With the Facebook “Phone” project due to be announced in a few hours, it’s worth remembering Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said building a phone is “so clearly the wrong strategy for us.” At TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF conference last September, Michael Arrington grilled Zuckerberg about the long rumored move by Facebook into hardware.

Arrington said “I have been bugging you about a Facebook phone for years. You dragged me into the office to say it’s not happening Mike.” Zuck replied “Do you believe me yet?”

Mike replied “No…. Of course I believe you, except that I don’t,” but then Mike speculated there was a secret group inside of Facebook building hardware phones.

Zuck then gave his strong argument as to why this was “always the wrong strategy” for Facebook. He says this phone he is NOT building “could get 10 million people to use it, 20 million, it doesn’t move the needle for us.”

Watch the entire 3 minute discussion in the video clip above to hear Mark explain why they won’t be building a Facebook phone. Then check back later after the event to see if Zuckerberg’s stated strategy has changed or not.

Pro tip: You can now watch, listen, and subscribe to our TechCrunch TV videos on iTunes. In addition to the video versions, each segment has an audio-only podcast, perfect while driving or working out.

A few weeks ago, we quietly relaunched our redesigned iTunes site. After some tweaking, we’re now ready to get the word out.

Our most popular podcasts have been CrunchWeek, our weekly tech news wrap-up show from our writers which publishes on Sunday, and TC Cribs, which takes a VIP peek inside a startup’s office.

If you had previously subscribed to some of our podcasts and discovered they weren’t getting updated, make sure you use the new links below.

TechCrunch videos can also be found within our posts, on our YouTube page, and on our soon to be redesigned video portal.

Here are links to all our iTunes podcasts:

TCTV Show Podcasts

Event Podcasts

Editorial independence is kind of a polemic at TechCrunch. When our corporate parent, a sister or an advertiser might have an issue with a story, we write it anyway. So we have an offer to make to the writers at CNET.

Its parent company, CBS, has decreed that CNET’s latest Aereo review, barring something changing, will be its last. A disclosure statement on a recent news article about the Aereo states bluntly:

“CBS, the parent corporation of CNET, is currently in active litigation with Aereo as to the legality of its service. As a result of that conflict of interest, CNET cannot review that service going forward.”

Well, CNET now can, via TechCrunch.

CNET staffers, we’ll happily publish any news article or review you want to write about Aereo or Dish AutoHop or anything else that you are prohibited from publishing on CNET. We’ll let you do this anonymously and we’ll keep your identity completely confidential. To protect your identity, you don’t need to contact us from your corporate email address, though you’ll need to prove you’re legit. We’ll also pay you our regular, modest freelance rate for the story.

Because although not all of us consider ourselves journalists here, we’re all very actively invested in publishing the truth. And if your own company won’t give you the platform to do so, we will.

When you take your seat at the 2012 Crunchies Awards next month, (tickets on sale now!) look above the stage. You will see an acoustical canopy system made of 59 Plexiglas reflector panels controlled by cutting-edge technology — for 1991. As the Crunchies celebrate the latest technology advances and startups onstage, over the heads of the winners will be an impressive feat of technology from more than 20 years ago.

When it was installed at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, it was bleeding-edge technology, yet it’s still in daily use today. The system runs off a long discontinued Apple Power Mac G4 with custom HyperCard software and AppleTalk networking, and it independently controls the height, roll, and tilt for each panel. The panels can travel 70 feet up and down with a 0.1-inch accuracy, with a triple-redundant system of microprocessors for safety.

The Power Mac G4 running the system sits on the desk of Jim Jacobs, the stage electrician at Davies who was part of the original team that installed the system. When Jim needs to move the panels, he makes changes on the Mac and can see the panels on several TV monitors move at 16 feet a minute. Only 16 panels can move at a time. Stopping all 59 panels at once could cause the building to shake with 50,000 pounds of down force.

The G4 is actually the third generation of the system. Jim says it first ran on an LC II running Mac OS 6. It then moved to a Centris 610 with Mac OS 7. Now it’s running on the G4 with Mac OS 9.1. Jim has a spare G4 just in case.

The software runs as a custom HyperCard program, with thousands of lines of code. Ted Chavalas, who oversaw the software and designed the circuitry at the now-defunct Radiant Enterprises, says HyperCard was fast enough to handle the job. The program hasn’t been updated since 1998. Color status and exact positioning information is provided for each panel. While panels can be controlled individually, entire canopy configurations can be stored and run at the touch of the “Go” button. The Crunchies will likely use the “PA Lighting” preset.

The settings in HyperCard are communicated from the G4 to the custom control circuits in 59 winches above the stage via AppleTalk. Chavalas says there just weren’t too many cost effective ways to network computers back then. AppleTalk was a popular protocol used by Apple in the 80s and 90s before the cost of the cost of the cost of Ethernet technology became affordable.

When Apple changed from OS 9.2 to OS-X, driver support for HyperCard communication over AppleTalk became extinct. So the system is frozen in time and can’t simply use a newer computer.

Jacobs gave me a tour above the stage where the winches sit (two are seen in the photo below), each with its own motors, relays and three PIC16C57 processors. 4 cables run through holes in the ceiling down to each panel. In addition to controlling the location of the panels, the circuit provides feedback to the Mac G4 on the actual positioning.

The canopy was built for three main reasons, but surprisingly the primary one wasn’t for the audience. The first priority was to help the musicians onstage communicate and hear each other as the panels reflect the sound back to the stage. By tilting the panels into custom configurations based on the orchestra design, the musicians can hear one another and stay in sync. Of course, this also helps the audience hear a better performance.

The other two priorities include making the sound better for the audience who might be sitting in acoustically dead spots near the stage, as well as providing an interesting visual aesthetic.

You might be wondering why Davies hasn’t upgraded the system. Well, it still works just fine. Why mess with something that works? Also, there are enough spare parts around to keep it running for a long time. The original system was built for around half a million dollars. Estimates to update just the electronics have topped $3 million.

For more information about the canopy system, visit this page put together by Ted Chavalas.

The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards, the Oscars of tech as some people have coined it, are coming up fast. Nominations for the best in technology have now been closed and the finalists are being tallied. It’s one night you will not want to miss. Tickets for this year’s Crunchies Awards, held January 31st, are on sale now. Be sure to grab yours while you can.

And as always, if you’d like to sponsor the Crunchies, reach out to our amazing sponsorship team here.

Photos by Ted Chavalas and Jon Orlin

A new startup, SeatID, wants to change the way you fly. Their service lets you use your social network to help pick your next flight and seat assignment. SeatID is available starting today on the Ukrainian airline AeroSvit and the company plans to sign up major international airlines and online travel services soon.

Whether passengers will want to share their flight and seat info is a big and controversial question. Eran Savir, CEO and co-founder of Israeli-based SeatID, says everyone has a bad flying story thanks to an awful seatmate. That experience is what inspired the founders to start the company.

When you are deciding what flight to take and where to sit, SeatID shows your Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts on each flight, if they have opted in to the service.

Savir argues it’s better to sit next to a friend, a friend of a friend, or someone with common interests or business connections, rather than a total stranger, which is the case now. Savir says while the service could be used for social and dating purposes, the more popular scenario is the business use case.

I asked a few folks around the TechCrunch office if anyone wanted so share their seat and flight info. None did. One said ‘flying is not a social thing’ and someone called it ‘creepy’.

The SeatID team knows not everyone will opt-in. They have built in strict privacy controls that allows users to decide who they share their information with. SeatID’s privacy rules inherit your existing Facebook or LinkedIn privacy setting and then add additional limits.

SeatID says they don’t need many passengers to get started. Their initial target is a 5 to 10% conversion rate, or 10 to 20 people on every flight. Given the nearly 3 billion passengers each year, that would be a huge number of users.

There are two parts needed to make SeatID work. The first is people who agree to share information that they will be on a specific flight. Without some passengers who are willing to share this info, the second group won’t know who is available for them to sit next to. If someone decides to sit next to you, you don’t have the ability to reject them. But, you don’t have that ability without SeatID either. Of course, you could try to move your seat.

SeatID also knows they need enough users in the beginning to have a network effect and make the service useful. Savir claims once his customers use the service, they won’t want to fly the old-fashioned way, without this social knowledge the next time.

I wrote about other companies that have tried to do this nearly a year ago, when KLM announced a “meet & seat” program. But SeatID’s concept is different. They want to work with every airline, something that KLM can’t offer. SeatID says while the airlines are looking to increase their uses of social media, building the technology to do social seating is not their core business.

In addition to KLM, I also reported Malaysia Airlines has been experimenting with social seating. But, the airline requires you to book your flight on the airline’s Facebook page, which is not the typical place people book flights. That’s not at all how SeatID works.

SeatID wants you to book your flight on the same site that you currently book it on, whether that’s an airline website or a travel ticketing site. But all the passengers who opt in to SeatID when purchasing their ticket on partner sites will see other passengers no matter which ticketing system they used, as long as their privacy settings allow.

With their first partnership, travelers can go to AeroSvit’s site and decide if they want to login with their Facebook or LinkedIn accounts.

SeatID doesn’t integrate with the backend ticketing or reservations systems of each airline. It only integrates on the frontend so a widget can display who is on each flight. David Rachamim, co-founder and CTO of SeatID says “we’ve built it as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution, which makes the implementation onto the customer’s website very simple.” SeatID says they can integrate with a new partner in a few days or less.

At launch, AeroSvit is only showing ticket buyers in your social networks who are on each flight. The seatmap feature, which shows their seat assignment, has not been implemented yet, but will be soon.

When I questioned how valuable this service would be without the seatmap feature, Savir notes that some airlines don’t have assigned seating. So friends could would be able to grab seats together after they board. Savir says SeatID has gotten interest from some of these “no seat assignment” carriers, but wouldn’t name them until a deal is reached.

SeatID has raised seed funding, but they won’t disclose the amount. For the first customers, the service is free and SeatID would like it to stay that way. They hope to make money by licensing the software to the airlines. If airlines discover this creates great value for users, airlines might charge passengers to use it.

For now, SeatID is only available on AeroSvit, based-in the Ukraine, with its 80 international routes to 34 countries.

At best, SeatID could make your flight much more enjoyable. SeatID might also help you avoid sitting next to a screaming baby. However, if you pick a flying companion that turns into a nightmare, you can’t just leave. Of course, you can always put on your headset or go to sleep.

Image: flickr / Daquella Manera

A hackathon this Veterans Day weekend in San Francisco is looking for a few good men and women. It’s sponsored by VetsinTech, a group working to connect veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem.

VetsinTech says these veterans share many entrepreneurial skills valued by tech startups, including a dogged determination, a high degree of discipline, the ability to work in teams or autonomously, and a strong work ethic.

The event starts tonight with a “basic training” course, Introduction to iOS Programming. On Saturday, a 48-hour hackathon gets underway with small teams of veterans and programmers working to take ideas from concept to company. According to organizers, “the vets can have the idea, help with the business plan, marketing or just sit in to audit/participate for educational purposes – coding skills are NOT required.” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee will speak to the hackers Saturday Sunday morning.

The winning team gets a mentoring session with Startup America CEO Scott Case, free co-working space, classes and more. TechCrunch TV is planning to interview the winner next Monday.

VetsinTech says over the next five years, 1 million service members will be leaving active duty according to government estimates. While the national unemployment rate is 7.9 percent, it’s 10 percent for post 9/11 vets.

Afghan veteran and Ustream SVP of Content, Strategy, and Operations Craig Mullaney is a member of VetsinTech’s advisory board. His company, Ustream, was founded by and is run by many veterans. In fact, the idea for Ustream started as a way for the founders’ Army friends deployed in Iraq to be able to communicate with their families.

Craig and Ustream co-founder John Ham were roommates at West Point. When Craig was making his transition from public service to the private sector, John reached out to him and said “you don’t know much about technology but I could use some help. I can’t find people with your skill set out in the Valley. I know you will do well out here and I’m willing to take a chance on you.”

The reason Craig says he got involved in VetsinTech is he doesn’t think that pathway should be restricted to those who happen to know the CEO of a tech company.

Craig made this powerful point about his fellow veterans:

“Generally, the American population is very very supportive of veterans, more supportive than any previous conflict. But I think as a society we tend to put this new generation of veterans on a pedestal, where they can be admired at a distance. But, they need jobs. They don’t want a handout, but they may need some assistance in making that transition from serving their country in one capacity to serving in another capacity.

I’m personally committed to making sure that we are the next greatest generation and that the real impact of Iraq and Afganistan veterans is not what they have left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what they are going to do in America coming home.”

VetsinTech is helping vets make this transition with programs in education, entrepreneurship and employment. VetsinTech was founded this past July by Katherine Webster. While not a vet herself, she comes from a military family. She’s also the founder of online directory TechCentralSF. VetsinTech founding sponsors include Andreessen Horowitz, Cisco, Intuit, Hewlett-Packard and Salesforce.com.

You can get more information about the hackathon here and still register for the event here.

Our TCTV show, Founder Stories, returns with a new West Coast host, Michael Abbott @mabb0tt. We are really excited Mike will be joining East Coast host Chris Dixon on this show. Mike is a general partner at KPCB and was previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering and a founder himself. His conversations with founders will focus exclusively on some of the key technical challenges they face in the creation of their products and businesses.

Prismatic is an app that creates a custom newsfeed based on your interests. Its news discovery iPhone app launched in August to positive reviews. For our West Coast premier episode of Founder Stories, we invited co-founder Bradford Cross back to our studios to learn how he is managing the business.

Cross tells our host Mike Abbott how it’s important to set the DNA right early. Also he says if founders want to get to the core of their product, they have to pay their dues and learn a lot, rather than try to outsource their problems. Cross also describes how he is working to get the right balance between engineers who want to ship and measure versus designers who are a force for slowing down and thinking about the product and users.

Cross discusses how product managers fit into the startup as the business grows.

Cross was interviewed by Semil Shah for an episode of “In The Studio” before the app launched. You can watch that interview here.

Since this is Mike’s first show, I want to share some of his words on his vision and plans for Founder Stories:

I’m personally excited for this new opportunity because it gives me yet another excuse to do what I love most — talk directly with technical founders and learn to understand the inner workings of the technical issues they’ve faced. The beauty of making it into a show is that these conversations become “open-sourced,” in a way, and will hopefully help transfer and spread knowledge within the community through a conversational format.

Read more on Mike’s blog, uncapitalized, about the show here.

Diigo, a social bookmarking and annotation site, is finally back online 50 hours after the domain was first hijacked. It’s an incredible story that involves crisis management, blackmail, investigative research, payoffs, a clever thief, and points to potential problems with the domain name registry system that could affect anyone with a website. Diigo’s co-founder called it a nightmare and crisis that he’d like to help other companies avoid.

Diigo has 5 million registered users. For two days this week, they couldn’t access the site. The service is both a collaborative research tool, and a social content site. TechCrunch called Diigo “a research tool that rocks”, back in 2006. I’m a big fan and started using Diigo (pronounced Dee’go) to bookmark websites after Yahoo shut down its popular bookmarking site Delicious.

What Happened To Diigo.com

This past Wednesday, I tried using Diigo’s browser bookmarklet to save a site to my library. But, it didn’t work. I went to the Diigo.com site and it got one of those junky parked domain pages that you see when you mistype a URL. My first thought was, did the site close or perhaps their domain name expire? I checked Diigo’s twitter account and learned their domain was hijacked. The twitter account directed users to an emergency announcement that was put up at diigo.net, not diigo.com.

“Dear Diigo users,
We’re terribly sorry to inform you that we’re experiencing domain hijacking, ie. someone gained access to our Yahoo domain registrar account, and illegally hijacked the domain, http://www.diigo.com. Very soon http://www.diigo.com may not be accessible to you until this issue is resolved.

But please rest assured that all our servers and user data are NOT compromised…”

The message also included a way users could help:

“Meanwhile, if you’re an avid Diigo/ twitter user, plesae (sic) help RT and speed up the recovery. Thanks!

@Yahoo @YSmallBusiness, pls help prevent the stealing of http://diigo.com , as done here http://bit.ly/Xqi6Ki …! pls RT!”

On Friday afternoon, after 50 hours, the Diigo.com came back online.

Diigo posted an update saying:

“After an unbelieveable 48 hours roller coaster ordeal, Diigo.com is back! While all our servers and user data were completely unaffected during this time, our domain name registered through yahoo domain service (completely separated access from Diigo servers / user data) was “hijacked” for the past 2 days (no, our domain didn’t expire, but was literally stolen and illegally “transferred out”. According to Yahoo’s log, the thief even called into Yahoo and pretended to be the owner to inquire the transfer, if you can believe that!)

Simply looking-around the web shows that domain theft / hijacking has been causing a lot of disruptions and economic damage. During this ordeal, we have learned some valuable lessons to share with you all. Stay tuned after we get some much needed rest first!”

The Backstory

I contacted Wade Ren, Diigo’s Co-founder and Executive Chairman to get the details of what happened. He agreed to share his story in the hope that other companies will learn some valuable lessons and not have a similar crisis.

Ren told me “it’s a nightmare since it was unexpected. It was a crisis because it may damage Diigo the brand if it isn’t resolved quickly. And it was an ordeal to go begging for help and getting frustrating go-arounds.”

The Diigo team learned their site was being redirected Wednesday morning. They did a WHOIS search and learned their domain was moved from their Yahoo domains to another domain registrar called Aust Domains.

Ren called Yahoo to find out what happened. Ren says he had several calls with Yahoo over the course of 30 hours, but Yahoo staffers repeatedly told him they couldn’t do anything to help. They insisted the only option was to file a police report, which Ren knew, at best, would take a long time to get his domain back.

Ren also discovered Yahoo is not an official domain name registry operator, like GoDaddy, eNom, Tucows, and Melbourne IT. It turns out Yahoo is a domain reseller, and anyone using Yahoo Domains really uses a third party DNS registry operator. Ren’s account used Melbourne IT Ltd., based in Australia.

I discovered that Yahoo discloses this in the fine print in our Small Business Terms of Service

In section 1.3,

“Certain Services that You purchase or receive from Yahoo! may be provided by one or more third-party vendors, contractors, or affiliates selected by Yahoo! … Currently such third parties include: Melbourne IT Ltd for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Business Email, and Yahoo! Domains customers.”

Ren discovered that the actual DNS registry operator, Melbourne IT, would need to get involved to get this resolved. After much pleading, a Yahoo staffer called Melbourne IT to help, and was told that since the domain was transferred out, there was nothing they can do.

At the same time, Ren called and sent an email to Aust Domains, where diigo.com was now registered. His email, titled “high traffic domains stolen, please help!” got a boilerplate reply from customer support saying:

“In this case, you will need to contact your domain registrar (Yahoo) to submit a complaint to Verisign (Global domain registry).

Once we receive the formal decision from Verisign, we will take the further action.”

Aust Domains and Yahoo weren’t going to help Ren get his domain back quickly. But then Ren was contacted by someone who could. The thief.

The thief, who had a yahoo email address, wanted money in exchange for Diigo to get their domain back. Ren says the thief bragged about how he had done this many times before and was very careful.

Of course, Ren in principle didn’t want to do business with a cyber blackmailer. But, he wanted to get his site back as quickly as possible for his users and didn’t want to deal with this problem much longer. He said the thief was well aware of the timing. He said the criminal knew it may still take 2 weeks for Diigo to get their site back even with the help of Yahoo, and it would be a lot quicker to pay him to get the domain back, otherwise known as blackmail.

Weighting options, Ren decided to pay the money and was given the account information at Aust Domain so Diigo could get their site back, by pointing the DNS settings back to his servers. Ren doesn’t want to disclose the exact amount of the payment, but it was in the 3-figures.

Searching the web, Ren found many cases of domain hijacking, and in one case, by the same hijacker at HowardForum.com, the thief was paid $400. You can read the timeline of that attack here.

In that case, the website owner says his registrar, GoDaddy, worked with Aust Domains to get the domain back. It took 13 days. Howard shared some of the emails he got from the thief:

Hello, I’m ready to sell that domain for 400 $. let me know if you are interested so we can talk about the transaction method.

My offer is valid for 12 hours anyway. Good luck.

I’m not looking for any trouble, You pay and I’ll provide you the info instantly after payment

The important thing is I’m the owner of this domain at this moment and after few weeks I decided to sell this domain…. you are wasting my time by asking unrelated questions.

Back to Diigo, Ren says that at the same time he was in contact with the criminal, a more senior person at Yahoo got in touch with him. This person was much more eager to help.

I sent requests via email and phone to Yahoo for comment. After 22 hours, Yahoo’s PR department told me they will look into this. I’m still awaiting their reply and will update this post with any response.

Lessons Learned

Ren says he’s learned several lessons this past week that he wants to share.

Ren isn’t sure how the thief got the account’s password. He speculates it could have happened on some public wifi network and was perhaps sold to the blackmailer. But, all the thief needed to transfer the domain was his email and password.

The thief was very careful according to Ren. He doesn’t let his target know that he’s hijacking their domain until it’s too late. The thief didn’t change his Yahoo account password. He just took actions to transfer the domain to the new registrar.

Since the thief still had access to the Yahoo account’s email, Ren suspects the thief was watching his emails and quickly deleted ones that might have warned Ren of the domain transfer. This wasn’t Ren’s main email account so he didn’t check it as often.

He says 2-step verification of logins could have prevented all this. Yahoo offers 2-step verification where “any sign-in attempt Yahoo! deems suspicious will require a second verification, either answering your account’s security question or entering a verification code we send to the mobile phone or non-Yahoo! alternate email address we have on file.”

Ren says that unfortunately, this security feature is still in beta and does not seem to work as promised. After the hijacking happened, Ren says he tested his account and was surprised to find that he could still login without the verification step. When Ren told Yahoo about this problem during the hijacking, they asked him to fill out a bug ticket to report it.

Would the domain locking featured offered by Yahoo and other registrars have helped? Ren says no, it only provides false hope. Since the thief had access to his account, the thief was simply able to turn domain locking off. And the thief was able to get the domain transfer authorization code, designed to prevent fraudulent or unauthorized transfer, because he had access to the account.

Ren says he’s learned it’s better to use a domain name registry operator, rather than a reseller.

Based on his experience, Ren says the the domain name registry system is flawed and it needs a system to freeze a domain transfer and revert the domain to its pre-transfer state, immediately after a transfer dispute is submitted, pending further investigation.

Ren makes a comparison to the online banking industry. If someone steals you financial account, you have more recourse and security since further verification steps are typically required. But even though your website might be your most business important asset, you don’t have the same protection from your domain host, and there ought to be better procedures and recourse in place to prevent this from happening.

Until that happens, criminals will still be out there taking advantage of the situation and prying on unsuspecting website owners.

Apple knows how to launch and promote new products better than any company in the world. Yesterday’s 73 minute special event, introducing the iPad mini, new MacBook Pro, Mac Mini and iMac was, in Apple’s words amazing, great, the best, incredible, tremendous, fantastic, incredible, gorgeous and much much more. While some potential buyers might be interested in the detailed specs, check out this short video I put together that contains everything you need to know.

As you listen to it, you might wonder whether they are describing new hardware products or a new lover. Thanks to Apple’s amazing, great, fantastic Final Cut Pro for help editing this video.

The super low cost computer called the Raspberry Pi is mind-blowing and awesome. As TechCrunch recently reported, the $25 to $35 mini computer on a circuit board is designed to give kids around the globe an easy way to learn computer programming. But the Raspberry Pi is not like a computer you get from Apple or pickup at the local Best Buy. It’s not as simple as plug and play. It takes a bit of extra work and time. And you need to be a hacker before you can get it working.

I got my hands on one of the 400,000 units that have been sold. The first thing I noticed is the Raspberry Pi is sold with no accessories. You get just the circuit board as seen above, without any of the connections. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, the British-based not-for-profit charity that makes the computer, says it wants to keep the price down, perhaps even $20 one day. But to keep the price down, they had to make some hard choices about what hardware and interfaces to include.

While a $25 to $35 computer makes a nice headline, the odds are good it’s going to cost you several times that amount to get it going. That full amount is still insanely lower than the price of a new PC or Mac.

You will need to connect a power supply, monitor, USB keyboard, mouse, SD memory card, and an Ethernet connection. If you want to get fancy, you might also find a box to hold it and attach all sorts of sensors, displays, and almost anything you can think of. No soldering is required to get the basic system running.

Diagram by Paul Beech and via raspberrypi.org website

The distributors selling the Raspberry Pi also sell some of the needed accessories, but they are in high demand and short supply, just like the circuit board itself. So, I decided to get started using parts I already had at home.

I had online help from the quick start guide on the RaspberryPi.org website, their wiki and support forums.

Power

I started by searching for a power source as no power cable is included. The quick start guide says you need to find a “Micro USB power supply – make sure you use a good quality one, capable of providing at least 700mA at 5V. Do not attempt to power your Raspberry Pi by plugging it into a computer or a hub.”

The Raspberry Pi makers say they picked the Micro USB jack for its ubiquity, saying it was chosen by the major mobile operator trade group, GSMA, as the Universal Charging Solution. Micro USB is also the standard charging port in Europe and it’s used on Android phones in the US.

As a big Mac user, I use a lot of USB chargers, but they have an Apple Dock connector on the other end. Not Micro USB. I read on one of the support pages that the power supply on the Amazon Kindle, which terminates with a Micro USB plug, could work. Looking at the fine print on the power adapter, it read “Output: 4.9V and 0.85 A.” It wasn’t the 5V in the spec but it sounded close enough, and 0.85 A was greater than the 700mA spec. Whether or not it was a “good quality one”, I had no idea.

This power supply did get the Raspberry Pi LED’s to light up. And it did work for a bit. But after everything was connected, my keyboard repeated letters (such as “EEEEEEEEEEEE” ) even though I touched the “E” key once. Other keys wouldn’t work at all. At first I suspected a bad keyboard, but after searching for “repeating keys” in the help forum and reading 45 results and the wiki, I learned the keyboard problem was likely due to the power supply. According to the wiki “common symptoms of an inadequate power supply are unreliable ethernet or keyboard operation … and SD card errors at startup.”

In order to tell if my power supply was inadequate, the wiki suggested I get out my multimeter and read the voltage across two test points on the circuit board. I don’t remember having to do that on any of my other computers.

With the Amazon Kindle power supply, I got a reading of 4.62 volts. The wiki said I should see a voltage between 4.75 and 5.25 volts and “anything outside this range indicates that you have a problem with your power supply or your power cable, or the input polyfuse F3.” I took a chance and decided I needed a better power supply and not a new input polyfuse F3, whatever that is. After hunting around the support forums, I found what I hoped was better power adapter for $10 and ordered it on Amazon. Using the new power adapter with the Kindle USB to Micro USB cable, I get a reading of 4.92 volts and the Raspberry Pi works much better.

Monitor

The video output from the Raspberry Pi is either HDMI or composite video via an RCA jack. I have a monitor with HDMI inputs and a spare HDMI cable so this wasn’t a problem for me. But, you can’t connect to a monitor using VGA, which many users might first try. The Raspberry Pi FAQ says “there is no VGA support, but adapters are available, although these are relatively expensive.”

According the the FAQ, the reason there is no VGA support is “the chip specifically supports HDMI. VGA is consider to be an end-of-life technology, so supporting it doesn’t fit with our plans at the moment.” The Raspberry Pi Foundation is hoping many of the students it’s trying to reach may have access to an old TV to use as the display since many of them have composite video input RCA jacks. I tried using the composite video mode on a tv and while the picture wasn’t as crystal clear as the HDMI method, it was workable.

USB Keyboard & Mouse

Finding a USB keyboard and mouse was pretty easy. But, if you don’t have one, those keyboards are pretty cheap, but they are another small expense.

SD Memory Card

You will also need a SD card to store the operating system and your programs and data. It’s a clever memory solution and SD cards are easy to get.

I used a 2GB card, but I’m running out of room, so I plan to upgrade to a 4GB card or greater. The FAQ says “we have tried cards up to 32GB and most cards seem to work OK. You can also attach a USB stick or USB hard drive.”

The default operating system for the Raspberry Pi is Debian, a version of Linux. I quickly learned you can’t simply copy and paste this software to the SD card from a computer. (Note: While I could have bought a SD card with the OS pre-configured, there is an order backlog own them and it was more fun to try this myself.)

I downloaded the special “Raspbian wheezy” version of Debian, which is recommended for those just starting out. Once downloaded from the Raspberry Pi website, the wiki gave me instructions on how to copy the image to my SD card by hooking it up to a card reader and my Mac. There were 12 steps including typing commands in the terminal program like this:

sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/debian6-19-04-2012/debian6-19-04-2012.img of=/dev/rdisk3

There were also some scary warnings, which basically said I could erase my entire Mac computer if it made a mistake.

Using the device name of the partition work out the raw device name for the entire disk, by omitting the final “s1″ and replacing “disk” with “rdisk” (this is very important: you will lose all data on the hard drive on your computer if you get the wrong device name).

A recent update to the wiki instruction page includes a “mostly graphical interface” method, compared to the original command line method, to copy the image to your SD Card. Still, you need to run the terminal and this command:

sudo dd if=path_of_your_image.img of=/dev/diskn bs=1m

Once the operating system is loaded on the SD card, you can insert it into the slot on the Raspberry Pi and hopefully it will boot up.

The first two times I tried this, I got fatal errors and the Raspberry Pi would freeze. Some of this might have been due to the power supply problem described earlier.

One time, the red power light came on but the Raspberry Pi wouldn’t boot. I found a suggestion in the support forums to remove “the ._.Trashes .Trashes/, .fseventsd/, … that OS X put on the card, and all is well.” I put the SD card back in the card reader, attached it to the Mac and fired up the Terminal program and used some basic Unix to remove these files, using commands like rm filename. When I put the SD card back in the Raspberry Pi, all was indeed well.

Seeing the Raspberry Pi start up successfully brought on a proud sense of accomplishment.

Ethernet Connection

To get full use out of the Raspberry Pi, I plugged it into an Ethernet LAN cable and had no problem getting online. You can also get it connected to the Internet using a USB Wi-Fi or wireless adapter.

Software & Browser

When the Raspberry Pi boots up, it will start in command line mode. Here’s what you should see:

Then, I launched its graphical user “X window system” by typing startx at the command line.
Here’s what you get:

The operating system comes with the Midori web browser installed. Here’s what the TechCrunch site looked like:

I also installed the Chromium browser. Here’s TechCrunch in that browser:

But be prepared for the pages to load extremely slow.

What’s Next

The Debian operating system comes with Python pre-installed and it’s the recommended default educational programming language. With just one command line of text, I was able to install PHP. You can run a web server or a media server from the Raspberry Pi. You can install WordPress, the software that powers TechCrunch, on it. You can blink a single LED or create an amazing 8x8x8 LED Cube. If you are a gamer, you can run Quake III, as Devin Coldewey wrote on TechCrunch last year. And so much more.

As the Raspberry Pi team writes “We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere.”

After getting started with the Raspberry Pi, I’m excited to see what I can do with it. I think the mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a very worthy goal. And they are achieving this goal around the world today. But I fear the current setup requirements might discourage some students, parents, and teachers. I’m sure the team and the developer community is working on this too.

TechCrunch has obtained a secret copy of what may be a mockup for the new Yahoo home page. Yesterday, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer shared her broad vision for the future of the Internet company with employees.

According to AllThingsD, Mayer didn’t share specific plans for fixing search and email or an “in-process and dramatic home page redesign.” While ATD reporter Kara Swisher seems to have the phones at Yahoo bugged, and perhaps a @yahoo-inc.com email address, she hasn’t been able to get a peek at the redesign. Yahoo has also been cracking down on leaks, but that didn’t stop us.

Click on the image below to open the screenshot in a new window:

Yes, the new home page looks a lot like the home page of Google, Mayer’s former employer. In fact Mayer, who was Google employee number 20, oversaw the famous clean, plain white search home page at Google. We’ve also heard that she was responsible for the longest time with no changes on that home page. So the new Yahoo home page mockup is not that surprising.

Mayer has been borrowing many ideas from her years at Google including a focus on product and data, free food in the cafeteria, and weekly “FYI” meetings like Google’s “TGIF” meetings. She is also approving all company hires, just like the Google co-founders.

Mayer has already removed some ads from the home page according to AllThingsD. But this new ad-free home page design is a surprise and a risk since the Yahoo home page generates substantial ad revenue for the company.

The new home page features links for key areas that Yahoo plans to double-down on, including Search, Mobile, and Social. It also has links to the reported 4 C’s that are part of Mayer’s goals for talent at Yahoo: culture, company goals, calibration, and compensation.

If you are not logged in, Yahoo’s home page first top nav button is “You!”, similar to Google’s “+You.”

Note also that Yahoo is dropping the ® symbol from their logo, which was first reported by TechCrunch earlier this month. But, not the ! symbol.

Hopefully, Mayer also has a good sense of humor. I’ve heard she has a good laugh.

Special thanks to Google Chrome’s developer tools for making this post possible.

OK, so we’re not at Gangnam Style or Call Me Maybe viewing levels. Those videos have more than 274 million and 269 million views, respectively, on YouTube. But today, TechCrunch’s YouTube channel passed its own milestone: 10 million views.

Michael Arrington wrote the first post on TechCrunch on June 11th, 2005. Less than two months later, obviously recognizing that video was going to be important, he had signed up for a YouTube channel.

We’ve just completed a re-fresh and re-design of our YouTube page and have started feeding it with our TCTV videos, after a short hiatus. We’ve got more than 2500 videos available, plus featured playlists for our shows like TC Cribs and events such as Disrupt. Our recent Mark Zuckerberg interview is now featured on our YouTube home page.

You can join our 14,181 YouTube subscribers by signing up here.

Here’s a look at our all-time top three videos on YouTube:

If you are wondering about that last William Shatner video, you can learn why he loves TechCrunch here.

We will still use the AOL On player for TechCrunch videos on our site, but we are glad to have our videos available on the YouTube network as well.

Every time Apple releases a new iPhone, Steve Wozniak is going to be waiting up all night on line to get one. TechCrunch was planning to talk to him at one of his usual digs at an Apple Store in Los Gatos or San Jose.

But, this time it turns out the Apple co-founder is waiting in Australia. According to his tweet from an hour ago, he’s “In line for first iPhone 5′s in the world!” at the Apple Store in Chermside, Queensland Australia, which is a suburb of Brisbane. Where it happens to be 5am Friday. So, Wozniak will be one of the first to buy the new iPhone 5.

In line for first iPhone 5's in the world! (@ Apple Store w/ 2 others) [pic]: 4sq.com/Vh8kYS—
Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz) September 20, 2012

According to the Apple website, the Chermside store opens in just a few hours at 9am.

When the iPhone 4S came out, he told TechCrunch how it would change his life. He also explained why he waits on line, saying “I’ve gotten so used to waiting in line, overnight, it has meaning. The product is so good and this is my way of recognizing it.”

In the last of our three part series of video highlights from Disrupt SF, we focus on Wednesday when YourMechanic won the Startup Battlefield competition.

Earlier in the day, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick explained how he goes up against regulators trying to block his disruptive business model. Yammer CEO David Sacks was asked whether his company was ever in serious acquisition talks with Salesforce or Twitter before it was sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. And Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures explained why he doesn’t like to refer to himself as a venture capitalist, preferring to be called a mentor instead.

Seven Disrupt Battlefield finalists were called back on stage to present and take questions during the final round of the competition. Finalists included Expect Labs, Gyft, Lit Motors, Prior Knowledge, Saya, YourMechanic, and Zumper. You can watch each of their presentations below.

You can view the video highlights from Monday (Day 1) here and Tuesday (Day 2) here.

Continuing our look back at the Disrupt SF conference video highlights, Tuesday featured the standing-room only interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In his first interview since the IPO, he called his stock performance disappointing and talked about his biggest mistake. Investors focused on the positive comments, including progress in the mobile business, and Facebook’s market value soared $6.785 billion after the discussion. It might be the first nearly $7 billion interview.

Besides Zuckerberg, many other founders and entrepreneurs made news earlier in the day. Kevin Rose denied a leaked memo from Paul Graham that claimed Google Ventures was lowballing valuations. Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler told Michael Arrington he hasn’t made any startup investments this year. And Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talked about how he thinks Google “squandered its enterprise opportunity.”

Another 15 startups presented their demos in the last three Battlefield sessions. The first company to present, YourMechanic, wound up winning the Disrupt Cup. It seems like going first helps, as the first company to present the day before was the runner-up.

For a look at the videos from Disrupt on Monday, check here. If you don’t have time to watch the entire Zuckerberg interview, you can cruise through the featured sound bites here. SnappyTV put together a video player based on the tweets from Crunchfund’s MG Siegler during the Zuckerberg interview. Check that out here.

Want to catch up on some of our Disrupt conference highlights that you might have missed? This weekend, we’ll be posting videos from each day of Disrupt.

Monday’s agenda featured a keynote from Twitter and Square Co-Founder Jack Dorsey who told the audience he “never wanted to be an entrepreneur.” Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz warned about how IPOs can change a company. We also heard from Greylock partner and LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, Path’s Co-Founder Dave Morin, Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker and The Honest Company Founders Jessica Alba and Brian Lee, plus many other founders and tech leaders. Check out the two video players below.

The first three sessions of our Startup Battlefield were also held Monday, beginning with a demo from runnerup, Lit Motors, maker of a fully-electric, self-balancing vehicle that looks like it’s from the future.

Whoa! That was quite a response. TechCrunch got 445 entries to our Disrupt Remix Contest. Check them all out below. After many hours of music screening, our busy Event Director Joey Hinson has chosen a winner. It was a difficult pick because so many were so good. But, now we are proud to announce the winner. Drumroll please. It’s Natasha Bryant-Raible, with her “TechTechRastaCrunch” remix. She gets 2 free tickets to attend Disrupt SF next week and a free Pro SoundCloud account.

Here’s her remix, that will also be played during Disrupt.

In addition to creating our catchy music, our partners Smith & Keats provided individual audio loops based on the full compositions, so our mixers would have more options.

You can find all the contest entries here.

A very large number of the tracks came via Songster, a Facebook game that lets anyone create great sounding mixes. Marshall Seese, the founder and CEO of Mowgligames.com, which makes Songster, read about our contest. He asked if he could make our tracks their “free song pack of the week” and we said “sure.”

Seese told us he “developed Songster so that anyone, regardless of musical talent, could feel the creative thrill of making their own song. When we saw that TechCrunch was hosting a remix contest, we wanted to help open it up to the masses by using our technology to drive many more remix submissions than would otherwise been possible.” And it sure did.

While we didn’t know this when we picked our winner, Natasha works at Mowgli and does a lot of DJing on the side.

Here’s all our original tracks from Smith & Keats, including some new ones making their official debut next week:

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the contest.

Livestream, one of the leading video companies enabling live web broadcasts, is taking a big leap today into the hardware business by offering its own video production switcher. Years ago, creating a high quality live show outside the studio required an expensive TV production truck. Major network events, like the conventions and sporting events still need a truck or several. But, most webcasts don’t support that level of investment. A typical webcast uses just one camera, which can be pretty visually boring . Livestream is looking to give live event producers who use its platform a more cost effective option with its new multi-camera studio-in-a-box. It may also give viewers of web videos a more professional-looking, engaging show.

The Livestream Studio HD500 (nice to start with a high number like 500?) is not for everyone. The new hardware, announced this morning, costs $8,500 and starts shipping next month. The product features 5 live video inputs and 5 outputs in a variety of formats from SD to HD. It also features audio mixing, graphic overlays, and a digital video recorder and player. In one-click, it can also stream to Livestream’s platform.

Max Haot, CEO and Co-founder of Livestream, says the move to become a hardware seller fits the company’s mission “to make it easier and more affordable for producers and event owners to produce high quality HD multi-camera live streams.”

Livestream appears to be taking aim at the Tricaster, made by Newtek, one of the current major studio-in-a-box providers for webcasting. (TechCrunch uses two of them when we produce our Disrupt conference webcasts.) Newtek announced new models in April priced at $20,000 and $30,000. But just last month, Newtek announced its TriCaster 40, priced at just under $5,000. Newtek has been a player in the all-in-one production space for many years. It introduced the Video Toaster back in 1990 that ran on the Commodore Amiga computer. The technology has certainly come a long way.

TechCrunch hasn’t had a chance yet to test the HD500. It will be interesting to see how well Livestream, mostly known for its streaming infrastructure, can sell this hardware product.

This isn’t the first move Livestream has made into selling hardware. Earlier this year, they released the Livestream Broadcaster which enables single-camera HD productions to be webcast without a computer.

Livestream also says they will release a software version of the switcher in the first quarter of 2013. It will work with some Blackmagic video input cards and webcam, and let your PC or Mac become a broadcast quality switcher. Other companies already offer ways to turn your computer into a tv truck, such as BoinxTV. While computers have gotten much more reliable, there always the risk they will freeze up during a show.

That’s one of several reasons why major broadcasters are not likely to abandon their million dollar production trucks anytime soon. But, these new hardware and software products do go a long way toward making webcasts look like bigger budget shows.

You can view Max Haot’s interview last year on our Founder Stories show here.

Disclaimer: TechCrunch’s streaming partner on our live events is Ustream, a competitor of Livestream. We also partner with Newtek and use their Tricaster.

Tech-Crunch DISRUPT! With Disrupt SF coming up in less than three weeks, perhaps you are starting to hum our memorable Disrupt music in your head. Tech-Crunch DISRUPT!

We are debuting new custom tracks at the event, but you can get a sneak preview in this post. You can also freely download and remix this music. Send us your best remixes and we will play our favorites during Disrupt. We are also holding a contest for the best remix. The winner gets 2 free tickets to attend Disrupt SF and a free Pro SoundCloud account. So get mixing.

We’ve been working with our music partners Smith & Keats to create some more original, addictive techie tracks. Use the player below to hear the new tracks, numbers 8 thru 11. You can also hear your old favorites like track 3, the Disrupt Theme Song.

Update: Based on input from our commenters, we are also providing original Audio Loops to help you remix our tracks. These 17 cuts below are protected by copyright and may only be used for the TechCrunch Disrupt Remix competition.

Here’s how to enter the contest:
1. Listen and download any of the TechCrunch Disrupt tracks. Use the Download button below. You are free to put this music on your music player or re-mix. You can do anything you want with the music except sell it.

2. Remix the tracks.

3. Upload your finished tracks to our music dropbox on SoundCloud at http://soundcloud.com/groups/techcrunch-disrupt-remix-music-contest/dropbox. When uploading content to SoundCloud you must agree that you own or have obtained all the correct rights, licenses, consents and permissions necessary in order to upload the content. You have the right to remix the Disrupt music.

4. When you upload your tracks to the SoundCloud site, you can use your existing SoundCloud account, or you will need to provide and confirm your email address. We will use this email to notify the winner. The winner gets two free passes to Disrupt and a one-year subscription to a SoundCloud Pro account (value €250/year.)

5. Give your track a title. Optionally, you can put your name in the track’s description.

6. The deadline is midnight PT, Monday September 3rd.

7. We will announce the winner on Wednesday, September 5th on TechCrunch.

Anyone can listen to all the contest entries here.

Since May 2011, our Disrupt music has been created by Smith & Keats, based in Auckland, New Zealand. Their creative team of Malcolm Smith and Steve Keats were the first New Zealanders to win the World’s Best Radio Commercial at the International Broadcasting Awards in Hollywood. TechCrunch gives these guys some musical ideas and styles, and Steve says they make sure “each track is just a fraction more modern than the original vibe requested, so that TechCrunch sounds edgy. You have probably heard their works done for other clients such as Facebook Games, Nintendo, Sony-Ericsson, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi.

Thanks also to SoundCloud for hosting the music and helping us set up the contest.

The sound booster Mac App called Boom will be releasing its Mountain Lion version on the Apple Store tomorrow. If you have ever wished you could raise the volume on your speakers higher than the maximum level that Apple allows (or to 11), you should check out the low-cost app Boom.

The app boosts the volume of Skype chats, Netflix movies, badly recorded YouTube videos, music, or any sound that comes out of your Mac speakers. It’s also useful in loud environments or when you want to just pump up the volume.

Boom, made by India-based Global Delight, already has a 4 rating on the Apple’s App Store for its earlier versions. The software was first released at Macworld 2011 and won a Best of Show Award. An earlier version of the software was Mountain Lion compatible, but some bugs have been fixed, and a notification feature added.

The app is very simple to install and use. Boom adds an extra volume control slider to the menu bar. The software also lets users create custom equalizer settings or use built-in presets, which helps with different kinds of source audio.

Boom uses a proprietary algorithm to boost quiet sounds up to 400% without apparent distortion. In addition to working on the system audio coming out of your Mac, you can also drop an audio file into the app to get a louder version.

Guruprasad Kamath, a manager at Boom, tells TechCrunch they would like to make a version for the Windows platform and work with OEMs. They also want to make an iOS version, but Kamath says they cannot capture system level audio on iOS yet. They are hoping Apple builds some frameworks to make it possible.

A Retina version is expected in 2 to 3 weeks.

There are some other apps, like Hear, which also boost audio levels, but Boom is cheaper at $6.99.

Boom is made by a team of 8 at Global Delight, a self-funded India-based developer. They also make the popular iPhone app Camera Plus, which has 18 million downloads. Camera Plus is different than the also popular Camera+, made by TapTapTap.

Boom is one way to make your Mac go to 11, by making 10 louder.

As Nigel Tufnel famously said in “This Is Spinal Tap,” when asked why his amps go to eleven, “You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there?” Marty DiBergi replies “Put it up to eleven” but asks “Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?” Nigel doesn’t seem to get it and replies “These go to eleven.”

So does Boom.