What’s the penalty for lying on a resume? It’s an important question for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, after his PR department offered up the laughable excuse that he made “an inadvertent error” on Yahoo’s website and in an SEC filing claiming he had a Computer Science degree. TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon just wrote this should cost him his new job. At Yahoo, the penalty could include “immediate discharge”.

I got a job at Yahoo in 1999. Before I started, I was required to fill out an Employment Application. The form included educational and employment history information and notes “A resume may be attached.” At the bottom of the form, there is a boxed section, with the bold headline “Authorization: Please read carefully, initial each paragraph and sign below.”

Here’s the first paragraph in that section:

“I certify that the facts on this Employment Application (and any supplements attached) are true and complete. I further understand that any omissions or misrepresentations made by me on this application will be sufficient grounds for denying my application, withdrawing any offer of employment or immediate discharge.”

So, if I had made ANY misrepresentations (in Yahoo PR speak: “inadvertent errors”) as a Yahoo employee, I would have been at risk of losing my job immediately. We’ll find out if the same rules apply to the CEO.

Some caveats here of course. This application is more than 10 years old and Yahoo might have changed this part. Unlikely. Also, Thompson’s employment application (if he even wrote one) and his contract are not part of the public record, so we don’t know exactly what’s in there.

We do know what’s in documents Yahoo filed with the SEC where the false degree was also mentioned. As activist shareholder Daniel Loeb noted in his letter to the Board, Yahoo’s Code of Ethics may have been violated. It states “Disclosure in reports and documents filed with or submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and in other public communications made by Yahoo! must be full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable.”

Update: Michael Arrington, who is now CEO of Yahoo according to his LinkedIn profile, just reported Yahoo even has a 24-hour IntegrityLine to report Code of Ethics violations. Mike says he called the number “and damn if they don’t pick that phone up on the first ring.” I tried calling the number and all I get is some peaceful on hold music and a message “Thank you for holding.” Seems that line might be pretty busy right now.

Perhaps, Thompson should have read this article, found ironically on Yahoo Voices titled “3 Reasons You Should Never Lie on Your Resume.” It ends with the following suggestion on why its not a good idea. “In the end, you’ll be happier for not having to look over your shoulder for the rest of your career, just wondering if, right now, someone is calling that bogus school you mentioned last year when you finally got your dream job.”

[Image: alexskopje/Shutterstock]

Blockbuster movie director James Cameron made the top two worldwide grossing films of all time – Titanic and Avatar. This week in Las Vegas he spoke not to the movie industry, but to television broadcasters at the NAB convention about how important TV is to the future of 3D. TechCrunch also got a chance to talk to him about 3D on tablets and tweeting from the bottom of the ocean.

Cameron believes 3D is inevitable as the way we will view all entertainment, whether it’s on a tablet, TV, or the movie screen. And he wants his company, Cameron | Pace Group (CPG), to remain the leader in 3D technology and production services. With Titanic 2D and 3D just passing $2 billion in worldwide ticket sales, Cameron has had huge success converting 2D Titanic into 3D. But he sees the day when much more new production is done in 3D, not just big movies and sports.

Early attempts at 3D television production, usually produced around sporting events, treated the 3D production as a separate, secondary system. But Cameron advocates what’s called 5D, shooting both the 2D and 3D as an integrated system, so there is only combined production, with one control room and each camera position and operator generating both 2D and 3D signals.

Cameron showed off all sorts of new 3D technology built by his company. But, he doesn’t want to sell it. He says the technology is changing so rapidly that what’s new today might be obsolete in as little as 3 months. He says the equipment is used to make his life better and, of course, better 3D. And he can afford to keep iterating. So, he’d rather you license or lease his gear and hire him to provide an end to end 3D solution. Imagine if the iPhone was sold that way.

I had a chance to sit down with Cameron and his partner Vince Pace after his presentation.

TechCrunch: Why does your style of making 3D movies works so well, compared to other 3D films where things keep flying at your head?

Cameron: You can’t fatigue the eye and you can’t draw attention to it. People talk about it being gimmicky. What they really mean is you are putting more focus on the interesting stereoscopic illusions versus the moment in the narrative. The second you are not paying attention to it as narrative continuum, then you have just lost the battle. You have reminded people you are just watching something in 3D with glasses on. That’s the last thing you want to do. What you want to do is let the 3D be a subconscious heightening of the experience. So, we use the depth to make the screen, whether it’s a TV screen or movie screen a window. A window into a reality. The more you are popping stuff off people’s foreheads, the more you are reminded it’s artificial.

Pace: Sometimes people get caught up in thinking that it needs to be a 3D movie, when in fact, it’s more powerful when you are engaged in something that has character. And it really makes it more intimate. One of the viewers (at the presentation) said it best. “It’s epic and intimate at the same time.” That means we are engaging you.

Cameron: We ought to do that as a t-shirt. “Epic and intimate.”

If you want to see that principle in action, check out Titanic 3D. This is not a plug for the movie, we are doing fine thanks. But if you want to see that principle, the first 2 hours of the movie, it’s boy meets girl, nothing happens. You don’t hit the iceberg until you are 2 hours in. Why is all that stuff so compelling and powerful in 3D, because there is this sense that you as the viewer, are intimately involved in the story. You are standing there in the room, you are on the ship.

TechCrunch: Is the future of 3D about the movies or TV?

Cameron: The future of 3D will be defined by TV. The reason for that is it’s going to solve this whole conversion issue. Because the 3D production cycle for TV is so short. You don’t have time to do a conversion. It just doesn’t exist. It’s just not part of the vocabulary. So, the tools for shooting it, posting it, delivering it, displaying it, are all going to be proven in the TV markets and then movie guys are just going to have to get in line with it.

TechCrunch: Are we ever going to see a first release not on the big screen, but on the Internet?

Cameron: Sure. Why not. It’s the same intimacy factor, right. You can shoot anything. It doesn’t have to be big effects film. Any delivery system that can carry an HD signal can carry 3D. So, we are there. You just have to see the wisdom of it. But, if it’s not a big blockbuster (jokingly) I’m not going to do it. Somebody else can do it.

We are very interested in enabling the global production community, (giving them) the ability to do what they are already doing. Just do it in 3D.

TechCrunch: What do you think about the state of 3D TV’s?

Cameron: Mid level big flat panels are 3D now. I think people are checking the box out. “It’s a feature I might want, I don’t need it right now. I don’t have too many 3D Blu-rays. but I might want in the future

It’s really not that big a deal anymore. So, I think where it’s ultimately got to end, is glasses free viewing in the home, on the big screen. I don’t think you go straight there. I think what you do is you look for places where you don’t have multiple viewers. Where don’t you have multiple viewers? Tablets. So, more people are watching their entertainment streamed to a tablet. That’s the place where 3D will really be the coming next big thing.

Everybody is already watching a lot of their entertainment on tablets, and on laptops. So, it’s usually single viewer, two at most. That’s the natural place because you are already glasses free. That technology is easy. It’s already here. But good glasses-free technology for both viewer positions is not around the corner. Maybe at the resolutions they want, it may be two or three years down the line. So, I actually think that’s not the place where we solve it first to really have rapid adoption of 3D.

TechCrunch: If you just started directing in this new age of video and film technology and YouTube, would anything be different?

Cameron: Storytelling is storytelling. You still play by the same narrative rules. The technology is completely different. I don’t use one piece of technology that I used when I started directing. I don’t use film cameras. I don’t do visual effects the same way. We don’t use miniature models, it’s all CG now, creating worlds in CG. It’s a completely different toolset. But the rules of storytelling are the same. As the French say, plus ca change, plus c’eset la meme chose. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

TechCrunch: Where will you and the technology be in 10 years?

Cameron: I’ll still expect to be able to crank out stories that people want to see. I know the technology will change. I know it will be incumbent on me to stay up.

Stay at the cutting edge. That way you are never obsolete technologically, as long as your are confident in your storytelling skills, you are never obsolete that way either.

TechCrunch: You hold the world record for the world’s deepest tweet, if you count tweeting by proxy. How did that come happen?

Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you @DeepChallenge—
James Cameron (@JimCameron) March 25, 2012

Cameron: It wasn’t a true wireless tweet, because you can only have acoustic communication thru the water column, so I typed it in, I sent it, then it was retranscribed and sent out by somebody on the surface.

It was something we wanted to do just to have fun. We set a record. Deepest solo dive. Deepest tweet. Tweet deep or go home.

TechCrunch: What about your tweet about the difficulties of doing a live underwater video stream?

Live-streaming underwater? "What could possibly go wrong?” A shot from@AquariumPacific #Sanctum http://yfrog.com/h59fdij—
James Cameron (@JimCameron) February 03, 2011

Cameron: What could go wrong. Yeah, right exactly. No, we didn’t do an underwater live stream (during his deepest dive). I had already done it (underwater) actually from the Long Beach Aquarium. But to do it at great depth requires a fiber optic link to the surface and we didn’t have that technology on this expedition. We hope to have it on the phase two expedition.

TechCrunch: Is there a role or opportunity for investors and venture capitalists in 3D?

Cameron: I think there are a lot of opportunities in the 3D space, and I think that they have to believe that it’s inevitable. I believe 3D is inevitable because it’s about aligning our entertainment systems to our sensory system. We all have two eyes, we all see the world in 3D. And it’s natural for us to want our entertainment in 3D as well. It’s just getting the technology, it’s really more the business model, than the technology piece. We’ve solved the technology.

TechCrunch: In the past, you’ve told Hollywood to stop making trash 3D movies. What’s your complaint?

Cameron: I’ll bash them, sure. What I’ve been pretty vigorously bashing is quick down and dirty conversions in post production. Now, obviously we make native 3D production tools. So, we are against the idea of conversion at all for new production. Now, if you want to see “The Godfather” in 3D, Francis has got to get his thumb out and start converting it. But, it has to be done right.

If you just made a $150 million movie, and you’re try to convert it in post production and do it right, it’s going to take you 6 months to a year. You really want to sit on with the interest clock running, sit on that negative for an additional 6 months to a year before you bring it to market? I don’t think it makes sense. But nobody factors that in. When they compare native (3D) to conversion, they are not really comparing apples to apples. They are comparing the right way to do it, which is native production, to the wrong way to do it, where you are getting 2 and a half D viewmaster cutout kind of version. But they are comparing the costs as if they are identical. And they are not.

One of our commenters suggested we ask why Avatar 2 and 3 was taking so long to make. Cameron had no comment on why or when it would be released.

When you watch a video on the web or your mobile phone, the odds are pretty good you are using the MP4 video format and the H.264 codec. There are a lot of choices when it comes to video formats. But, MP4 is the top pick for both web and mobile viewing, according to a new survey released this morning by Sorenson Media.

69% of video professionals use MP4 regularly for the web, and 58% use it for mobile. Nearly four out of every 5 pros say they use the H.264 codec for file compression.

The report has some bad news for WebM, Google’s sponsored royalty-free open video compression format. WebM came out on the button with just 5% usage on the web and 3% on mobile.

Here’s the full results for web video by percentage of video pro users:

• 69% MP4
• 54% Flash
• 45% QuickTime
• 34% Windows Media
• 5% WebM

(Note: A majority of those surveyed selected more than one format, so the results total more than 100%.)

For mobile videos:

• 58% MP4
• 16% Flash
• 16% HTML5
• 9% Windows Media
• 3% WebM

Video formats have undergone major changes since the early days of streaming when Windows Media and Real were the dominant players.

To create the distribution formats above, the pros use very different input formats. Apple’s QuickTime Reference Movie was the favorite source format.

Here’s a look at the preferred inputs:

• 28% QuickTime Reference Movie
• 25% .mov
• 10% ProRes
• 9% AVI
• 8% DNxHD
• 7% MPEG-4
• 3% MPEG-2
• 2% FLV
• 2% WMV

Where do all these videos wind up? The web is the most popular platform but there are many other destinations:

• 89% Web
• 67% DVD
• 46% Mobile
• 45% Corporate
• 43% Broadcast

The survey, released during the National Association of Broadcasters convention, was conducted by Sorenson Media, a leading video encoding solutions company, with users in a majority of broadcast station groups in the U.S.

Update: The live event has ended. We will put an archived video below if it becomes available.

James Cameron, director of the just-released 3D version of Titanic, as well as Aliens, Terminator, Avatar and so many other major blockbusters, is spilling some secrets today. He’s speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas about how to make money making 3D movies. The event starts live at 10:30am PT.

The original “Titanic” and the 3D re-release has just passed $2 billion in lifetime ticket sales. The only other movie to top $2 billion is Cameron’s “Avatar.”

His company, Cameron | Pace Group (CPG), with his partner Vince Pace, has been a leader in 3D technology. They have been involved in more than 200 sports productions and dozens of feature films.

Making money doing 3D hasn’t been easy. But, Cameron has figured out a way to make it work. In the past, he has told Hollywood to stop making trash 3D movies.

The NAB program describes the session saying:

CPG will reveal the strategy and the details behind 5D productions, including the ESPN Winter X Games where 35 rigs were used to accomplish the largest 5D production in history. See how only the 5D methodology enables broadcasters to increase revenue by integrating 3D into their existing 2D business model.

TechCrunch is getting our own exclusive interview with Cameron later today. If you have some good questions for him, put them in the comments and we’ll try to ask as many as possible.

Calling email overload “a crisis in communication”, TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington issued a challenge back in 2008: “Someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.” The entrepreneurs at SaneBox read this and other articles by Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet, and set out to build a better inbox. After a month of testing, SaneBox has really helped control my inbox and risen to Mike’s challenge.

Many solutions to email overload have been proposed with limited success. Arrington wrote about a service called “Attention Auction”, since renamed attn.me, where people pay you to get their emails read. Some folks just quit email. Companies try to ban it. Others write short emails and use systems that force you to keep it brief. Some kill your email subscriptions and someone even tried moving their inbox to the bathroom.

Another method to tame the inbox has been to remove the non-important stuff. As the number of emails keeps increasing, the only real way to solve email overload is to prioritize. Arrington manually did this when he wrote how he would “scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with” he would open.

Google automated this when they introduced Gmail Priority Inbox. This feature helps, and has its fans, but to me it wasn’t good enough.

Before Priority Inbox launched, the team at SaneBox, founded by Stuart Roseman, was in private beta testing a similar concept. Gmail’s solution surprised them. SaneBox VP of Growth, Dmitri Leonov, recalls those were scary times for the company. Many of their users switched to Gmail, but most came back shortly after.

I tried Priority Inbox, but SaneBox works better for me. It’s not going to magically eliminate all your email or get your inbox instantly to zero. But, your inbox shrinks and you stay focused on the higher priority messages. SaneBox says its moves 58% of the average users email out of the inbox. Your mileage may vary.

When asked why the small self-funded team at SaneBox believes it can solve the problem better than giant Google, Leonov says “this is a very difficult and expensive problem to solve – one giant edge case. The kind of personalized analysis that we do requires a lot of infrastructure on a per-user level, which is cost prohibitive for a free service like Priority Inbox.” After a free trial, SaneBox users pay up to $5 a month for the service, which claims to save people an average of 2 hours per week.

Sanebox’s solution lets you train your inbox, but unlike Priority Inbox, you can see all your trainings and adjust them. It’s also easier, quicker, and more powerful than building your own custom filters or email rules.

By reducing your inbox to important emails, you have less mental attention switching costs. It takes time to switch from important to unimportant emails. So the less time spent switching, the more productive you are. And you can get to the lower importance emails when and if time permits.

SaneBox says it’s like having a very good executive assistant who stops unwanted visitors at the door, keeping you more productive during the day. SaneBox is also modeled on the excellent GTD (Getting Things Done) ideas of David Allen, such as focusing on the most important thing “now” and avoiding distractions.

Before explaining how it works, you need to understand what it is not. SaneBox is not a plugin or a download. SaneBox is not in the spam control business. It doesn’t read the body of your email, change any headers or store email on its servers. Even though most of SaneBox customers use Gmail, it works with almost any email service.

Once you set it up, it scans your inbox headers to determine if the message is important and should stay in your inbox. It moves unimportant messages to the @SaneLater folder (or label) using its own smart filtering algorithms combined with your personal trainings.

Right off the bat, SaneBox works pretty well. If you add your social networks, it will prioritize emails from people you follow on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If something comes into your inbox that’s not important, just move it to your @SaneLater folder. SaneBox’s algorithms recognize the difference between personal and corporate or bulk email coming from the same domain.

I find I only need to check my @SaneLater folder once or twice a day. It’s much quicker to go through these lower priority emails when they are all batched together. Your @SaneLater emails don’t get lost. You can always find them in their folder and they appear in searches.

SaneBox also sends a @SaneLater message digest list to your inbox at the time interval you set. You can always move an email from @SaneLater to the inbox, and these trainings can be remembered for that one email or all from the same address. Each contact training can be adjusted via the SaneBox settings page.

SaneBox has two other very useful features. Move an email to @SaneBlackHole and you won’t ever get email from that address again. It’s much quicker than building your own custom filter or unsubscribing.

There’s also a @SaneRemindMe folder for emails you want to make sure get followed up. When you send or reply to an email, add addresses to the to: cc: or bcc: like tomorrow@sanebox.com, Friday@sanebox.com, Dec31@sanebox.com, or 3h@sanebox.com (in 3 hours), and SaneBox will send you a reminder email at that future time. This feature is similar to what Nudgemail and followup.cc offers. But with SaneBox, if your email gets a reply, the reminder is cancelled.

SaneBox does have some competitors beyond Google’s free Priority Inbox. OtherInbox offers a free “Organizer” feature that sorts receipts, newsletters and social media emails into folders. OtherInBox was a TC 50 finalist in 2008. I found it took a long time to search through my emails and it didn’t do nearly as good a job as SaneBox. It also created more folders than I wanted. They were bought by email certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path, whose mission is to help marketers and publishers reach an audience. That’s quite different than a startup like SaneBox whose clients are its paying email overload sufferers.

Another player in the space is the paid service AwayFind. Its goal is to get only the 3% of super urgent emails to you even when you are not near your inbox. That’s a different solution than SaneBox which tries to get a majority of your emails out of your inbox.

Here’s a video overview to SaneBox:

In 2010, TechCrunch broke the news that Facebook was going to release a “Like” button for the whole darn Internet. Now, TechCrunch has learned Facebook is considering a “Hate” button as well.

According to Facebook’s S-1 filing, users are now generating 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day. With the Hate button, Facebook expects to at least double that. The S-1 noted “popular Pages on Facebook include Lady Gaga, Disney, and Manchester United, each of which has more than 20 million Likes.” Many inside the company think the Hates could easily top that.

When the original Like button was announced, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction there would be over 1 billion Likes across the web in just the first 24 hours. Sources at Facebook say Mark is estimating 2 billion Hates on the first day. Facebook studies have shown the sad fact that people hate things on the Internet more than they like things. There’s also an internal debate on whether the new button should be called “Hate” or “Dislike.”

Since the tiny Like button makes up such a huge part of Facebook’s revenue, the introduction of the Hate button could raise Facebook’s valuation further ahead of the IPO.

Facebook has already shown they are open to changing the Like button. Earlier this month, Facebook Mobile changed the 2-Click Like button with a 1-Click Like bar.

The company has also experimented with the “Fax” button, as TechCrunch was also the first to notice.

Other buttons under consideration are the “Meh”, “Love”, “Who Cares”, and “+11″ but there is also a fear this could lead to a button explosion.

Our sources say the Hate button is not a sure thing. It’s being heavily debated inside the social networking company. This new feature would fit with Facebook’s mission to “build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want” whether that’s love or hate.

While the product and sales teams favor the idea, many inside Facebook oppose it. That view is best summed up by Robert Scoble who wrote “I really hope we never see a hate button that gets wide adoption. The world has enough hate as it is.”

Since Facebook is in their quiet period ahead of their IPO, Facebook had no official comment on this report.

Apple is hot. I’m not talking about the temperature of the new iPads, I’m talking about its stock. At around 3pm ET today, Apple traded at a new all-time intraday high $609.65 a share, up more than 50% for the year. The stock finished 2011 at $405 and closed today at $602.50, up nearly $200 a share (+48.77%) year-to-date. One share is now worth more than a new 32GB iPad.

Apple’s soaring stock is clobbering the rest of the market, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up “just” 7% and NASDAQ Composite up 18% year-to-date. The NASDAQ Composite makes up 2,500 companies, but Apple accounts for 12% of the index. [PDF] Apple alone has contributed one-quarter of the entire NASDAQ Composite yearly gain, according to the folks at NASDAQ who ran the numbers for me.

Surprisingly, Apple is not included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, despite being the world’s most valuable publicly traded company with a market cap of $562 billion. The stated purpose of the DJIA is “to provide a clear, straightforward view of the stock market and, by extension, the U.S. economy.”

Clearly, it’s missing a huge gap by not including Apple. It’s also much lower than it would be had it included Apple. The Dow Industrials is a price weighted average (the Dow Divisor is now 0.132129493 [PDF]), so hypothetically if Apple had been included at the start of this year, it would be 1,495 points higher. Think Dow 14,619, instead of 13,124.

An investor would have been wise to follow MG Siegler’s advice last October when Apple stock dropped 5.5% in one day. MG wrote a post called “If You Sold Your Apple Stock, You’re An Idiot.” If you sold, you would have missed out on a big gain. At the time, Apple failed to beat Wall Street expectations in its Q4 earnings and fell from a then all-time closing high to under $400 a share, more than $200 a share below today’s price.

Disclosure: I sadly do not own any shares of Apple stock.
Chart via Google Finance.

From the floor of the Austin Convention Center, TechCrunch TV is live with all the latest news from SXSW. Find out what TechCrunch writers have to say about their favorite apps, events, and surprises. TCTV’s Colleen Taylor leads a roundtable with our TechCrunch writers. There was huge pre-show buzz for the app, Highlight. We’ll talk to the Founder Paul Davison and about whether it lived up to the hype.

We’ll also have interviews with Dave Morin, Founder of Path; Adam Goldstein, Co-Founder of Hipmunk; and Robert Scoble.

Our thanks to the folks at Newtek’s who are providing the studio and Tricaster for the show. If you are in Austin, join the studio audience on the 1st floor of the exhibit hall at Newtek booth #713. Or watch it on our Ustream player above.

We will be monitoring your questions and comments on twitter at #sxswcrunch.

Mark your calendar. Tune in to TechCrunch later today for a special show, live from the Austin Convention Center at SXSW. TCTV’s Colleen Taylor will host a roundtable with TechCrunch writers who have been running around the city non-stop. They will tell you about the best and worst of what they saw and might discuss TechCrunch Real World Austin. We’ll also speak with the Founder of the much talked about mobile awareness app (yes, it needs a better description) Highlight, Paul Davison.

Other top guests include Dave Morin, Founder of Path; Adam Goldstein, Co-Founder of Hipmunk; and Robert Scoble.

The show will be produced using the Tricaster at Newtek’s studio. If you are in Austin, join us on the 1st floor of the exhibit hall at Newtek booth #713.

If you can’t see the show in person, we’ll have a post later with our Ustream player or catch it at techcrunch.com/video.

We will be monitoring your questions and comments on twitter at #sxswcrunch.

H/t Hunter Walk and articles from Leena Rao, Colleen Taylor, Henry Blodget, and Om Malik.

Disclosure: If it’s not obvious, these are not the actual star rankings from these authors.

The mundane Address Book was big news this week due to the privacy fiasco, but here’s a post about an impressive address book app with a different approach to privacy. Cobook is a Mac contact management app that’s simple, powerful and actually fun to use. The software, made by a boot-strapped startup, is now in a free beta test, with 60,000 downloads since it launched at the end of January.

Cobook is what the Mac OSX Address Book should be. It sits in the menu bar or can be undocked and instantly synchronizes with Apple’s Address Book. Any data entered into Cobook gets synced to your other computers and devices. Because it’s a native app, adding contacts, assigning tags, and editing contact info is very quick. Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contact info can also be pulled in, and if you hover over it, a pop-up window displays your contacts’ Facebook info, Tweets, or LinkedIn profile. It’s the fastest way to read a contact’s info, much quicker than using any of those websites.

The address book controversy has focused on iOS apps that upload users contact data without their knowledge. For an address book app, you purposely want your data uploaded to the cloud so it can be viewed anywhere. So I was a little surprised when I installed Cobook and got a warning saying:

“Cobook cares about privacy. All your data is stored locally on your computer only, we don’t have any access neither to your data nor accounts. In fact we don’t even have any servers, except for a component that collects bugs.”

Cobook still lets you access your data everywhere, since it’s based on Apple’s Address Book and that’s where the syncing happens. You use iCloud, Google or Yahoo contacts to sync.

In the past, I’ve had problems syncing Apple’s Address Book, so I use Google contacts. To use Cobook with Google, I first needed to sync Apple’s Address Book to Google and wound up with three contacts for everyone. But, Google’s “Find and Merge Duplicates” feature fixed that.

And cleaning up bad contact info is fast and easy, much more so than with Google contacts or Apple’s default app. With 1,000 contacts, I never got around to it. But, Cobook has some neat features that make cleanup easy, such as viewing all contacts with no phone or email address.

One warning. Definitely backup your contact data before you do any syncing. Yeah, we know we should do this but often don’t. You will thank me later if you follow this advice just in case you run into any issues. I didn’t follow my own advice and lost half my contacts when I added a laptop to sync Google contacts with the Address Book. But, Google has a “Restore Contacts” feature that lets you travel back in time with your contact list and that restored the lost contacts.

I was able to get Cobook loaded on 2 laptops and a desktop, and via Google contacts, with an iPhone and iPad. I did run into one problem when I added a phone number in Cobook and it went to Google, but not to the iPhone. Hours after notifying Cobook’s support about the problem, they released a patch that fixed it.

The man behind Cobook is Kaspars Dancis, Founder and CEO of Codo. He worked at an enterprise startup that got acquired by a large company. After working at the big company for a few years, he decided he would rather work at a startup in the consumer space. Dancis wasn’t personally happy with any of the existing contact management solutions, and says he chose to “scratch his own itch.”

Dancis is now working on the project fulltime along with a team of three, in Riga, Latvia. He started building it last April.

Dancis says his vision is to make contact management something you don’t need to worry about. He says that just like Dropbox is for files, and Evernote is for notes, he wants Cobook to be for your contacts, so they are everywhere easily and quickly accessible.

Cobook is expected to come out of the free beta period by the end of March. The pricing hasn’t been set.

While Cobook is Mac only right now, they have a broader vision. Future plans include a PC version and mobile versions on iOS and Android. They might do some type of syncing service, where your data does get uploaded. Dancis says any such syncing would involve client side encryption so if contact data is stored on a remote server, it couldn’t be read without the user’s key.

Cobook faces competition from well-funded Xobni, which recently released a new iPhone app. Xobni, which launched at TechCrunch 40, also pulls data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But it doesn’t have a native app. It runs as Gmail and Outlook plugins on the desktop and laptop.

Another competitor is everyme, now in private beta.

Here’s a video demo of Cobook:

TechCrunch TV is using a LiveU mobile pack provided by our partner Ustream for our live streaming coverage from CES. Our camera connects to the pack via a HDMI connector cable. But at the end of our evening Showstoppers coverage, the HDMI plug snapped and broke. At 10pm in Las Vegas, how do you find a replacement HDMI plug? Actually, of all the places in the world to have this happen, we were in the right place.

John Biggs suggested we look around the exhibit hall. So, I spied a large monitor at one of the booths that was using a HDMI cable. I offered to buy it from the exhibitor after the event. They suggested an even better solution.

The exhibitor at the booth next to them was Perfect Path. They were showing what they claim was the industry’s first Locking HDMI Connector. The company says their patented plug has four times the holding retention of our regular HDMI connector. They happily provided us one for free. And the locking feature really does make make the connection much more solid. If you pull lightly on the cable, it won’t come out.

Problem solved. Thanks guys.

As we enter 2012, shouldn’t we all be traveling around in flying cars by now? That was the prediction in the Jetsons cartoon tv show. The futuristic series, first produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1962, was set in 2062, exactly 50 years from today. 2012 is the halfway point, so we’ve still got some time before we are all driving around in flying cars. But, many other technology advances from the Jetsons are already with us.

The Jetsons represented an optimistic view of technology and the future. As Jeffrey Tucker writes, “it was neither utopian nor dystopian” and “technology was the best (but of course it still malfunctions, same as today.)”

The Jetsons was created at a time almost technologically unimaginable today. Television was still partly black and white. The Jetsons was the first program to be broadcast by ABC in color. No personal computers, no cell phones, and of course, no Internet. But, let’s see how well some of the Jetsons vision of the future has worked out so far.

The flying car: The design of the Jetsons flying car was inspired by a 1954 Ford concept car, the FX-Atmos, notable for its all-glass bubble canopy, dashboard radar screen and jet-plane-like tail fins. We are not quite there, but the car/plane called Transition, made by Terrafugia, made its debut flight 2 years ago.

There have been dozens of other flying cars built, but most people have never seen one overhead. While George Jetson actually drove/flew his car, we do have Google’s self driving car.

RUDI, George’s “Referential Universal Digital Indexer” work computer: We have Yahoo, “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and the digital index that is Google. And we also can ask questions and get answers from Siri.

Video Chat: George would see and speak with his boss and family from this screen. We have lots of that including Skype video calls, Google+ Hangouts, Cisco TelePresence and many more.

The Televiewer: At home, George could read the news off this screen. In the 1960s, this was a strange concept to actually get information off a screen. Now, it’s the primary way.

George Jetsons’ 3 hours a day, 3 days a week workweek: Tim Ferris has already achieved that and more with his popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

George’s job is pushing buttons: In the original 1960s episodes, George’s work involves pushing buttons, knobs, dials, and switches. More episodes were made in the 1980s, and George’s desk was upgraded to flat buttons and brightly lit consoles. While not quite a console, how many of us push buttons on a keyboard all day?

Spacely Space Sprockets: Forbes magazine jokingly valued Spacely Sprockets at $1.3 billion, on their “The 25 Largest Fictional Companies” list. Apple’s market cap is around $376 billion today.

Robot Vacuum Cleaner: iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Rosey, the household robot: TechCrunch wrote about the ReadyBot in 2008, a robot that picks up toys and empties trash. There’s also a slight resemblance to the Anybots robot.

Didi, Judy’s digital diary: Judy’s diary was private, so this analogy isn’t perfect, but now Judy might share information about her life on Facebook. There are also many private diary diary applications.

Moving walkways: Moving walkways are pretty common at airports, but not as widespread as they were in the Jetsons world. But, this proposed moving Chinese bus that lets traffic pass underneath seems right at home in that world.

Mr. Spacely tells George Jetson “You’re Fired”: No need to explain where we’ve all heard that one before.

A big part of future technology that the Jetsons totally missed is emailing and texting. Perhaps by 2062 those forms of communication won’t exist.

For more, PhoneTVInternet.com has a list of 10 comparisons between the Jetsons and Modern Technology.

Intuit has just released some good news for  ”Quicken for Mac” users.  The accounting software company says they will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac “Lion-compatible” by early spring 2012. Yes, irony alert. Back in July, I wrote about the dilemma facing those users, because Apple Lion OS was dropping support for Rosetta.  Without Rosetta, Quicken 2007 wouldn’t run on the Mac with Lion.  And I wrote each of the three options Intuit proposed (Quicken Essentials for Mac, Mint.com, Quicken for Windows) had their own flaws.

Aaron Forth, Intuit’s General Manager of its Personal Finance Group which includes Quicken and Mint.com, wrote a note to existing customers saying “I am committed to creating products to help you reach your financial goals.  I recognize, however, that we have not always delivered on this promise to Quicken Mac customers.”

Forth adds “I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address the issue.”

The details have not been worked out yet, but Intuit says they have a team in place to solve the problem and they ask for their customers patience.

Back in July, Cult of Mac reported one solution might be Intuit bakes some Rosetta libraries into Quicken.  It’s unclear if that’s the solution now being worked on.

After calling them out for this problem earlier, it’s only fair to give them credit for doing this now.  Forth says “working toward a … solution is just a first step in winning back your confidence.”  I agree. Ok, I realize it is about to become 2012 and we are talking about a 2007 product, but it’s still a widely used product.

You have a long flight coming up. You don’t want to get stuck sitting next to (fill in the blank here). What if you could use your social networks to select your seatmate, based on your friends or common interests? Would that make for a better flying experience?

Such a service is going to be launched next year. The developer is not some bootstrapped startup. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, founded in 1919 and now part of Air France KLM, confirms to TechCrunch the feature will launch next year.

KLM says their new social seating tool, called “meet & seat”, will work with Facebook and Linkedin, but not Twitter. The tool will be opt-in only. When pressed if both people will be required to accept a seat pairing, KLM couldn’t say because they are still in the development phase.

The travel website Tnooz, which first reported the story, wondered if “this is something passengers really want as opposed to a service the airline believes they might want.” USA Today wrote about the possibilities this could create for in-flight dating, suggesting it “could be fodder for a flight from hell.”

KLM has pushed the envelope on technology before. TechCrunch reported two years ago about the airline’s idea to hand out e-book readers to passengers. Matt Burns called it a bad idea.

KLM isn’t the only one mixing seat selection with social networks. Earlier this year, Malaysia Airlines launched a system that allows passengers to book a flight and check-in all on the airline’s Facebook page. Passengers can also see if any Facebook friends are on their flight.

Startups are also in this space. Planely, wants you to join what they say is the “social flying revolution.” If you give the website info on your flight, they will connect you with other Planely fliers.

Another website, AirTroductions joined the deadpool. The founder says he sold it in 2006 and it appears the new owners closed it. The website hasn’t been updated in 5 years.

If flying KLM, would you sign up for this?

Is there any part of human existence that won’t have a social media component?

[Image: Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock]

A surprising piece of news was buried in an article this week. Friday, The Mercury News reported the three top executives at Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, are offering to pay $33 million to finish the restoration of the historic airship hangar at Moffett Field. The giant structure, built in the 1930s and called Hangar One, sits a few miles from the Googleplex and it’s well known the Google executives have special permission from NASA to park their jets at Moffett.

The jets are not owned or operated by Google. Instead, the 3 Google leaders operate the fleet through an LLC called H211. Google has no official relation with H211. Ken Ambrose, the Director of Operations for H211, announced the funding offer at a public meeting this week. He also complained that NASA, which owns Hangar One, has taken too long to respond to the offer.

On first glance, it sounds like a purely noble gesture by the Google trio. The building is in the middle of a project to strip toxic materials in its siding. Lack of taxpayer funding to complete the project has raised fears that could lead to the demolition of one of the world’s largest freestanding structures.

But, as the Mercury News reported, “There’s a catch: They want to use up to two-thirds of the floor space of the hangar to house their fleet of eight private jets.” Most of the members on the Hangar One committee, along with the local congresswoman, support the idea, although there is some concern about the public-private partnership.

But whoa. Wait a minute. The Google execs own eight jets? 2.6 jets per person, for the 2 co-founders and the executive chairman?

In 2007, TechCrunch reported on the Google execs first jet, a modified Boeing 767 and the controversy it created. (See Search Engine Land’s Guide To The Google Jet for more info.) In addition to the Boeing 767-200, they own two Gulfstream Vs.

Later, in 2007, the team picked up another Boeing, a 757 this time. A NASA lease document with tenant H211 lists those four planes. (PDF: see Exhibit C) Images of the Google jets can be seen here. Despite some fake images appearing around the web, there’s no Google logo on the planes.

In 2008, the New York Times reported they appear to have added a Dornier Alpha fighter jet to their fleet.

But, counting the fighter jet, that’s only 5 jets. What about the other 3? Perhaps, the Merc got the number wrong?

Thanks to a “Google Search,” two more articles came up confirming Ken Ambrose said “8″ planes at the meeting. One in the Mountain View Voice, and another with detailed notes of the Moffett Field Restoration Advisory Board subcommittee meeting on a Moffett Users website. At the meeting, a member of “Save Hangar One” said they don’t want to see “Google” in 200-foot letters on the hangar as part of the deal. Ambrose said the Google team didn’t want that either.

TechCrunch is trying to contact Mr. Ambrose for more information about the additional three jets.

The Google leaders and their friends are not the only ones using the jets. NASA conducts flights on the planes with its own researchers and equipment to gain scientific data. That deal was part of the unusual agreement with NASA allowing the Google team the use of Moffett Field, an airport closed to private aircraft. When that deal was announced, it raised concerns from the local community leaders opposed to expansion at Moffett. Other Silicon Valley private jet owners and users, who are not allowed to use the airport, couldn’t have been pleased either.

The Google jet fleet has been a source of fighting and controversy over the years. The Wall Street Journal reported on the lawsuits with its contractors and the famous dispute, settled by Schmidt, over what size beds the co-founders would have on the plane.

Of course, lots of CEOs and executives own or lease private jets. On one hand, the Google leaders can spend their money any way they please. Their time is valuable, and using the jets makes them more efficient. On the other hand, using private jets is not very environmentally friendly for leaders of a company that prides itself on being green. See Google Green.

Speaking of private jets, Michael Arrington posted this photo of the TechCrunch jet on his posterous page in 2010. It hasn’t been seen since our AOL buyout.

Customers who used the self-checkout lanes at Lucky Supermarkets have been hacked. The grocer, which operates stores in California, says some of their credit card machines have been altered with sniffers to capture credit and debit card numbers. Lucky, owned by parent company Save Mart, is telling customers who used those machines to close their bank and credit card accounts. At least 80 at-risk accounts have been identified and the supermarket chain has gotten calls from more than 500 customers who fear they are victims of fraud.

Card-skimming scams have been reported at gas stations and ATMs and retail chain stores. But this appears to be a first widespread attack at a supermarket checkout lane.

A key question remains how criminals could have attached these devices at multiple Lucky locations without anyone noticing. Lucky says at least 24 Bay area stores have been affected.

According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, Save Mart’s CFO doesn’t think it’s an inside job, saying “It’s pretty well-understood technology. If a bad guy really wanted to go do this, they could probably go online and educate themselves at Google.”

Lucky first got suspicious on November 11th, when an employee doing maintenance noticed something that didn’t look right. They discovered an extra computer board inside the checkout machine recording customer info. Lucky says it warned customers on November 23rd, but it wasn’t aware of any cases of fraud at the time.

The checkout card readers were made by VeriFone, which confirmed there was a problem. The Lucky spokesman told the Mercury News “it was a very sophisticated device that they’d never seen before.” In addition to making credit card readers, VeriFone has a partnership with Google for NFC-based mobile payments.

Save Mart operates 233 stores in Northern California and Nevada under the names Save Mart, S-Mart Foods, Lucky and FoodMaxx brands. Lucky has posted a list of stores affected and information for consumers on their website.

PayPal restored sexy social network Zivity’s account tonight after a weeklong battle over whether the website violates its policy. Zivity bills itself as “Hotness. In Person” where “76,102 people just like you rub elbows with models, photographers, and video artists.” But early Thanksgiving morning, PayPal decided it didn’t want to rub elbows with Zivity anymore after four years of doing business together.

According to Zivity CEO and Editor-in-Chief Cyan Banister, Zivity asked PayPal if the content of the website would be an issue before they signed up with the payment processor. After a review by PayPal, Banister says she was told there were “no issues”. PayPal became the engine behind a majority of Zivity’s subscription payments.

Then over the holiday, Zivity got an email from PayPal saying “after a recent review of your account activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy” and the account has been “permanently limited.” That meant PayPal could hold the funds in the account up to 180 days. Zivity was ordered to remove all references to PayPal from their website.

According to PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy cited in the email, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene. So, what was acceptable for four years suddenly became a violation. What those “certain” materials are or what could be considered obscene is unclear.

Since Zivity’s photos are non-exclusive, some of the same images on Zivity appear on flickr and OneModelPlace, both of which use PayPal to process payments.

Banister says she called and emailed PayPal for a week to appeal the decision. She even had a potential inside connection. Zivity’s Co-founder and Chairman, and Cyan’s husband, is Scott Banister. He is named as a co-inventor on the original PayPal patent for its email payment system as well as being an early PayPal board member and investor. But Cyan and Scott’s connections had long left PayPal, and they got nowhere.

After getting the original email, she removed PayPal from her site.

Earlier today, a story about Zivity’s blocked account ran on the local NBC Bay Area TV station. PayPal told NBC:

“We cannot comment on specifics of Zivity.com’s account due to our privacy policy. However, we can confirm that PayPal does not allow our services to be used for the sale of adult-oriented digital materials. This is clearly stated in PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy.”

Soon after the NBC segment appeared (coincidence or not?), Zivity got an email saying their account had been restored. PayPal did a further review and determined “the account is currently not in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy.” No explanation was given for what, if anything, had changed. PayPal apologized for any inconvenience and pointed to the same vague Acceptable Use Policy for any further questions.

So for now, Zivity can come back to PayPal. I asked Cyan if she was considering a switch to a new payment provider. She says she will look at alternatives, but “my members love, use, and want PayPal” and she doesn’t want to take the service away from them.

TechCrunch contacted PayPal for comment tonight, but has not received a reply.

Disclosure: Cyan Banister is a contributing writer to TechCrunch and hosts the show Speaking Of.. on TechCrunch TV.

A San Francisco-based team has just won the DARPA Shredder Challenge. DARPA, the government agency whose work led to the creation of the Internet, challenged the public to reconstruct five shredded documents. The winning team, called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” completed the task in 33 days, spending nearly 600 man-hours building algorithms and piecing together more than 10,000 shreds.

9,000 teams registered to compete. The winning teams gets a $50,000 prize paid for by the U.S. Treasury.

Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office says “the most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work.”

DARPA Director Regina Dugan adds “The DARPA Shredder Challenge underscores the value of increasing the number and diversity of problem solvers. The varied methods used have potential implications for so-called ‘wicked problems,’ generally considered insolvable by conventional means, and offer the possibility of increased speed, agility and breadth in innovation.” I’ll say.

The shredder challenge also suggests just because you shred something, that doesn’t mean it can’t be put back together.

You can see the puzzle solutions and pictures of the winning submissions at www.shredderchallenge.com.

Update: Here’s a look at the winning teams solution to the puzzle above:

The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email and wants his 74,000 employees in 42 countries to stop using it. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, wants his “zero email” policy to be in place within a year-and-a-half. He told the Daily Mail only 10% of emails turn out to be important and that “email is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.”

TechCrunch writers have a long history of trying to solve email overload. MG Siegler quit email for a month earlier this year and wrote about it when his experiment ended. Michael Arrington has discussed his email overload problem and how it’s an opportunity for an entreprenuer. We covered Gmail Priority Inbox which helps you focus on the important emails. I wrote about the 3 sentence email concept. We’ve also written about Shortmail, which tries to keep email, well, short. And there have been many other posts too.

But, none of these attempts are as drastic as Breton’s company-wide plan. He says one of the big problems is people switching to ‘useless’ emails when they were working on more important tasks. Also, he complains “It is not right that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their emails.” That’s clearly the standard practice in Silicon Valley and the start-up world.

Breton’s solution is employees should spend more time talking directly to each other in person or on the phone. And he wants them to use real time messaging tools, saying the chat tools on Facebook would be better than email.

This is not the first time Breton has preached against email. Back in February, he told an innovation conference his firm would be a “zero email company” within three years. A writer at Computerworld suggests this might just be an elaborate PR effort for Atos’s IT service business, and he might be right.

I also wonder what happens to the 10 percent of emails that even Breton admits are important. What business opportunities and improvements might be missed with a zero email policy? Yes, many of us really hate email overload. If email served no useful purpose, we wouldn’t use it. But that’s not the case, and a company-wide ban sounds like the wrong solution. It will be interesting to see if Breton’s ban really gets put into place and how the company then performs.

If Atos is serious about this, they might start by updating their own website. Their contact us page lists several email addresses.

[Image: olly/Shutterstock]