Viralheat, the affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites, has exited private beta and added additional functionality to its monitoring service. You can read our initial review of the site here. Viralheat will now give users a real-time listing of blogs and Web sites that are actively being discussed and shared about a topic or brand.

Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites, the web and Twitter. The platform’s new website monitoring tool gives you data on the number of websites that mentioned a topic in a given week and day, the country where users are most actively mentioning a topic, the average number of mentions per day, the breakdown of mentions between blogs and websites and more. Additionally, the service will provide a real-time stream of topic mentions between blogs and websites.

Bad news for Amazon over the weekend. The Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau slapped Amazon’s affiliated unit “Amazon.com International Sales” with a $119 million tax bill. Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported yesterday [JP], the subsidiary is accused of failing to report income in Japan between 2003 and 2005.

Japanese tax authorities started making these allegations as early as 2007 but now seem ready to pull out the hammer. The way Amazon operated so far is that every time Japanese customers buy something from Amazon’s Japanese website, they legally make contracts of purchase with Amazon offices in the US. The problem for the Japanese taxation bureau: These sales were booked and taxed in the US, even though Amazon operates two companies in Japan, Amazon Japan and Amazon Japan Logistics. (Click here for more background on Amazon’s position in Japan.)

Reportedly, income of several hundred of millions of dollars wasn’t taxed in Japan under the U.S.-Japan tax treaty, as demanded by local tax authorities now. Amazon is currently in talks with authorities to invalidate the accusations.

Paris-based online media group Hi-media has announced its acquisition of AdLINK Media, the display advertising unit of AdLINK Internet Media (also the company behind SEDO and Affilinet, which are not being sold), itself a part of Germany’s ISP United Internet. Still with us?

The acquisition comes about 18 months after the latter assigned Morgan Stanley to assist in the sale of the European display advertising power-broker.

At that time, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report citing anonymous sources indicated that AdLink Group expected a three-digit million euro sum from the sale of the unit, adding that AdLink’s valuation was nearly €400 million. That’s a far cry from today, with AdLINK Media getting valued south of €30 million.

There are a couple of places where you can go to get your fill of tech-related information and keep track of breaking news and events outside of your RSS reader or e-mail inbox. Google News isn’t one of those places (yet), but Techmeme and to a lesser degree Alltop, popurls and Digg are some of the most frequented websites when it comes to pleasing those who like to stay on top of hot tech news (us included).

Techmeme is undeniably the leader of the pack; it has solid algorithms and ranking systems in place that can quickly detect breaking news and gives you a clean overview of which other technology news sites and blogs are discussing it practically with minimal lag. It has its flaws, sure, but I dare you to show me a service that does what Techmeme is supposed to do better than they are.

blueTunes, a streaming music site that lets you stream your music library from the cloud to any computer, is launching a new desktop app tonight that looks to make the service an even more compelling alternative to other online music sites and possibly even iTunes.

For those who aren’t familiar with the service, blueTunes lets you scan your hard drive for music files and upload them to the site’s servers, which you can then stream from wherever you are. This process would take a very long time (and quite a bit of bandwidth) were it not for a shortcut the site is employing: while you still have to prove that you own your music (the site uses a Java app to check through you music folders), the site only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its database. In other words, unless you’ve got a really eclectic collection, you’ll be able to transfer your library to the cloud without having to move many files.

Like most people who’ve had an iPhone 3GS in their hands, we’ve been extremely impressed with the video capabilities of this little device. Not only Does it take near-HD video, it has excellent basic editing software and video can be uploaded to YouTube over Wifi or the cell networks. Among other things, it is the most useful video camera in the world today. No wonder the video camera market is shaking in its collective boots.

Thank God those iPhones are so expensive, and Apple will only sell 20 million or so of them in 2009. If Apple added cameras to its line of iPods, there would be another 3+million of them hitting the market per month, and the low end of the digital video camera market could be crushed.

Uh oh.

That’s exactly what we’re hearing is going to happen. One of our sources in Asia say that Apple has placed an order for a massive number of camera modules of the type that they include in the iPhone. These are inexpensive cameras, in the $10 range. And the size of the order, our source says, means they can only be used for one thing - the iPods.

Last April, Hulu made the major announcement that The Walt Disney Company had acquired an equity stake in the online video site. Up until that point, Hulu’s original investors News Corp and NBC were the site’s primary content providers, making for an impressive but still somewhat limited selection. The Disney deal opens doors to an entirely new library of content for Hulu to distribute, ranging from movies from the Disney library to prime-time ABC shows, but for the last two months we’ve had to wait for the catalog to make its way online. Tonight, we’re beginning to see the fruits of the deal.

Beginning this evening Hulu now features Grey’s Anatomy, a very popular prime-time medical drama that’s sure to be a crowd-pleaser. The episode selection for the show is pretty sparse right now — you have five episodes from the most recent fifth season to choose from (with large gaps in between each) but we may well see the selection rotate through the summer. Hulu plans to release more ABC shows over the next two weeks, which will include Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are launching their much-anticipated $300 million venture fund this evening, aptly called Andreessen Horowitz.

The fund will make investments of $50,000 to $50 million (yes, $50 million), but will generally focus on early stage opportunities. And here’s a fun fact: they don’t currently have a website, and apparently they aren’t sure they will have one in the future. For now they’ve reserved a16z.com for use if they do ever launch a site. Basically, if you don’t already know Andreessen or Horowitz, or know someone who knows them, getting in contact with them is going to be…difficult.

Marc Andreessen has long been one of my favorite people to interview, because he is tapped into nearly every hot company and isn’t afraid to answer questions directly. That is, when you can actually get him to sit down with you and a camera, notepad or tape recorder. But last week, he had to chat it up with the press since he and long-time partner Ben Horowitz were announcing their new $300 million venture fund called Andreessen Horowitz Venture Capital. This is not going to be your typical venture capital firm.

For one thing, there’s that $300 million fund size. That’s pretty big for a first-time fund and gargantuan when you consider there are only two general partners, Andreessen and Horowitz. It’s big enough that some people didn’t think they’d be able to pull it off.

Mobile video is taking off in Japan, where mobile operator NTT DoCoMo just invested $45.5 million in PacketVideo, which s a long-time supplier of mobile video software. The all-cash investment gives NTT Docomo a 35 percent stake in PacketVideo, which is s subsidiary of NextWave Wireless (a holding company that owns rights to wireless spectrum in the U.S. which it plans to use for a Wimax network). NextWave acquired PacketVideo in 2005 and the company is now its main source of cash.

The investment indicates how important PacketVideo’s technology is to NTT Docomo, and raises the possibility of an outright purchase down the line. Other customers of PacketVideo include Verizon Wireless, Orange (in France), and T-Mobile. They might not feel so warm and fuzzy about PacketVideo now being so closely aligned with another carrier, even if it is in Japan.

Twitter has been hailed as an incredibly useful marketing tool for businesses and brands, both big and small, to disseminate information and engage with consumers on a massive scale. But what about non-profits? The ability to use social media to fundraise for charitable purposes has been questionable. A few months ago, the Washington Post reported that Causes, one of Facebook’s popular applications used by non-profits to raise money, was not netting much money for charities, despite its large amount of users (according to the application’s page, it has 26 million monthly users).

Twitter, the current darling of the social media world, is increasingly being used by charities. In addition to building awareness, Twitter has potential to raise charitable contributions. One of the more successful initiatives launched in the Twittosphere was February’s global Twestival, which raised over $250,000 for charity:water, a non-profit organization devoted to bringing clean drinking water to developing nations. The volunteer-run organization held events to bring Twitter communities in nearly 200 cities together. 250K sounds like an awful lot of dough to raise over the microblogging network, but this amount fell way below Twestival’s goal of $1 million.

Only a couple of days after George Hotz became the first hacker to release a jailbreak app for the iPhone 3GS on Windows, there’s a Mac-compatible version out too. This time, Hotz got some help from two fellow coders to be able to please the Mac folks, but he also made some improvements to the Windows version.

Happy jailbreaking, and in case you didn’t know yet: happy unlocking too.

The term “e-commerce” still lacks a universally valid definition, but even if you just bundle B2B and B2C transactions under it, it’s a multi-trillion dollar business globally. Last year, Nielsen found [PDF] 86% of the global web population made an online purchase already (North America: 92%). For the US alone, B2C sales are expected to grow from $130 billion this year to over $200 billion by 2013 (excluding travel).

In North America, Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the B2C arena - by very, very far. After the US launch in 1995, the company quickly established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. But although Amazon wins in Canada and Europe, things are not going as well in Asia. In China (where Amazon started offering a localized site in 2004), it practically gets destroyed by local player Taobao [CN]. Traffic-wise, Amazon gets dwarfed by a local e-commerce site in Japan, too: Rakuten.

Amazon is active in Japan for a good reason: In its last report [JP, PDF], the Japanese government said the country’s online B2C sector grew by 21.7% to over $55 billion in 2007 on a year-on-year basis. (Note: Statistics from different sources can vary widely because of totally different methods of measurement. The Japanese numbers, for examples, do include travel.)

Now it seems Rakuten wants to take its global plans (laid out numerous times in the past) to the next level, with CEO Hiroshi Mikitani saying just this weekend he wants to see his company generating $1 million in daily sales outside Japan by the end of this year.

This short case study tries to shed light on Rakuten’s background and key success factors, why they win against Amazon in Japan and what efforts they make to go global.

6,000 or so people have congregated at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas for this year’s World Series of Poker to fight for $50 million or so that will be split among the last 10% of players left standing. Among them are a number of tech startup entrepreneurs. We’re tracking four of them, plus any others that pop up.

This is David Sacks’ third WSOP. Sacks, a former PayPal exec and the CEO of Geni/Yammer, walked away with nothing two years ago. Last year he took home $25k in prize money, and twittered every hand. This year he’s way up after the first day, with $91k in chips. That likely puts him in the top 10% of players. He is twittering summaries of his play at @davidsacks. You can see his player card here with last year’s results.

Jason Calacanis (Mahalo founder) is playing today for the first time. He’s been sponsored by FullTiltPoker (they paid his $10k buy in) and looks absolutely ridiculous. Look for his twitters later this afternoon.

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.

The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-person audience.

The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry, a new mobile operator that promised to “revolutionize the telecom world”. Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical.

Then the company’s CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn’t need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service.

One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything. We fought over the fine print in the contracts after the meat of the deal was ironed out by CEOs. Skinning and dressing whatever the hunters bring back to the cave is fine for some people. But it’s not exactly being in the middle of the action.

PR firms today aren’t much different than corporate lawyers. They are paid to perform a service. They like to think of themselves as core to the strategic action of their clients. But more often, they’re just there to spin whatever happened in the most favorable light possible. Then they smile and dial and pray for coverage. Occasionally they are called in to smother a story, which is mildly more exciting, I imagine. But when a CEO is wondering what she should do next to drive her business forward, she generally doesn’t call her PR firm for advice. Or at least I hope she doesn’t.

PR firms are apparently just as frustrated by always being in the back seat as the law firms are.

I’m fascinated by Claire Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times today about PR in general and the birth of a startup, Wordnik, specifically.

For all of you World of Warcraft fans out there, there’s a new Twitter client that is worth checking out. TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for WoW that lets you send and receive Tweets within a game. If you are busy in the middle of a WoW match, you can put Tweets in a queue to send when it’s more convenient.

The client also lets you upload in-game WoW screenshots using TwitPic and will automatically send out Tweets when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement.

Before everyone gets in a huff, let’s consider Amazon’s intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be placed in books which you have purchased legitimately at full price, so let’s put that out of our heads. But what if you could take a few bucks off the cover price at the cost of a few contextual ads relating (if possible) to the book’s content? Personally, I wouldn’t mind — partially because I don’t use a Kindle or intend to any time soon, but more because it’s a no-lose situation. Amazon wouldn’t risk alienating its loyal Kindle base with dirty tricks like this, so it’s safe to assume it’ll be at least somewhat opt-in.

An abundance of free or reduced-price content would widen the appeal of the reader — I imagine many people are put off e-books by the idea that they are not getting their money’s worth. As offensive as the idea of inserting ads into a book is to me (and surely to the average reader), it’s almost certainly part of a value proposition which increases the utility of these expensive little buggers.

Dearest CrunchGear readers: I recently had the honor and privilege of speaking to Karen Dyer, who is not only the voice of Sheva Alomar, from Resident Evil 5, but who also did said character’s motion capture. I hope you enjoy it on this day, our day of freedom.

Obviously, “K” is for Karen, and “N” is for Nicholas. With that…

N: Well, first off congratulations. Resident Evil 5 was a big hit. It sold something like 4 million copies.

K: That’s what I hear!

N: Excellent. But before we get into the game, I just wanted to bring up something I saw on your bio. It says here you’re known for your circus skills, and I just wanted to say how that awesome that is. And I wanted to ask, where do you study that? Because I don’t know if your average community college offers that type of training.

It’s no secret that bloggers love their polls — they’re a great way to increase user engagement, and sometimes you can even get some useful data from them. But most people probably don’t realize just how popular these polls really can be. PollDaddy has just released some of its latest stats, and they don’t fail to impress: the company is now serving 430 million poll impressions per month, with a reach of over 74 million people worldwide, giving it a Quantcast rank equivialent as the 22nd most visited online service in the world.

That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy’s acquisition by WordPress’s parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic’s premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don’t want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.