Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile or HTC depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it's launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you'll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google's standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. It doesn't come as a total surprise though — last week there were reports of a Google job listing for "Phone Support Program Manager, Android/Nexus One" to be based out of its headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

We're big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song 'I've Got Mail and I've Got it Made,' which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it's about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!

Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn't have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it's not the same. And while they still haven't added comments, tonight they've temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies. While it doesn't appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they're going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it's a photo comment.

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They've now released last month's data as well. A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech. 36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we've heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That's a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.

With the East Coast and Midwest awaiting a monster snowstorm, popular weather forecasting site Accuweather, is rolling out a timely relaunch of its site. The site, which provides up-to-date local information on weather in the U.S., is launching a beta version of the site that includes a complete redesign and a few extra user-friendly features. The new version of the Accuweather is still in private beta but will be publicly launched to the public on February 15. On the content side, the general theme for the new version of the site is "weather for your life," with specialized and interactive weather forecasts for Weather and Health, Weather and Travel, Weather and Home and Garden, Weather and Outdoor Activity in your area. The health-related weather interest sections include Arthritis Pain Forecasts, Asthma Forecasts, Common Cold Forecasts, Flu Forecasts, Pollen Level Forecasts and more

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple's App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case. The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers' overall happiness with the program.

Are you a budding Web entrepreneur who would like some pointers or advice from seasoned company founders? MayField Fund and First Round Capital are sponsoring a raffle to give away mentoring sessions with the founders of Digg (Jay Adelson), Flickr (Caterina Fake), Mint (Aaron Patzer), Ning (Gina Bianchini), Slide (Max Levchin), and Zynga (Mark Pincus). The raffle will take place at a private event in Silicon Valley with space for 100 attendees on March 1. But you can win a ticket for the event by applying here. The event and raffle are free, but the 100 attendees in the running will be selected beforehand by partners at Mayfield and First Round.

Since the dawn of Facebook's Photos feature, users have been tasked with the not-so-terrible burden of having to manually click through every photo in an album. Sure, you can also hit the arrow key on your keyboard to jump to the next picture, but even that repetitive task could send you inching down the treacherous path toward carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, there's a way to view hundreds of photos without lifting a finger: a new Facebook Prototype lets you turn these photo albums into slideshows. You can activate the prototype here. The new feature was released as a Facebook Prototype some time last week, and it's about as basic as they come. After activating it, you'll find a 'Play' button nestled between the 'Previous' and 'Next' navigation buttons in the photo viewer. Clicking it will turn the album you're currently viewing into a slideshow, displaying a new photo every five seconds. That's it.

Google is planning to unveil a broad new social product on Tuesday that will integrate with at least two existing Google products. Some details emerged earlier today on the Wall Street Journal ("a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates"), but our understanding is that the product goes well beyond a Gmail integration. As I wrote last night, there is still a lot of room for improvement in online social services. Status updates, photo and video sharing, review and location based content are not only decentralized today, but are becoming overwhelmed with spam and other noise. The Google event begins at 10 am. Tune in to TechCrunch for live coverage.

Movie ratings site Flixster raised $12.5 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. The last time Flixster raised money was a $5 million Series B in April, 2008. The new round brings the company's total capital raised to $19.5 million. Flixster operates both a Web site and a companion iPhone app, which is the most popular movie app in the App Store. The iPhone app lets consumers find nearby movies, add their ratings, and buy tickets. In January, the company bought Rotten Tomatoes from News Corp for an undisclosed sum. The combined reach of the two movie review services is 30 million people, according to the companies.

Company meetings are a nearly universally hated thing. No matter what line of work you're in, most are simply a waste of time. And even when they're important and necessary, they're still likely inefficient. A new startup aims to show you just how wasteful they are. MEETorDIE is an online tool that asks you to put in information about your meeting, including what company you work for, what industry you're in, how big the company is, how long the meeting is, and who is attending. When you submit that information, you're taken to a page that shows how much money your company wasted with that meeting. Below that, you can see the aggregate statistics for how much money your company has wasted on meetings total.

We haven't heard much from PlayFirst since we covered the San Francisco-based casual gaming startup's last funding round back in December 2007, but that doesn't mean things aren't moving for the venture-backed company. Earlier this year, the startup inked a major deal with Big Fish Games and today it has announced that social game industry executive Mitali Pattnaik has joined PlayFirst as General Manager, Social Games.

There remains an ongoing desktop Twitter application war. Traditionally Tweetdeck and Seesmic have been at loggerheads for the lion share, although Tweetdeck has remained in the lead so far. Increasingly it appears that Seesmic is heading towards trying to be a much more mainstream application, for anyone on any platform, from celebs to your non-tech friends. But for power Twitter users, Tweetdeck seems to be go-to app so far. Of course, all that can change, but that seems to be the landscape at the moment. Just now Tweetdeck has released the latest version of its desktop Air application, this one is v0.33. It's available right now as a manual download here. Existing Tweedeck users will get an auto upgrade in the next few days. For uber-Tweetdeck users (like social media experts, as we know) Tweetdeck can get pretty long as they plug in every search term they can think of to avert that client disaster (Eurostar, we're looking at you). So there are a bunch of new features which extend the app quite a bit and greatly enhance its speed of access to the Twitter firehouse.

Almost two years ago The Filter, a startup backed by Peter Gabriel, launched to bring better music and movie recommendations to consumers. The site got lost in the abundance of more popular music and movie sites out there, so about a year ago CEO David Maher Roberts decided to shift gears and start licensing his recommendation engine to other businesses. It was the right move. Today, the Filter powers recommendations for sites and devices with a combined reach of about 20 million people, with two more large media deals in the final stages of converting from a trail to a full license which will bring its total reach up to 85 million. The startup's revenues went from $150,000 in 2008 to about $1 million in 2009. "All that money came from licensing," says Roberts. "I think we git $2,000 from Google for advertising." Since November, the company has been "borderline breakeven." And it just added to its board of directors former Google engineering VP Doug Merrill, who <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/01/another-

With the Super Bowl yesterday came the time-honored Super Bowl commercials, each costing $2.5 million for a 30-second spot.  Even Google got in on the game with its first ever spot receiving rave reviews (although the commercial wasn't new). But which commercials went beyond TV to score on the Web?  Reprise Media released a report that ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence on the web in terms of search and social media. According to Reprise's scorecard, Boost Mobile, Home Away, E*Trade and Google were the marketing standouts out of last night's commercials. Reprise decreed that Boost Mobile and Home Away, which were both first-time Super Bowl advertisers, had the best cross-channel promotion from the tube to the web. E*Trade and Google followed with compelling ad spots that encouraged users to look to the web for more information. Who fumbled?  The Pop Secret/Emerald Nuts, Prudential, Dodge Charger and all movie commercials had the least amount of cross-channel integration.

Social music player TuneWiki has raised an undisclosed amount of additional funding in a Series B round led by Motorola Ventures and joined by Intellect Capital Ventures, HillsVen Capital, Novel TMT and prior investor Benchmark Israel. TuneWiki says it will use the investment to expand its product offerings for mobile platforms and the Web. The company will continue to focus on the use of song lyrics in new ways that connect music fans with new products.

On the heels of the EU's approval of Oracle's $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, the tech giant has opened up the purse strings to acquire application management software provider AmberPoint. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of this year. AmberPoint's software helps organizations diagnose and resolve issues in application performance and business transactions, such as insurance claims processing or account provisioning where multiple applications need to work together.

Vitamin D Video has officially gone out of beta and is now available in 1.0. The basic, single camera version of the software is available now for free while a two camera version costs $49 and unlimited cameras costs $199. The software watches a web-based camera - including many popular models from Linksys and D-Link - and records motion as it it happens, even alerting you when humans step into the frame. I've been using the beta for months now with a Linksys WVC54GCA and I consider the software an early warning system for the home. Since I work up in the attic I can't always tell if I'm facing a friend or a foe at the front door so I rely on Vitamin D to ping whenever someone comes into the frame. Special motion sensing systems also pick up lights and other activity outside while the system can also email clips to a mailbox whenever an event occurs or ring a chime.

Loopt continues to tamp up its focus on location-based deals. The pioneer of the mobile social network is launching a new app called LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers tap into offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Today, Loopt is launching a partnership with Mobile Spinach to offer deals and coupons for local merchants via the Loopt App. TThe deals are part advertising part coupon and will only be featured in San Francisco for now. Coupon site Mobile Spinach will offer dozens of deals exclusively to Loopt users and through their own site per week. For example, Blowfish Sushi, a Sushi restaurant in San Francisco, offers any signature roll for free which typically costs $10-$15 per roll. Loopt users show their phone message at the restaurant to receive these discounts. Loopt says it will be rolling out the offers in LA and New York in the coming months.

It looks like some major consolidation is about to go down in the Central European Internet market, and in particular Poland. According to local newspaper reports, the largest Internet group in the region, Naspers/MIH Group, is conducting due diligence of assets belonging to DST (Digital Sky Technology)-owned holding Forticom, including the "Facebook-of-Poland" Nasza-Klasa.pl which has 23 million users. Naspers/MIH Group and DST already together own the largest Russian online portal Mail.ru.

A consortium of investors led by The Walt Disney Company is currently engaged in advanced talks to invest in Bus Online, China's leading in-bus digital media and advertising company, sources tell Reuters. The deal, which would provide Disney with a new platform to promote Mickey Mouse in China, is oddly said to involve Google, which is a minority investor in the consortium according to the news agency's sources.

Trackle, the personalized web and realtime feed tracker, is going pro with the launch of premium tracking services aimed at marketing and PR professionals looking to track mentions of clients across the web. Trackle.com’s web service lets users create personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, updated job listings, sports scores and more. On Trackle, marketing, PR and sales professionals can set up realtime tracking alerts for key words to track press coverage and mentions across Tweets, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and the web. The initial service will allow users to enable "Trackles" for a select number of keyword categories, including company, person, brand, SEC filings; website changes and LinkedIn updates. Trackle will email and SMS alerts for mentions and even provide users with graphs and charts detailing results. The service is available for $9.99 per month.

AMEE, the US/UK-based startup that aims to build the largest engine for computing greenhouse gas emissions, has secured a $5.5m series B financing lead by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside existing investors, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. AMEE wil use the funding to expand its geographic reach and platform. The prize AMEE is aiming for, known in the sector as "enterprise carbon management", is expected to reach $4 billion by 2017 because of government and consumer pressure to address climate change. AMEE's engine is now being used by companies offering carbon accounting or business intelligence software, as well as governments, multi-nationals and SMEs.

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn't know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn't imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately. For a good history of search, get John Battelle's book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It's a mess, but we don't complain much about it because we don't know there's a better way. Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I've got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I've got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.

img src='http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/cp_1265613401_3895v3-max-250x250-215x54.png'class="shot" alt="" />Wikia, a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company's revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn't yet reached true profitability. He won't disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions on their jobs page). Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 2.7 billion page views. The company attracts around 8 million U.S. visitors monthly, they say.

Back in July 2008, Tapulous released a music game for the iPhone called Tap Tap Revenge (TTR). The game proved to be a massive hit, growing to 1 million users within its first few weeks. Over the last year and a half, TTR and its sequels have become the most popular series on the App Store, with over 25 million installs. And tonight, Tapulous is ready to release its newest entirely new music-focused gaming series: Riddim Ribbon, featuring the Black Eyed Peas. Riddim Ribbon is a fusion between racing, popular songs, and to a limited extend, remixing music. After choosing a song, the game throws you into a hyper-colorful racetrack, where you piloting a futuristic spherical vehicle. The track is filled with globes (which are good) and obstacles (which are not), and there's a path showing you where you should be driving. To control your vehicle, you tilt your iPhone from side to side. Most of this is standard fare for racing games, but Riddim Ribbon comes with a twist: you actually can modify the music you're listening to during the race depending on how you navigate the course.

As predicted, Hell has indeed frozen over. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at something most people probably never expected to see: a Google Super Bowl ad. But the contents of the ad, and even the product it would be promoting, remained a mystery. Moments ago some 90 million Americans watched as Google showed off the search functionality that it's famous for, in an ad called Parisian Love. We've embedded the ad below. Yesterday, John Battelle correctly predicted that the ad would be running during the Super Bowl.

Yesterday, California's Chief Technology Officer, P.K. Agarwal, wrote that the government is using a crowdsourcing tool, IdeaScale, to get a consensus on the ideas to spur IT innovation around the California's IT systems. IdeaScale, which is a crowdsourcing tool produced by startup Survey Analytics, is gaining serious traction as a crowdsourcing tool for government agencies. Currently, 24 agencies in the U.S. Federal Government are using IdeaScale to power crowdsourcing initiatives. IdeaScale's technology allows citizens to submit ideas to a site and then vote on their favorite ideas via a Digg-like voting system. The ideas that have the most favorable votes bubble to the top. Agencies can also participate in the discussion by commenting on ideas and posting updates, effectively creating a community around this ideation.

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan.Previously, he wrote about the State of Online Video, 12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising, and Context is King: How Videos Are Found And Consumed Online.  In part 4 today, he examines where he thinks the sweet spot is for making money in onljne video. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo. In Search of Profits Ten years ago, web companies didn’t generate much revenue.   These days, web companies are some of the most profitable around.  Online video is where the Web was ten years ago: in investment mode as video companies that are generating high revenue are not necessarily the most profitable. Are those companies suffering low margins because they’re investing in the future or are they fundamentally lower-margin businesses?

When the mobile payment service Square launched in December, VeriFone rushed to get its own version on the market. A couple weeks ago, they accomplished that with the launch of PayWARE Mobile. Now they're looking to take out their competitor the good old fashioned way: out-spending them. VeriFone is already heavily advertising its PayWARE Mobile product with huge ads in New York City taxis. As you can see in the picture, VeriFone is paying for big screen real estate on the screens that are in the backseats of all cabs in the city now. The ad shows a large picture of the device (a piece of hardware that you attach to your iPhone) and promises users that not only will they be able to accept payments with the iPhone with it, but that they will "never miss a sale."