Say Hello To The Buzz Button. Google Didn’t Make It, So We Did.

Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about Google Buzz right now. And, judging from my account, a ton of people are actually using it too. The main use envisioned for Buzz was sharing, but the problem is that for content, you still need to copy a URL and then head over to Buzz to share it. Not anymore. We're all used to tweet buttons (like the one built by Tweetmeme), Facebook buttons, Digg buttons, and even Yahoo Buzz buttons on many posts around the web. These make it easy to share without having to leave the content. So we made a Google Buzz button.

One Block Off the Grid Raises $5 Million

One Block Off the Grid, a company that helps residents get competitive group pricing for solar panel installation, has raised a $5 million series A round of venture capital from New Enterprise Associates. The company has gotten pretty far without formal venture cashâ€"facilitating more than 600 installations in 2009, most of that in the fourth quarter. 1BOG, as it's called, hopes to install five-to-ten times that amount this year, so that NEA cash will help the company hire and grow. Think of 1BOG like another NEA investment, Groupon, but focused on solar panels. The site groups together customers in large metro areas interested in having panels installed and helps get them the best price. Only one could argue there’s a much bigger need for IBOG. Most people don’t know where to start if they want to install solar panels and have no idea how to compare bids between contractors. On average, 1BOG saves customers 15%. And, of course, there’s the whole getting-us-off-foreign-oil/saving-the-planet benefit to 1BOG.

Gmail Banned By Iran; Is Twitter Next?

The Iranian government has officially banned the use of Gmail in the country, reports The Wall Street Journal. In place of Google's email platform, Iran will allow citizens to use a State-sponsored national email service. The ban coincides with the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic, which is expected to draw mass protests and riots from citizens who are both for and against the regime. Last summer, during the controversy surrounding the Iranian elections, Iran banned social network FriendFeed. Facebook was also banned around election time. As many other communications outlets were blocked around this time period, Iranian citizens took to Twitter as the main tool of choice to spread information about what is going on.

The Zany 2006 Twitter Video Biz Stone Would Probably Rather Forget

These days, thanks to its growing ubiquity in the media, nearly everyone knows what Twitter is. But back in 2006, when it was known as Twttr, a side project of the podcasting service Odeo, no one knew what it was. So co-founder Biz Stone made a video. As you can watch below in "Twttr 101," dug up by Say OMG, Stone dresses up as some sort of crazy scientist with Harry Potter glasses and sports an even crazier accent. Also worth noting is that at the time, Twitter was described as a "social texting service based on the contents of you mind." Most users today don't realize it, but in the early days, Twitter was almost entirely based around SMS.

Facebook Chat Launches XMPP Support

If you're a fan of Facebook Chat but haven't been able to use it in your favorite chat client, good news: Facebook has just launched support for Jabber/XMPP, an open protocol that makes it very easy for any chat client or web service to integrate Facebook Chat (it's also the same protocol used by Google Talk). Facebook first announced that it was working on implementing Jabber/XMPP support way back in May 2008, and rumors that XMPP support was on its way began anew in November. There's a chance that this will lead to a surge in Facebook Chat usage, since it can now be easily integrated into just about every chat client out there, including iChat and AIM.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta Steps Down

MySpace has just announced that CEO Owen Van Natta has left the company. Taking his place will be co-Presidents Mike Jones And Jason Hirschhorn, who had been serving as the company's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively. The news comes less than two weeks after we interviewed Van Natta about his first eight months running MySpace, when he gave no indication that he was intending to leave the company. Van Natta joined MySpace last April alongside Jones and Hirschhorn as part of a major executive shakeup. We'd previously reported that Chief Product Officer Hirschhorn would soon be leaving the company. Obviously that isn't the case. Our sources tell us that there has been a long standing conflict between News Corp digital chief Jon Miller and Van Natta, and that part of Van Natta's decision to leave was his inability to terminate Hirschhorn.

Hands On With D&D On The Microsoft Surface

I just returned from the Microsoft campus, where some students from Carnegie Mellon University are showing off their awesome project, a version of D&D that runs on the Surface. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, just recognize that this isn't just a holy grail for tabletop gaming nerds. I mean, it's that too, but really it's a proof of concept that shows how fun and intuitive something like this can be, and how accessible a team can make it. I honestly think that if they had these things scattered around like Golden Tee cabinets, they'd get a huge following. The build we played with was last semester's (it's a student project, not a professional development), and since then there's been a lot of bug-squashing and feature-adding, but the newest build isn't playable. So they've got a short little scenario where we went from a zoomable map screen to a town where we... spotted some orcs! Roll for initiative!

With Subscriptions Off The Table For Now, Apple To Test $1 TV Shows

Leading up to its January event, rumors were swirling that Apple was talking to the TV networks about offering possible subscriptions to their shows through iTunes. Of course, that never happened. While reports had CBS and ABC interested in such a deal, the other networks apparently were less enthusiastic about it â€" perhaps out of fear of repercussions from the cable companies. But that doesn't mean that Apple is giving up. A new report today in the Financial Times indicates that Apple will begin testing the sale of $1 U.S. TV shows this year. Specifically, the new pricing could launch around the time that the iPad does, which will be March/April, FT notes citing people familiar with the discussions. Apple currently sells its shows for $1.99 (standard definition) or $2.99 (high definition) through iTunes. These $1 would be the standard definition variety, apparently, as they will play on the iPad.

Brands Wasting No Time With Google Buzz. This Could Get Annoying.

When it came to Facebook and Twitter, it took brands a while to figure out how to take advantage of the social networks. With Foursquare, they have been much faster. But now with Google Buzz, they're beating plenty of early adopters to it. Samsung has already set up a Google Buzz account this morning and is already cranking out buzzes. Not only that, but they're apparently trying to start their own trends on the service, as they have today tagged a bunch of their "favorite buzzers" and tagged the buzz with "#BUZZwednesday." Of course, the problem here is that Google Buzz doesn't support the "#" symbol the same way Twitter does (at least not yet). Still, you can search Buzz (right from within Gmail) for the term "#BUZZwednesday" and Samsung's buzz will appear.

Topsy Becomes An Even More Powerful Alternative To Twitter’s Offical Search Engine

If you've ever tried to use Twitter Search, you know that it's got some pretty serious problems. First, the site only lets you search back through a couple weeks of tweets. Even worse, the service doesn't seem to employ any relevancy algorithm to speak of â€" you just see the most recent tweets that contain your query's keywords, regardless of who said them (which oftentimes yields junk and spam). Today Topsy, the startup that views tweets as the currency of the web, is launching a handful of new features that improve on the official Twitter search in almost every way. Up until now, Topsy has been based entirely around links. When you visited the site, it would prompt you to enter a search query, and then would display a list of links most relevant to whatever you searched for. The links are ranked by the number of times they've been retweeted, and also by the influence of the people who have tweeted them; the site actually keeps track of the number of retweets each user typically gets to establish their overall reputation. Now, Topsy is taking this reputation system and extending it beyond just links, allowing you to search for both photos and tweets that don't contain links at all.

Facebook Mobile Hits 100 Million Users, Growing Faster Than On Desktops

For years, one of the most popular ways to access Facebook has been from mobile phones. The company has done quite a bit to make this possible, offering everything from SMS messaging functionality to web-based mobile sites and native applications for most smartphone platforms. Today, the company has announced that 100 million Facebook users are tapping into these mobile services, up from 65 million users last September. Of course, Facebook has grown by over a hundred million members since the last milestone, so this increase isn't a big surprise. But mobile growth seems to be accelerating even faster than Facebook is acquiring new members â€" Facebook had 65 million mobile users in September, and less than a week later announced that it had hit 300 million total active users (in other words, around 21.7% of users were using Facebook mobile).

Hulu Could Still Launch On The iPad

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad last month, one notable potential partner absent from the stage was Hulu, now the second-largest video site on the Web. The launch event focussed more on the iPad as an eBook reader to rival the Kindle, but watching videos on it will be just as important. The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesn't support Flash, and all of Hulu's videos currently run inside a Flash player. But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor I've heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market.

AOL Shells Out $200K To Join MIT Media Lab Consortium

AOL has joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab as a sponsor, which according to the consortium's site, costs around $200,000. The MIT Media Lab is a research community that focuses on the study, development and invention of digital technologies. The sponsorship, which lasts for 3 years, was spearheaded by AOL Ventures, an investment fund launched by AOL in 2009 to nurture early-stage external and employee-originated ideas. With the sponsorship, AOL have access to all of the research conducted at the Lab; Lab-wide visiting privileges; open invitations to Lab-wide lectures and special events; and most importantly, non-exclusive, license-fee-free, royalty-free licensing rights for IP that's developed within the lab.

Next New Networks Sees 300 Million Views In 2009; Approaches Profitability

Online television studio Next New Networks is reporting a few milestones today, releasing news that the network has seen over 300 million views across its networks in 2009. The company also claims it doubled revenue from 2008 to 2009 and saw a 70% increase in the number of sponsors. Next New Networks builds internet based “micro television networks” for targeted niche communities. Over the past few years, Next New Networks restructured and reshuffled its executive team and staff, bringing in Lance Podell as CEO in late 2008 and added a new chief of programming Kathleen Grace in 2009. The company says viewership grew thanks to programming and networks in 2009, which include Fast Lane Daily, Barely Political (aka Obama Girl),Beyond The Trailer and more. In 2009, NNN’s networks grew to over one million subscribers on YouTube, podcasts and e-mail, a 300% increase from 2008.

DailyMotion Secures EMI Video Content In Ad Deal

Music giant EMI is to deliver its premium music videos onto the platforms run by DailyMotion, the French-based 'European YouTube'. Content will go onto the main site, mobile, iPhone app and the DailyMotion channel on Internet-connected TVs. The deal covers all EMI's labels, and the labels represented by EMI Label Services and EMI's Caroline Distribution unit. Artists featured from April will include Coldplay, Katy Perry, Robbie Williams and David Guetta. Dailymotion will deliver ads against the videos to all three screens. Paris-based Dailymotion has over 65 million unique monthly visitors, according to comScore. It raised another €15 million in financing late last year. The venture recently turned profitable, but that additional investment was required to fund its steep growth. It expects a 50% increase in turnover in 2009 and 2010. DailyMotion says it currently serves 1 billion video views per month.

Encoding.com Raises $1.25 Million For SaaS Video Encoding Platform

Encoding.com, a startup that provides online video encoding services, has raised $1.25 million in Series A funding. The funding was led by Metamorphic Ventures and included angel investors Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan, and Allen Morgan. The funds will be used to further sales, marketing, and partnership programs. Launched in September 2008, Encoding.com provides a cloud-based, video encoding SaaS offering to let users host and encode user-generated and premium video. The company encodes an average of 30,000 videos per day for a variety of well-known media and technology companies including MTV Networks, WebMD, Nokia, and MySpace. To date, Encoding.com has encoded more than four million videos since its launch.

AOL’s Surphace Goes Self Serve With Private Beta Of S4

Surphace, previously called Sphere, is an excellent tool for bloggers and other publishers to add related content to their articles and posts. The company, which was acquired by AOL in 2008, has now released S4, a self serve product that gives smaller sites the ability to use Surphace's more advanced features. More than 2 billion articles per month bring in Surphace content, says CEO Josh Guttman. Until now only the largest publishers were able to tailor the types of related content links, as well as the look and feel of the Surphace widget. Small sites had to make due with a standard pop up Surphace widget that had little flexibility in terms of content and design. Now, sites of any size can customize the size, interface and types and quantity of content that Surphace pulls into posts. The result, says Surphace, is higher reader engagement. Read on for more details and an invite code:

TED: Now with More Elitism?

Let me say upfront: I have never been to TED, mostly because I have never been invited and I can’t imagine a world where I justify paying $6,000 for a conference. But I live in Silicon Valley so every year leading up to the star-studded event, I have to hear about it from nearly everyone I know: People who love it and people who hate it. For the last few years, these conversations have gotten ugly. What I’ve seen and heard from the outside depicts the sad transition from what used to be an inventive, elite industry conference that cross-pollinated experts from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design to a $6,000, always-sold-out-unless-you-“matter” invitation to rub shoulders with celebrities and talk about how compassionate of a millionaire you really are.

Buzzkill: Google Won Disputed Googlebuzz.com Domain A Month Ago

Naturally, which you launch a new product with a huge amount of hype, like Google Buzz, you're going to want to own the .com domain name for it. And Google obtained googlebuzz.com just in the nick of time, according to a document from the National Arbitration Forum. On November 13, 2009, Google, represented by Meredith M. Pavia (presumably, a Google lawyer), filed a complaint that BuzzNews Network was using the googlebuzz.com domain in bad faith. Further, they argued that it was "confusingly similar" to Google's trademark on the company name. This was an easy one for the forum to rule on since BuzzNews Network never responded to the complaint.

Is This @EricSchmidt’s Facebook Profile?

Some people are suggesting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have just created a Facebook profile for himself, after signing up for Twitter in early December 2009 and right on the heels of Microsoft founder Bill Gates setting up an account on the wildly popular social networking service. Evidently, we can't be 100% sure that this is his real account at this point - unlike Twitter, there's no 'verified account' stamp for Facebook profiles and the man has yet to confirm our friendship (I forgive him, since it's the middle of the night in the United States).

Sergey Brin Used Google Buzz To Write His NYT Op-Ed On Google Books

During the Q&A session today following the Google Buzz event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed something both humorous and interesting. When asked a question about practical uses for Google Buzz, Brin noted that he actually used the service to help him write his op-ed about Google Books that ran in the New York Times last year. Brin noted that he was having difficulty with the article because it's just his one point of view. So he put out his draft on Google Buzz (which Google was testing out internally within the company at the time), and quickly got dozens of comments. Brin then used this feedback to edit his article.

Video: Sergey Brin On His Six Months Using Google Buzz, The China Situation, And More

Today, Google's social strategy took a big step with the launch of Google Buzz â€" a new FriendFeed-like feature that's integrated into Gmail, mobile search, Maps, and more (you can see our live notes from the announcement here). Shortly after the event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin fielded questions backstage from members of the press. Our own Steve Gillmor was there to record the conversation (and ask a few questions himself). We've embedded the footage below, and have transcribed some of his answers. In the video, Brin answers questions covering a broad array of topics, including Google Buzz, Google's current situation in China, and the company's research in clean energy. Among the revelations: Brin hopes to eventually remove the task of having to choose between Email, Buzz, and IM, so expect those to converge more in the future.

A Look At 4INFO, The King Of SMS

When Google bought mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in November 2009, 4IFNO CEO Zaw Thet said that he received a couple of phone calls from investment bankers and potential buyers who where were sniffing around the space. When Apple bought Quattro Wireless for $275 million two months later, he says his phone started to ring off the hook. Why? Because 4INFO is usually described as the AdMob of SMS advertising. That isn't a very good description of the company, but it's enough to make everyone think that the company is next in line to close a big acquisition. And that last part just may be true. The company, which has raised around $40 million in venture capital, is where companies go when they want to create a "mailing list" of SMS subscribers. For example - when Zynga began testing SMS notifications in December, they turned to 4INFO to power the product. 4INFO has 250 premier publishers, plus a couple of thousand more that use its self service platform.

What The Wii Did For Console Gaming, Glitch Wants To Do For MMOs. And It Just Might.

Last night, the news started to come out about Glitch, the new massively multiplayer online game that a few of the key cogs that built Flickr had been developing in secret for much of last year. Today, I got to see a still relatively early build of the game. It is both beautiful and impressive. I met up with Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr, so he could demo Glitch for me. Sitting in a hotel lobby on a WiFi connection being used by who knows how many other people, the game, which runs in the browser and is Flash-based, was incredibly smooth. Even more impressively, Butterfield was able to manipulate the game from the backend (using his "God" mode tools) to add new elements on the fly right in front of me. This is a key part of what will likely make or break Glitch.

Gowalla To Roll Out API Today

As location-based social networks gain serious traction, its inevitable that that these applications will become full-fledged platforms. Like Twitter, these networks can become ecosystems. Plus, they have a better chance of continuing to survive when Facebook enters the location ring. Foursquare released its API in November. And now Gowalla will be releasing its API today, we've heard. We will update with more details when the announcement is made. We originally reported on the impending release here, with Gowalla working on adjusting privacy setting for users as as third-party services start getting access to their data. Gowalla's Josh Williams said that privacy controls are becoming more granular so that users can pick certain things to share while holding back others.