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Some of you may recognize that Twitter’s recent downtime issues are a result of its architectural problems exposed by its rapid growth. However, back in the day (that is, January and the preceding months), Twitter used to crash the old fashioned way — when large events would bring a burst of usage. One of those events was the last Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld in January.

Now another one is upon us.

Jobs will give the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday morning (10 AM PST). The question is: Given Twitter’s current state is there anyway it can stay online during the whole event?

The smart money is of course on “no” — but Twitter has surprised before, staying up for the majority of this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) conference despite everyone believing it would crash and burn.

The next question is: What is everyone going to use if Twitter does go down? Sure, you could just constantly reload the websites covering the event (including VentureBeat), but it will probably be more efficient to get news via a micro-messaging platform.

The problem when Twitter goes down is that all of its users fragment over a number of sites. FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, Brightkite — these are all contenders for the sloppy-seconds. Which one will you use if Twitter fails during WWDC? Let me know and I’ll try to meet you there. We need a back-up plan.

I’ve contacted Twitter to see if it was working something, such as disabling certain features, to help the service live through the keynote. I’l update if I hear back.

update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone tells me that Twitter does in fact have a plan in place to stay up during the keynote. He also notes that they have a fun idea for the event (he didn’t elaborate on what). He also said that the backup plan is in fact to disable certain features as needed to keep the service up.

[Twitter is a nominee for best mobile company at MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat's conference on July 24]

[photo: flickr/Tom Coates]

We’re now two weeks away from Apple chief executive Steve Jobs taking the stage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to give the keynote address. It’s pretty well accepted that the big announcement at the event will be the launch of the 3G iPhone, but Jobs does love his wild cards — could there be something else in the works as well?

An event with a 3G iPhone and the launch of the 2.0 software for the device wouldn’t need anything else — I foresee a lot of talk about amazing native applications built with the software development kit (SDK) — but if Jobs really wanted to make jaws drop, here are a few possibilities:

A smaller, cheaper second version of the iPhone. Think of this as perhaps an “iPhone Nano.” There is a lot of speculation that AT&T may subsidize the new 3G iPhone all the way down to $199 — but most analysts and experts are in agreement that it really doesn’t need to; the thing will sell like hot cakes even at $399. There are also some interesting questions this raises. Such as, if the sign-up process is once again online through iTunes, will users be getting $200 rebates after the fact?

Instead, what if Apple had a second version of the phone it intended to sell at the lower price point? Maybe this version would be a bit smaller than the current one and would lack some of the functionality, such as video streaming (if that is included in the 3G iPhone). This talk of a cheaper, smaller version of the iPhone has been around for about a year now, but nothing has come of it — yet.

A tablet Mac or new version of the Newton PDA device. While there are multiple rumors that Apple is working on such a device, a launch alongside the 3G iPhone is probably very unlikely. Still, imagine a larger version of the iPhone that was a full-powered computer. Maybe it has a 3G chip built in as well, but also has USB ports and even more advanced multi-touch capabilities. Some are betting on a launch of such a device this fall, others say 2009, but wouldn’t this just make a killer “One more thing…”?

Would anyone still want a Kindle? What about an Ultra-mobile PC (UMPC)? Did anyone want one of those to begin with?

A new Apple TV. While the Apple TV got a software upgrade and price cut at MacWorld in January, the box itself didn’t actually change. With increased pressure from the likes of Netflix and its Roku-built set-top box, this could change.

Apple hasn’t significantly updated the Mac Mini in years. (I would even say that it has never gotten a significant upgrade since its launch over three years ago.) What if Apple merged the Apple TV and the Mac Mini for the ultimate living room device?

Full computing capabilities, an optical drive, the ability to act as a digital video recorder (DVR) — yeah, I’d buy one in a second.

A revamped iTunes. While most people will focus on new gadgets, Apple is said to be working with the record labels on some new deals that could alter the iTunes store. Certainly the ability to buy music and ringtones any time and any place on the 3G network seems like a no-brainer. But what if Apple goes really wild and launches a subscription-based version of iTunes?

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re nearing the mark for when the 3G iPhone could become a reality. The device, which is now widely expected to be announced at Apple’s WWDC event on June 9th and launched shortly thereafter, already apparently has people waiting in line in New York — perhaps a month before it’s released. Excitement is high and rumors continue to flow.

While the first iPhone had a huge impact on the mobile market, the 3G version could be even bigger. Many indications are that the device will launch in a significant portion of the world shortly after CEO Steve Jobs unveils it. Armed with 3G technology to enable faster data speeds (as some contend the iPhone should have had from the beginning), the iPhone should become a major player worldwide.

Here’s some of the latest news circulating on the device today:

The 3G iPhone to top out at 42 Mbps?

A senior executive for Telstra, a carrier that will carry the iPhone in Australia, allegedly told Channel News that by the end of 2008 the 3G iPhone will be capable of download speeds of 42 megabits per second. That is faster than almost all broadband Internet connections.

While there has been a lot of talk about Apple including a 3G chipset in the iPhone that is capable of speeds faster than most of what is out there right now, most expect these speeds to top out at 7.2 Mbps, far from the 42 Mbps speed. So unless Apple has some kind of special iPhone with a souped-up 3G chip and network headed for Australia, these claims should be “all but impossible” to achieve.

AT&T won’t confirm the 3G iPhone, but talks price — or lack thereof

“There’s not been a product announcement. There hasn’t been any pricing decisions made. That’s yet to come,” AT&T chief financial officer Rick Linder said while speaking at a summit in New York yesterday. So basically he won’t confirm the 3G iPhone, but is saying that a pricing decision on something hasn’t been made yet, but will be shortly.

There’s been a lot of talk that the 3G iPhone could be subsidized by AT&T to bring its price down to $199 if a customer signs a two-year agreement with the mobile service. This talk began with a story last month by Fortune that cited a source familiar with AT&T’s strategy for the new device.

Apple Canada gears up for event of some sort, may contain a letter and a number

A suspicious gathering of Apple Canada staffers is taking place today in Markham, Ontario. The reason? To gear up for a big upcoming event, according to Electronista. We all know that Canada has been chomping at the bit to get the iPhone after watching its Southern neighbor have the device for about a year now. And now we know it’s coming. So it seems unlikely that this big event is for a big summer savings sale.

OS X iPhone?

In his notes to clients, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster laid out a few predictions of what to expect on June 9th when Steve Jobs gives his keynote at the WWDC event. Not surprisingly, the first item on his list is the new version of the iPhone with 3G technology. More interesting is his prediction that Apple will use the event to launch a new version of its OS X operating system, one specifically built for the iPhone, dubbed “OS X iPhone.” It sounds like this is basically Apple’s iPhone 2.0 software, but a name change could be in order to show just how integrated the iPhone will be with Apple’s computers.

For what it’s worth, Munster also expects new MacBooks at the event.

[photo: flickr/blakespot]

Apple product rumors are really unlike any other. People (myself included) get all excited over patent filings. Users foam at the mouth over Photoshop product mock-ups that border on comical. Some even get whipped up into a frenzy over carrying cases (such as yesterday with the supposed 3G iPhone case). These rumors often start months — or even years — ahead of a product launch (if there even is one), but the mayhem doesn’t usually really even start up someone “confirms” a launch date. Today we have that for the 3G iPhone.

Gizmodo says it has a source “very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch” (that’s two “verys” for you keeping score) who knows when the device will be unveiled: June 9. That is of course, the day of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s WWDC event. It is also the day analysts have been speculating on for a couple months now, and yes, the date we’ve been predicting even when others said the 3G launch was “imminent.”

Some of the details Gizmodo includes are much more interesting. The biggest of these is that the device will be available worldwide right after the launch. Some are taking this to mean that it will be immediately available that day. This could potentially cause a dangerous situation for anyone going to the WWDC keynote as journalist and fanboys would no doubt engage in a heated race to the nearest Apple store as soon as Jobs leaves the stage.

I’ll stick with my earlier prediction that Jobs’ announces it at the keynote and says it will be available within a couple of weeks in the United States — in the window AT&T gave its employees: June 15 to July 12th. I wouldn’t be surprised with another Friday launch (as Apple did for the initial version of the device last year), so everyone could have an opportunity to get their hands on one.

Gizmodo also gives details about a launch in Spain that will take place on the 18th of June. It will be available at the grand opening of a Telefonica store in Madrid. A nationwide roll-out would follow that. The other European countries are said to have similar roll-out schedules.

With worldwide launches so close to one another, Apple clearly has a lot of the 3G iPhones ready to ship — and it better. If the device is in fact subsidized by AT&T in this country, the rate at which it sells should be breathtaking. Just think of how quickly the first generation $599 iPhone sold last year. Now we have a 2nd generation version for potentially $199.

[photo: flickr/whatcounts]

Updated

There was plenty to chew on from Apple’s WWDC yesterday.

Chief exec Steve Jobs said Apple would release a version of the company’s Safari browser for Windows (update: vulnerabilities are already being found in the new browser). Safari will also help with mobile applications for the iPhone, he said: “It’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone…And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, check email, look up a location on Gmaps… don’t worry about distribution, just put ‘em on an internet server.” (Update II: And there’s skepticism about the iPhone’s ability to be a revolutionary platform for developers.)

Critics were disappointed, however, that this means developers will have to write two separate programs, one for the Macintosh computers and one for the iPhone. There’s more detailed coverage at Engadget, which carries the iPhone comments at the bottom.

Releasing iTunes on Windows has benefited Apple tremendously, so this is an extension of Apple’s strategy to embrace Windows.

Jobs also talked about Leopard, the company’s update to its Mac OS. Dean Takahashi of the Merc has a more succinct summary than Engadget’s live coverage — providing a look at the “Finder” and “Quick View” features, which make for easier file sharing and previewing compared to Microsoft’s Vista. Leopard’s widget feature, which lets you track changes at various Web sites directly from your desktop, is also more sophisticated than Vista’s equivalent. Leopard includes “BootCamp,” a way to let Mac users choose which operating system to run when they start their computers — Windows or Mac OS (see story by Troy Wolverton).

Apple’s Steve Jobs dealt setback — Former Apple finance chief Fred Anderson now says Apple chief executive Steve Jobs misled him about stock option accounting. Story here, and statement by Anderson here. Question: Will this bring down Jobs?

Ram Shriram weighs in on FCC vote on wireless rule changes — See the Google investor’s VentureBeat column, where he advocates the FCC should take the first step toward opening wireless standards and access when it meets later today (Wed). He says the innovation gap will grow, if it doesn’t. Separate but related: India added 67 million mobile phone users (WSJ sub required) last year alone, more than the 41 million land lines in the entire country.

Google Maps have limited reach — Indian streets, along with the village masses of the Indian countryside, defy Google’s search for order, and so Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and its investing scout in India, Ram Shriram, have invested in Mapmyindia, according to Content Sutra. Although even Mapmyindia has trouble in India’s own capital.

Blackberry users get VoIP — Iotum’s Talk-Now feature lets Blackberry users see who in their contact list are available to chat with. Now, Iotum has incorporated Jajah’s VoIP service, letting users make low-cost global phone calls with an Internet call.

…while other phone users can get Blackberry features — Users of Windows Mobile 6 phones, including Palm Treos, will this fall be able to use software from BlackBerry that makes these phones work like a BlackBerry. It will load applications like its push email, phone, address book, calendar, browser and so on. We remember Silicon Valley’s investors dismissing Blackberry a few years ago, saying it didn’t understand software. Despite its recent outage, this company isn’t going away.

FunnyOrDie.com continued — Turns out, the comedy site, run by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, got its capital from Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme. Kvamme became interested, he tells Forbes, when his 17-year-old son, an aspiring stand-up comedian came to him and said there weren’t any good comic sites online. Kvamme’s explains why this is a venture-backed company: On one hand, you have the talent of Ferrell and McKay driving things but they can only do so much, so you also draw on user generated content and voting to do the rest. (Photo via Valleywag).

Chinese video clones keep coming — Ku6.com has received $5 million from DFJ ePlanet Ventures and some others, according to Bill Bishop. Meanwhile, Tudou.com has raised a very large (for China, and for video) $18 million from JAFCO in its third round of financing, and is reportedly valued at about $70 million. This comes after it got more than $9 million from IDG, Granite Global and others.

Check out Zude — It launches May 1. Mashable says it is a better version of the homepage Netvibes, but it is really just a convenient way to drag and drop any content from the Web onto your page.

Peace between MySpace and Photobucket — The announcement is here, but we don’t know how they resolved it.

The proliferation of Twitter continues — When a company spreads virally, it’s a good sign. Twitter, the service that lets people update their friends with their latest goings-on, is finding itself being pulled into various plug-ins for your browser — from 30boxes’ feature, which lets you share Flickr photos, Youtube video and URLs via Twitter, to TwittyTunes, which lets you send a message to Twitter telling friends what music you’re listening to, with a link back to the song and artist.

Controversial company, PayPerPost, now seeking readers — PayPerPost, the company which pays bloggers to post articles about advertisers, just acquired Zookoda, which gives those bloggers another way to distribute their paid posts to readers. Announcement here. Zookoda, of Australia, lets a bloggers update their readers via email whenever they blog a new post. (Presumably, paid articles won’t draw hordes of readers — so now the strategy is to push the posts on people). Zookoda is the second company that listed on our VentureBoard to be sold.

Here’s the latest action:

Amazon’s odd and scary patent — First, Amazon rolled out a product called Mechancial Turk (image left), where people do tasks for you that a machine couldn’t perform. Strange name, we thought, but nicely couched in history, and the people still ruled. But the latest Amazon patent puts the machine in charge, breaking down tasks, and commanding the human to do them. According to the patent, just awarded, “the humans perform the subtasks and provide the results back to the server.” Note that the inventors are the guys who have since left Amazon and launched Kosmix, a search engine.

Steve Jobs: Great artists steal — We can’t confirm this yet, but h Here’s a statement reportedly made by Apple’s Steve Jobs. The transcript is on PBS, and the edited version of the video is still at YouTube (see below), and emphasis is ours: “…I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” This airing of this again is notable, of course, because Apple is also in the midst of sparking a revolution in music copyright, prodding the removal of digital rights from its iTunes offerings — and music labels are sensitive about their music getting ripped off. The original video, meanwhile, has been ordered down. (Udpate: This is apparently a well-known quote by Jobs, as pointed out in comments below, so perhaps only relevant in the context of the take-down order).

Viacom vidoes represent just two percent of views on YouTube — Viacom, the large music and video publisher, sued Google for $1 billion for hosting pirated video on its video property, YouTube. But only two percent of views had Viacom-owned music or video, according to a report. That’s more than the other labels and studios, though. See summary by Henry Blodget.

Topix, the news site, opens up to citizen journalists — Topix has been working on local news for a long time, and yesterday opened itself up for citizens to post and edit stories. Question is, why did it take so long? Chief executive Rich Skrenta explains some of this on his blog. Also, note Topix is partly funded by USA Today parent Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, and so was trying to serve those masters, and lost focus on its own survival. Meantime, though, several other such sites (Newsvine, Backfence, NowPublic, Outside.in etc) have emerged and make Topix a little late to the game. Helps to have your partial owner, USA Today, the nation’s largest newspaper, announce the news, though.

Something fishy with Technorati traffic? — Odd that Technorati, the search engine for blog material, suddenly announces a spike in traffic as rumors circulate it is searching for a new chief executive. Chief exec David Sifry provides the latest details on traffic: Nine million unique visitors over the last thirty days, up from 3.5 million two months ago. At first, we wondered whether the company had hit the wall, and was looking for publicity as it searches for a sale, or a new round of funding. This comes after we stopped using Technorati for blog searches last year — with the emergence of blog material in other engines such as Google. To be fair, though, others are asking the same question, and hearing that Technorati has simply gotten better. Any thoughts?

MySpace ad revenue disappointing? — The giant social networking site will only make $271 million in ad revenue, says one Wall St. analyst, even though Google was supposed to pay a minimum of $300 million to sell ads on the site!

Capital gains tax on VCs — Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has an good analysis on the debate about the VC tax proposal being weighed in Washington. He criticizes a NYT editorial, which argues the capital gains benefit is excessive. Wilson’s point is that the earlier the stage of investment, the greater the risk, and thus the more justified the tax benefit. Should private equity firms, which invest very late, and take on less risk, enjoy the low taxes they get? Maybe not. But if you tinker too much with VC taxes, the better VCs will leave the industry and become angel investors. The Europeans would love it. They’ve been trying to figure out how to get a vibrant VC industry, and a weaker U.S. industry might push more money over there.

As usual, see latest deals — See our VentureBeat Newswire here.

SustainLane gets $3.5 million for sustainable living site — The funding for the San Francisco company is its second round, according to a regulatory filing cited by PE Week. It ranks US cities by how environmentally friendly they are, and provides animated media about people trying to live green and reviews of eco-products.

FatDoor, secretive social network, to launch soon — The Palo Alto-based start-up, backed by Bill Harris, former CEO of Paypal and Intuit, and Bertram Capital, launches April 15, and describes itself as “a wikipedia of people,” with over 130 million people and business profiles at launch. It wants to let you get to know your neighbors, with “…..search and groups based on pre-seeded politics, religion, ethnicity, age, interests, etc.” The site features “three-dimensional geo-spatial visualization of data” and user-generated community publications and “geo-spatial coupons.” Stay tuned

Apple’s Steve Jobs ridiculed the Microsoft’s Zune, saying by the time you finish fiddling with one of its main features, “the girl’s got up and left.”

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer now laughs at the iPhone (click image above for video), saying it is “the most expensive phone in the world” — even after being fully subsidized (with the Cingular plan) — and that it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard. How vulnerable the iPhone looks, now that the hype dies down — even without Ballmer chiming in.

Updated

A recent internal review by Apple concluded chief executive Steve Jobs didn’t do anything wrong even though he knew about the back-dated stock options. The review suggested Jobs didn’t appreciate the full consequences of what he was doing.

However, that doesn’t seem to square with fresh reports suggesting Jobs is strongly aware of the significance of back-dating, and has been for some time. John Heilemann in New York Magazine, reveals Steve Jobs pressured Apple’s board to reprice stock options as early as 1997:

Or so Jobs told Time magazine that August: “To restore morale, Jobs says, he went to the mat with the [Apple] board to lower the price of incentive stock options,” the magazine reported. “When the board members resisted, he pushed for their resignations.”

This revelation follows other troubling evidence that Jobs benefited from repriced options over time. A lawsuit filed last week, alleges, for example that from 1997 to 2004, five of seven grants by Pixar (where Jobs was owner and board member) were recorded at the lowest possible price within the months they were granted, and four of the seven were recorded at the lowest price within the fiscal years.

And at Apple, he exchanged his option for 10 million shares of restricted stock in Apple, netting $300 million in profit on stock sales on March 19, 2006, just a day after the Wall Street Journal first reported evidence of widespread backdating among U.S. corporations, the lawsuit points out.

Finally, even the impartiality of Apple’s internal review has come into question: Members of the special committee that oversaw the investigation — and more broadly, the board itself — have multiple potential conflicts of interest, the Merc points out.

What do VentureBeat readers think? How do you balance the tremendous benefits we get from having Jobs stay at Apple and continue to enrich our lives with things like the iPod (and iPhone, if it lives up to its hype), and the need for justice that lawsuits and — likely further investigations - are clamoring for?

(Illustration by Demetrios Psillos)

Updated

Apple has not let us down.

Chief executive Steve Jobs said the company will launch its own phone, dubbed the iPhone, and that Cingular Wireless will provide the phone service, ending weeks of speculation.

It will do much more than make calls and play music. It aims to be a full-fledged smart phone, and is underpinned with some elements of Apple software, such as its Safari browser, which could expose mainstream users to Apple’s eco-system in more varied ways. This may radically rewrite the digital balance of power, what with Apple simultaneous unveiling of its iTV device — which lets you transfer to your TV content from multiple PCs, outside sources, or Websites such as Apple.com. It contains a 40 gigabyte hard drive, and will cost $299 and ship in February.

From the WSJ, which first broke the news:

The iPhone, which is less than a half-inch thick, has no keyboard or dial pad. Instead, it uses a 3.5-inch wide touch-sensitive screen to make calls, watch videos or listen to music. It comes with a two-megapixel digital camera built into the back and can connect to the Internet using Wi-Fi wireless technology.

The iPhone, which will be available in the U.S. in June and later this year in Europe, will come in two versions. A model with four gigabytes of storage space will cost $499, while a version with eight gigabytes of storage will cost $599.

The phone will automatically synch a user’s media — movies, music, photos — through Apple’s iTunes digital content store. The device also synchs email content, Web bookmarks and nearly any type of digital content stored on a computer. “It’s just like an iPod,” Mr. Jobs said, “charge and synch.”

It will detect location, and Yahoo will provide Web-based email, while Google will provide maps — thus ensuring the buy-in of those two companies as supporters of the phone. Jobs says he wants 1 percent of the phone market by 2008. The company is negotiating with Cisco to be able to use the name “iPhone.” Cisco owns rights to the name, and recently introduced its own WiFi phone under the same name.

Here’s more, from the NYT:

iPhone rests heavily on a high-resolution touch screen that makes it possible to use a finger to control the phone. It also has several more subtle features, including sensors that track light and movement to prompt the phone to control screen brightness and physical orientation and other aspects of its operation. For example, when the phone is placed next to the user’s face, the keyboard is automatically turned off.

One of the immediate questions that analysts and industry executives posed about Apple’s new product was why the designers eschewed the higher-speed Cingular digital cellular 3-G network. Mr. Jobs said later models would support additional networking standards.

Apple’s shares soared more than six percent after the announcement. And in a sign that the market sees Apple likely to take market share away from others, shares of smart phone leader Research in Motion, which makes the Blackberry, plunged by about seven percent.

Here’s the latest Silicon Valley round-up:

Is the “Browser Operating System” finally coming? — Google and others have built all these online applications that can, collectively, take the place of Microsoft Office. All we need now is a browser operating system, which makes it easy to switch back and forth between these applications online — so we’re not tied to Microsoft’s XP or other desktop-based operating systems. The home-page companies like Netvibes and Pageflakes appear to be headed that way. Google’s personal homepage is the “fastest-growing Google product,” according to Marissa Mayer, Google vice president. Now, the integration of theses apps via the browser needs to improve, and investors at Intel Capital tell VentureBeat they think a “Browse OS” is coming next year, and several players will be in the running. We’ll be moderating a SVASE panel Thursday discussing what’s hot and what’s not. Newsweek calls 2007 the “year of the widget;” it may also be the year of the browser-based OS. Btw, the image above comes from a decade-old CNET story, showing how readers have long preferred the Web experience not be integrated with the PC.

Technorati used to be hip — Technorati used to be how you searched the blogosphere for people, conceptual memes and companies. But two trends appear to be hurting it: Blogs have become main-stream, and so they’re getting tracked by other search engines. If you’re searching blogs, you can first try Google’s general search. If that doesn’t yield anything, Google has a blog search, with a link directly from its news page. After suffering criticism early on, Google’s blog search has improved, and has apparently overtaken Technorati. And there are internal problems at Technorati. A Handelsblatt reporter sent us a story this morning (scroll down) saying Technoratic’s PR relationship with Edelman has foundered over frustration with Technorati’s service in Germany.

Apple safe from Jobs fallout, for now — Apple today said its chief executive, Steve Jobs, didn’t do anything wrong in the stock options backdating scandal rocking the company (update: though as this Merc story shows, there is still some intrigue). This is a relief to investors, who pushed up Apple’s stock by 5 percent. Earlier this week, an SF publication, The Recorder, reported that options documents had been falsified, and Apple’s stock had plunged on worries Jobs might be vulnerable. What this shows is that a great portion of Apple’s value is dependent on Jobs staying at the company. As such, Jobs is probably the most valuable executive alive — arguably more indispensable to Apple than the Google guys are to Google, for example, or Gates to Microsoft, and Ellison to Oracle — all companies with perceived depth of talent extending beyond the founders. In other words, its time for Apple to engage in successor plans.

Google’s fixed Zeitgeist — Now we find out, through Google’s recent admission, that the most popular searches on 2006 really isn’t the one we were led to believe. The real list apparently contained “eBay,” a competitor, which Google conveniently chose to knock of the official list. It’s another example of Google’s tendency to avoid transparency. If you read Google’s explanation, it all makes sense enough — but we agree with other bloggers that Google’s hand-picking of words based on what Google thinks is relevant removes much of the exercise’s meaning.

The dot-bomb records of Brobeck opened for public viewing? — There’s quite a brouhaha over the project led by professor David Kirsch to open up the records of Silicon Valley law firm Brobeck. You’ll remember that Brobeck was at first fantastically successful, cashing in on the dot-com era IPOs, but then suffered a spectacular crash when the bubble burst. Now, former clients are being informed that if they take no action, their records will be turned over to the Library of Congress’s National Digital Infrastructure and Preservation Program, for perusal by academics and others. See details here. There’s outrage, given the files contain social security numbers and other private data. However, Kirsch seems to have shut everyone up for now with this comment at Techcrunch, where he says some individual information “may need to be scrubbed by archivists for sensitive information.” We’re wondering what clients Kleiner Perkins, Cisco, and Accel and the other Silicon Valley heavyweights will think of their bubble-era laundry being aired.

SlimDevices to release latest Squeezebox — The come-out-of-nowhere Mountain View start-up sells a device that lets you play your music anywhere in the house, and hooks up with all kinds of services, from Pandora to Rhapsody. Its latest one will sell for $2,000 device; the NYT has the scoop. This scrappy company is run by 20-somthing Sean Adams, and to our knowledge he has made do with a mere $330,000 from angels (though he may have raised more without us knowing).

ChaCha a new search engine, with guides — That’s right. This company is just like Google, only it pays its employees or contractors to help you refine your search. On the good side, this a really useful service, and we hope ChaCha will stay in business. But that is the mind-boggling part for us. Read the story in the Mercury News. Maybe we’re missing something, but if this service is really for free, how is the company going to make money? Yes, there may be search result advertising (including vidoes while you wait), but we don’t see how that will cover the costs. We tried it out, but got tired waiting for a response (ChaCha is supposed to average about a minute, but we gave up after five minutes waiting for answer we posed about how much venture money start-up Rojo had raised; it was listed on both VentureBeat and Gigaom, but ChaCha didn’t find it). And we were annoyed by the site, which made regular “swooshing” sounds, though don’t understand why (was it the ads?). Don’t want to be quick to criticize; we’re just raising these questions given the prominent coverage in media articles where the cost question isn’t really dealt with.

Band of Angels for India — The Band of Angels in Silicon Valley, a network of individuals who band together to invest in start-ups, has been fixture for years. They told us a few years ago they had no plans to go international. So now there is a Band of Angels in India, led by the same guy Alok Mittal, who also happens to run the new office in India for Silicon Valley venture firm Canaan Partners. See more at Gigaom.

Digg to respond to criticism about clique influence — Responding to criticism that a small group of influential “Diggers” are controlling what news gets to the site’s home page, Digg chief exec Kevin Rose says he’s found a way to counterbalance their influence. He said a new algorithm will “look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be [needed] to deem the story homepage-worthy.”

Has eBay become the investment bank for Web 2.0? — With Web calendar company Kiko being bought on eBay for $250,000 by another company Tucows, this is a question being posed lately about eBay being posed lately. Om first joked about eBay setting a new floor on investment banking fees about a few days ago. Now Techcrunch is talking about it as a serious way for Web 2.0 companies to be bought. There are more showing up. Indeed, why don’t companies place a permanent listing at eBay, disclosing the lowest price they’d agree to be sold for — even if they aren’t desperate for a sale yet? They can keep changing the offer price, depending on their own assessment of their promise. In Kiko’s case, of course, the company had run out of steam, and wanted to make whatever it could from a sale of its assets. And Tucows, which wanted a basic calendar company for its own use, made the move. Tucows probably wouldn’t have found out about Kiko without eBay. Conclusion: The risks associated with starting a Web company, already reduced because of the very low costs involved, have just gotten even lower. Maybe that’s why you see even more Web calendars still launching (the company hassome differentiating features such as voice-enabled entries, and new ways of synching.)

Woz’s book, and Steve Jobs’ change of heart — Valleyway runs with some news that it concedes might be a tad old; but we hadn’t seen it. It is about Woz’s book, and why the Apple co-founder couldn’t get his former colleague, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, to write a foreward. Perhaps no one saw news about the book until now because the latest, from the DailyNews, has a much more colorful quote from Wozniak:

“We wanted him to do a foreword, but he declined,” Wozniak tells Jacob Bernstein this week in WWDScoop, the new magazine from Women’s Wear Daily. “He felt the book sort of portrayed me as a good guy and him as an a-hole.”

Among other anti-Jobs anecdotes, Wozniak recalls in the book that when he invented a universal remote control and sent it to Jobs, he threw it against a wall, stuck it in a box, and mailed it back. “Steve had a fit about it,” Wozniak tells Bernstein. “He was under the impression that I’d left Apple in a very negative mode.”