Netvibes, the site that lets users customize their homepages with a variety of widgets, has partnered with Rambler.ru to bring its widgets to the massive Russian web portal. Rambler is the Yahoo of Russia, with an estimated 40 million users and 3 billion monthly pageviews. The deal is being described as “multi-year” and worth “multi-millions”, but further details haven’t been disclosed. Netvibes availability on Rambler.ru is expected to begin in November.

This marks the first time Netvibes has licensed its platform for installation and distribution to an independent third party, and probably won’t be the last. In order to stay competitive with other widget hubs like iGoogle, Netvibes would do well to spur its growth by offering its widgets to other region-specific portals (that said, Netvibes has been doing well, with a reported 500 million widgets served montly). According to the press release, the Rambler homepage will include Google Search, Blinx video search, and a number of Russian services like Price.ru.

In July Google acquired Begun, a contextual ad service, from parent company Rambler. As part of the $140 million deal, Rambler has been using Google for some of its advertising and search functions.

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Sugar Inc, the company behind a network of popular women-focused blogs that includes PopSugar, is announcing two major releases tonight that take advantage of its fashion-hungry userbase. The first, dubbed PopSugar’s CelebStyle, is positioning itself as an IMDB for style, analyzing outfits from many of television’s most popular shows. Sugar Inc is also announcing a new ShopStyle API, which gives developers access to the site’s massive database of clothing and accessories which can be used in any variety of applications. Here’s a breakdown of both announcements:

ShopStyle API
ShopStyle, which Sugar aqcuired a year ago, is a search engine for fashion. The site indexes clothing and accessories across thousands of brands and stores, presenting them to users in a uniformly formatted grid of thumbnails, prices, and descriptions.

Sugar had previously made this data available to partner sites like In Style and People, and is now opening it up to developers. CEO Brian Sugar says that apps using the API could easily be deployed across a variety of platforms, including webpages (like SaleHabit, which Sugar developed in a weekend), Facebook, and the iPhone.

In thirty days, the platform will also allow developers to convert clicks from the fashion items they’ve displayed into cash. Sugar says the revenue split will vary by app, and will be determined by the success rate of the app’s lead generation.

Fashion may not be most developers’ cup of tea, but the market for this kind of application is huge - expect to see a variety of fashion-based iPhone and web applications hit the market in the next few months.

PopSugar’s CelebStyle

PopSugar’s CelebStyle will allow users to see exactly what their favorite stars have been wearing on some of the most popular shows on TV. The site is edited by a number of Sugar employees, who will pick some of the most prominent outfits from these shows and offer links to each accessory and piece of clothing. To build and help populate the site, Sugar is leveraging the technology and partnerships behind StarBrand, which it acquired in May. Through some of these partnerships (and PR representatives), Sugar editors will have access to lists detailing exactly what the stars were wearing, so users will be assured that the items presented are authentic.

Visitors to CelebStyle will also be able to craft their own outfits using Sugar’s database of clothing, which can be added as comments beneath any article. For instance, users could put together an outfit closely mirroring a fancy get-up shown in the latest episode of Gossip Girl, but with clothes that were only a fraction of the cost.

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There doesn’t appear to have been an official announcement, but Twitter has begun soliciting spam reports to a “spam” user account via direct messages.

Are you a victim of Twitter spam? Just begin following @spam and send it a direct message with the username of your spammer. As the following email autoresponse to spam reporters instructs, you can send these direct messages from your mobile phone or opt for a public tweet as well:

Howdy!

Thanks for reporting spam- we’re working really hard on getting rid of it! Did you know: you can now easily report spam directly from your Twitter account? Visit:

http://twitter.com/spam

and follow the account. You can then send:

* a direct message to @spam: @moneybagsnow is a spammer!
* a direct message from your phone using d+ username + message: d spam @carmoney, @cashnow is spam!
* a reply to @spam like so: @spam this is a spam account: @bigmoney5

and we’ll take care of it. You can send as many spam user names as will fit in one direct message or @reply as long as they are designated like this: @crystal.

Note: it’s better to send a direct message over an @reply. Direct messaging keeps @replies reporting spam out of your followers’ time lines. Sending direct messages also keeps the spam account’s user name out of all search results. Because the message is private, you prevent them from benefitting from publicity. Thanks again for helping us track down spammers!

Twitter Support Team

So far 213 members have begun following @spam, which oddly has decided to follow 179 members itself. It will have to gain a much larger following to make a dent in Twitter’s spam problem. The Twitter Blacklist, a website that tracked all banned Twitter accounts before its owner lost faith in the service, lists 561 blacklisted users as of July 12th.

Read more about Twitter’s spam efforts here.

[Thanks for the tip, Rafa]

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Tomorrow Mozilla will launch a new geotagging project called Geode into Mozilla Labs that promises to leverage your physical location to enhance your overall browsing experience. More details will be provided in an official post tomorrow, but this is what we know already:

Geode is a Firefox add-on that understands location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content.

For example with Geode, a user who is looking for restaurants while they are out of town will be able load up their favorite review site and find suggestions a couple blocks away and plot directions there.

It’s unclear how Firefox actually intends to determine a user’s location, especially since Mozilla doesn’t have a mobile browser that could provide GPS data. How web apps are supposed to leverage the plugin is also yet to be seen.

Geode joins the recently announced Labs projects Ubiquity and Snowl. We’ll post more details as soon as we get them.

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As Research in Motion prepares to open its Blackberry Application Center to answer the iPhone’s App Store, an unaffiliated startup called the BerryStore has already launched a competing app store for Blackberry Apps. What makes it better than the official BlackBerry App Center (besides the name), is that apps in the BerryStore work across both old and new BlackBerries alike (not just the upcoming BlackBerry Storm), and across carriers. The BlackBerry App center, in contrast, is designed to be a carrier-specific store, with different apps for different carriers.

AYou can download the BerryStore as an app itself by visiting www.berrystore.com on your BlackBerry. (The App Center will require users to download apps through their Blackberry browsers, which is not the best experience). Already there are about 40 apps in the store, ranging from Loopt, 3Jam, and TwitterBerry to Obopay, Citysense, and Google Mobile. All of them are currently free, although the company plans on offering paid apps in the future. Developers can get more details about how to submit apps or the BerryStore here.

Below is a list of each app currently in the BerryStore with a short description:

Books & Reference
NeoReader: Turns your Blackberry into a barcode scanner.
Blackberry Wiki: Wikipedia reader.
Beyond411: Yellow pages, maps, and directions.
MobipocketReader: Mobile e-reader.

Business & Finance
Obopay: P2P payments.
Bank of America: Manage your dwindling bank account.
NyTimes DealBook: A bookmark icon to the popular blog.
E-Trade Mobile Pro: Manage your dwindling stock portfolio.

Lifestyle
Google Mobile: Search, Maps, Gmail.
Opera: Opera Mini Web browser.
Zumobi:Mobile widgets.
Google Mail: As in Gmail.
Poynt: Local search.
Maufait InstaFind: Al-in-one 411, flight tracker, movie showtimes, stock quotes, weather, news.
Puretracks:Mobile music store.
Tellme: Voice-enabled GPS info.
reQall: Voice-to-text recorder, to-do list, and idea manager.
Nobex Radio Companion: Shows you the name of the songs playing on the radio.

News & Weather
Viigo: News, sports, entertainment, weather, stock and traffic alerts.
New York Times: Bookmark icon.
ABC News: Bookmark icon.
The Washington Post: Bookmark icon.
CNBC Mobile: Bookmark icon.
USA Today: Bookmark icon.
Slate: Bookmark icon.
PinStack.com: Forums

Social Networking
TwitterBerry: Mobile Twitter client that avoids SMS charges.
3jam: Group text messages.
eBuddy: Instant messaging app
Dexrex: Archives your text messages.
Pinger: Voice IM.

Sports
Sports Illustrated: Bookmark icon.
ESPN Mobile: Bookmark icon.

Travel & Navigation
Google Maps: What it sounds like.
GPSed: Map your GPS tracks, save them, and share them. Also geotags your photos.
Citysense: Live hotspot tracking.
WorldMate Live: A personal digital assistant for travelers

Utilities
Box.net: Access and share files on your BB.
AutoLock: Locks the keyboard.
MidpSSH: Connect to remote servers.
MiniMoni: Monitor IP traffic.

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Attention all TechCrunch readers in Munich: here’s your chance to meet Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Hmm, I wonder if he’ll be making some sort of announcement). He will be giving a speech at a closed, invite-only event on Tuesday evening, October 7 at Amiando headquarters. Amiando CEO Felix Haas is offering to give admission to one lucky TechCrunch reader. (That’s right, only one). Explains Haas in an e-mail:

Mark will give a speech to the selected guests about Facebook’s plans for Europe and Germany. After the speeches and an extensive Q&A session with Mark Zuckerberg there will be plenty of time to get-together with Mark at dinner & drink. I want to offer admission for one of your readers.

All you have to do to apply is explain why you want to meet Zuckerberg in comments. The person with the best reason gets a ticket. (Put in your real e-mail address so Felix can contact you in case you win).

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Web bookmarks are badly in need of an overhaul. Sure, they’re fine for jumping to the dozen or so sites you visit on a daily basis, but they quickly become unwieldy whenever they’re used for research purposes. Folders of bookmarked job listings or apartment openings on Craigslists become practically useless as you frequently need to revisit them to remind yourself why you bookmarked them in the first place.

Tonight sees the launch of SimplyBox, a San Francisco-based startup that allows users to clip portions of websites in a visual way, overcoming some of the shortcomings of traditional bookmarks. SimplyBox is currently available as plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a Safari version on the way. The site will go live at 6 PM PST tonight.

To use SimplyBox, you hit the “Box and Save” button in the browser toolbar, which turns your mouse arrow into a targeting cursor and displays a series of “boxes” at the bottom of the screen. After highlighting the portion of the page you’d like to save for later, you drag it into the box you’d like to store it in. The whole process is very intuitive and only takes a few seconds.

Clicking on the toolbar’s SimplyBox logo brings you to your profile page, where you can access and sort through each of your boxes. Clippings appear as large images that clearly show their contents, and can be displayed in a desktop view (where you can drag them around), a list view, or a grid. Users can also add comments to each of the snippets.

In practice, the plugin seems to work well, especially when conducting research across a number of sites. For example, house hunters could easily use the service to keep track of the homes they’re interested in, clipping photos and summaries for future reference. The site also allows users to share their boxes with friends, so they collaborate on a single project. Finally, the toolbar includes a “box and send” function that sends snippets in Emails as image files.

SimplyBox’s biggest flaw is that its snippets are simple images - they don’t retain any of the functionality of their original source. If you were to snap a clip of a YouTube video, it would only appear as an image, and you’d have to visit the linked page to see the video itself. That said, it’s still a big improvement over simple bookmarks.

There are a number of other “clipping” tools available, including Sazell, Diigo, and to some extent, Safari’s Webclip.

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GameFly, which is perhaps most easily explained as the NetFlix of the gaming world, today launched a new version of their site specifically optimized for mobile handsets.

Through the magic of user agent detection, getting to the mobile site is a one step process: just type the standard GameFly.com address into the browser of any mobile handset. Once there, users can search through the GameFly library, order games, switch up their "GameQ" queue, read reviews, and manage their account.

On the same day the public markets are tanking because of the spreading credit crisis, we see one of the biggest M&A exits of the year with eBay acquiring Bill Me Later for $945 million ($820 million in cash, plus an extra $125 million in options). The only other tech exits of this size in 2008 were Sun buying MYSQL for $1 billion (which involved less cash and more options), AOL buying Bebo for $850 million. This is for a company that lets consumers defer payment when they buy things online. Remember, loose credit is part of the reason we are in the current economic mess.

So is Bill Me Later part of the problem or part of the solution? I put that question to Michael Kwatinetz, the former Wall Street tech analyst who is now a partner at Azure Capital, the biggest shareholder in Bill Me Later. He explained to me how Bill Me Later works, and how it actually has more stringent credit controls than most credit cards:

The problem is people who can’t afford to pay for things are financing things. If you have the proper controls, you don’t allow that to happen.

We don’t grant credit limits. We grant credit on a transaction basis. If you are somebody who is not paying us, or running up your bills in other places, we don’t grant credit.

Traditional credit cards, in contrast, let you run up your bill up to a pre-determined credit limit. With each transaction, BillMeLater check your credit score, credit outsanding, status with credit agencies, and a few other criteria. And it either approves your credit or it doesn’t for each purchase in less than three seconds. Kwatinetz says that the company tightened its lending policies about a year ago, and claims that the nonpayment rate is “probably the lowest of anyone on the Web.”

The value of the company lies in its algorithms that determine credit risk and in its ability to use the Internet as a platform for granting credit. All of the data that its algorithms consider is pulled in via Web APIs from credit agencies and other data providers.

For eBay, Bill Me Later will help expand its Paypal franchise to consumer credit. Bill Me Later is already used all over the Web by more than four million customers at places like Amazon, the Apple Store, JetBlue, and Walmart,com. This year the company is expected to finance $1 billion worth of online purchases and bring in $125 million in revenues. Revenues are estimated to be $150 million in 2009 (a 20 percent growth rate), but the acquisition will also be dilutive to eBay’s earnings, meaning the business is not yet profitable on a net income basis.

Still, you can see the appeal of an all-online credit service. Traditional credit card companies pay about $150 for each customer who signs up for a new Visa or Mastercard, and it usually takes a coupel weeks to process each account through the mail. Bill Me Later acquires customers pretty much instantly at the time of purchase for less than 10 percent of what it costs the credit card companies.

Announcing a large acquisition like this that is essentially a foray into the troubled credit markets may seem counterintuitive, but after a string of deals that didn’t make much sense for eBay (Skype, StumbleUpon), this could end up being one of its smartest non-core acquisitions since Paypal.

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In particular, this shot, which was included in a CNET article, shows what appears to be SearchMe’s search interface (itself borrowed from Apple’s iTunes album browser) with the logo cut off (compare it to this). CNET describes the screen shot as “One idea Yahoo showed for BOSS: show miniature versions of the Web pages returned by search results.”

To be fair to Yahoo, the screen shot was included in a press briefing document (the slide, which I also received, is shown below) and Yahoo was using it only as an example to show how the service worked. Yahoo has also said that they reached out to SearchMe to discuss a partnership, as they’ve done with scores of other companies. In the briefing, Yahoo didn’t specifically call attention to the slide, and it was made clear to journalists (or at least me) that the product wasn’t made for front end design, just as a search web service.

Yahoo probably should have left the SearchMe logo on the screen shot, but given how many other things there are to criticize Yahoo for these days, I’m inclined to give it a pass.

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Yes and no. It’s clear that AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, wants this deal more than ever. What isn’t clear is whether AOL’s assets will fix any of Yahoo’s problems.

The deal structure that is currently being discussed is Yahoo’s acquisition of AOL (content, services and advertising), minus their subscription dial up business. That plus a couple of billion dollars in cash from Time Warner gets them approximately a third of the combined entity. Time Warner’s AOL headache is gone, and they have a stake in the world’s most valuable chess piece in the Google/Microsoft search and advertising war.

Factors favoring a deal: the companies believe Yahoo’s advertising platform would monetize AOL assets far beyond what they’re generating today (a little over $2.4 billion annually). And those against: combined dominance in mail (they’d have 48% of all worldwide email accounts according to Comscore, with Microsoft #2 at 42%) and instant messaging (39% worldwide combined market share, compared to 55% for Microsoft). In reality, though, email and instant messaging market share are only a problem if Microsoft then comes in and buys the combined entity.

Yahoo gets to make a case to stockholders that they dominate the online portal/services/content world, and who cares if they outsource search advertising to Google. Our position is that they can’t succeed in the long run without strong and competitive search advertising, although it may take the Department of Justice to get that message through to Yahoo’s executive team. Even after these entities combine, if they do, Yahoo still has a major long term competitive problem on its hands.

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It’s a blood bath out there this morning. The S&P 500 is at a four-year low as the credit crisis keeps getting worse, despite the passage of the government’s $700 billion bailout plan. The market is taking tech stocks down with it. Google is down 4 percent to $368, its lowest point since 2006. Apple is down 6 percent to $91. Microsoft is down nearly 5 percent to $25. Amazon, Yahoo, eBay—all down.

Fears of a credit freeze are growing as the contagion spread to banks in Europe. The Fed is already flooding the market with more cash through new powers it was granted in the bailout package. All of this makes you wonder if A) the U.S. government acted fast enough and B) whether the bailout package is going to end up doing any good.

As far as tech stocks are concerned, already as I write this, there seems to be somewhat of a rally going on in some of these stocks (particularly Google) from the lows where they opened. But if the economy falters, tech stocks won’t be a safe haven for investors, even if they are cash-rich and not as exposed to the credit debacle as companies in other sectors. The markets always tend to overreact to systemic risk because nobody knows how far the problems are going to spread. What we are seeing is panic in the face of the unknown. It reminds me of the market panic after 9/11. Investors whop loaded up on tech stocks then ended up making a lot of money.

Does this signal a buying opportunity, or are investors better off running for the hills? Who is buying (or selling) what out there? Tell us in comments.

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And they’ve made two acquisitions: Denmark’s DBA for $380 million and Amazon-funded Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.

Regarding the two acquisitions: We covered dba.dk, Denmarks’ leading classifieds site, earlier this morning. Bill Me Later, the larger acquisition, is a service that let’s ecommerce partners issue instant credit to buyers. You enter your birth date and last four digits of your social security number online, and it does a credit check on you in three seconds to determine whether you are worth the risk. Bill Me Later pays the merchant, and sends you a bill. The company has raised a ton of cash - at least $272 million - from Amazon, Azure Capital Partners, Chase Paymentech, Crosspoint Venture Partners, First Data Corp., and others.

eBay stock is at a 52 week low, we’ll see how it does in the market today. (Update: well, the markets are tanking, so it’s not really a good day to judge eBay alone).

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GigaOm, one of the first blog networks to raise money, has joined b5Media, Silicon Alley Insider, VentureBeat and Paid Content (acquired), among others, in raising capital. Holdout ReadWriteWeb is said to be testing the waters and looking for a round of funding as well. This is something I’ve recommended against, and we are one of the last large blog networks to remain independent.

Still, I can’t blame Om’s reasons for raising the round - aggressive expansion, software development and a nest egg for troubled financial times ahead. Congrats to him and his team, particularly newly promoted CEO Paul Walborsky.

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The “credible” results tend to come from government, university, medical, and news sites. For instance, here are the credible results for “green buildings” and “common cold.”

The idea is if your site is a dog, it won’t get on the list. While this white-list approach could improve the quality of results, it also seems way too easy to game. Any spammer can try to get their site on the truthful and authoritative list. And they will.

Hakia’s redesign includes some other new tabs as well. Namely “news,” “images,” and “meet others.” (No, this third one is not a semantic dating service. It is a social feature that lets you join groups and discussion forums around the same topics that you are searching for). The results are all based on semantic matches within each domain. (See the screenshots below). But I am not sure how much better they are than Google’s. For instance, here is Hakia’s image search results for “global warming”. Now try the same search on Google image search. In both cases, the results are underwhelming.

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DBA, founded in 1995, attracts around a million visitors a month, and is a top ten Danish website. 275,000 new listings are added each month, according to its website.

The site is owned by Blue Avis, founded in 1981, which is a free newspaper with a circulation of around 500,000 per week. The company has 225 employees.

Update: More news -Ebay has also acquired BillMeLater, and announced 10% layoffs.

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Alert Thingy 2.0 should be released sometime this month. Get the current version here.

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TechCrunch is a media partner (which means we’ll be covering the event extensively), and we will be holding a party on the last night of the event as well.

They expect 1,500 or so attendees from 40 countries. See the video below, as well as Geraldine’s attempt to explain the theme of the conference this year: Love. (meh)

See you there.

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Despite the fact that males have long accounted for the majority of online gamers, there is a surprising shortage of casual online games directed at men aged 25-45. Beyond fantasy football and online poker there is little variety, with nearly every game failing to take advantage of advanced graphics or any interactivity beyond clicking “all-in”.

World Golf Tour is looking to fill this gap. The site has launched a free, full-featured Flash game that offers 3D graphics, an advanced physics engine, and user-customizable characters - it’s not as good as EA’s Tiger Woods series, but it’s going to be close enough for most people. The site launched a beta version last year, and is now introducing a new course, expanded customization options, and multiplayer support.

CEO YuChiang Cheng says that his team recognized early on that it wouldn’t be able to compete with EA’s massive development team and art department, so it took a few innovative shortcuts. To create the game’s graphics, the WGT team went to the famed Kiawah Island Golf Resort, where it took geo-tagged photographs spanning the entire course. The team then went through and mapped the photos to a 3D model, which makes the world seem three dimensional while telling the physics engine how each part of the photograph should affect the ball. Using technology similar to Google Earth, WGT allows users to move through the course by seamlessly displaying photographs that are adjacent to each other. The result isn’t as immersive as the 3D worlds crafted by EA’s huge dev team, but it’s very impressive.

While users will be able to play games on their own, the game allows for multiplayer sessions, and tracks stats across all games to produce a network-wide leaderboard. Along with the game itself, the WGT homepage allows users to create profiles, befriend and challenge other golfers, and participate in massively multiplayer tournaments. Tournaments will include cash prizes as well as virtual goods prizes, like new clubs and clothing that can be used to customize an in-game avatar. WGT will generate revenue through microtransactions for these virtual goods, as well as sponsorships for their virtual tournaments.

World Golf Tour will likely do very well - it’s polished, free, and will appeal to millions of golf fans. It may not stand up side-by-side to a console game but its target audience won’t care, especially given the fact that WGT can be played from nearly any browser with no download.

For another casual golf game, check out Wii-like iGolf on the iPhone, which we demoed last month.

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TV advertising doesn’t have to be just on TV. That’s the premise behind BlackArrow, a startup that caters to the cable industry by offering a way to place ads on broadband Web video, on-demand TV, and digital-video recorders (with unskippable ads). The company is announcing a new $20 million round of funding from existing investors Cisco Systems., Comcast Interactive Capital, Intel Capital, Mayfield Fund and Polaris Venture Partners.

BlackArrow lets cable companies and TV networks show the same ads on the Web and on other platforms as they do on TV, making it easier to do bundled sales. The company’s technology also provides a central place to manage and track all the ads, whether they run on a TV network’s own site, are syndicated to other sites, or run on a set-top box.

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