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Yesterday, browser market share figures came out from Net Applications, and the big news is how Chrome is moving up the ranks at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox, compared to December.  But you have to look further back to get a sense of what is really happening.

The various flavors of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, and IE8) together have 62.1 percent market share, down from 68.5 percent last March.  That is a 6.4 percent drop in about a year.  During the same period Chrome went from 1.6 percent share to 5.2 percent.  Firefox and Safari each gained about a percentage point each over the same period to 24.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.  (Although Firefox is a tiny bit down since November, when it peaked at 24.7 percent).  If you add up the gains from those three—Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—that is where most of IE’s share went.

But even that doesn’t tell the whole story because if you look at share of individual versions of the different browsers, you can see another dynamic in play.  Namely, a big part of the share shift can also be explained by the uneven rate at which people abandon older browsers like IE6 for newer ones like IE8 or Chrome.  Let’s look at the share shifts just among IE6, IE7, and IE8.  The pitchforks are out for IE6, people hate it and Websites (especially those run by Google) think the sooner it dies, the better. Even Microsoft wants people to move away from IE6.

IE6’s individual market share has dropped by about 11 points since March, 2009, from 31.4 percent to 20 percent.  Meanwhile, IE8 took almost twice as much share as IE6 lost, it’s up  almost 21 points from almost nothing to 22.4 percent share.  So why did IE show an overall drop?  You can blame poor old IE7, which lost exactly as much as IE8 gained, going from 35.2 percent to 14.5 percent share.

But taken alone, IE8 actually gained more than any other browser during the period (up 20.6 percent), followed by Firefox 3.5 (up 17.1 percent).  Chrome’s 5.2 percent share gain was spread across its Windows and Mac versions.  So IE8 is making stronger gains than you might think from simply looking at the overall IE share numbers.  In fact, in January, it finally surpassed IE6 in market share and is now the largest single browser. As IE6 and IE7 continue to dwindle, IE8 needs to capture as much of those legacy users as it can.  With almost 35 percent share left between them, IE8 will no doubt continue to see rapid individual share growth simply by getting people using older versions of IE to upgrade. It helps that IE8 comes pre-installed with the Windows 7 operating system also.

But those users are also prime targets for Chrome and Firefox (which is still going through its own transition from 3.0 to 3.5).  Chrome, in particular, has the most to gain here.  It only needs another 5 percent to double its market share, whereas IE8 can win over another 20 percent and still see IE’s overall share go down.  It remains an open question where the overall shares will settle when all of this shakes out over the next year or so.

As great as Android phones are getting, there has been one major feature lacking that users have complained about: multi-touch. Yes, some third-party apps have been free to use it on certain devices, but the best Android apps, those made by Google, have all lacked it.

Until now.

With the Android update announced for Nexus One phones today, Google has enabled multi-touch for its Browser, Gallery, and Maps applications. Specifically, they’ve enabled the popular pinch-to-zoom functionality that iPhone users are fond of.

So why did Google wait all this time to implement this obvious feature when its devices have been capable of it since the G1? Well, a report last year (written by me for another publication), cited a source within Google who noted that Apple and Google had a gentleman’s agreement that Android wouldn’t encroach on what Apple believed to be its property, certain multi-touch gestures, like pinch-to-zoom. With Apple and Google now fighting, all bets are apparently off.

Android chief Andy Rubin has said that there was no conspiracy about multi-touch, and suggested the Google apps haven’t implemented it simply because he didn’t like the functionality too much. But given that just about every Android user disagrees with him, that statement seems suspicious, at best. And why the change of heart now? And why does it happen to coincide with a time that Apple and Google are clearly at odds with one another?

While the two used to be just about as close as two companies can be, sharing two board members, one of whom was Google CEO Eric Schmidt, things have turned sour as the two are increasingly competing in various fields. This led to Schmidt resigning from Apple’s board last year, and since then things have gotten more sour. While the whole Google Voice not being allowed onto the iPhone situation was one thing, Steve Jobs reportedly made recent remarks that Google’s Android team was out to destroy the iPhone (as well as other disparaging remarks about Google).

And the battle continues on — those new Chrome OS tablet mock-ups are clearly envisioning multi-touch usage, just like Apple’s new iPad.

Apple and Google also apparently used to have a gentleman’s agreement not to poach each others workers, we reported in August. But again, with the situation between the two deteriorating, that is apparently off now as well.

And Google may have another reason to be okay with implementing multi-touch now: the Palm Pre. Since its launch last year, webOS (the OS that runs on the Pre and other new Palm devices) has allowed for native multi-touch, including pinch-to-zoom. While Apple has made some thinly veiled threatening comments about protecting their IP, they have so far not sought any legal action against Palm for this. Microsoft’s new Zune device uses similar multi-touch functionality too. Maybe Google now believes that Apple is not going pursue legal action against the use of this, despite their many multi-touch patents.

[image: warner brothers pictures]

News Corporation just announced financial results for the second quarter ended December 31, reporting net income of $254 million ($0.10 per share) for the last 3 months of 2009.

That’s compared to a net loss of $6.4 billion ($2.45 per share) in the second quarter a year ago, and solidly beating Wall Street’s expectations.

In the quarter, total revenue increased by 10% to $8.7 billion as a result of double-digit percentage growth at the majority of business segments (Filmed Entertainment, Television, Cable Network Programming, Newspapers and Information Services and Book Publishing) as compared to the same period a year ago, said News Corp.

Zooming in on the ‘Other’ segment, however, things are looking less bright. The Digital Media group, which operates MySpace, IGN Entertainment, as well as the Hulu joint venture with NBC Universal, took a bit of a hit (again).

The company says earnings contributions from the Digital Media Group decreased by $32 million from a year ago, principally due to lower search and advertising revenue. Unfortunately, those numbers aren’t broken out.

News Corp chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch said he was overall pleased with the results:

Our strong top-line revenue growth demonstrates that News Corporation is emerging from this recession with renewed vigor and strength.

Google has just started to deploy an update to the Nexus One that brings a long-desired feature to Android: Multi0touch.  In a blog post announcing the news, Google says that the new update will bring “Pinch-to-zoom functionality” to the Nexus One, which will allow users to pinch-to-zoom in the Android browser, Gallery, and Maps applications.

So does this mean that Multi-touch will be coming to all Android phones? Not quite yet.  A Google spokesperson says that multi-touch support is part of the Android 2.0 framework and that its integrated support on the Browser, gallery, and Maps applications will be part of the next Android update.  However, it will be up to carriers and device manufactures to roll the updated software to these devices.  

The post also says that Nexus Ones will be receiving some other updated apps.  The new version of Google Maps Navigation will include a ‘night mode’ that automatically changes the screen for optimized night time driving.  And Google Goggles, which lets you search with pictures, will now be included in the default set of applications on the phone.  Finally, 3G connectivity has been improved.

You may have to wait a little longer to get your update though — while the over-the-air update will start going out today, Google’s post says some users may not get it until the end of the week.

It’s worth pointing out that Android has actually supported Multitouch for some time — the functionality just hasn’t been implemented on most popular Android devices, like the Droid and Nexus One. Some software add-ons have been circling that enable multitouch in the Android browser, but this is the first time Google has baked the feature in.

Israeli genealogy site MyHeritage has completed its third acquisition,  buying Germany’s OSN. OSN operates seven genealogy sites including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland and Dynastree.com in the US. It was launched in 2007 just after LA-based Geni and, at first, it was just your typical German clone. But it added features and grew fast in older European markets like Germany and Poland, and even emerging markets like Brazil. In a clone-rarity, OSN grew twice as fast as Geni in the early days according to TechCrunch.

The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN’s information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago.

This was a big job because each profile has a lot of bits and pieces attached to it and there was only a 5% overlap in accounts. That may be a sign that MyHeritage wasn’t doing so hot in Europe, proving this was a smart deal.

MyHeritage has an algorithm that helps find family tree connections for users, so it should be interesting to see how this influx of European users expands existing users’ family trees in the coming weeks. “A huge amount of people in North America are going to discover unknown roots,” MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet says.

I visited Japhet the last time I was in Israel  and we chatted about the merger over the weekend. He wouldn’t disclose whether the deal was stock or cash or how much he paid, but it was clear that he was eying OSN for some time. “It was founded by two very talented individuals, and I knew from their track record they were serial entrepreneurs,” he says. “I thought from the start they wouldn’t have the patience to run this for ten years, maybe they’d be willing to merge their vision with ours. Eventually that theory proved correct.”

Japhet is not playing around. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone whose spent time in Israel if I tell you he’s intense, competitive, and relentlessly determined. Post-deal, MyHeritage is far beyond most genealogy competitors with the exception of Ancestry.com, which started in 1983, has spent some $80 million acquiring census information and went public last year.

But there’s a key difference: MyHeritage is more about living family members, and Ancestry.com is more focused on, well, ancestors. So in practice the companies are far different. There’s more interaction, communication, and photo and video sharing on MyHeritage because—bluntly put—more of the profile-owners are alive. Last Saturday when Japhet and I talked, 1 million photos had already been uploaded to the site that day. “There is a clear need for families to have a secure and private place online to share memories, stay in touch and preserve their history,” says Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures and a MyHeritage board member. “I think the further Facebook opens up to the real-time web and defaults to public, the greater this need will become.”

Indeed privacy is a big issue to Japhet, even if it means slower growth. Unlike competing sites, if you chose to be public on MyHeritage, only your information goes public, not the details of your siblings, nieces, nephews and other members of your family tree.

This is less about beating other genealogy sites now and more about MyHeritage making up the third leg of the social networking stool, which is still largely up for grabs. Facebook has won on friends, LinkedIn has won on professional and MyHeritage is seeking to win on family. It took LinkedIn far longer to get to critical mass because professional relationships were less viral and sexy, and my guess is family relationships may take even longer. Indeed, MyHeritage started six years ago and is still largely unknown in the high-brow Valley circles.

But eventually it’s a huge opportunity, and Japhet is patient. His site has those same endorphin-rush elements of discovery and connection that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have. But here’s kicker—it has to be international to work because the US, Israel, and much of the world are essentially young nations with huge immigrant melting pots communities. You can’t trace distant cousins too far back, if you’re only going to focus on the US. And you only get those moments of true “holy-shit!” joy when other trees start connecting to yours and you discover whole new branches. If you’re just entering your known-relatives, it’s not too exciting.

Don’t expect this to be MyHeritage’s last acquisition. Japhet borderline stalks competitors. He can rattle off any stat from Ancestry.com’s public filings and viewed Geni’s 2007 launch as a huge wake up call for better UI and features. Japhet knew a lot about genealogy, but MyHeritage was a wonky, tech-heavy download before Geni’s beautifully simple site launched—and got a whopping $100 million valuation. Later, when Japhet saw OSN’s faster growth in Europe, he knew he had to have them.

Japhet says OSN didn’t have a deep understanding of genealogy, but they killed it on features, many of which MyHeritage will be keeping. Among other things OSN had an iPhone app, operated in 14 different languages, and offered poster printing of family trees in any size. “There’s nothing like German engineering,” Japhet says. [Update: Originally I wrote "40 languages" which is what I heard via our Skype connection.]

Japhet’s favorite feature is the coat of arms. If you don’t have one, you can create your own, and it appears on all your pages—you can even order merchandise bearing your new coat of arms. The site will soon allow you to register it with the coat of arms authorities– a big hit with its European audience.  When designing his own coat of arms, Japhet was a bit put off by the dragons and swords and instead asked an engineer to design some chess pieces. Yep, tech geeks are the same in every country.

Is all of this making MyHeritage a target for someone like Ancestry.com? “I’d like to say we’re too expensive for them,” Japhet said. MyHeritage has raised $24 million to date and started to focus on revenues last year. It’s profitable now, making money through ecommerce transactions and premium services. MyHeritage has been funded by some of the strongest investors in Europe including Index and Accel.

That’s ultimately the thing I find most exciting about Japhet and MyHeritage—he wants to build a billion dollar business, and he’s not put off by how long that will take or by the rap that Israelis are great at enterprise, but bad at the consumer Internet. Japhet himself wasn’t naturally great at it, but he’s benefited mightily from his competitors who were and moved quickly to compensate—whether it’s learning from them or buying them.

It looks like another Delicious key architect is migrating to the new location-based startup BlockChalk. The latest is Josh Whiting, who was formerly a lead engineer at Delicious for three and a half years (he was actually one of the first members of the team before they were acquired by Yahoo,. we’re told) before he left that role to become a senior engineer for Craigslist. Whiting joins former colleague, Stephen Hood, who was the product lead at Delicious before starting BlockChalk with Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design.

Along with his title of co-founder, Whiting will be BlockChalk’s chief engineer. The location space continues to be red hot right now, and BlockChalk has a compelling, yet simple product. It’s a mobile app that lets you adds notes to the real world by pinning them to any location. Hood notes that in the past few weeks alone, they’ve doubled traffic and users, and are now available in 111 countries, 8217 cities, and nearly 13,000 neighborhoods all over the world.

Whiting’s engineering expertise will certainly come in handy, as will the local experience he’s picked up with Craigslist for the past year. You can find the BlockChalk iPhone app here in the App Store. Or simply use the mobile web to use it on Android phones (or the iPhone since it’s HTML5-ready).

Glam Media, a vertical advertising network, has raised its fifth round of venture capital – $50 million from aeris CAPITAL, a Switzerland and Silicon Valley based private equity fund. The company is not disclosing the valuation of the round, but it is rumored to be around $750 million.

Glam’s last major funding was a $85 million combined debt and equity round in early 2008, two years ago, that valued the company at around $500 million.

$10 million – $15 million of this new round will be used to purchase stock from existing employees/founders as well as early venture investors. The rest of the round will be used for investment in the business and strategic acquisitions.

Glam is also announcing EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. 2009 revenue was likely around $55 million, up from $40 million in 2008.

The company attracts nearly 160 million unique monthly worldwide visitors to the sites it controls and represents, putting it at no. 14 on Comscore’s top 100 worldwide Internet properties. Those visitors racked up over 2.5 billion page views and 2.5 billion minutes spent on the site. The network includes over 1,400 publishers and other content sites.

Glam attracts around 72 million montly U.S. visitors to its site, more than double competitor iVillage’s 33 million. The company, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, is clearly gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.

Larry Cheng, Managing Partner at Volition Capital recently put together a list of the top VC blogs according to traffic. On that list, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and Paul Graham of Y Combinator. But which VC firm Websites attract the most attention?  Today, Cheng released another list.  This time, he ranked technology VC firms by traffic to their websites during the fourth quarter of 2009 (as measured by Compete).

Topping the list is First Round Capital, with 31,632 average monthly uniques. Sequoia Capital, which sports a very spare look on its site with only a searchbox and four faint links underneath (“U.S.,” “Very Early,” “Early,” and “Growth”), has the second-most popular site with 22,441 average monthly uniques.  Rounding out third place is Bessemer Venture Partners with 14,825 average monthly uniques. In order to make the list, the firm’s website had to have monthly unique data from Compete for October, November, and December 2009. Volition Capital averaged the traffic and ranked 150 VC firm sites. Of course, the traffic stats are just one benchmark of popularity, but Cheng did say he will be updating the list quarterly.

These are tiny numbers as far as most Websites go, but these are not consumer-oriented sites. The people who go to the sites are prospective startup founders, partners, and people looking for information on VC portfolio companies. Still, it’s interesting to see that First Round took the top spot; perhaps because its VCs are heavy bloggers. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between blogging and traffic to the related VC website VC and seed firms with investors who blog heavily, such as Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Foundry Group, Union Square, and Spark, all have top 25 websites.

Here’s the list of the top ten:

Venture Capital Firm Directory (Avg. Monthly Uniques – Q409)

1. First Round Capital (31,632)
2. Sequoia Capital (22,441)
3. Bessemer Venture Partners (14,825)
4. Highland Capital Partners (12,704)
5. Garage Technology Ventures (12,375)
6. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (11,823)
7. New Enterprise Associates (11,762)
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (10,924)
9. Polaris Venture Partners (10,217)
10. Benchmark Capital (10,162)

French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.

The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million).

Gameloft withdrew from boxed games in January 2009, and says mobile games accounted for 94% of the company’s sales for the whole year. The remaining 6% are related to consoles game sales.

Full-year revenues from the mobile game segment grew by 12%, self-reportedly due to the success of the games the company distributes through Apple’s App Store. To demonstrate its growing importance for the company, you need only look at revenue figures for the fourth quarter of 2009: iPhone revenues for the company reached €7 million ($9.75 million), while initial expectations were €4.4 million.

Total Q4 2009 sales reached €31.8 million ($44.5 million), which means revenues from the App Store are currently about 22% of the company’s total revenue.

Last week, Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot was quoted as saying that he regards the iPad as massive new opportunity for game developers, and to ’stay tuned’ for upcoming announcements on iPad-specific video games.

Gameloft was founded by the Guillemot brothers, founders and owners of video games leader Ubisoft, and has partnership agreements with carriers, handset manufacturers, specialized distributors in over 100 countries. The company employs some 3,500 developers around the world. For a comprehensive list of games developed by Gameloft, head on over to their Wikipedia profile.

Brand marketers trying to figure out how to tap into social influencers online might want to pay attention to an experiment going on at AdaptiveBlue’s GetGlue. Glue is a social browsing assistant that shows ratings and recommendations of movies, books, restaurants, stocks, and other things as you surf the Web (via a browser plug-in). Members who rate and comment the most in any given category are named Gurus. These are the most active, opinionated people on the service.

Glue is going to be rewarding its Gurus with free giveaways for movies and book from promotional partners including Universal, Random House, Hachette, Harcourt, Farrar, Wiley, and Harper Collins. Some of the initial giveaways include free tickets to the movie The Wolfman or free copies of books such as Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! (as if that needed any more social-media promotion).

The media companies get their movies and books seen by known influencers, who are likely to rate, comment, and talk about the products. And Glue gets a way to reward and encourage active users with free books and movie tickets. Targeting giveaways to online influencers is smart. Typically, these giveaways involve 10 books or tickets. The unanswered question is how many downstream purchases will these gurus influence.

Glue is still a small service with a few hundred thousand active users, but tens of thousands of those are Gurus of one sort or another. Using semantic technology, Glue can show related products and media across categories. So if you are a Guru in Horror, that might be because you rated the movie “The Ring” or the last Stephen King novel. In the same way, Glue can broaden the pool of Gurus eligible for a giveaway by including related categories. This way the brands still get to target people who influence the types of products they are pushing, but can expand that to related areas. For instance, someone who rates a lot of Stephen King novels would be a good person to give a Wolfman ticket, even if that person hasn’t rated any horror movies yet.

Targeting influencers is a well-worn strategy in brand marketing, but with online services like Glue it is becoming easier to figure out who are those influencers. The key, of course, is to make sure the giveaways are desirable enough to act as an incentive, not just the books and movies that need an extra push.

This morning, Twitter started locking out a subset of users of their accounts, sending them e-mails asking them to change their passwords in order to regain access to the service. The e-mail said those measures were taken due to concerns that their accounts may have been compromised in a phishing attack, and hinted at a third-party service being at fault.

We asked Twitter for more information about the attack, and this is the response that they just gave us:

As part of Twitter’s ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite. In one case, a number of accounts posted updates indicative of giving their username and password to untrusted third parties. While we’re still investigating and ensuring that the appropriate parties are notified, we do believe that the steps we’ve taken should ensure user safety.

Asked how many users were affected, Twitter declined to share details but said the number is ‘very small’. Twitter also said its response is for issues seen from last Wednesday on.

Update: asked if Nutshellmail has something to do with this, which has been suggested on other blogs, Twitter says it has not. The company instead referred to multiple “get followers fast” schemes causing trouble for some users.

Twitter promises to continue to provide updates and encourages users to read the help pages on what to do if their account is compromised.

Note that Twitter has yet to communicate the whole ordeal on its company blog and/or status website, although the account @safety acknowledges the attack and refers to its security measures as a ‘precautionary step’.

We’ll keep you posted as we try and obtain more information about these attacks.

If you’ve been reading MobileCrunch lately (as you most certainly should be), you might have noticed a new name floating around the bylines. I thought we’d give him a day or two to get his feet wet before we made it official – but with that out of the way, we’re really proud to announce that Marc Flores has joined the TechCrunch family. I’ll let Marc take it from here, but be sure to drop a comment and bombard his inbox with warm welcomes. – Greg

I begged and pleaded with Greg, editor of MobileCrunch, not to make me write this, but it looks like I’m stuck introducing myself to you all. So in my best Troy McClure voice let me say: Hi, my name is Marc Flores. You might remember me from such popular sites as Boy Genius Report or True/Slant.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Adobe’s Flash technology has been taking a beating lately. Apple still won’t support it on its upcoming iPad or its iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it buggy and crash-prone and dismisses Adobe as being lazy. Adobe is trying to fight the negative vibes emanating from Cupertino and elsewhere. It has already pointed out that it will be easy to convert Flash apps into iPad apps, and now CTO Kevin Lynch is weighing in to defend Flash.

In a blog post today, Lynch addresses the two major threats to Flash: Apple’s refusal to support it on mobile touchscreen devices and the rise of HTML5 as a new, open standard which may one day replace Flash. On Apple, Lynch says Adobe is ready and able to put Flash on the iPhone, the iPad or anything else Apple can throw its way. But, as has been the case for more than a year, the ball is in Apple’s court:

We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.

Lynch points out that the next version of Flash for smartphones, 10.1, is about to become available and that practically all other smartphones will support it, including Android, Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm Pre. If they can handle it, why can’t an iPhone?

But the bigger long-term threat to Flash is HTML5, especially for rendering video. Lynch says that 75 percent of video on the Web currently is shown in a Flash player. That number could decline if HTML5 video starts to take off. Google (via YouTube, Chrome, and other products) and others are pushing HTML5 hard. Lynch tries to pretend that HTML5 is not a threat, saying in the same breadth that Adobe supports HTML5, but its incompatibilities across browsers spells doom for the Web. He writes:

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

HTML5 is still a young technology, and those incompatibility issues can be solved over time. Flash is still a more capable technology when it comes to rendering video, but HTML5 is advancing faster and as a native Web standard it has many other advantages which may help it win over time.

Adobe is in a battle for developers, who buy its Creative Suite software to make Flash apps. As long as Flash is the de facto standard for video and animation on the Web, those sales will not be threatened. But if Flash developers migrate to other technologies to build better apps for the Web and mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, Adobe’s competitive position will be weakened. It will defend Flash to the death.

Photo credit: Flickr/Bill Tyne.

Some VCs are getting an early Valentine’s Day gift fromTheFunded, the site where CEOs rate venture capitalists and their firms. Below you will find the top-ranked individual VCs, as determined by their ratings in 2009. What makes this ranking particularly useful to entrepreneurs is that it is ratings by other CEOs, often CEOs who have had direct dealings with the VCs they are rating.

While this is still a popularity contest of sorts (for instance, the rankings are not based on individual investment returns), presumably CEOs are smart enough to take investment performance into account. But they also take into account their own personal experiences with the individual VCs.  These are the VCs who CEOs love the most, and not just because they are nice but because they help CEOs do their jobs, which is to build great businesses.  Topping the list is Terry McGuire, co-Founder of Polaris Ventures and a big life sciences investor. Mark Suster of GRP Partners is No. 2.  David Sze of Greylock comes in at No. 7.  Brook H. Byers of  Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is No. 10.  Kleiner’s star investor John Doerr is No.11  Michael Moritz from Sequoia is No. 32..

Anyone who is on this list is well-liked and respected by CEOs.   A total of 84 individual VCs (and some angel investors) made the cut out of 17,834 investment pros listed in TheFunded’s directory. To get on the list, each VC had to have at least an average rating of 4 out of 5 and have at least five separate reviews from CEO members of the Funded. (There are 13,480 CEO members). No more than one of the five ratings can be negative (a score of 3 or less).  Other VC that made the list include Howard Morgan (No. 28) and Josh Kopelman (No. 39) of First Round Capital, Bill Tai (No. 29) and George Zachary (no. 64) of Charles River Ventures, Roelof Botha of Sequoia (No. 50), Fred Wilson (No. 60) of Union Square Ventures, and angels Mike Maples, Jr. (No. 43)  and Ron Conway (No. 61).

You can compare this list to the most active VC firms of 2009 to get a sense of the overlap between these rankings and which firms are doing the most deals.  Some other insights that TheFunded shared with us: there was a lot of turnover in VC firms in 2009.  When TheFunded sent emails to all the investment pros in its directory, 38 percent either bounced back or replied with an automated message saying they’ve left their firms.  None of those people are on this list.  And about one or two firms a week became inactive, or 9 percent of the 4,005 firms listed in its directory.

TheFunded.com is offering two free tickets to the Future of Funding event on February 18th in San Mateo, where many of the top-ranked venture capitalists will be attending an awards ceremony. The tickets will go to the two best comments about the state of venture capital (as determined by us or TheFunded’s Adeo Ressi).

Top-Ranked VCs by TheFunded

1. Terrance G. McGuire, Managing General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, rated 5 by 5 CEOs
2. Mark Suster, Partner at GRP Partners, rated 4.8571 by 7 CEOs
3. Andy Fillat, Managing Member at Leapfrog Ventures, rated 4.8333 by 6 CEOs
4. Dan Rua, Managing Partner at Inflexion Partners, rated 4.8 by 5 CEOs
5. Paul H. Klingenstein, Managing Partner at Aberdare Ventures, rated 4.6667 by 9 CEOs
6. Stuart Ellman, Managing Partner at RRE Ventures, rated 4.6667 by 6 CEOs
7. David Sze, Partner at Greylock Partners, rated 4.6429 by 14 CEOs
8. Ross A. Jaffe, Managing Director at Versant Ventures, rated 4.6364 by 11 CEOs
9. Steven D. Arnold, Managing General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, rated 4.625 by 8 CEOs
10. Brook H. Byers, Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, rated 4.6 by 10 CEOs
11. John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, rated 4.5714 by 14 CEOs
12. Philip Gianos, General Partner at InterWest Partners, rated 4.5714 by 7 CEOs
13. James D. Robinson III, General Partner at RRE Ventures, rated 4.5556 by 9 CEOs
14. Richard W. Levandov, General Partner at Masthead Venture Partners, rated 4.5455 by 11 CEOs
15. Phil Black, General Partner at True Ventures, rated 4.5 by 12 CEOs
16. Andreas Stavropoulos, Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, rated 4.5 by 6 CEOs
17. Jed Katz, Managing Director at Javelin Venture Partners, rated 4.4737 by 19 CEOs
18. William J. Link, Managing Director at Versant Ventures, rated 4.4444 by 9 CEOs
19. Jon Callaghan, General Partner at True Ventures, rated 4.4167 by 12 CEOs
20. Joerg Ueberla, General Partner at Wellington Partners, rated 4.4 by 5 CEOs
21. Tom Bogan, Partner at Greylock Partners, rated 4.4 by 5 CEOs
22. Maria Cirino, Managing Director at 406 Ventures, rated 4.4 by 5 CEOs
23. Mark S. Menell, Partner at Rustic Canyon Ventures, rated 4.3333 by 12 CEOs
24. Doug Pepper, General Partner at InterWest Partners, rated 4.3333 by 9 CEOs
25. Michael T. Fitzgerald, General Partner at Commonwealth Capital Ventures, rated 4.3333 by 9 CEOs
26. Bijan Salehizadeh, M.D., General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, rated 4.3333 by 9 CEOs
27. Nicolas El Baze, Partner at Partech International, rated 4.3333 by 6 CEOs
28. Howard Morgan, Partner at First Round Capital, rated 4.3077 by 13 CEOs
29. Bill Tai, Partner at Charles River Ventures, rated 4.2857 by 14 CEOs
30. David Ladd, Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, rated 4.2857 by 7 CEOs
31. Frank Boehnke, General Partner at Wellington Partners, rated 4.2857 by 7 CEOs
32. Michael Moritz, Partner at Sequoia Capital, rated 4.2778 by 18 CEOs
33. Peter Sinclair, Managing Member at Leapfrog Ventures, rated 4.2727 by 11 CEOs
34. Donald B. Milder, Managing Director at Versant Ventures, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
35. John Burke, General Partner at True Ventures, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
36. Bill Kaiser, Partner at Greylock Partners, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
37. Bill Elmore, General Partner at Foundation Capital, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
38. Mark Hatfield, Partner at Fairhaven Capital, rated 4.2222 by 9 CEOs
39. Joshua Kopelman, Managing Partner at First Round Capital, rated 4.2 by 30 CEOs
40. Lon H.H. Chow, General Partner at Apex Venture Partners, rated 4.2 by 5 CEOs
41. Dave Fachetti, Managing Director at Globespan Capital Partners, rated 4.2 by 5 CEOs
42. Edward L. Cahill, Partner at HLM Venture Partners, rated 4.2 by 5 CEOs
43. Mike Maples Jr., General Partner at Maples Investments, rated 4.1818 by 22 CEOs
44. David Stern, Venture Partner at Clearstone Venture Partners, rated 4.1818 by 11 CEOs
45. Curtis Feeny, Managing Director at Voyager Capital, rated 4.1667 by 12 CEOs
46. John W. Jarve, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
47. Shawn T. Carolan, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
48. Bob Spinner, Managing Director at Sigma Partners, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
49. Stuart MacFarlane, Managing Director at Momentum Venture Management, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
50. Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia Capital, rated 4.1538 by 26 CEOs
51. Anthony P. Lee, General Partner at Altos Ventures, rated 4.1538 by 13 CEOs
52. William D. Porteous, General Partner at RRE Ventures, rated 4.1538 by 13 CEOs
53. Michael Kim, Partner at Rustic Canyon Ventures, rated 4.1538 by 13 CEOs
54. Brent Ahrens, General Partner at Canaan Partners, rated 4.1429 by 7 CEOs
55. Eric Wiesen, Principal at RRE Ventures, rated 4.1429 by 7 CEOs
56. Alex Mendez, General Partner at Storm Ventures, Inc., rated 4.125 by 8 CEOs
57. Richard A. D’Amore, General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, rated 4.125 by 8 CEOs
58. Jonathan Ebinger, Partner at BlueRun Ventures, rated 4.1111 by 9 CEOs
59. Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, rated 4.1 by 10 CEOs
60. Fred Wilson, Partner at Union Square Ventures, rated 4.0952 by 21 CEOs
61. Ron Conway, General Partner at SV Angel, rated 4.0909 by 11 CEOs
62. Hodong Nam, General Partner at Altos Ventures, rated 4.0833 by 12 CEOs
63. Gilman Louie, Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, rated 4.0769 by 13 CEOs
64. George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures, rated 4 by 16 CEOs
65. Paul Maeder, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, rated 4 by 9 CEOs
66. Warren J. Packard, Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, rated 4 by 9 CEOs
67. Bryan Schreier, Partner at Sequoia Capital, rated 4 by 9 CEOs
68. Brian Pokomy, Associate at SV Angel, rated 4 by 8 CEOs
69. Byron Deeter, Venture Principal at Bessemer Venture Partners, rated 4 by 8 CEOs
70. Kevin Spain, Principal at Emergence Capital Partners, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
71. Thatcher Bell, Principle at Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
72. Kirk Holland, General Partner at Vista Ventures, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
73. Jonathan Seelig, Managing Director at Globespan Capital Partners, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
74. Andrew L. Zalasin, General Partner/CFO at RRE Ventures, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
75. Bruce K. Taragin, Partner at Blumberg Capital, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
76. Frederick J. Dotzler, Managing Director at De Novo Ventures, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
77. Max Niederhofer, Associate at Atlas Venture, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
78. Gil Dibner, Principal at Genesis Partners, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
79. Ryan Ziegler, Investment Manager at Edison Venture Fund, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
80. Bob Pavey, General Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
81. Philippe Herbert, Partner at Banexi Ventures Partners, rated 4 by 5 CEOs
82. Eric Hjerpe, Partner at Atlas Venture, rated 4 by 5 CEOs
83. Angelo J. Santinelli, General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, rated 4 by 5 CEOs
84. David Min, Principal at Steamboat Ventures, rated 4 by 5 CEOs

Photo credit: Flickr/le vent le cri

Scanbuy, a New York-based provider of mobile barcode solutions, has received a capital injection in a round led by Motorola Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners, Hudson Ventures and private investors. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Scanbuy’s ScanLife platform provides a way for advertisers to provide digital information to consumers through the use of 2D barcodes and camera phones. That way, advertisers are able to provide consumers with access to information like product reviews, price comparisons and coupon offers simply by having them scan two-dimensional codes placed on product packaging, a magazine ad or other media. Scanlife can scan traditional UPC barcodes as well as popular 2D barcode formats like Datamatrix and QR Codes.

According to a statement released by lead investor Motorola Ventures, ‘millions’ of people have used ScanLife on a range of mobile devices running Android, BlackBerry OS, iPhone OS, Java and Symbian to date. Scanbuy also claims to have the largest and oldest patent portfolio of any company in the industry, with over 30 patents granted covering the solution.

Noteworthy: Scanbuy’s chief executive is Jonathan Bulkeley, previously CEO of barnesandnoble.com and prior Managing Director of AOL’s joint venture with Bertelsmann Online in the U.K., and AOL’s Vice President of Business Development in the United States.

This investment follows Motorola Ventures’ backing of Zephyr Technology Corporation, which dates back to June 2009.

This is the story of Time To Know, an enigmatic Israeli startup that has somehow managed to remain under the radar of Israel’s tightly knit startup scene. What makes this feat wondrous is not only because of the daunting challenge the company has chosen to meet, but that it has quietly ramped to 350 employees and no less than $60M in funding—all without attracting attention.

Time To Know is the realization of a single man’s vision to un-root teaching methodologies from their 19th century origins and thrust them into the 21st century. The entrepreneur is Shmuel Meitar, co-founder of Israeli hi-tech posterchild Amdocs. To appreciate Meitar’s commitment, consider this: He is TimeToKnow’s sole investor. That’s right, the $60M the company has taken in funding all came out of his pocket.

The basic thesis Time To Know is operating under is that today’s current classroom is following a teaching paradigm designed in the industrial age, i.e., a teacher standing in front of a class, a blackboard on the wall and students at their desks. Think of it this way… Imagine time warping a teacher from the 1800’s and implanting her in a classroom in 2010. She could basically hit the ground running with little to no adjustment in teaching style. Quite scary when you think about it.

Time To Know believes there are three main reasons why today’s classroom is ineffective: First, relevancy—or rather, irrelevancy. Kids are living in a digital world with a tremendous amount of stimulus. Expecting them to happily and effectively embrace ‘passive learning’ that requires them to just sit, listen and provide output in exams is simply unrealistic. Second, variance. There no such thing as a homogeneous level of learning and comprehension in a classroom of students. Third, assessment—aka, the feedback loop. In today’s classroom a student could have gotten lost with the material three weeks back, but the teacher would be oblivious to it.

Contrary to partial solutions such as computerized tutorials, or digital whiteboards, Time To Know set out to create a holistic solution designed to migrate from instructional to Constructivist Learning in which learning and knowledge are experience driven.

Due to the nature of the work environment (the classroom), and the content (curriculum), Time To Know has set certain infrastructure and operational prerequisites schools must commit to. These are:

Infrastructure: Every student must be allotted a laptop or netbook with a headset. No more than one student per machine. Every classroom must also be equipped with a laptop for the teacher that is connected to a projector. A WiFi Internet connection is another prerequisite. Ethernet will not do as it restricts inner-class mobility.

Support & Professional Services: Schools committing to Time To Know’s curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after.

Schools must also commit to provide their teachers with training and support. This sounds obvious, but if mis-handled it could be the Achilles heal of the entire initiative. These services can be provided by Time To Know itself or by a third party.

For all intent and purpose, Time To Know is a software company whose management application, applets and content, all reside on the cloud and are accessible via web browser. There are two main components to the system:

Learning Management System: This is the teacher’s command center, a management application that allows the teacher to review each student’s progress, view trends in the class’ performance, as well as plan for the next day’s lessons.

It also allows teachers to customize learning sequences, assign assessments to students, and create reports of student progress. As each student uses a laptop during class, the teacher can monitor individual progress and communicate with each student unobtrusively.

The application is quite robust, so here are just a few of its many features:

• Alert Management: Real-time notifications of student progress that alerts teachers on students that require extra attention and assistance.
• Content Preview & Simulation: Teachers are able to run through lessons at home, allowing them to review lesson plans ahead of class time.

  Once the teacher runs through the lesson in the classroom, the system begins to record data such as what learning activities were used, student achievement, etc.

• Gallery: Students can submit their work to the shared Gallery area for peer review and class discussion. Teachers can divide students into groups with unique assignments, and then have the groups share and discuss their work in the Gallery. They can also promote collaboration and peer review by encouraging students to write comments on peer and group projects in the Gallery. These can be performed as part of the lesson, or afterward.
• Administration: Teachers, principals and superintendents can generate various reports to monitor class progress (standard coverage for instance) and achievements (grades). The system allows data analysis, graphing and reporting. The system also comes with an administration component for control of all the technical elements.

The Curriculum: Time To Know designs and produces what it calls ‘full digital curriculum coverage,’ which is a complete year’s worth of lesson plans, learning activities, and homework assignments. To grasp just what an immense undertaking this is, multiply these by the four subjects matters Time To Know targets—math, science, language arts and social studies—and now multiply that by 13 year’s worth of education (kindergarten plus 12 formal years of schooling). To put this into perspective, in a single year Time To Know produces animation with a combined length of one and a half feature films.

The challenge is daunting not only because of the sheer amount of content that requires to be designed and produced, but also because the curriculum has to fulfill alignment to state and country standards. This means that curriculum which received approval in Texas will require tweaking for approval in New York. This explains why Time To Know employees a team of 350 consisting of 120 pedagogy and instructional designers (aka teachers), 60 graphics artists, illustrators and animators and 80 technologists.

To date, Time To Know has produced yearly curriculums for Israeli schools in the subjects of Hebrew, English and math for 4th, 5th and 6th grades. For American schools, it’s produced yearly curriculums for 4th and 5th grades in the subjects of math and language arts. By July 2011, curriculums will be expanded to include grades 3 and 6, with curriculums for science added across all four grades.

The curriculum combines ‘blended learning’ materials, from movies, to on-screen tutorials, to on-paper exercises. Take for example, 4th grade math aligned to Texas state standards. There are 81 lesson segments, each 120 minutes long. The lesson segments provide a complete coverage and preparation for standardized testing. Lesson segments include:

• Learning activities based on interactions with Rich Exploration Applets (more on these below). These activities include group, teacher-led, and individual work.
• Instructional games that directly relate to the concepts taught in the segments.
• Guided discussions to help teachers motivate and summarize lesson segment concepts.
• Instructional video clips used to introduce, elaborate, or reinforce lesson segment concepts.
• Review activities that help prepare students for benchmarks and standardize testing.

Teachers do have flexibility and can mix and match lesson plan modules and exercises. There’s also the ability to add external items such as videos from YouTube for example, or links to sites on the Web. Time To Know discovered from its pilots that American teachers stuck to the structured curriculum, while Israeli teachers took advantage of the flexibility at their disposal and enriched the curriculum with external materials.

The curriculum is presented to and interacted with by the students through ‘Rich Exploration Applets’. These provide guided learning sequences intended to facilitate the development of cognitive learning skills in a sequential and spiraled manner. The purpose of the applets is to motivate students to explore, experiment, discover, and discuss the concepts presented under each subject. Doing so allows students to form deeper understandings of these concepts and how they can be extended and adapted to new situations.

The Geoboard Applet for example (thumbnail on right) is designed to encourage students perform constructive problem solving. It has four areas: The first is the Work Grid in which the student can manipulate different objects, draw lines and polygons, write text, and measure objects. The second area is the Toolbox, which contains different tools for mathematical expressions, drawing, coloring, measuring and entering text. The third area is a collection of visual objects to be placed on the grid. The fourth area is the External Atoms Zone where the student receives instructions and answers different questions regarding his/her conclusions. The atoms, containing the questions and directions, are gradually exposed to coincide with progresses.

If this isn’t compelling enough, the system is also adaptive. A component called PAL, which stands for ‘Practice and Learning’, maps each student’s knowledge in response to answers given in the subjects of math and language arts. As a result, a practice path is then built on the fly to address the student’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

Students also have home remote access so they can go over materials that were taught in the classroom, do homework, or review and comment on items in the Galleries.

Time To Know has been running pilots in four schools in Texas and ten schools in Israel. The expectation for the 2010/2011 school year is for fifteen pilots in the US and around 50 in Israel.

The feedback collected from teachers is quite interesting: 86% reported an increase in instructional time. There was also a decrease in discipline and an increase in individual assistance during class time. Teachers also reported an increased sense of empowerment to guide and support the learning process.

Feedback collected from students showed that they perceived the new learning methodologies as fun and relevant. There was also an increase in motivation and positive attitude to subjects taught. Put differently, the kids started enjoying math(!)

Another dimension was brought from Israel’s Ministry of Finance and Bank of Israel, which both see TimeToKnow’s approach as being able to ultimately increase the GDP.

“LaAsot Kavod LaMedina” is an Israeli expression that sums-up Time To Know’s story. It translates roughly to “to bring national pride” and it’s used to express “bravo, I’m proud to be an Israeli because of ________”. Rarely, if at all, is it used in the context of a startup. In the case of Time To Know though, it fits hand to glove. Respect.

T2K: a Paradigm Shift in K-12 Education from Time To Know on Vimeo.

With the proliferation of mobile app directories on the web, it comes of no surprise that many are beginning to acquire each other and merge their content. Today Appolicious, a comprehensive iPhone and Android app directory with a social twist, is acquiring AppVee, a startup that provides in-depth and comprehensive video reviews of iPhone and Android applications on AppVee.com and AndroidApps.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AppVee was one of the pioneers in the mobile app directory space, and was launched in 2008, shortly after the launch of the iTunes App Store. While AppVee has extensive coverage of iPhone apps, the site’s Android app reviews are also comprehensive. As part of the acquisition AppVee reviewers will continue to write for both sites in addition to Appolicious. The sites will maintain their original style, but Appolicious will add more social benefits, such as the ability for users to create profiles, curate their own list of top apps, import their app libraries, and more.

Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter. The site also recently added the ability to create curated lists of apps.

Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Android, Blackberry and other smartphone apps, which will certainly be accomplished party through the acquisition of AppVee. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007.

Spotify is no longer invitiation-only in France. The streaming music startup now lets anyone register, but for some reason – probably to make sure you actually live in France – they’ll allow you to register only by verifying your phone number first.

The company says it’s now because they are sure they can “maintain the quality of service for many users.”

Despite scepticism from TechCrunch that Spotify is going to have a tough time launching in the US, it seems to be on its way to rolling out across Europe, at least.

They blogged (Google translation) today that:

Like many people, I have the Stanza app installed on my iPhone. Made by Lexycle (acquired by Amazon last year), Stanza is a free app for iPhone and iPod Touch that serves as a gateway to a library of more than 100,000 ebooks for easy reading on the go.

Last night, I was prompted to update the app to a new version (2.1), and as usual I checked what the changes were. The accompanying message was pretty brief: ‘Removed the ability to share books via USB’.

I thought it was an odd update but didn’t think much about it, and since I didn’t actually use that feature simply downloaded and installed the new version.

Just for your reference: the feature enabled users to transfer books in the ePub or eReader format to their mobile devices using a USB cable.

This morning, we got some tips from people who were angry or surprised about Lexcycle removing the USB sharing feature from the Stanza app. I looked up the app in the iTunes Store and saw that the update notice now read ‘Removed the ability to share books via USB as required by Apple’. A glance at the forums on the Lexcycle website revealed that users were quite upset about the removal of the app, with only some suggesting that Apple may have had something to do with it and offering explanations why they would have demanded it.

I asked Lexcycle if and why Apple had requested the removal of the feature from the iPhone app via e-mail and swiftly received a short response, saying that Apple had indeed demanded that Lexcycle remove the feature from Stanza. I requested more information but was subsequently told by Lexcycle was strictly ‘forbidden from discussing the specifics of our conversations with Apple on this matter’.

I’m sure Apple has good reasons to prevent people from being able to transfer files to iPhone and iPod Touch devices using a USB cable, and I believe this isn’t the first time they’ve asked developers of apps with this or similar features to remove them for new users. That said, I’m not 100% certain which rules were broken here, and since Apple requested Lexcycle not to discuss specifics we’re left guessing why Cupertino had an issue with the USB syncing features.

Update:

Chris Devor of myPod Apps, which built the iPhone Explorer program Stanza used for USB file transfer, told the LA Times:

From an iPhone app development standpoint, you get access to two directories: (1) your app’s sandbox folder and (2) the DCIM directory for access to pictures and such. On a non-jailbroken iPhone, iPhone Explorer can access the DCIM directory, but not the apps sandbox. So we made a subfolder in the DCIM directory a common ground or shared folder for the two programs.

At the time we began doing this we figured that we were in the iPhone app development “gray zone” and this was something that Apple hadn’t officially made a stance upon. Once Good Reader topped the charts around the world, it drew a bunch of attention from people and Apple figured we were up to no good. After a series of e-mails back and forth between the iPhone app developers and an Apple correspondent, the conclusion was as follows:

(1) the iPhone apps must remove access to the DCIM directory (Apple claims this is in violation of the iPhone App Developer Agreement)
(2) the developers should not blame (point the finger at) Apple for being forced to remove access to the folder (hence the lack of explanation from Stanza).

Apple’s Michael Jurewitz also weighed in on Twitter, saying: “Simple point of fact — there are no public APIs for an iPhone app to sync via the USB cable”. He lated added that people are free to file an enhancement request. (Via MacWorld)

Naturally, this event adds fuel to the fire for the many observers claiming Apple is far too controlling, and it also seems rather suspicious that they’re targeting an Amazon company in light of the increased competition between the corporations in the ereader/ebook field. But in my mind, this is a small, non-essential feature they took away, and not updating the app to the new version preserves the USB sharing feature for those who deem it to be important enough to raise hell over anyway.

Do you think Apple is going too far in placing constraints on iPhone applications, or do you think they’re well within their right to exercise as much control over the whole process as they do? The comment section is all yours.

On the heels of the surprising news that Nokia’s Ovi Store delivers one million downloads per day, mobile ad network Greystripe is announcing support for Nokia’s very own app store. Although Greystripe supported Java downloads before, this is the first time they will be supporting Java apps in the Ovi store.

The Ovi Store is the centralized application shop for programs fit for Nokia devices that the Finnish mobile device giant launched in May 2009. Greystripe offers rich media ads through its ad network, and has seen considerable success with its iPhone platform, and recently launched support for Android to ride the tidal wave of growth for the device. Greystripe maintains that its rich media full-screen ads generate higher click through rates and are able to generate better revenue to its publishers.

Greystripe has created an automated self service web-based portal for developers to ad enable their Java/Symbian apps. Developers can upload all of their fully developed mobile app ports, while the ad client is automatically merged with their application. Greystripe’s ad network will display pre- and post-roll full-screen ads within the app. Currently, Greystripe supports over 1,400 Java handset models, in addition to iPhone and Android. Greystripe will also migrate 1,200 Java titles on its consumer mobile gaming store GameJump into the Ovi App Store.

Greystripe has continues to make its ad offerings more appealing and attractive to both developers and advertisers by extending support to various devices and even launching a guaranteed CPM program. The company also partnered with Tribal Fusion to enable online ads to fit on iPhones.

It’s unclear how Google’s acquisition of AdMob and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless will effect the other ad networks in the space. If anything, these networks will now have to compete with two of the largest companies in the world. But Greystripe, which recently received a $2 million infusion from NBC, is wise to continue to innovate and expand its reach and should be able to hold its own.