If you want to learn more about the booming tech startup scene in New York City, it doesn’t get much better than talking to Fred Wilson. Wilson has emerged as perhaps the most recognizable figure of the New York tech world, through his 25-year career as a venture capitalist (currently he’s a partner at venture capital firm Union Square Ventures) and also through his very popular “A VC” blog.

So, TechCrunch TV was glad to have the chance to sit down with Wilson last week after he came offstage from his fireside chat with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at the Disrupt NYC conference. Watch the video above to hear his thoughts on the rise of angel and seed investing, how the Facebook IPO is impacting the larger ecosystem, the importance of geography when it comes to building a tech business, and more.

“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER!” – ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, The Social Network. Not quite. Facebook was offline or slow to load for some users around the world for over an hour. Reports started flooding in to Twitter at roughly 4:26pm PST today with many users quipping that “Facebook is down. Just like its stock price.”

One hour in, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe confirmed the outage continued for some users, though others had no trouble logging on. We’re awaiting a response from Facebook on the cause.

Similar to Facebook’s IPO, which was largely chronicled with tweets rather than the social network itself, Facebook users turned to Twitter to vent their frustration with the downtime. The site so rarely encounters loading problems that the outage came as quite a shock to some.

Facebook goes down, U.S. workforce productivity suddenly spikes for the first time since 2004.—
Calvin Fleming (@calvinfleming) June 01, 2012

[Update 5:46pm PST: 80 minutes after the outage began we're hearing reports that users in the United Staes, Brazil and Tunisia and likely other locations lost service, but the site seems to be coming back to life for others, including me.]

[Update 6:00pm PST: 95 minutes after the site started to sputter it looks like most of those users who lost service have now regained it, though there are still reports of outages.]

As Jesse Eisenberg fumed during his fictional portrayal of ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ in Aaron Sorkin’s dramatized history of Facebook, ‘The Social Network’:

“If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don’t you get that? I am not going back to the Caribbean Night at AEPi!”

Honestly, Facebook has been remarkably reliable over the last few years, even as its user base swells. But hopefully the site’s engineering team doesn’t mine sipping on a Caribbean piña colada while they sort things out.

[Image Credit: TwitterWhale]

The RIM PlayBook by just received a developers update that adds some interesting new Android functionality to RIM’s tablet. This new version now supports Android apps running in their own windows, improving compatibility with the general Android app universe.

From Crackberry:

This version is butting up against the incoming BB10 OS that will soon appear on phones and tablets, but, as the Verge notes, the BB10 PlayBook should be able to run apps written for previous OS versions.

Oddly, this version seems like a bit of a dead end but it’s nice to see Android functionality getting fleshed out more concretely.

via RIM

Manipulating images for your website is such a tedious chore. You need to open Photoshop, click your mouse about ten thousand times, then save the file and upload it. Then next month you redesign your site and suddenly need to re-size all your image elements again! Startup Cloudinary has a good alternative for you: use custom URLs to transform your images in the cloud! I was a bit skeptical when I first read about Cloudinary, but after five minutes of goofing around with it I’m sold.

Upload your images — either through the Cloudinary dashboard or from your own applications via their API — and then access those images using specially crafted URLs to apply a variety of transformations to your images. That’s the real magic: you don’t need to do anything other than request your image with the transformations you want. Your original photo is still available, if needed, and each new variant you request is cached and delivered through Amazon’s CDN.

You want that full-size image scaled to 100 pixels high? Here you go!

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/h_100,c_thumb/butterfly.jpg

Oh, you just want the woman’s face from that photo in a nice 90×90 thumbnail? Cloudinary provides face detection, so no problem.

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face/butterfly.jpg

You need rounded corners?

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_20/butterfly.jpg

Or how about a circle?

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_max/butterfly.jpg

Users can create named transformations in their dashboard, which can then be used in the URLs for convenience and clarity. “round_thumbnail” makes a better URL component than “w_90,h_90,c_thumb,g_face,r_max”, wouldn’t you agree?

Cloudinary can also trivially grab profile photos from Facebook and Twitter:

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/facebook/scottmerrill

http://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/twitter_name/smerrill
And all the various transformations can be applied to these images, as well.

Cloudinary offers a robust and well-documented API. Pricing plans look reasonable, and they have a free tier for low-volume or proof-of-concept users. Now you can quit mucking around with Photoshop and get back to agonizing over which font to use for your blog about ancient Egyptian cat worship.

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.

“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the original post said, it’s because it would be a poor user experience (there’s no action that anyone could take) and it would expose the creators of unsuccessfully funded projects to unnecessary criticism from the web (those projects would be prime for trolling).”

“Most unsuccessfully funded projects come up short because of a lack of interest in the project or because their creators didn’t promote it enough, not because of the Kickstarter page itself. Success on Kickstarter comes down to making a video, pricing things reasonably, and telling people about the project.”

In fact, project creators asked that Kickstarter projects be de-indexed for a reason: they ranked high in search results and, if Google crawled them, the resulting failures would percolate towards the top. “Because Kickstarter projects index very highly in search, creators were seeing their unsuccessfully funded projects ranking extremely high — in some cases as the #1 result — for their name. That obviously sucked, so we made the decision to de-index them.”

The company has added a FAQ to address the problem here.

As we said before, this isn’t a marketplace, it’s a dog show. You don’t want the ugly mutts hanging around when there are plenty of great specimens to peruse. This is crowdsourcing perfected, in a way, and if there’s one thing we know about crowds it’s that they’re easily swayed, fickle, and rarely kind.

Solar Mosaic, an Oakland, California-based startup that is creating a crowdfunding platform specifically for solar energy projects, has taken on $2.5 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Spring Ventures with the participation of Serious Change, Jim Sandler, Steve Wolf, Tom Chi, and a group of angels from the “Toniic” investor network. The round was first disclosed in an SEC filing that surfaced earlier this week which was reported on by GigaOM’s Earth2Tech blog. Today the company confirmed the funding and disclosed more details.

Solar Mosaic, which also goes by just Mosaic, says it wants to be the “Kickstarter for solar” — enabling people to invest their own money into solar energy projects large and small. To date, the company has facilitated the crowdfunding for five projects in its beta mode, in which more than 400 people invested more than $350,000 in five rooftop power plants in California and Arizona. The company says it will use the new funding to build out its platform for crowdfunding on a larger scale.

Now, the Kickstarter comparison may not be completely accurate: According to Solar Mosaic’s website, investors earn a return from each project’s eventual revenue — so it seems to be facilitating actual equity investing, not the donation model used by sites such as Kickstarter. Today, only accredited investors are legally allowed to invest money into private companies in exchange for equity — and to receive accreditation, individuals must meet certain criteria such as having a net worth in excess of $1 million. Existing crowdfunding public platforms like Kickstarter allow people to fund projects on a “donation” basis — they can’t receive a stake in the company in return.

However, the JOBS Act signed into law last month contains passages that remove that restriction, allowing virtually anyone to invest in private companies. Crowdfunding as it stands right now is already huge — more than $1.5 billion was raised with crowdfunding methods last year alone — and the recently-passed JOBS Act will soon opening up the floodgates even further for a brand new investor class to enter the scene. The crowdfunding aspect of the JOBS Act is still being reviewed by the SEC, so Mosaic may be teeing up its widescale public launch until it goes live.

Overall, I think Solar Mosaic seems like a smart idea that comes at a smart time.Thanks to debacles such as Solyndra’s, government bodies and traditional venture capital firms are now a bit skittish about investing in solar energy and green projects. Opening up the space to crowdfunding could give the industry the jolt it needs to keep innovating. Of course, people looking to donate money have to be very careful here — but that is always the case, isn’t it?

Another day, another iPhone 5 leak. This time we’re looking at a four-inch long front panel of what appears to be a new iPhone. This panel suggests a longer, 16:9 style body and screen and lines up with previous news of a longer iPhone casing with a Micro USB port on the bottom.

I’m very skeptical in regards to these videos simply because rapid prototyping and sourcing is getting so simple these days anyone can carve out a convincing iPhone shell and take some good footage of it. Am I skeptical enough to dismiss this outright, however? No.

Japanese bloggers at Macotakara acquired the piece and compared it to the current iPhone. The clear portion is almost as big as the entire screen of the old iPhone, making this a fairly radical redesign. It’s not as slab-like as other phones out there but it gives you a bit more screen for media consumption.

Will we really see this at WWDC this year? Who knows. It’s always nice to dream.

It was just last September that we covered the launch of Prescreen, the startup founded by former Groupon and Zoosk execs that aimed to help independent films find the publicity they nearly always lack. To do so, they built a curated, on-demand video platform that would give filmmakers and distributors an alternative to traditional ad and distribution channels, while giving users an easy way to discover low-budget films they wouldn’t otherwise.

In February, Prescreen redesigned and relaunched with Facebook Open Graph integration, and in March added Netflix founding exec Mitch Lowe to its advisory board. Things were looking good.

But, as it goes in Startup Land, sometimes even veteran advisors, seed capital, and a good idea aren’t enough to keep a business afloat. Yesterday, Prescreen notified its users that it will be suspending its beta until further notice. While this doesn’t exactly mean that the startup has hit the deadpool, for all intents and purposes for its users, Prescreen is no longer operational.

Prescreen co-founder Shawn Bercuson tells us that, while the site will be officially closing its doors tomorrow, it’s reimbursing its users who had paid for movies — as well as its filmmakers — and is making an effort to put users who want to continue finding indie movies in touch with their creators. The startup will officially remain in a kind of holding pattern while the founders and advisors consider their options, as Bercuson says that it’s had interest from other companies in terms of both acquisition and merger.

That being said, much of the team has found — or is beginning to find — work elsewhere. And with $1.4 million raised from from the likes of Former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, Ed Cluss, Auren Hoffman of Rapleaf, Saad Khan of CMEA Capital, and having featured 168 films, rented more than 10K movies and having attracted over 115K subscribers (10 percent of whom became paying customers), it’s a disappointing end for the team.

“We’re obviously disappointed,” said Bercuson, who was also a founding ThePoint/Groupon employee, “but we’re going back to the drawing board proud of what we’ve accomplished … we see this is a part of the game we chose to play and are excited to apply what we’ve learned to our next endeavors.”

The decision to move on is also likely a result of something many founders and entrepreneurs are familiar with: Timing. As Marc Andreessen says, for startups, “timing is everything, but it’s also the hardest thing to control … being too early is a bigger problem for entrepreneurs than not being correct. It’s very hard to sit and just wait for things to arrive. It almost never works. You burn through your capital…”

While Prescreen saw interest both from users and filmmakers (and the co-founder added that some of its investors were willing to re-up), timing is crucial. The space is hot, and Bercuson believes that it’s inevitable that a platform like Prescreen will be successful, but the startup just couldn’t continue to bet on third-parties — or play the waiting game.

In the startup ecosystem, one company doing well often leads to success for many, but in Hollywood, the CEO says, it’s an individual endeavor. At this point, studios and executives see online, on-demand platforms like Prescreen as competition, and the whole digital realm as a “zero sum game,” he says.

I would argue that this is a frustration cord-cutters and everyone who consumes movies and TV shows online is familiar with — don’t want to pay for a subscription to HBO, but you want to watch the new Game Of Thrones episode without breakin’ da law? Good luck.

Content should live anywhere that people want to consume it, and eventually that will be the case. But change has been slow, as those who control rights, networks, and the distribution of content continue to fight it, Aereo being a good example. That may be the case with Prescreen, or it could be a number of other factors. We’ll update as wel learn more.

But, startups are on a different timeline, the Prescreen CEO admitted, and at this point it just wasn’t worth it for them to wait it out. Without mind-melting traction and with many obstacles still ahead, the costs were too high.

For now, the founders are considering whether to sell off the technology and move on or opt for a merger, perhaps working within a bigger entity that has more developed inroads in the industry. They haven’t ruled out the idea of eventually re-launching the website as is, with a new approach, but for now, that’s up in the air.

For more on Prescreen, you can find it here before the doors close on Friday. The startup’s notice to users is below:

Notice below:

Prescreen Notice of Change of Service

Please be advised that on Thursday, May 31, 2012, Prescreen will be suspending our initial beta test until further notice. We very much appreciate your interest in our service and hope that you enjoyed your experience with Prescreen.

In early 2011, we started Prescreen because we believed the future of film discovery and distribution is digital. Last September, we launched the beta version of our site to test this premise. In just 8 months, we proved that this is likely to be the case. In total, Prescreen featured 168 films, rented more than 10,000 movies, and saw more than 115,000 subscribers opt in to receive Prescreen movies. That said, we’re perfectionists and we still don’t believe we’ve seized the opportunity. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board. When we come out on the other side, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Team Prescreen thanks you for your support from the bottom of our digital hearts

Best,
Team Prescreen

Ryan Lawler contributed to this story

I’m smack dab in the middle of my HTC Evo 4G LTE review (the full review will be up tomorrow), but as I judge, I felt the need to bring John Biggs into the mix for a little Fly or Die.

Now, John is notoriously hard on Android phones, namely because they’re all incredibly similar. The Evo 4G LTE is no different. I, on the other hand, think it brings some pretty strong design language to the table, which could be great for someone looking to stand out.

I’m impressed with how comfortable the 4.7-inch 720p display is on the phone — usually that’s much bigger than I like (perfect “that’s what she said” moment, since you can’t say it yourself). But despite the fact that I threw out 25GB of free Dropbox storage, Beats Audio, and HTC’s Sense overlay, John still could not be impressed.

And to be honest with you guys, neither could I. Evo is a huge name to Sprint customers, but the yellow carrier has beefed up its offerings to now include the Galaxy Nexus and the iPhone 4S. Those are major competitors, which should crowd the shelves that the Evo line once dominated.

Dies across the board.

Check out the rest of my HTC Evo 4G LTE review coverage here.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham recently begged entrepreneurs to consider “frightening ambitious startup ideas,” like building a better search engine or replacing universities. “Any one of them could make you a billionaire,” said Graham. “That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s not a sign of weakness. Arguably it’s a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying.”

Among those terrifying ideas was rethinking the inbox, and in particular, the Gmail inbox. Although there has been much complaining about the sorry state of email, very few companies are addressing the situation. It’s just too hard. But there is an interesting startup to watch in this space, which happens to be thinking about the bigger picture. The somewhat stealthy Fluent is not shy about its vision either, offering a tagline that boldly proclaims it’s offering “the future of email.” But can it deliver?

For starters, if anyone can ever disrupt email, why not three ex-Googlers who spent years working on Google Wave, among other things? Jochen Bekmann, Cameron Adams and Dhanji R. Prasanna have the technical expertise (seriously, check the bios), and unlike the shuttered Wave experiment, Fluent is an entirely more functional and more attractive product. While many scoffed at Wave’s confusing, engineer-driven design, Fluent is the opposite. It’s simple, streamlined, and easy to use.

Currently, if you had to compare Fluent to something, then “the future of email” looks a lot like a web-based version of Sparrow, an email client which has been achieved some popularity among the Mac/iOS crowd. But Fluent brings a lot of new ideas to the table. Plus, it’s dreaming a bit larger, too. By starting with a web app, the team is building a front-end email client which could address users on any platform, desktop or mobile. Mac, PC or Linux. Phone or tablet. Or refrigerator…or so jokes(?) the company via blog post.

“Email hasn’t been innovated in 20 years,” explains Adams. “But in the last decade, there’s been a lot of change in how people communicate.” Communication is now more informal, more social. But while social messaging – like Facebook messages or Twitter direct messages – is good for quick one-on-one conversations, when you want to talk about multiple things, it’s easy for streams to get cluttered. Gmail helped with this by introducing threaded messages, but as you read, write and reply to email, there’s still a lot of context switching involved.

Fluent operates differently. Composing, replying, reading, archiving, deleting, searching, starring and “to-do”ing email can all be done within the one stream-like interface, no switching needed.

The Mobile Experience

While not there yet in terms of implementation, the company has a decidedly mobile-first mindset when it comes to using Fluent on smaller screens, like smartphones and iPads. The concept video (below), makes using Fluent on mobile seem more akin to navigating through a fun Twitter app than parsing an inbox. Swipes, gestures and touches let you perform tasks quickly, with optimizations for the screen size in question.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with all the drooling.

It Is Not An Alternative To Gmail, Just A Better Front-end

Today, Fluent is not an alternative to Gmail – it’s a cloud-based email client. The platform supports Gmail and Google Apps, and more email services will be added in the future. The company doesn’t plan to hand out their own email addresses (which could be truly disruptive to Gmail), preferring to operate as a new front-end to whichever inbox you use. Eventually, it will support IMAP and Exchange, too.  There are no plans to innovate in terms of email protocols, however, as Graham suggested, despite the team’s Google Wave backgrounds.

That being said, Fluent still has major potential. Fluent’s interface is elegant, presenting conversations as threads which you can step through with clicks or the familiar Google shortcuts (j, k to move forward and backward, e.g.).

But unlike most email systems, which require you to click to open a message, type, then hit “reply,” you can reply from the main inbox view in Fluent. That makes reading through your emails in Fluent more like scrolling through your Facebook News Feed and leaving comments. Want to reply? Just type in the “reply” box beneath the email thread, then hit send. As with Gmail, you can also star items from the main inbox view.

What’s New: To-Do’s, Attachment View, Instant Search & More 

Also unlike Gmail, it only takes one click to turn an email into a to-do item. (In Gmail, you check the email, click “More,” then “Add to Tasks.” In Fluent, you click the check mark.) Starred emails, to-dos and your Gmail labels are all available from the left side of the screen (or at the bottom in the current mobile view) for easy access.

There’s also an attachment view which lets you visually search through emailed files, filtering for documents, images, zip files, audio, or video. These concepts are not new (remember Xoopit?), but they’re implemented in a way that makes you thump your head, wondering “why hasn’t someone done this before?” (For what it’s worth, Sparrow is also rethinking attachments in other ways that make sense.) Adams says that the attachment view, as it exists now, is only “a taste” of what’s to come.

“People use email as a de facto backup system, but accessing those files is quite hard,” he says. “We want to make it more like a file system.” In the future, Fluent will let you cluster files by version, organize them with labels, easily search them and let you filter them by time, person and filetype.

Even more impressive than all the above is Fluent’s instant search. This is potentially the service’s “killer” feature. When you start typing in Sparrow or Gmail’s search box, you’re given auto-complete suggestions in a drop-down beneath the search box. Although Sparrow’s are pretty smart, in Fluent you’ll see actual emails matching your keywords appear instantly. The drop-down box’s suggestions show matching contacts, allowing you to find either a contact or email from one search interface. Fluent’s search feature doesn’t wait until you’ve completed a word, it’s truly instantaneous. Fortunate enough to test the service myself, I can confirm that despite its early, wobbly, private beta: Fluent’s instant search is crazy, crazy fast. It’s like Google Instant for your inbox. Which, of course, then begs the question: why isn’t Google doing this? (Apparently, Google+ Circles integration was the priority there.)

Other features in the works include a better contacts management experience, showing a timeline, history, and pattern of your communications, an email summarization feature which will aggregate and summarize things like social media updates or mailing list threads, plus other more common additions, like support for email signatures. Eventually, an open API will be available, too.

Can Power Users Switch?

Could a Gmail power user switch to Fluent today, assuming stability? Of that, I’m not sure. Here’s why:

• At present, it lacks a true “priority inbox” functionality which many power users have come to rely on, instead favoring the stream-like view.
• There isn’t an easy way to see important mail (i.e., “important” as determined by Gmail’s filter) or just important + unread, for example, which are often critical tools for getting through a large number of messages. Right now, “priority” mail is tucked away under a label, for example.
• It’s psychologically challenging to adjust from an inbox segmented into sections (important, unread, starred, etc.) to one where emails are simply listed chronologically, starred and non-starred all mixed together in one view. (Obviously, these concerns apply more to some Gmail users than others. It depends on how you prefer to view your inbox.) But the company plans to integrate priority mail deeper into the system, while also being more transparent about why things were marked priority, too. And a follower-like model for contacts will allow you to manage who gets flagged as “priority” in the future.
• More critically, though, I’m concerned that the “compact” view in Gmail still achieves a better at-a-glance view of the inbox than Fluent’s compact view does, which is not nearly as compact and loads more emails dynamically as you scroll down. This seems to be thought of as a feature, but I’m not convinced. I’d like to see some 40 or 50 emails in one view before worrying about it “loading” more.

In other words, despite its good looks, Fluent is still walking a fine line between favoring pretty over powerful. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. And all this is subject to change.

That said, the overall workflow, the ease of to-do’s, and the clever attachment view are all powerful enough features that Fluent could easily grab early adopters in search of alternative solutions. As the startup shakes out the kinks (and there are kinks – scaling, stability, syncing), it’s a given that it will at least attract a Sparrow-sized audience, if not larger.

WHEN CAN YOU HAVE IT?!!

The saddest thing about Fluent, the so-called “future of email?” It’s not ready for you to use yet! When asked when it would be available to a wider launch, co-founder Jochen Bekmann told me, “we hope to be able to open wider in a few months, mostly depending on whether we have funding to pay for servers and refined some of our features.”

Wait, “depending on whether we have funding to pay for servers?” Hurry up with that funding, investors. (Fluent says seed round talks are “pretty far along,” thank goodness, and should have some news on that front this summer). A staged rollout will soon follow.

Since I can’t show off my *actual* inbox, here are some sanitized screenshots. My iTunes folder:

Some attachments:

Compose screen (it pops up over current window, in this case, my empty to-do’s section):

What’s the best thing that I (and others) learned at D10 this year? (Other than the fact that Steve Jobs used to own a peacock, of course.)

Onstage at D10, Google SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki revealed, in answering Walt Mossberg’s question about the sad state of ad relevancy, that Google calls its machine learning smart ad targeting technology “Smart Ass” internally.

Aside from those self-driving cars, this is probably the coolest thing happening at Google at the moment.

Wojcicki then told Mossberg that a “huge amount” of Google engineers were working on improving “Smart Ass,” “There are all kinds of amazing things on the Web. Advertising is not one of them,” she said. “Display ads are very crude, there is a really high CPM price for the value being extracted.”

“I’m not against advertising, I just don’t understand why it’s not good.” Mossberg replied. “How come I’m not seeing the things that I might like to spend money on as I’m traveling around the web?”

Wojcicki agreed with him, hoping that one day Mossberg ideally would be served ads about new tech products and not a trip to Iraq when reading a news article about the Iraq War for example. “We’re getting better, we’re evolving from a user standpoint,” she said.

And I’m still picturing that “huge amount” of Google engineers chuckling every time they say smart ass instead of smart ads. Amazing.

Photo via: @karaswisher

@bhankes Might be the best single thing I learned at D10. #ATD10—
Eric Savitz (@savitz) May 31, 2012

Remember this report about Google Chrome passing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in browser market share? Well, at today’s D10 conference, Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai basically confirmed this is true, saying that Chrome is “#1 in most countries” and even noting that Chrome’s market share is over 50% in some regions.

One-third of people are using Chrome, said Pichai.

StatCounter’s report, to refresh your memory, found that Google’s Chrome web browser had overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for a period of time in May 2012. The firm compiled data for the week of May 14th through May 20th, showing that Chrome had a market share of 32.76%, compared with IE’s 31.94%. This isn’t the first time that Chrome had gotten ahead, however. And the race itself is close – perhaps too close to call.

Pichai didn’t reveal specific details regarding Google’s own internal data on web browser metrics, but said Google believes Chrome is in either first or second place in almost all countries worldwide, based on what it’s seeing:

Chrome grew roughly 300 percent last year — we have hundreds of millions of active users. We have many ways of looking at it. You can argue about the data, but in general I think we have gained substantial mindshare since we’ve launched the product. I think it’s fair to say that we are number one or number two in all countries in the world. It’s fair to say that roughly a third of people are using Chrome; I think it’s much more than a third in the consumer space.

In other words, Pichai confirmed everyone’s typical assessment of the situation: that most enterprise users are on Internet Explorer because it takes time to upgrade. But anyone who can log in and change their browser will be on Chrome – that’s why consumer usage is far higher than enterprise usage.

Emerging markets are especially fond of the browser because of its speed, Pichai added. And more Windows users than Mac users are also on Chrome, mainly because that’s where Chrome first launched.

Microsoft just announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company’s final pre-release version of Windows 8, is now available for download. With this release, Microsoft is also making new versions of its Windows 8 apps for Hotmail, SkyDrive an Messenger available, as well as hundreds of new and updated apps from third-party developers in the Windows Store.

Other new apps in this release include a Bing Travel app, as well as Gaming and Music Xbox apps that integrate with Microsoft’s Zune music service.

Microsoft says that it will focus its resources before launching the final version of Windows 8 on improving the installation process, security and privacy, as well as device and software compatibility. As Microsoft’s president of its Windows Division Steven Sinofsky noted, his team “will still be changing Windows 8, as we have done in past releases of Windows.”

We will be giving the Release Preview a good spin soon, but we already know that Microsoft has significantly improved multi-monitor support in Windows 8, for example. While this new version still features the Windows 8 Aero theme, we also know that this will be gone in the final release.

Microsoft also says that it has increased personalization options for the Start screen and refined the way “the way people find and download apps through the Windows Store.” The touch-friendly Metro version of Internet Explorer now also supports Adobe’s Flash player and features a Do Not Track feature that is turned on by default.

You can download the Release Preview installer here. If you prefer to get the Preview Release as an ISO, you can find there here.

Businesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That’s why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization. PostRocket analyzes your Facebook Page, and provides recommendations for when and what to post.

The 500 Startups Fall 2011/Winter 2012 company pulled in the syndicate seed round from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, and several angels. PostRocket’s CEO Tim Chae is actually the youngest founder ever funded by Dave McClure’s accelerator.

The money will build out the team, content recommendation tech, and marketing, and hopefully get it out of private beta. The investment seems like a smart little bet considering the bloated acquisition prices Facebook marketing companies have been commanding lately.

PostRocket’s team was originally managing the Facebook presence for multi-platinum selling musician Pitbull. They helped him go from reaching 650,000 fans a week with his news feed posts to 1.3 million in just three weeks. The team began building tools to more efficiently pull publishing insights and tactics from Facebook Page data.

Eventually the Boston-based co-founders dropped out of Babson College, drove across the country in 42 hours, and joined 500 Startups. Then three weeks before Demo Day this Winter they pivoted from another idea into selling access to their tools and service as a subscription.

The five-person team’s average age is 21 years and 3 months, with the youngest member just 18. With their $610K seed in hand from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, Maneesh Arora (founder of MightyText, ex-Google PM), Amar Chokhawala (Google engineering manager), Mehdi Maghsoodnia (CEO of Rafter, ex-CafePress VP), Roham Gharegozlou (Rising Tide partner), and some more angels, the spunky youngsters are eady to hustle

PostRocket fancies itself masters of EdgeRank, the secret formula Facebook uses to determine what appears in the news feed. It’s why the average Page post only reaches 16% of a Page’s fans. SEO is still important, business are getting an increasing share of the their traffic from Facebook, and need to be focusing on their Facebook EdgeRank as well as their Google PageRank.

While there are plenty of general best practices guides floating around the Internet, Chae tells me those don’t work because a brand’s Facebook strategy “all has to do with their demographic. The problem with NFO is that it requires marketers to spend a lot of time analyzing Insights data, and to have great knowledge and expertise in understanding EdgeRank.”

So PostRocket uses the Facebook Insights API to suck in data about a client’s Page performance. It analyzes what types of posts (photos, status updates, links, videos) work best, how frequently they should be published, and when they should be pushed out. These aren’t vague suggestions — they’re formatted as “Today’s Recommendations”, a checklist of exactly what to do to improve your Page’s reach, click-through rate, and virality. PostRocket says its tech is proven to double the fans a Page reaches.

Now the company is cranking on its content recommendations, which lets admins tag their posts with topics, sentiments, and other characteristics, and see which kinds of content are performing best. Along with paying for marketing and hiring a chief data scientist, its seed round will fund development of its recommendation engine so it can point admins towards relevant articles to publish or current events to mention. Since most Pages are best off posting multiple times a day, admins can quickly run out of things to say, but PostRocket’s data makes sure brands aren’t desperately fumbling for what to post.

PostRocket is definitely a software company, not an agency. The whole process is completely automated so it’s very scalable. It’ll be competing with PageLever and EdgeRank Checker, two experienced news feed optimization companies.

These types of analytics startups could have long legs, as while Facebook continues to stream roll Facebook Page management solutions by adding features like scheduled posts and admin permissions, it’s yet to offer real recommendations instead of pure performance data. Then again, you never know what the Facebook juggernaut will do next.

If brands are going to shift their spend from TV and other mediums to social, they want to get the best bang for their buck. PostRocket can help those brands blow up on Facebook. Boom.

PostRocket is still in private beta, but you can get an instant analysis of how well your Page is doing and request an invite here.

OnSwipe’s been around for a little over a year, and since raised a total of $6 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form content on their even-smaller iPhone.

That said, publishers who don’t want to build out an app will now have a new tool to display iPhone-optimized content to folks on-the-go.

OnSwipe for iPhone essentially lets publishers, both big-name sites like TechCrunch (for example) or a smaller Tumblr-er, beautify their site by pairing high-res imagery and touch interactions (just like their tablet-centric publishing platform) to create a smoother web experience for readers. In fact, all of the features of OnSwipe’s tablet publishing [WHO USES ONSWIPE?] tool have migrated to the iPhone version, including favorites, recommendations, and content categories. Publishers can also brand their OnSwipe iPhone web app by adding accent color and logo.

But the iPhone publisher isn’t the only feature the company is launching today.

OnSwipe Draft is a web-based layout editor and IDE for devs and publishers to personalize their own layouts. And you may have noticed me drop in the word “Favorites” up there, which, if you’re familiar with OnSwipe, should sound new.

The feature will allow readers to favorite content across all of OnSwipe’s publishing partners, complete with social integration. The feature uses Facebook connect, so any favorited content will be available to your friend network and vice versa. This means users will have a trove of their favorite content, regardless of publisher, and be able to see friends’ favorited content, as well.

Check out OnSwipe’s Draft tool in action below:

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next big idea.

Courtney Powell is the CEO and co-founder of PublikDemand, a social crowd-based platform where individuals can initiate and/or join campaigns (or “demands”) against Fortune 1000 companies. (Currently, they support demands against nine larger companies and plan to expand as demands increase.) Their platform is different from other “social good” or corporate social responsibility programs — on PublikDemand, customers of companies can use the power of the crowd to lodge complaints against those large entities and pressure them into changing policy. Within the last six months, PublikDemand has served as the catalyst for a California man who became so fed up with his service from AT&T that he initiated his campaign against the company on the site itself, has created targeted leads for AT&T competitors, and has even caught the eye of Netflix’s Reed Hastings in his fight to preserve Net Neutrality.

On the surface, PublikDemand is tapping into some large, global trends — the explosive growth of crowd-sourcing (embodied by Kickstarter), the ability of social networks to capture, aggregate, and channel negative consumer sentiment, and the next generation’s reluctance to accept the norms of larger, established institutions. With PublikDemand, Powell and her team have created a social media-based “pressure valve” that enables everyday people to collectively pool their complaints to create a bigger swarm that larger companies will have little choice but to deal with. In this brief discussion, Powell explains how people can use PublikDemand today, how they will add new companies over time, and how the company’s platform can amplify customer complaints to bring about real, tangible change.

Note: This discussion was originally recorded on April 23, 2012 in San Francisco.

Privacy guidelines such as the “Do Not Track” option proposed by the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily mean the end of the kind of targeted online ads that have brought such riches to web companies over the past decade. In fact, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says, more privacy on the Internet could actually bring the industry much more money that it attracts now.

When it comes to advertising paying the way for the bulk of the Internet’s content and innovation, Leibowitz said in an on-stage conversation this morning at the D10 Conference in Southern California that “no one wants to undermine that, and I don’t think the FTC’s policy prescriptions would.” The proposed changes would simply make companies come up with a less invasive way to target advertisements, he said: “A ‘Do Not Track’ alternative for third party cookies is a pretty modest proposal for protecting consumer privacy.”

It’s not just regulatory agencies who are welcoming of some increased privacy policies on the web, Leibowitz added. Even profit-minded executives have expressed support for “Do Not Track,” according to him. “I’ve heard from chief captains of the tech industry and CEOs that this is a good thing for this industry, because there is a virtuous cycle here,” he said. “The more control consumers have over the internet, the more they trust it and the more commerce they do…. this is good for business.”

If the proposed policies are implemented, Leibowitz said, “We will have a vibrant internet ecosystem and we will also have privacy protected ina meaningful way.”

“Do Not Track” as a concept has received general support from major internet portals and browser providers such as our own parent firm AOL, Yahoo, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft — although some of these firms have differing opinions on how new policies should be implemented and what exactly they should entail. Social networking sites such as Twitter have also stated support for “Do Not Track” initiatives.

Quite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple’s Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not.

John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week’s TC/Gadgets webcast.

As far as WWDC expectations go, the debate currently centers around docks and displays. Matt seems to think that a 4-inch display on a Droid X-sized iPhone is in the works, while I’m hoping against hope that a larger display can fit onto the same size iPhone. John, as usual, doesn’t really care. He’s more interested in the docks — rumors are circulating that suggest a microUSB port on the new iPhone rather than Apple’s standard 30-pin connector.

This would, of course, leave hundreds of speaker and charging docks out in the cold, with the exception that Apple releases John’s suggested $39.99 iDong.

We also discussed what we expect out of E3, which amounts to little more than nothing. No new Xbox, no new PlayStation. Basically, we’re getting our hands on the Wii U, which is exciting, but there’s only so much that can be upgraded in current hardware.

Which leads right into our next point: how important are specs?

Matt wrote a post recently harshing on the Nexus tablet for a lack of wireless connectivity, but more importantly, detailing the insignificance of performance testing and specs. To his first point, John and I both own WiFi-only iPads and are perfectly content, whereas Matt needs data to survive.

As far as specs are concerned, we seem to agree on the idea that specs are important in a few select areas, like camera and display. But without a solid understanding of what they mean, and how they can be unrepresentative, they’re just as worthless as a processor clock speed. For example, Nokia’s 808 Pureview 41-megapixel camera doesn’t take 41-megapixel pictures. It rather captures around 40 megapixels of raw data which is then compressed into an incredibly sharp 8-meagpixel image.

In the same vein, display resolution is only a worth looking at alongside display size. The idea is to have a high resolution on a smaller screen. The bigger the display, the less pixel dense the resolution is.

We spent a good deal of this webcast arguing, so feel free to join the fight in the comments.

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google’s chief Internet evangelist and “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, however, the company also applied for domains it thinks ” have interesting and creative potential,” including .lol.

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like these will soon become a reality on the Internet and will work side-by-side with today’s 28 TLDs like .com, .org, .net and more obscure ones like .jobs and .aero. This new program will likely create somewhere between 300 and 1,000 new gTLDs per year. Applicants have to pay a $185,000 evaluation fee, as well as additional fees once their applications have been accepted.

It’s worth noting that there had been quite a lot of opposition against these new domains. A number of stakeholders, including large corporations and non-profit organizations, have argued that this process would force them to spend more money than necessary on securing their trademarks, for example.

Here are some of the domains Google applied for (and the company’s reasoning behind applying for them):

• Our trademarks, like .google
• Domains related to our core business, like .docs
• Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified
• Domains we think have interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

Chances are, this is just a small glimpse into all of the gTLDs Google applied for. As Cerf notes, Google is “just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment. By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverse—and perhaps shorter—signposts in cyberspace.”

We asked Google for a full list of all the gTLDs the company applied for and will update this post with this information once/if we get it.

Besides Google, a number of other companies today announced the gTLDs they applies for as well. Web.com, for example, said that it applied for .web. CloudNames applied for .cloud and .global and Radix applied for 31 gTLDs, including .law, .music, .movie, .baby and .app. Just like Web.com, Radix also applied for .web, by the way. So far, we haven’t heard from Facebook, Microsoft and other major Internet companies about the gTLDs they applied for and we may just have to wait until June 13 before we find out.

Until now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS, however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services.

The Flikdate team gave me a demo of the service earlier this week and it turns out the app is about as easy to use as it gets. You simply sign up with your Facebook login (no worries, the app doesn’t post to your wall or access any of your data), tell the service if you want to chat with men or women, and after that, it just takes one click to get started. The service works over 3G and WiFi (though the video quality tends to be more consistent over WiFi).

The team built a monetization scheme right into the app. By default, every conversation is limited to 90 seconds and costs you one flik. If, however, you decide that you want to talk for longer, you can go on a virtual “date” without time limits. That’ll cost you 5 fliks, but if your partner accepts your proposal, he or she will now appear in your datebook and you can go on another “date” or communicate by text chat anytime.

Once you run out of fliks, you can either wait a day for the service to automatically top off your account or buy 25 additional fliks for $0.99.

Avoiding The Chatroulette Penis Problem

Chances are, the memory of Chatroulette and its constant parade of exhibitionists is still burned into your unconscious, but Flikdate hopes to avoid this problem by allowing you to ban users who decide to expose a bit too much of themselves. As Flikdate uses Facebook as an identity mechanism, which allows it to easily ban users who misbehave. On the service itself, of course, you are completely anonymous – but if you decide to take those pants off, Flikdate knows who you are.

Flikdate was founded by the all-girls team Dominika Wolski, Crystal Johnson, Lauren Lin and Kimberly Hunt. The company’s advisor’s include Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, Lemon.com‘s Isabel Pesce Mattos and echoecho‘s Nick Bicanic.

The Flikdate team has submitted its app to Apple and expects it to be live within about a week. At first, the service will be iPhone-only, but an Android app, as well as geofenced sessions (so you could limit dates to a specific college campus, for example), are coming soon.