If you’ve been following the whole Sam Sethi/TechCrunch lawsuit debacle (see here and here and here), you’ll want to read this post by Paul Carr as well, where he prints emails from Sethi sent on record. I’m also reprinting below, these things have a tendency to disappear when lawsuits strike: An open letter to Sam Sethi, on [...]

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Just back from Foo Camp 2009. You don’t see a ton of stuff on the Internet about Foo because it’s mostly off record. Here are my notes From Foo Camp 2008. This year I decided to do something a little different and created an Animoto show with their new video product. Cool stuff. CrunchBase Information Animoto Information provided [...]

Update to our June post on the…absurd…Sam Sethi litigation. Our lawyers sent a letter letting them know that we have no intention of submitting the the jurisdiction of the UK courts, although we’d be happy to litigate his claims here in California. Sethi obtained a default judgment on July 30 and is now messaging people [...]

Many of you know all about Sam Sethi, the former TechCrunch writer who left after a disagreement and then went on to create BlogNation. Two days ago Sethi filed a lawsuit against us for libel and other issues. As we always do, we’re posting the litigation threats and will continue to fight the litigation [...]

The ETA may or may not have a legitimate goal in demanding Basque independence, but bombing a building full of journalists is no way to win karma points or influence people.

Lian Li ?spider? case seen creeping around Taiwan Heat powered arcade mugs The red TomTom EASE is probably meant to be a Valentine?s Day gift because it?s red

It's crazy how the slightest little hint of something starts all the rampant speculation about Apple's product development. This is the third clue that the next generation of iPad will have a camera, if not video capability. It certainly explains the stuff that was found in the SDK.

YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. ?It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since?most YouTube videos are so short. ?But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites. According to comScore's 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. ?What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. ?Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams.?So there is hope yet for niche video producers.

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process. Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. BlueKiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.

You might want to sit down for this one. Are you ready? Saving Private Ryan is coming to Blu-ray. Yep, the 1998 Academy award-winning movie is finally coming to Blu-ray on May 4th. Expect the ad machine to fire up some time in April, since you're going to want to buy another version of this movie as well, right?

It actually took longer than I would have expected for someone to come up with a good mocking of Google's "Parisian Love" commercial that played during the Super Bowl yesterday. But today brings us just that. The video comes compliments of the Upright Citizens Brigade Beta Team "The Brig." They've named their video "Parisian Oops" and have given it the tagline, "Romance, Consequences, Awkwardness. Search on." Watch it below.

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions. Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads) Here's the full ranking:

For quite a while now, I’ve been following the progress of the Pandora, an open-source handheld for music, movies, and games. It’s hard to stay excited, though, when there’s the constant threat of the thing ceasing to exist. That seemed to be a risk for a while, but now we’re being told that all the [...]

Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google's carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it's launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you'll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google's standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products.

Got a Kindle? Get thee to the British Library! Not only are they giving away a ton of old 19th-century literature in e-book form, but they're a special "first edition" e-book with the original typeface and illustrations baked in. The 1800s encompass nearly all of my favorite literature, so this is actually making me want a Kindle pretty bad right now. Original typefaces! O lawd!

Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn't have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it's not the same. And while they still haven't added comments, tonight they've temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies. While it doesn't appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they're going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it's a photo comment.

We're big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song 'I've Got Mail and I've Got it Made,' which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it's about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this extensive HD video tour of International Space Station. You better enjoy the ISS while you can. There’s a good chance it’s going to crash into Planet Earth within the next couple of years because of budget issues unless the ESA can save it.

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They've now released last month's data as well. A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech. 36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we've heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That's a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.

Beware the coming of the spider! This strange creature was seen in a back alley, eating cats, small dogs, and any memory chips it happens to find. It has the capability to disguise itself as the Lian Li T1 Pitstop, which is a Mini-atx case with room for a full size power supply. Of course, [...]

The Olympus E-PL1 budget micro four thirds camera launched last week but Amazon already has it available for pre-order. On one hand this pre-order will ensure you’re one of the first kids at school with the new toy, but that’s not going to be until next month away so you may wanna hold on to [...]

Nokia this morning published two press releases on its website, one talking about the 'development' of one of its manufacturing plants and one commenting on a class action lawsuit filed in the United States. The Finnish mobile juggernaut says it plans to develop the operating mode of its Salo, Finland plant to ensure production is "focused on the high-value smartphone market, especially in Europe". The plans will result in the introduction of new manufacturing methods, but also entail 'changes to personnel' at the facility.

Market research firm IDC has just released their quarterly report on the top selling smartphones (or “converged mobile devices”, as they call them) in the US for the fourth quarter of 2009. RIM and Apple dominate the list in an almost absurd manner, but a few welcome surprises managed to sneak their way in. Want to [...]

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O?Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE will use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform. The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as "enterprise carbon management", is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE's engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

When the Nexus One was announced, many folks were questioning Google’s game plan and why it would release such an amazing device shortly after the Motorola DROID’s release. If that wasn’t enough to make some DROID owners envious, the Nexus One received a multitouch update last week which allowed pinch-to-zoom gestures within Google Maps, the [...]

If you’ve been camping outside of your local T-Mobile store ever since word first got out that they’d be replacing busted trackballs on a handful of BlackBerry models, you should probably run to the store and grab some more supplies. Looks like things have been pushed back a few days. According to TmoNews, the trackball replacement [...]

Vertu, French for "virtue," has a pink phone just in time for Valentine's Day. It's the Constellation Ayxt only it's pink. Fascinating.

When it comes to bar-shaped smartphones, it takes a good amount of effort to design something visually appealing. There’s really only so much you can do with a flat slab – and whatever can be done likely already has. With that said, there’s just something about this handset, the Qisda QCM-330. I’m not sure what that [...]

So for a bit of fun we've decided to open a TechCrunch Europe T-Shirt store on that European startup Spreadshirt. We're going to see how it goes (your feedback is welcome) and the store is very simple (black and white T-shirts). But for now, you can grab a T-shirt here. We'll be giving a few away in an upcoming competition at some point, plus we'll be looking for more slogans to put on the shirts. Suggestions welcome. The funnier the better. And other languages than English are cool too.

It looks like some major consolidation is about to go down in the Central European Internet market, and in particular Poland. According to local newspaper reports, the largest Internet group in the region, Naspers/MIH Group, is conducting due diligence of assets belonging to DST (Digital Sky Technology)-owned holding Forticom. Naspers/MIH Group and DST already together own the largest Russian online portal Mail.ru.

[UK] The London-based online identity startup Garlik has partnered with the UK online stockbroker Selftrade to offer its customers identity fraud protection. In what looks like a classic premium play, a basic free version of Garlik's offering, rebranded Selftrade Identity Monitor Lite, is being made available to all of Selftrade's customers with the option to upgrade to the full version, which offers more widespread monitoring of an individual's 'identity' including address, passport number and credit/debit card and bank account details. The full offering will initially cost ?35 per year, with presumably both Garlik and Selftrade sharing revenue.

No one likes early termination fees, but for one reason or another they can become a necessary evil. When Google introduced a new channel for buying the Nexus One, I was excited at the thought of grabbing a phone without being hassled by a retail sales rep. The only downside was that if I bought it at the subsidized price and wanted to cancel within 120 days, Google would charge a $350 device recovery fee... on top of the carrier's cancelation fees!

This isn’t official or anything, just a concept that happens to use some Microsoft assets, but what it Windows Mobile 7 looked like this? I think we all know it will not, but until the hammer actually falls at MWC, hope springs eternal. The “location-based desktops” idea is a good one for a MID or [...]

While pundits were arguing about whether Doom was damaging to us kids, we were busy having our sensibilities shocked by the phenomenally violent Rise of the Triad. While it wasn’t as flashy as Doom (it was Wolf3D-based), it had crazy weapons, fire, and enemies that would beg for their lives. So ahead of its time! [...]

There's a certain irony that TechCrunch's in-house satirist Paul Carr is currently slaving over the sequel to his book about his failure to launch a startup. Fridaycities was to be a site which allowed anyone to swap information about London, in real time, and eventually other cities. The site failed, Paul wrote his book (and a few other things, let's admit) and the rest is history, including our little run in, thankfully. If only he'd done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. Because today, two weeks after launching, the Secret London Facebook group has 182,010 members and counting and is poised to propel its 21 year old creator into her first startup. Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. Over 800 groups have now been created, such is the dire economy for graduates now. However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There's now a holding page and Twitter account (@secret_london) as Secret London morphs into a full-blown startup.

[France] As entrepreneurs and entrepreneur hopefuls flooded the Salon des Entrepreneurs in Paris during this last week, the Founder Institute released the details of its Paris program for Spring 2010. TechCrunch published a previous article on the international launch of the Silicon Valley-based Founder Institute, which is offering additional programs in Singapore and Asia Pacific this spring. The program itself screens and selects an exceptional group of entrepreneurs to be mentored by stars from both Silicon Valley and the French tech space. Over a period of 4 months beginning on March 16, entrepreneurs meet once per week to be mentored by some of the most successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. A unique equity model has been developed for the program in order to eliminate competition and motivate both mentors and participants to collaborate and help each other succeed. Ultimately, the goal is to develop their ideas and put their businesses into practice ? some companies even score funding before the 4 weeks are up. Additionally, the program offers various discounts with service providers, which can help reduce the cost of starting a company by up to 80%.

Nsyght is a startup we broke just before the Christmas vacation which focuses on making realtime streams manageable and is similar in scope to Friendfeed and Cliqset. It currently integrates accounts from Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious, and Last.fm - with other networks planned - and has now introduced a bunch of new features.

A couple of weeks ago Loren Feldmen put on the Audience Conference in New York. We supported the conferece, first announcing it and then writing more posts and tweets to help with ticket sales. I also committed to speaking at the event. About a week before the event I was asked if I could foster [...]

Sometimes we get into it a little bit on our Yammer account at TechCrunch. It’s usually me and MG, and every once in a while I like to post the exchanges. See this one for example. Tonights fabulous discussion – embargoes and the frustration they cause.