Transhuman News Blog

Craigslist, embattled over the most recent allegations of sex trafficking and underage prostitution, pointed their finger at eBay yesterday. Craigslist has put significant efforts into moderating inappropriate listings on their site, says CEO Jim Buckmaster. But eBay continues to accept the worst kind of ads, depicting “young Asian females engaged in unprotected sex” on its Spanish subsidiary Loquo. He points to a number of listings that showed graphic pictures of sexual acts, and also pointed out that eBay aggressively markets upsell opportunities to listers, effectively taking part in the transaction.

How did eBay respond? By blocking access to Loquo from IP addresses originating in the U.S. But the site, and the listings, are easily accessible – just copy the URLs into an IP anonymizer, for example. The extremely NSFW listings are still up and active.

A post on Aimgroup says eBay is also planning on eventually taking down these types of listings as part of its “process of ensuring all of its sites are in alignment with its family-friendly values.”

For its part, Craigslist has taken a disproportionate share of the heat over prostitution and sexual trafficking claims. A half page ad was recently run by two “survivors of Craigslist sex trafficking” in the Washington Post, for example. And last year South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster targeted Craigslist as part of his run for governor.

And recently a new Facebook group emerged called “Stop Craigslist Human Trafficking – Choose Ebay Classifieds.” Buckmaster seems particularly incensed by the fact that eBay is being seen as family friendly, when they’re running ads far worse than anything you see on Craigslist and have historically been quite fine with selling pornography and other adult materials.

It’s over a year ago when we covered the launch of 6rounds, a consumer-facing video chat platform with a couple of interesting twists that made it a lot of fun to use.

Henceforth, the startup and service will be called Rounds – they’re now leasing the domain name rounds.com, which is far more memorable.

The company is today also debuting a cool video chat application on the Facebook platform that I’m pretty sure will be appreciated by many.

The app, which is called Video Chat Rounds, lets you interact with Facebook users over video, not only to chat but also to play games, enhance conversations with effects in real-time, share Flickr photos, watch YouTube videos, exchange virtual gifts and much more.

Essentially, it’s video chat on steroids.

For now, effects and gifts that users can pull from the interactive menus inside the application interface are free of charge – you can simply earn ‘coins’ by being active in various ways – but in time Rounds will start charging for a subset of them.

The startup also hopes to generate revenue from letting advertisers plug branded experiences (check the Heineken-sponsored Truth Or Dare game to see how that would work).

Rounds is also keen on letting third-party developers build stuff around the platform, both the regular Web app and the Facebook Platform application.

Check it out and tell us what you think.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Rounds was founded back in 2008 and has to date raised $2 million in venture capital funding from investment groups Rhodium and Startup Factory.

It’s hard to believe, but in the days before blogging and Twitter plenty of people still found a way to record the personal (and sometimes mundane) details of their daily lives. But instead of sharing them with the world, they simply jotted them down in a book kept hidden in the sock drawer or under a pillow. Turns out, the personal journal is still alive and well, and now Y Combinator-funded startup OhLife thinks that it can make it even more popular by bringing it to your inbox.

The service is as simple as they come. After filling in a standard signup form, you’ll receive an email inviting you to submit your first journal entry. Simply reply to that email message and you’ll have your first journal post. Your posts are all archived on the web for future reference and are kept totally private — this is all meant to be kept private, so you won’t find any Facebook share buttons here.

Granted, some people have no inclination to record their daily thoughts (myself included), but there are definitely plenty of folks who have attempted to keep a personal journal, only to forget about it a few days later. This site is for them. After signing up OhLife will promptly email you every day at 8PM to remind you to add an entry — to do so you simply reply to the email message you’ve received. To help keep you engaged, each email prompt you receive will also include a random past entry, which can help you reflect on where your life was a few weeks or months or (eventually) years ago.

It sounds far too basic, but the OhLife team says that it works: they report that 50% of users who complete their first entry have continued to add an entry at least once every other day. It probably helps that, despite the spare feature set, the site is very nice to look at. At this point OhLife isn’t doing anything to monetize, but if it can get traction then the  team will consider freemium options.

OhLife faces a few obstacles. For one, the site is inherently private, so it may be difficult for it to spread virally. The basic feature set also makes it easy for other companies to reproduce, and there isn’t much of a lock-in effect because there’s no social component. That said, it does one basic thing very well, which may be enough for it to gain traction.

OhLife is actually the third startup to come from this YC team — the founders previously built IDidWork and MeetingMix, the latter of which is still alive (though it doesn’t have a sizable user base).

Though it has only been out for a few months, it seems as if Facebook’s Like button is all over the web. And despite some initial backlash, a lot of people seem to like it (see what I did there?). It now appears that Facebook may already be testing a new version of the Like button. [Update below]

As you can see in the screenshots in this post, the Like button now has the like count on the right side of the actual button in its own smaller box. When you click on this new button, it brings the number inside the actual Like box. Previously, it remained outside the box and the Like box simply turned dark blue indicating you had clicked on it. Now the box remains light blue — but again, this count is inside of it stating that “X people” liked the item.

A few quick things: this new Like button now appears to be the same size as both the Buzz and new Tweet buttons (and it looks more like each of them) — something which publishers will definitely appreciate. Also, this new button makes it hard to accidentally unlike something because you don’t just click the button again, now you have to hover over the thumb icon to bring up an undo arrow — this is something everyone should appreciate.

It seems to be completely random which pieces of content Facebook is testing these new buttons out on. For example, some our our posts have the old button, some have the new button. We’ve reached out of Facebook for clarification about the new button and will update when we hear back.

Update: Facebook has just confirmed the roll out of the new button. ”We’ve begun rolling out new variations of the Like button to make it more seamless for people to like content and share it with their friends. We’ll have additional details to share in the coming weeks,” a representative tells us.

After your initial surge of people connecting to your social graph what do you do to strengthen it? Launch a “who to follow” feature. It worked for Facebook. It’s working for Twitter. And now Google Buzz is going to give it a try.

As they announced tonight in their Buzz feed, the next time users load up the Buzz tab in Gmail, they should be greeted with a box suggesting other people to follow. Google says these will be based on people you frequently email and/or chat with. It also depends on your social connections on other networks (aka your social circle), and activity on Buzz. Only people with public profiles will appear as suggestions, Google says.

If you find a person you like, you can click a button to follow them. Or if you don’t like a suggestion, you can click an “ignore” button and they won’t show up again. Pretty standard stuff at this point, but it works. What was so great about Twitter’s implementation of this a few weeks ago was that it was front and center on Twitter.com. I started noticing a huge uptick in people following me, and I found a lot of people to follow that way as well. Of course, they still need a way to collapse that box so it doesn’t always have to be in your face. It looks as if Buzz’s box will have a close (and “Done”) button.

Buzz’s implementation may be slightly more controversial because once again they’re looking at your email/chat habits to suggest people to you. Sometimes these aren’t people you necessarily want as friends on social networks. But the ignore button should work fine there.

Google’s Chrome Web Store is launching this October, giving users the ability to purchase premium web applications (and developers an easy way to sell their wares). And, in an apparent attempt to make sure that users are as comfortable as possible with this new web-app market, Google is drawing inspiration from the best. Actually, “blatantly copying” would probably be a better choice of words — the Chrome Web Store looks nearly identical to Apple’s App Store.

The image above, which was captured by 1Up.com at a recent gaming conference, shows just how similar some portions of Google’s Chrome Web Store are to the iTunes App Store: colorful panels of featured apps at the top, scrolling thumbnails further down, with top ranked apps on the right side of the screen. The only major differences are the left nav-bar and garish ‘top rated’ and ‘hot games’ logos in Google’s version.

Still, blatant as this may be, it’s probably a wise choice on Google’s part. Chrome’s Web Store will only thrive if a lot of people are actually buying apps and games on it, and Google is giving people what they’re familiar with.

Update:: In Google’s defense, the profile pages for apps do look different from the App Store’s (I actually like Google’s better):

Our favorite digital coupon group buying site Groupon has cemented its foray into Japan and Russia today with the acquisitions of Japanese and Russian deals sites Qpod and Darberry respectively.  Groupon has a tendency to acquire and rebrand its better outfitted clones, most recently buying the German startup Citydeal as an outpost of its European expansion.

Groupon, which has the dubious distinction of being a startup with a built in business model, recently raised $135M in Series C funding lead by DST and Battery Ventures. The site also just launched “personalized deals,” which are also in line with the company’s push towards expansion.

Groupon Japan and Groupon Russia are the latest notches in Groupon’s belt of world domination; The company now serves up deals to more than 13 million subscribers in 29 countries and employs more than 1,200 people worldwide.

When asked at last month’s Social Currency CrunchUp about reports that the coupon company is now generating $1 million in revenue a day, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason did not confirm, responding, “it’s a cool business”.

Google’s app store for the web is almost ready for business.

Gaming portal 1Up.com has detailed a presentation given by Google developer advocates Mark DeLoura and Michael Mahemoff at GDC Europe that contains new details about the Chrome Web Store — a feature first announced at Google I/O that will allow users to purchase web applications from their Chrome web browsers. During their talk, the Google employees revealed that the Web Store is going to (probably) launch in October, and they gave more details on how the web store’s payments would work.

One key piece of news: when the Web Store was first announced, Google VP of Product Sundar Pichai indicated that there would be a standard 70/30 (developer/Google) split — the same as on Apple’s App Store and Android Market. However, the slides from the 1Up report say (in bold text, no less) that Google will take only a 5% “processing fee”, with no additional revenue share.

This is a very interesting change, because it means that developers now have a strong incentive to develop and promote the web versions of their applications over their native counterparts. Google may make less money from this in the short term, but if it helps the web win out over native apps then it’s a decision that will pay off for Google in a big way.

The slide also indicates that the store will launch with support for free trials, subscriptions, and other in-app payment platforms. At launch you’ll be able to purchase apps from anywhere in the world using Google Checkout, but only with US dollars (multiple currencies and in-app transactions are slated for the first half of 2011).

Also interesting: applications will be auto-approved and published “most of the time” (the report doesn’t indicate what the exception to the rule might be). Each application profile will include customer reviews including those left by your friends.

Dear Internet, please stop clicking on the damn Twifficiency link. In case you’re unaware by now given the 4,000 tweets in your tweet stream, it’s not the coolest app ever, it just automatically tweets out your results.

Yes, it alerts you that it will do this with some tiny red text at the bottom of the page, but clearly no one is reading this. According to Twitter Search, a new sucker is born almost every second.

The most humorous example is Google executive Marissa Mayer who a few minutes ago tweeted out her total failure of the exam to her 35,000 followers. “My Twifficiency score is 0%. What’s yours?,” Mayer tweeted. Something tells me she wouldn’t have tweeted the absolute failure on purpose.

What is Twifficiency? It’s a score based on how many people you follow, how many people follow you, and how often you tweet. In other words, it’s yet another meaningless metric that is attempting to trick you into thinking you’re using Twitter wrong if you don’t have a good score. Mayer is actually on Twitter and uses it somewhat regularly, which is more than you can say about most high-profile executives. And yet, she got a 0 percent on the exam. Why? Who cares.

Update: Mayer quickly followed up with a tweet:

Lesson learned! RT @adamrofer my twifficiency is “I don’t trust them to tweet on my behalf”

In 1997 Wired Magazine declared the browser dead. “Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we?” said Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf.

They were wrong, of course. The browser is still the killer app of killer apps. It’s the single most important way that we interact with the Internet. From Wikipedia to webmail to YouTube, it’s the universal virtual machine that has made pc operating systems irrelevant. If all you have is a browser, you’ll be just fine.

Fast forward to today and Wired is once again saying the browser is dead. “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display,” says Chris Anderson.

And about that 1997 article: They weren’t wrong, they were prescient. “The point was altogether prescient,” Anderson says now of that article. Overheard on the TechCrunch Yammer stream: “Possibly the greatest explanation for being dead fucking wrong that I’ve ever seen.”

Wired is still wrong. Way wrong.

The new article is based on a foundation of data supplied by Cisco that shows web traffic, as taking a smaller piece of total Internet traffic. The chart itself is misleading, as BoingBoing pointed out. But even taken at face value, it’s still wrong.

Wired’s argument, based on the data, is that the browser is dead and apps, like iPhone apps, are taking over. “This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

Um, ok. But the data doesn’t show this at all. Sure, video traffic is expanding. Which makes sense because it’s a heavy load. But most of it is also being transported via Flash and HTML right through a web browser. And most app data is counted under “web” in Wired’s graph, meaning its all lumped together with normal browser data.

In other words, Wired took a misleading graph and then drew all kinds of conclusions based on it that don’t even make sense in their make believe world. It’s like they showed a picture of a banana and said it explains the rising cost of gasoline.

In fact, the only thing Wired’s chart really shows is that video files are really big, and people like to watch them in browsers.

The browser isn’t dead. Web pages aren’t dead. HTML works really, really well. Check out Facebook’s iPad “app,” for example. You don’t download it from an app store, you just point your browser to touch.facebook.com. Not only does it work really well, Steve Jobs doesn’t get to have a veto right over people using it. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing a surge of traffic from the iPad to our site, via a browser.

Apps are great on mobile phones with small screens. But they are a pain to install and keep synchronized. Eventually having less local software will make sense on phones, too. All you really need is that browser virtual machine and you can pull everything else from the cloud. This is obvious. Only a bunch of hipster tech journalists checking email on their iPads all day* would think otherwise, and then make up a bunch of data to support their argument.

*Wired, not us.

Google made their “opt out of street view” service live in Germany today, giving select Germans until September 15th to exclude their properties from being mapped when the Street View service launches. The function will be available for a limited time in the 20 cities that are mentioned which includes Berlin, Dresden and Hamburg and then extend to all cities covered as Google Maps Germany rolls out.

While I’ve contacted Google for analytics on the number of people who have requested building camoflaging, the fact that private citizens can mass opt out of certain Google search functions is unprecedented until now. Why not give people the option to opt out of search entirely? After all, a hypothetical “Opt out” or rather “Do not index these pages I swear are about me and harmful” is considerably less far-fetched a privacy solution than Erick Schmidt’s suggestion that people change their names.

Bear in mind that there is no specific German law forcing Google to do this, and buildings, experts have assessed, do not count as person-related data in Germany. The general privacy greyzones of the strict German Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (Federal Data Protection Act) and the fact that German citizens and the newspaper BILD are up in arms over the risk that their data will be used maliciously pressured the search giant into providing this special service.

The German Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière is currently proposing a new law that would specifically target Google Street View and issues surrounding privacy. It is actually against the German constitution to enact a law that targets a specific company.

Google Maps has already launched in 23 countries and has experienced turbulance in Spain and Austraila as well as various strange use cases. Google insists that the service will provide value to Germany, “Many German users are already using Street View to visit other European countries virtually.”

On a side note: German Chancellor Angela Merkel has revealed that she will not opt out of Street View.

Image: Cologne Blog

Translation from German: Philip Mertens

About four months ago we decided to take a look at our logs to see how many people were visiting our site from the iPad. At the time, the device wasn’t even a month old, so it was surprising to see that it had already surpassed Android in terms of visitors to TechCrunch. Some attributed this to the fact that it was a great web browsing device. Others thought it was because there was an initial surge of purchasers (especially among tech early-adopters) who were browsing a lot to test it out. So let’s take a look to see where things stand now, shall we?

I’ll cut to the chase: the iPad browsing traffic is surging. In the past 30 days, it’s up almost exactly four-fold from what it was back in April. It’s now the fourth most-popular OS that people browse TechCrunch from — last month it surged past Linux machines. The only devices more popular to view TechCrunch from are now Windows machines, Mac machines, and the iPhone.

The iPad is also quickly catching up with the iPhone. And when combined, iOS devices are now well past 10 percent of browsing share.

Below, find the percentage numbers for the past 30 days:

1. Windows – 55.20%
2. Mac – 26.88%
3. iPhone – 6.13%
4. iPad – 4.51%
5. Linux – 3.38%
6. Android – 2.08%
7. (not set) – 0.69%
8. iPod – 0.60%
9. BlackBerry – 0.37%
10. SymbianOS – 0.08%

Let’s look at those compared to the numbers we published in April 2010:

1. Windows – 59.68%
2. Mac – 27.78%
3. iPhone – 5%
4. Linux – 3.72%
5. iPad – 1.18%
6. Android – 0.99%
7. iPod – 0.67%
8. (not set) – 0.54%
9. BlackBerry – 0.28%
10. SymbianOS – 0.07%

Now, it’s important to note that traffic as a whole to TechCrunch is up quite a bit in the same timeframe, so it’s not like people are no longer using one platform in favor of another — all boats are rising. But based on these numbers, we can see that iPad is very clearly eating into both Windows and Mac share in this regard.

The iPhone continues to rise, up over 1 percent in the same time span, it’s just not rising as quickly as the iPad. Android is gaining as well, up over 1 percent (which more than doubled its browsing share).

Based on these numbers, the iPad’s initial surge clearly wasn’t some fluke by early-adopters testing out there device. Sure, TechCrunch has a highly tech-savvy audience, but it’s also a large and rather broad audience.

Just for fun, let’s look at some numbers from the past as well. Here are the browsing share numbers from November 2007 (when the iPhone first showed up as a somewhat significant share of browsing traffic):

• Windows – 81.12%
• Mac – 14.80%
• Linux – 3.05%
• iPhone – 0.52%
• (not set) – 0.21%
• iPod – 0.07%
• SymbianOS – 0.04%
• PalmOS – 0.04%
• Nintendo Wii – 0.04%
• FeeBSD – 0.02%

Clearly, the times they are a-changin’.

In Zork, when your torch goes out you could be eaten by a grue. In real life, when your Torch phone is a flop – about 150,000 sold opening weekend and not many more sold over the week it’s been out – you could be eaten by your competitors.

As I said before, the hard-core Blackberry audience cares about the much-ballyhooed features of the Torch – namely social media connectivity and add-on functions already available on other phones – about as much as they care about Arcade Fire. The Blackberry is a business tool and each time RIM has tried to push it into hipster and soccer mom territory, they’ve failed. The perception is that Blackberry is the go-to phone for email. If you need anything else, there are plenty of other phones out there much more competitive.

Read more…

While most economists tiptoe nervously around the D word, Dr Paul Kedrosky has no inhibitions about throwing this verbal grenade around in public. We’re in an economic depression, Kedrosky told me when the San Diego based CNBC business pundit came into the TechCrunch.TV studio last week. “As bad as 1929”, Dr. Kedrosky described a situation in which all the governments in the world might have to “collectively default” if we are to avert economic catastrophe.

And it’s not just the world economy that, according to this Kauffmann Foundation Senior Fellow, might be dying. While Dr Kedrosky’s doctorate is in economics rather than medicine, death seems to be a major preoccupation on his mind. Whether it’s the death of big venture capital, the death of American airline industry, the death of market fundamentalism, the death of American welfare capitalism or the death of the global economy, Kedrosky – the author of the Infectious Greed blog – is at his most provocative when announcing the demise of a significant idea or institution.

The funny thing, though, about Dr. Death’s dire economic prognosis is that it is anything but depressing. That’s partly because Kedrosky is such a smooth media operator that he could probably announce his own death with a tiny twinkle in his eye. But it’s also due to the silver lining in even his darkest observations about today’s global economy. Yes, Kedrosky says, conventional large scale venture capital is dying – but micro-fund investors like Ron Conway and Jeff Clavier are doing great. Yes, IT is no longer an interesting bet, but he is increasingly interested, as a Kauffmann analyst, in clean tech investment. Yes, all US airlines should die, but travel on some foreign airlines is better than staying in a luxury hotel. And yes, we are in depression, but that offers the American government the opportunity to once-and-for-all fix our utopian faith in the free market by simultaneously raising taxes and cutting spending.

Part I: Kedrosky on how the current global economic situation is “as bad as 1929” and why are in an economic DEPRESSION.

Part II: Kedrosky on why Obama gets a C+/B- for managing the economic crisis and what he’s now got to do to head off a calamity.

Part III: Kedroksy on why technology can’t save the American economy and why big venture capital has no future.

Part IV: Kedrosky on the bet that “ruined the world” and why markets never really work.

Part V: Kedrosky on why we all hate airlines and he desperately hopes that the US airline industry will die.

It’s no secret that Zynga has actively targeted the Asian gaming market in its international expansion strategy. The gaming giant recently bought Japanese gaming startup Unoh, took a $150 million investment from Japan’s SoftBank Capital, acquired Chinese game developer XPD Media and set up a Beijing office. Today, this expansion is culminating in the beta launch of Zynga’s first internationally localized game, Zynga Texas Poker, in traditional Chinese.

Zynga Poker, the company’s first ever social game, launched in July 2007 and is currently the third most popular game on Facebook globally with more than 28 million people playing monthly. Now, the game is available in China as well as on Facebook in Hong Kong and Taiwan as Zynga Texas Poker and can be played in traditional Chinese or English. Of course, Zynga’s game is only available on Facebook in Hong Kong and Taiwan as Facebook is largely blocked in mainland China.

The game itself simulates playing poker, except in a social gaming environment. Users enter a casino lobby and can play at any table or join friends for a game. Players choose from casual Hold ‘Em tables, tournament play or VIP tables. A leader board shows players how they compare in chip ranking to other players and allows players to send or receive gifts.

As an incentive for users in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Zynga Texas Poker players will automatically receive a complimentary stack of 8,888 Vegas-style Poker chips to play games with. Additionally, this month, Zynga is offering a grand prize for the “ShootOut” tournament that allows local players to compete for a prize of $880,000 Taiwanese dollars. Zynga is also giving away a trip to Las Vegas to a lucky user.

Zynga’s choice of Poker as its first game seems to be based on the high engagement numbers that the game has seen since 2007. Currently, the english-version of the Zynga Poker game on Facebook has attracted players from more that 100 countries. Every day, Zynga Poker players spen 360 million minutes of play time daily, and 28 million people globally play Zynga Poker monthly with the game seeing 5.6 million daily users. On an average day 375,000 Zynga Poker players are simultaneously playing together live.

Considering Zynga’s massive investment in the Asian market, I’d expect Texas Poker to be the first of many localized games in the area. It would make sense for the company to launch a Japanese version of a game as well.

Evernote, the ‘memory enhancement’ service that allows one to capture, organize, and find information across multiple devices and platforms, is gaining new users at a fast clip.

As you can tell from the graph above, the Mountain View startup needed 446 days to get its first million users, 222 days to get to its second million, and 134 days to get to its third. But it only took Evernote another 108 days to reach the 4 million users milestone, the company is set to announce later today.

Chief executive Phil Libin tells me the large majority of its user base is located in the United States, but not overwhelmingly so: about 57%, followed by 18% who hail from Japan, where the startup now boasts an office. A decent number of users comes from Spain, UK and Germany, and more than 12% of its users are located in the ‘rest of the world’.

Surprisingly, nearly 100% of all new users are attracted organically through blogs and word-of-mouth, Libin adds, which is always a powerful – and cheap – way to grow. Retention rates are on the high side, too, with approximately 70% of users remaining active after first usage.

Evernote hopes to attract more users through hardware bundles (i.e. in partnership with Sony, Samsung and others) in the future.

More than 10% of its user base – roughly 424,000 to be more precise – paid a visit to Evernote’s Trunk since its launch a month ago, Libin says. The Trunk is essentially a showcase of Evernote-enabled applications and hardware devices.

Also important: close to 100,000 Evernote users have already gone premium so far, paying the startup $5 per month or $45 per year for bigger upload capacity, support for more file types, enhanced security and other features.

As you can tell from the graph below, Apple devices are clearly the most popular means of accessing the Evernote service, with the iOS platform coming in it about 75% of total usage. The Android platform comes in second with just over 20%, while the other platforms and the mobile website are very small compared to iOS and Android.

Perhaps surprisingly, Windows remains the most popular platform on the desktop in terms of usage, accounting for nearly half of all usage compared to 36% on Mac.

How long till the company climbs to 5 million users?

My guess is they’ll reach that milestone in less than 108 days.

Deal hunters in San Francisco and Los Angeles have a new site to prowl starting today: Gilt City, the local deals arm of semi-exclusive “flash sale” site Gilt Groupe, has expanded to the west coast. Each city is currently offering three local deals, ranging from San Francisco’s Street Food Festival to a wardrobe makeover.

Gilt quietly started testing Gilt City in April, but it was available only in NYC. In June Gilt CEO Susan Lyne told us the company planned to expand into 15 to 20 markets in the US, but at that point nothing was finalized. Now things are finally beginning to ramp up, with a launch in Boston late last month and today’s expansion to SF and LA.

Gilt Groupe has offered online flash sales for years, selling products from luxury brands at steep discounts. That site is semi-exclusive as it requires an invite to join (though it isn’t tough to find one) — it looks like Gilt City doesn’t require an invite at all.

So why does this matter? Over the last year or so, we’ve seen countless startups try (and usually fail) to mimic Groupon’s stunning growth. But now Groupon is increasingly seeing competition from companies with established audiences, who will have a much easier time getting traction. Gilt has an established audience of users who already associate the brand with time sensitive hot deals, and it has plenty of resources — the site has raised $83 million in funding, including a $35 million round in May.

Gilt isn’t the only established site looking to get a piece of the group-deal pie — Yelp has already recently started testing its own local deals. Update: Gilt isn’t actually using a ‘group deal’ model, as their local deals will be ‘active’ regardless of how many people sign up for them. The same appears to be true for Yelp (though they are still experimenting).

Booyah’s MyTown is still losing to Foursquare in the hype department, but frankly, I don’t think CEO Keith Lee really cares.

MyTown is still adding users at an impressive clip. This Tuesday, the geo-location game hit 3.1 million users. The site has racked up 400 million check-ins in the last 6 months, or roughly 67 million check-ins per month on average. For comparison, Foursquare, which poignantly differs from MyTown by emphasizing social utility, is quickly closing the gap but currently stands at roughly 2.7 million users.

So what does Booyah’s MyTown nation look like? We have a handy check-in infographic that breaks it down by geographic location. The map below is a snapshot of MyTown’s July activity, with the dots representing check-ins. Logically, the higher the density, the greater number of check-ins. As shown in the image, Booyah is attracting significant activity from the Northeast (particularly near New York). In fact, there seems to be strong coverage across the Eastern section, only a sprinkling of users in the mid-section (with the exception of Colorado), and, as expected, a hubs of activity in the northern and southern sections of California near San Francisco and Los Angeles.

For a fun comparison, here’s a map of the actual density of the US:

Beyond traditional game mechanics, Booyah’s MyTown is also trying to increase engagement with the recent introduction of its product check-ins. With the product check-in, users can scan real-world products via barcodes for points and to unlock promotions from advertising partners. The feature, which launched in late July, is still in its infancy but it represents a major financial opportunity for Booyah, which, like Foursquare is rushing to bulk up its rolodex of advertising clients. The greatest hurdle here is not only expanding the user base but also getting users to actually check into products, en masse. So far, so good, Booyah recently registered 350,000 check-ins in one week.

Every morning I wake up and find 50 to 100 new emails in my inbox. Am I really that popular? Sadly, no. About 75 percent of it is unsolicited PR pitches. Delete. Delete. Delete.

As fun as that morning ritual is, I would much prefer not having to take the time to look at those emails. That’s something NewsBasis thinks they can help with.

When we last caught up with NewsBasis they were still called Plato’s Forms — yes, this name is much better — and they had just raised a seed round of funding. That was last November, and besides the name change, NewsBasis has been busy working on building out their underlying architecture. But the goal is still the same: create a new way for journalists and representatives from companies to interact.

The service, which is currently in beta testing, asks you to sign up as either said journalist or representative of a company. Once you do that, you can start looking over NewsBasis to find things you’re interested in. This can mean either scanning the news (via a keyword search on the site which pulls information from thousands of news feeds in realtime), scanning a topic, or making a request.

The request is the most interesting aspect because it’s how the two sides (journalist and company) interact with one another. For example, if I say I’m looking for something about location-based services, the companies on NewsBasis can see it and directly respond to my request. And it doesn’t have to just be companies. If I say I’m looking for an expert opinion on something like location hardware, someone with that area of expertise can see my request and reach out to me.

The main idea is that PR people (on behalf of companies) don’t have to waste their time sending me stuff and I don’t have to waste my time reading it. The idea is to eventually build up profiles of journalists and companies so that NewsBasis can know what you’re interested in without you having to explicitly search for news or information — or just get blindly sent stuff.

Obviously, I’m not naive enough to think this will wipe out the PR spam I get. But neither is founder Darryl Siry. He realizes that this PR business is a $4.4 billion one and if he can get just a slice of that to convert to his method, NewsBasis will be solid.

And they have some interesting tech to make that happen. Beyond the questions and answer database aspect, NewsBasis has a web browser plugin that runs in the background as you read the news online as you normally would. If you see something you like, you can use the plugin to mark it or take notes. Or if some expert in a field has already publicly annotated an article, you’ll see that as your browse. And links from within News Basis can take you to these articles to see these experts’ opinions and see if you agree with them.

Also interesting is the aforementioned NewsBasis news crawler. Simply by entering some keywords you’re interested in, the service pulls in all the articles about those topics. And they really do come in in realtime. Sure, a lot of people use Google News alerts for things like that, but this is noticeably faster (though obviously not as thorough as Google). And again, it’s nice to have all of this stuff in one main hub.

This technology is being built out by Siry’s partner in the endeavor, Jacob Rothstein. Going forward, they hope to pull in all kinds of documents as well to make it so a journalist doesn’t have to leave NewsBasis on their hunt for information.

To me, NewsBasis seems like a good idea for people relatively new to journalism seeking out stories, or those doing research on a particular topic. In some ways, it’s similar to some of the Q&A services like Quora and Aardvark, but with more of a focus on being a behind-the-scenes service for the news.

I just hope it cuts out a least a few of the PR pitches I get everyday.

In advance of Facebook’s possible location announcement tomorrow, Foursquare is tweaking its privacy settings today. In an announcement made on the company’s blog, Foursquare says that its service will now allow you to change your settings to withhold or share more information with your Foursquare friends.

For example, Foursquare is now allowing users to choose to share your email or phone number with friends or choose to opt out of all Mayorships. You can choose whether local merchants can see when you’ve checked into their businesses, and can regulate the syndication of your check-ins and activity to Twitter and Facebook. A Privacy 101 page gives you details on type of information that can be shared on the location-based network. The startup has even created an elaborate grid that breaks down how certain default settings effect the information that is shared with your friends and the public. The startup even goes so far as to provide definitions of what a check-in is and the difference between a mobile app and the website.

Nearing 3 million members, Foursquare is growing fast and wants to ensure that users understand their privacy setting. More than that, the startup is trying to empower users to take control over their privacy.

And privacy missteps aren’t new to the startup. In June, Wired highlighted an issue with Foursquare privacy, whereby a program could effectively harvest Foursquare checkin data by constantly refreshing venue pages and looking to see which users were showing up in the “Who’s Been Here” section. Foursquare addressed and patched the data breach immediately.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this announcement comes a day before Facebook is reportedly going to talk about the network’s location app. And privacy is no doubt going to be central to any location product that is announced tomorrow, considering the issues that Facebook has dealt with in the past over user controls and privacy.

As my colleague MG Siegler wrote last night, it seems highly unlikely the Facebook is going launch a Foursquare killer tomorrow. It’s more plausible that Facebook’s location application will federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s or Gowalla’s data) at first.