7 at PC Magazine, which is ceasing its print edition.

We’ve added all of these to the Layoff Tracker, which is now up to 77,151 layoffs across 225 technology companies big and small.

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CrunchGear Review: BlackBerry Storm for Verizon Wireless

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Mozilla Add-Ons Hit One Billion Downloads

In other Mozilla news, Firefox and other Mozilla products hit a major milestone today with the one billionth download of add-on software for the browser. That feat took three and half years.

Many of those downloads are never used more than once or twice, of course. But there is no doubt about it that Firefox is major software platform. Just look at StumbleUpon, it was built on top of Firefox.

What is atop the current list of most popular add-ons? Adblock Plus, followed by a bunch of download tools. And let’s not forget Greasemonkey at No. 9, which is it’s own Web development platform.

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This Week on the Crunch Board

Make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. While doing that take a look at our new Crunchboard Service and Sales Directories. They are a great way to connect with the start-up community. Here’s some of jobs posted in the past week:

• Senior Web & User Interface Designer
  Online Computer Library Center - Remote
• ECommerce Marketing Associate
  Harvard Business Publishing - Watertown, MA
• Software / Customer Support Engineer
  Articulate - Remote
• Linux Server Engineer
  Slide - San Francisco, CA
• Web application developer
  ThatOne Company - Mountain View, CA
• Product Manager
  Life Events Media - San Francisco, CA
• Mojiva
  User Interface Engineer - New York, NY

TechCrunch is also still looking for a Ruby Developer to work on CrunchBase, as well as a fulltime writer to work on TechCrunchIT at our office in Atherton, CA.

International readers are encouraged to visit the British and French job boards as well.

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Google Makes Up 88 Percent Of Mozilla’s Revenues, Threatens Its Non-Profit Status

Today, the (for-now) non-profit Mozilla Foundation released its financial statements for 2007 (embedded below). Revenues for the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser were up 12 percent to $75 million, with search-related royalties from Google accounting for 88 percent of the total, or $66 million. (Another $2 million or so came from other search engines). Those revenues come from Mozilla’s portion of the search advertising revenues generated by the default Google search box in the Firefox browser.

Google’s overall percentage of Mozilla’s revenues is even bigger than it was in 2006, when it accounted for 85 percent. And that proportion may continue to grow over the next three years, as Google just extended its contract with Mozilla.

But buried in the financial statements is the fact that the Mozilla Foundation is being audited by the IRS and its non-profit status is in question:

On the audit of the Foundation there has not been any formal notification of issues. There has been inquiry regarding its tax exemption. Management believes that it is conducting its operations in accordance with its original application for exemption and for which it received the advance ruling as a public benefit corporation.

The Foundation has an advance ruling as a public benefit corporation. The ruling period ended December 31, 2007. It submitted its public support test documentation as required by the advance ruling. While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33% of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10%.

Mozilla argues that the search dollars should be treated as royalties, and thus not count as revenues under the tax code. There is little precedent for a non-profit generating so much of its “support” from what is, in effect, a commercial agreement. If the IRS rules against it, the Mozilla Foundation would lose its tax-exempt status. It would then be classified as a private foundation and have to pay an estimated $100,000 in excise tax for 2007 alone.

That’s peanuts, and wouldn’t change much at Mozilla—except for the fact that it is pretending to be a non-profit foundation when everyone knows it is a charitable arm of Google. What we still don’t know is how Google accounts for the $66 million it paid to Mozilla last year. Was it a charitable contribution, or lumped in with its regular traffic acquisition costs?

And here’s another conundrum: Why does it take the Mozilla Foundation more than year to issue its financial statements from 2007? After all, it is almost 2009.

mf-2007-audited-financial-statement - Get more Free Tax Forms

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First Guns N’ Roses Album In 17 Years Debuts Tonight On MySpace Music

Chinese Democracy, the first new Guns N’ Roses album since 1991, debuts tonight at 9 PM PST exclusively on MySpace Music, where fans can listen to it for free.

Well, actually it debuted on BitTorrent a while ago, but we’re not talking about that. Also, the band has previously released two songs, Chinese Democracy and Better, to radio stations and music sites in the past couple of weeks.

But tonight is the big debut, and for most people it will be the first time they hear the music. It will be available in 25 countries: US, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Turkey, Poland, India, Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Japan.

Remember this ’cause it’s important: listening to music on BitTorrent for free is illegal. Listening to it for free on MySpace isn’t.

The physical album goes on sale November 23.

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How Can The Music Industry Be In Trouble With All This Free Promotion.

2007 person-to-person music downloads were worth a staggering $69 billion, and movie/television piracy continues to grow, says a new study.

And all that free promotion didn’t cost them a penny.

At least, that’s how Techdirt sees it. And I agree. Instead of embracing what might be the largest free marketing giveaway in the history of the world, the music labels instead sue their customers.

And ask the social networks for handouts.

Somebody over there needs to put their thinking cap on, quit screwing around and just give the damn music away for free with no lawsuit strings attached. Then use 360 contracts to find a way to survive on other revenue stream. Or even thrive.

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SnapTell: Instant Product Lookup From The iPhone. You Want This.

If you have an iPhone, you’ll probably want to check out SnapTell Explorer, a free application now available on the App Store. The premise is simple: take a photo of the cover of any CD, DVD, book, or video game, and the application will automatically identify the product and find ratings and pricing information online.

I was skeptical when I first saw the app - the iPhone has had difficulty with image processing for barcodes, and most image recognitions systems I’ve tried on other platforms have been iffy at best. But SnapTell just works. Every time.

The app correctly identified just about everything I threw at it: Xbox games, Pocketbook O’Reilly manuals, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom, Kurt Vonegut novels, and a number of more obscure books (yes, it worked on The Twinkies Cookbook). It even managed to ID a copy of Civilization 4, despite the fact that it was covered in obnoxious price tags and stickers. I actually tried to mess it up by taking photos in poor lighting and odd angles, but the app still stayed nearly flawless. No, it doesn’t have everything - I managed to stump it on a book about Danish Grammar - but it will do just fine for any trip to a retail store.

But while SnapTell seems to have the technology perfected, the app itself still needs a little work. Once you’ve located a product there is no rating or description offered - instead you’re directed to the appropriate links on stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble (it would be nice if some basic rating information was pulled into the app). There’s also currently no way to quickly view a product’s price across multiple online stores, though this will be included in the next release which is expected in the next few weeks. The UI could also use some more polish - buttons are oddly placed, and the app doesn’t look nearly as slick as it should.

SnapTell works best on Wi-Fi and 3G, but also supports Edge (it takes around 10-15 seconds to upload the image on the slower network, versus a moment or two). The application will also be coming to the Android soon, and will feature both the image recognition seen on the iPhone version as well as barcode lookup (which is popular on Android but very difficult to pull off on the iPhone). The app was developed by SnapTell, a company that primarily focuses on image-recognition based marketing, and is making use of the company’s 5 million+ product database.

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Gmail Themes. That’s Totally Ninja.

Apparently a lucky few Gmail users had a “Themes” tab pop up under settings. No longer do you have to suffer through the boring-if-functional standard Gmail interface for the 16 hours a day that you keep the page loaded. Try “Ninja” instead.

Thanks for the tip Dan.

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Tweetag: Tag-Based Search For Twitter

Erick recently wrote:

We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.

Enter Tweetag, a brand new way to search Twitter, or ‘browse the Twittosphere’ as they put it. The app, like most Twitter-related applications, is fairly simple: you enter a tag, and Tweetag will show public Twitter messages that contain that particular keyword, but more interestingly also a list of other tags that are related to it.

This allows you to filter down Twitter’s constant stream of 140-or-less-character messages intuitively. Take for instance a query for ‘obama‘: you’ll see all tweets contain the President-elect’s first name, and you can simply filter it down by adding other keywords to the URL or clicking an associated tag, e.g. ‘obama/youtube‘. In addition, Tweetag features tabs which allow you to filter down Twitter messages containing links, questions and @replies.

The Tweetag homepage also displays the 40 most frequent tags, so you can easily get an idea of what’s hot on Twitter in a way similar to what Twitscoop, TwitBuzz, TweetWire and other services are all about. It’s also a great way to track conversations around a given topic, say the earthquake in Indonesia from last weekend.

Twitter recently acquired Summize, whose technology currently powers Twitter Search, and it wouldn’t take them all that much time and effort to build something similar on top of it. Until they do, you can use Tweetag to monitor specific keywords and find out what’s hot on the popular micro-sharing tool in just a few seconds. Tweetag even boasts their own API which allows you to integrate their results into a blog widget or third-party applications.

At first glance, Tweetag is merely a feature, not a business. The creators insist however that have a way to monetize the service as a B2B tool, and that they are currently raising funding to make that happen.

By the way, if you’re not into Twitter, check out this WordPress plugin the guys behind Tweetag have created for tag-based filtering of comments: Commentag.

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GazProm Media Completes $15 Million Acquisition RuTube, The YouTube Of Russia

Russia’s media conglomerate, Gazprom Media, is now the proud owner of video-sharing site RuTube. This deal has been in the works since at least June, 2007 and is believed to be in the $15 million range.

RuTube is the YouTube of Russia. Or, rather, it wants to be. According to comScore, YouTube is actually the YouTube of Russia. In September, RuTube attracted 2 million unique visitors in Russia, versus 2.9 million Russian uniques for YouTube. RuTibe is seeing some nice growth, though. It has doubled its audience since June. (All caveats about comScore estimates apply here. Their numbers for Russia should be looked at as indicative of the trend rather than as absolutes).

TechCrunch reader Andrei Taraschuk, the founder of UMapper, translated the following Russian press story about the deal into English for us:

Gazprom-Media completed the acquisition of video service RuTube. The news came today from TNT – Teleset (TNT-Telenetwork) is the largest television network in Russia. According to sources inside TNT, RuTube is going to be headed by TNT’s Michael Ilitchev.

Ilitchev told Lenta.ru that RuTube will continue its focus on three main areas: video service, online video hosting, media platform. Down the road RuTube might expand its services to brands like RuTube movie, RuTube sport, RuTube music, RuTube news, RuTube humor.

Ilitched pointed out that RuTube founders will continue their involvement in RuTube from the technical side. The rest of RuTube team will continue as subcontractors to support, develop and host the project.

The exact acquisition amount is yet unknown.

It took Gazprom-Media over a year to purchase RuTube. Gazprom-Media announced their acquisition plans back in June 2007, the legal (purchase) process was started in March of 2008. Russian newspaper Kommersant (Коммерсант) wrote that Gazprom-media valued RuTube at 15million USD and had plans to become primary shareholder. It was expected that after the acquisition, RuTube will start hosting videos from TNT and other media properties of Gazprom-Media.

RuTube is the biggest video hosting service in RUNET (Russian internet). According to Gallup, in September 2008, RuTube had over 4mln visitors. Over 5,8 had watched videos.

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Insidious New SEO Ad Product Will Be Hard For Google To Detect (Updated With Google Response)

New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz, never one to worry about gray areas when it comes to advertising, has launched a new product today called InLinks.

It’s fairly straightforward - advertisers who want their sites associated with specific keywords simply buy ads. Links to those sites are then added to publishers sites whenever those words pop up in content. These aren’t ghost links like Kontera and others include in content - they’re full blown links without any notation (like a nofollow) that they are advertisements meant primarily for SEO juice.

Content sites are paid a flat rate per month per ad sold. I’m trying to get more details now from the company, but there is more on this here and here.

Update: Google’s Matt Cutts emails:

Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines. Other search engines have said similar things. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also given unambiguous guidance on this subject in the recent PDF at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2008/03/P064101tech.pdf where they said “Consumers who endorse and recommend products on their blogs or other sites for consideration should do so within the boundaries set forth in the FTC Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising and the FTC’s guidance on word of mouth marketing,” as well as “To date, in response to this concern, the FTC has advised that search engines need to disclose clearly and conspicuously if the ranking or other presentation of search results is a function of paid placement, and, similarly, that consumers who are paid to engage in word-of-mouth marketing must disclose that fact to recipients of their messages.”

Oh, but you say your blog isn’t in the U.S.? Maybe it’s in the UK? Then you’ll be interested in
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2008/uksi_20081277_en_5#pt11 which covers unfair trade practices and specifically mentions “Using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer (advertorial).”

But you’re not in the UK? I believe many of the unfair commercial practices directives apply through Europe, e.g. http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/rights/index_en.htm to prohibit misleading or aggressive marketing.

The reality is that accepting money to link to/promote/market for a product without disclosing that fact is a very high-risk behavior, in my opinion.

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Ian Rogers On The Death Of The Music CD Business: “I Don’t Care.”

We’ve written a lot about the death of the recorded music business, but in a keynote address to a music industry conference a couple weeks ago Topspin CEO Ian Rogers sketches out a different future. Rogers, the former head of Yahoo Music, correctly points out, as others have before him, that it is not the music industry that is dying. It is the CD business.

And as far as the CD business going the way of the dodo, with sales of physical CDs declining and the growth of digital sales not making up the difference, his response is:

I don’t care.

The lamenting we read in the press is not the story of the new music business. Continuing to talk about the health of the music industry on these terms is as if we’d all been crying about the dying cassette business in 1995. The difference is that when we moved from cassette to CD the winners were the same (big companies who owned access to cash, distribution, and marketing) and the definition of winning was the same (more units sold for these big companies).

As I’ve been saying for years, the physics of the media space have changed and you shouldn’t expect the winners or even the definition of winning to stay constant, so simply looking at how iTunes replaces CDs doesn’t tell the entire story.

I see news about the health of the music industry as defined by the stock price of WMG or quarterly earnings of UMG, Sony, and EMI every day. What I don’t see, apart from a few articles on Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, is an update on how the world is changing from the artist point of view. But I tell you, when I talk to managers and artists they feel it, they feel an ability to take their careers into their own hands, to redefine what success means for them, and that is the emergence of the new music business.

He argues that what will replace the current hits-driven music industry is a broader middle class of artists that can support themselves using the Web to promote their music, shows, and merchandise. Rogers illustrates his argument with two examples of artists who distribute their music through Topspin and are making more money than they would under the traditional system.

The first example is David Byrne and Brian Eno’s new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. By distributing digitally and keeping most of the profits themselves, the gross revenues of the album matched what they could have expected to get as an advance from a music label within the first 50 days. The second example is a lesser-known artist in his twenties, Joe Purdy, who has sold 650,000 tracks on iTunes and was able to buy a house from the proceeds.

Rogers concludes:

Digital sales don’t make up for physical? From the artist perspective they certainly can, and quickly. David and Brian keep the majority of the profits, and (via Topspin at least) are paid within sixty days of the fan purchasing (no wait for recoupment and complex royalty accounting). When your costs are low your royalty rate high and your channel direct, the marginal profitability from the artist perspective can be far different than in the old model, to be sure.

And where the mass-marketed approach was low-margin from the artist perspective, the target-marketed approach can be much higher margin (which is how Joe Purdy buys a house on his iTunes sales). Topspin believes there is an entire middle class of artists for whom the system hasn’t worked in the past who will be empowered by this new model.

Again, there are only two players in the music business that matter at the end of the day: the artists and the fans. The rest of us . . . either add value today with a compelling service or we die. And I’m perfectly happy with that.

Rogers is right. The music industry needs a bigger middle class of artists. It also needs more people like Rogers trying to create that middle class.

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TeachStreet Expands To San Francisco: Find That Perfect Cooking Class. Or Whatever.

TeachStreet, a Yelp-like service for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), just opened its doors in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

The site first launched in Seattle, where the company is headquartered, and then expanded to Portland. Their Bay Area expansion adds 65,000 local classes, teachers and schools, and more than doubles their existing 50,000 resources in Seattle and Portland combined.

There are, for example, 442 painting classes, 625 Yoga classes and 567 piano classes in the area. More importantly, TeachStreet tells me there are twelve dog training classes near my home in Atherton.

The company raised $2.25 million in a 2007 financing.

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YouTube, TroopTube Go To War

Video infrastructure site Delve Networks launched TroopTube in partnership with the Department of Defense a few days ago as a more secure alternative to YouTube, which the DoD banned in 2007. TroopTube is basically Youtube, but without the embedding feature, and the DoD has moderation and censorship controls.

Now Delve Networks CEO says Google is up to no good, trying to convince the DoD that TroopTube won’t scale, and that YouTube’s exclusive arrangement with Barack Obama means the troops won’t be able to watch the president’s weekly talks. “Google is trying to attack TroopTube,” he says.

The email is below, and we’re following up with Google for a comment.

I should not be telling you this and will get in big trouble with the DoD, but it is just too interesting to not mention.

Today, I was informed that Google is trying to attack TroopTube by telling all sorts of technical lies about Delve’s ability to scale. Apparently, they don’t really understand the cloud computing thing.

They also claim that because Barrack Obama is posting his presidential messages on YouTube and not TroopTube that the troops wont be able to get video from the president and that is another reason for the DoD to cancel the TroopTube project.

So much for do no evil. I guess Google would rather have troops be unable to get videos from their loved ones this Thanksgiving.

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Parlor Game: Pick Yahoo’s Next CEO

With Yahoo now looking for a new leader, Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor game is picking a new CEO for the embattled company. Plenty of names are being bandied about, from former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (whose non-compete with Time Warner expires next March) to OpenTable CEO and former eBay superstar exec Jeff Jordan. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is also being thrown out as a possibility, but she is not interested.

Other strong candidates include Google senior VP Tim Armstrong (who heads up North American ad sales), former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig (as we’ve noted before), and Marc Andreessen. Mark Cuban would have been interesting too, but he has other things to worry about right now.

Less likely names, in my opinion, are current president Susan Decker, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson (who tried to buy Yahoo when he was at Microsoft), or Carl Icahn’s hand-picked board members Frank Biondi, Jr. and John Chapple. News Corp president Peter Chernin is also mentioned as a perennial candidate, but he seems better off where he is running Murdoch’s empire.

What Yahoo really needs is new blood, most likely someone not on the list below. Picking an old-media executive like Biondi or Chernin would risk repeating the same mistake Yahoo made when it put former Warner Brothers CEO Terry Semel at the helm. But it can’t pick a green startup executive either. Yahoo is a huge organization that requires a leader with at least some serious management experience. Vote below for who you think is the best candidate, or nominate your own in comments with your reasons why he or she should be considered.

(Flickr photo by Paul Fisher).

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JuicyCampus Gets Banned From TSU, Cries Foul

JuicyCampus, a public, anonymous message board that basically encourages college students to gossip about each other (often using full names and with malicious intentions), got its first ban from a public university. Apparently, Tennessee State University’s VP for Student Affairs, Michael Freeman has blocked access to the website, which spurred CEO & President of JuicyCampus Matt Ivester to write an open letter in response.

Get ready for some drama, with Ivester claiming TSU is “joining the ranks of the Chinese government in internet censorship, and spitting in the faces of everyone who believes in free discourse online”.

University administrators are probably acting in what they believe to be the best interests of their students. They’re just misguided, and missing the big picture. The most significant threats to free speech (in the U.S. at least) tend to come not from tyrants who openly question the value of the First Amendment, but from well-meaning busybodies who want to protect peoples’ feelings—a mission that is generally incompatible with free speech.

The idea of banning JuicyCampus.com has been considered, and flatly rejected, at the nation’s premier universities (including Yale, Duke, Princeton, Harvard, and many others). These universities decided that limiting free speech would be fundamentally incompatible with their educational missions, and that censorship was a slippery slope that they did not want to be on. Instead, administrators at many top universities seized the opportunity to educate their students. All over the country, discussions have taken place with regard to what is and is not appropriate to discuss in a public forum, and how students should react when they see something they disagree with online.

This approach stands in stark contrast with TSU’s decision, which was to censor the speech of its own students. In a truly Orwellian manner, the University chose to limit students’ abilities to read and write to an un-moderated message board online, because their speech was reflecting “negatively” on TSU. Freeman’s position would seem to be that his students cannot be trusted with their First Amendment rights, perhaps believing that they are too immature or irresponsible. Perhaps though, they are just under-educated on this issue. But, unlike his colleagues at top universities, Mr. Freeman has abdicated his responsibility for educating those students, and in doing so has disgraced both his University and his State.

Because TSU’s decision seems to violate its students’ First Amendment rights, there is some question as to how long their ban will remain in effect. Students and free speech advocacy groups are already discussing legal action.

JuicyCampus believes that the answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship. To that end, JuicyCampus encourages students who disagree with certain comments to reply to those comments with additional information and/or their own opinions. Everyone has an equal voice on JuicyCampus.

JuicyCampus claims nearly 1 million unique visitors per month, but both Quantcast and Compete estimates suggest it’s more around 1/10 of that. The website recently expanded, opening support to over 500 new campuses.

We’d be surprised if TSU will remain the only institution to block access to the website, and we’re still doubtful if Ivester will be able to avoid being slapped with a lawsuit by upset students and/or their parents. He acknowledged to us earlier that JuicyCampus was under investigation by Attorneys General in New Jersey and Connecticut, but we remain unsure about the current status.

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Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done

A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app we’ve seen. Etherpad, a new product from Appjet, launches this morning, and you must try it out.

It’s comparable to Google Docs or a wiki, but it’s far more useful. You start off by creating a new workspace. You type basic text on numbered lines at will. Then invite someone else in and have them type as well. Each user’s edits are highlighted a different color. Changes are made in absolute real time, something even Google hasn’t been able to do (Google docs update every fifteen seconds).

Users can also chat in the sidebar, save versions and make a few tweaks to the settings like removing line numbers. One great feature optionally highlights Javascript syntax (making this a great way to write code collaboratively) And that’s it for now. There is very little bling to the site at this point.

In the future, co-founder Aaron Iba says that they’ll have features for exporting documents into text files, Word format, etc. Eventually they’ll offer businesses premium features for a fee, like controlled access, private URLs, etc. They’ll even offer non-hosted version that companies can install on their own servers for higher security.

This instantly became a must-use application for me. It makes phone calls a lot more productive - just open up a workspace and take notes together, in real time.

A screencast is here.

Like Yammer (which spun out of Geni), Etherpad wasn’t the core focus on the company (see our previous coverage of Appjet here and here). Iba says the team needed a tool like Etherpad and just created it for internal use. Now they’re unleashing it on the rest of us, which is quite nice of them.

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Poll: More Than Half Of Twitter Users Would Pay

Guy Kawasaki posted a poll on via his SocialToo service that asks “How much would you pay to use Twitter?”

More than half (around 53%) of respondents, presumably all Twitter users who follow Guy, said they’d pay at least $5/month. The last thing I want is for Twitter to start charging, so I want each of you to take that poll and say “$0, I’d rather see it go away.”

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Apptera Raises $10.5 Million More To Get Ads To Your Phone

Mobile advertising network Apptera has closed a $10.5 million funding round led by Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Walden International. The company is also announcing that David Karnstedt, Yahoo’s former SVP of North American Sales who has extensive experience in advertising, has joined its board.

Apptera offers a suite of audio and visual advertising solutions for companies looking to place ads on mobile devices. The company is behind many of the voice ads when you hear on free 411 services, as well as the ads found on AOL’s Moviefone. The company estimates that its ads reach over 100 million users a year, with huge growth rates as more companies expand to take advantage of mobile platforms.

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Nanoscaffolding Regrows Limbs, Organs

By using ultra-fine polymer fibers, military researchers have been able to regrow damaged or missing organs and limbs. They will announce their findings officially next month at the 26th Army Science Conference in Florida. One example given by John Parmentola, a director of research and lab management, involved a man who lost the entire tip of his finger while starting up a model airplane.

"That has been completely regrown . . . the nail, the bone, the tissue," he said.

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