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Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service , and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades. First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events — and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I’ve ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare’s list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there. This new app will be crucial for the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which starts tomorrow. If you’ve been reading TechCrunch over the past week, you’ve undoubtedly seen that just about every location-based service has an app they’re unveiling. And another service based around planning events, Plancast , just launched their app this evening . But Hot Potato offers the best of both worlds as it allows you to both plan future events, and interact with ones currently taking place. The new app makes it very easy to chat about the event, and upload photos and videos. And they’ve cleaned up the stream of information around these events. There is now a filter to show everyone commenting, or just your friends. There are also now number indicators to show unread items. And the check-in process has been simplified thanks to big green buttons that make it obvious. Also new for SXSW is Twitter integration. On a case-by-case basis, Hot Potato will be pulling in tweets about certain events at SXSW, using a filter to make sure only relevant ones show up. You’ll be able to do things such as filter those tweets to show only those by people you actually follow, which will make them potentially much more meaningful to you. You can also reply to tweets thanks to integration of Twitter’s API. And you can share tweets from within the app that will show up as retweets on Twitter. Another new features is Calendars — something which each Hot Potato user now has. Obviously, you can add the events you wish to be a part of to your calendar, but people you are friends with on the service can also add you to other events as well. The app also now features Push Notifications now (on top of revamped email notifications). On top of the new app, Hot Potato has rolled out a completely revamped website with just about all of the same functionality of the new app (as well as the new look and feel). And at the highest level, Hot Potato finally has its own social graph, which can pull in friends from the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc. And here’s something that should really help Hot Potato this week: each time someone checks-in to a SXSW event with Foursquare, that service will recommend they also join the event on Hot Potato. Clicking on the accompanying link provided in the Foursquare app with open the Hot Potato app and let them join the event with a click (if they have an account). As you might expect, you can also check-in to a venue on Foursquare within Hot Potato. With Foursquare likely to be one of the key apps used by conference goers, this cross promotion is simply huge. On top of all of this, the service now has its own full API, so others can use and interact with their data. Simply put, all these updates are full of win, and make a good app even better. And remarkably, they’ve managed to cram in all these new features while at the same time simplifying the overall experience. Fine the new iPhone app here in the App Store . It’s a free download. CrunchBase Information Hot Potato iPhone Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase

Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service , and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades. First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events — and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I’ve ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare’s list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there. This new app will be crucial for the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which starts tomorrow. If you’ve been reading TechCrunch over the past week, you’ve undoubtedly seen that just about every location-based service has an app they’re unveiling. And another service based around planning events, Plancast , just launched their app this evening . But Hot Potato offers the best of both worlds as it allows you to both plan future events, and interact with ones currently taking place. The new app makes it very easy to chat about the event, and upload photos and videos. And they’ve cleaned up the stream of information around these events. There is now a filter to show everyone commenting, or just your friends. There are also now number indicators to show unread items. And the check-in process has been simplified thanks to big green buttons that make it obvious. Also new for SXSW is Twitter integration. On a case-by-case basis, Hot Potato will be pulling in tweets about certain events at SXSW, using a filter to make sure only relevant ones show up. You’ll be able to do things such as filter those tweets to show only those by people you actually follow, which will make them potentially much more meaningful to you. You can also reply to tweets thanks to integration of Twitter’s API. And you can share tweets from within the app that will show up as retweets on Twitter. Another new features is Calendars — something which each Hot Potato user now has. Obviously, you can add the events you wish to be a part of to your calendar, but people you are friends with on the service can also add you to other events as well. The app also now features Push Notifications now (on top of revamped email notifications). On top of the new app, Hot Potato has rolled out a completely revamped website with just about all of the same functionality of the new app (as well as the new look and feel). And at the highest level, Hot Potato finally has its own social graph, which can pull in friends from the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc. And here’s something that should really help Hot Potato this week: each time someone checks-in to a SXSW event with Foursquare, that service will recommend they also join the event on Hot Potato. Clicking on the accompanying link provided in the Foursquare app with open the Hot Potato app and let them join the event with a click (if they have an account). As you might expect, you can also check-in to a venue on Foursquare within Hot Potato. With Foursquare likely to be one of the key apps used by conference goers, this cross promotion is simply huge. On top of all of this, the service now has its own full API, so others can use and interact with their data. Simply put, all these updates are full of win, and make a good app even better. And remarkably, they’ve managed to cram in all these new features while at the same time simplifying the overall experience. Fine the new iPhone app here in the App Store . It’s a free download. CrunchBase Information Hot Potato iPhone Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase

Every year year the World Economic Forum names its Young Global Leaders, a list of up-and-comers from the worlds of business, politics, culture, and non-profits. Last year’s list included YouTube founder Chad Hurley,, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and Skype CEO Josh Silverman. Today, the World Econmic Forum named its 2010 Young Global Leaders. There are 197 people on the list overall, including celebrities like musician Wyclef Jean and fashion designer Stella McCartney. Some of the startup CEOs and tech execs on this year’s least include: Evan Williams—CEO and co-founder of Twitter Marissa Mayer—VP, Search Product and User Experience, Google Steven Chen—Co-founder, YouTube Peter Corsell—CEO, GridPoint Calvin Chin—CEO, Qifang Heather Fleming—CEO, Catapult Design David Rosenberg—CEO, Hycrete CrunchBase Information Evan Williams Marissa Mayer Steve Chen Information provided by CrunchBase

Ensemble comedies are awesome. Especially when they boast a cast like the one coming together for ” Bad Teacher .” The comedy comes from “Walk Hard” director Jake Kasdan working off of a script from the powerhouse “Office” (and “Ghostbusters III”) writing duo of Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. We also know that Cameron Diaz , Jason Segel and Lucy Punch, star of CBS’ “The Class,” will headline. Today, Sony revealed that a few more have joined the cast. Justin Timberlake , who will also star in Facebook biopic ” The Social Network ,” is the big get; he’ll star alongside Diaz, Segel and Punch. Also joining the cast are “Saturday Night Live” alum Molly Shannon and “Modern Family” star Eric Stonestreet. We don’t know a whole lot about the story just yet. Diaz leads the cast as the titular lousy junior high teacher, a crass woman who has just been dumped by a man she’d come to depend on… financially. Now free to pursue other romantic interests, she sets her sights on a fellow teacher, which pits her against another teacher, a more popular one. There’s no word on Shannon’s or Stonestreet’s role, but Timberlake will play a substitute who stands to one day inherit his family’s watch fortune. Diaz and Timberlake should make for an interesting on-screen pairing, since the two used to be romantically involved in real life. One wonders if Kasdan and company will play with that history in the film, and how Timberlake’s character will factor into the love triangle that will presumably involve Diaz, Segel and Punch. If Diaz’s character is in fact a gold-digger, maybe she’s fated to end up with Timberlake’s sub anyway. One thing is certain: we have plenty of time to wonder. At last report, “Bad Teacher” was targeted for a 2012 release. Do you like this casting news? Do you hope to see some reference made to Timberlake’s and Diaz’s shared history?

HootSuite, the Twitter clients that dubs itself as a social media dashboard for professionals, is launching an Android app, a new version of its iPhone app with Facebook integration and is integrating targeted ads in both apps via recently launched Twitter ad network, 140 Proof. HootSuite’s features are targeted towards helping marketing professionals keep track of the Twitter conversations happening on the web. The startup offers a free and paid version of its web app, and mobile clients. The Android app features much of the same functionality as the iPhone app, including the ability to manage multiple Twitter account, create streams for hashtags and searches, schedule messages for the future, add followers to lists and accounts, share photos and shorten URLs. The paid versions allow for unlimited Twitter accounts plus on-board, click-through statistics tracking. The updated paid version of the iPhone App will include Facebook integration and landscape view. And in an effort to boost revenue, HootSuite is partnering with 140 Proof to serve ads on all versions of its mobile offerings. Ads are served within users’ Twitter streams on and are clearly marked as ads, but act as Tweets that can be retweeted. HootSuite is taking the advertising risk on 140 Proof because the startup promises highly targeted advertising. Twitter clients pass 140 Proof a user ID list (with no names) and the public information contained in a Twitter users profile, and on the advertiser side, advertisers bid on ads to be directed toward users based on keywords in tweets, followers, as well as device, location and platform. 140 Proof’s algorithms calculates Twitterer’s “persona” based on public tweets and who they follow and serves ads to users based on this data. The deal with HootSuite is a big coup for 140 Proof, which just launched its network a few weeks ago. OneRiot is doing something similar with its realtime ad network RiotWise, and is seeing promising results during its private beta. And we are anxiously awaiting Twitter’s new advertising model which may or may not be revealed in the near future. CrunchBase Information HootSuite 140 Proof Information provided by CrunchBase

Anyone who’s been to SXSW in the past few years, ever since the iPhone’s release, knows that the AT&T network absolutely explodes during the festival. Texts, if they ever make it through, take hours; calls are dropped at an alarming rate, even by AT&T standards; and Internet access is essentially impossible. It’s hard for AT&T to keep up because Austin, any other week of the year, isn’t absolutely flooded with iPhone users mucking about, asking where the Facebook party is, or if they’re on the list for the Gawker party. (I’m on the list, but I’m not going this year so it doesn’t matter.) The point is, AT&T has its hands full that week, so let’s give them an A for effort for trying to prevent another iPhone meltdown this year . SXSW starts on March 12, and runs through March 21. It’s a couple of days worth of tech, music, movies, and open bars. It’s sort of an exaggeration, but every single attendee rocks the iPhone. It brings AT&T’s network, already sorta meh, to it knees. This year, though, AT&T has prepared itself for the huge influx of users. AT&T has installed a distributed antenna system at the Austin Convention Center. In a perfect world, it adds the equivalent of eight cell towers to the covered area. AT&T has also three temporary cell sites for good measure. These things are typically installed during big, but temporary events. Think Super Bowl or, well, large conventions. The company also says it has “added fiber-optic connections to more than quadruple the backhaul capacity of each of the eight cell sites that serve the event area, and temporary sites will also be served by extensive backhaul.” Whatever that means! Fingers crossed, every SXSW attendee will be able to FourSquare till their battery dies. That’s all you can ask for. Flickr

Since Facebook started on a college campus, it makes sense that they celebrate kegs. But did you know they actually have a Facebook application dedicated to the keg in their office? And they like to have fun with it. While Keg Presence isn’t an official Facebook app, it was created and is maintained by Facebook employees. So what does it do? The app is a steady stream of information about what’s going on with the Facebook keg. For example, Keg Presence sends out notices to let users (other Facebook employees) know what type of beer is in the keg. And when the keg is empty, it posts pictures of BevMo, where Facebook employees apparently go to refill it. Anyway, the application isn’t new, it has been around since sometime last year, but a humorous update from Keg Presence was recently brought to our attention. Announcing the “launch” of Keg Presence 2.0, one Facebook employee jokingly named it “Facebook Buzz”: At Facebook we move fast and have already launched Keg Presence 2.0 which we have named Facebook Buzz. 80-some Facebook employees gave the update a thumbs up “like.” This is of course in reference to Google Buzz, the recently launched social stream feature that now resides inside of Gmail. Following its launch, much was made of Buzz as a potential “_____ killer,” including, naturally, Facebook. The social network doesn’t seem too worried though if their response is a keg application. Update : As former Facebooker Ryan Merket notes in the comments: You forgot one key part of Keg Presence. Employees swipe their RFID badge when they get there, which snaps a photo of them pouring their beer and updates their Facebook status. That’s just awesome. Viva la Facebook Buzz. CrunchBase Information Facebook Google Buzz Information provided by CrunchBase

Filed under: OS , Odds and ends , Internet , Leopard Research released today indicates that in North America, Apple’s Mac OS X is gaining traction, while the Windows share of the OS market is shrinking ever so slightly. That’s the report from Quantcast , a company that measures and analyzes web traffic. They say that the market share for Mac OS X is up 7% from December to January. Microsoft held steady for the last 3 months of 2009 with the release of Windows 7, but started a slow decline again in January. According to Quantcast, Apple has a 10.9% North American share as of January, while Windows has 86.8%. An interesting note is that the largest group of users is on Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, while Windows XP dominates on the Microsoft side. Apple’s relative share in North America is up 29.4 % in a year, while Windows share is down 3.8%. These figures measure web consumption, so if you’re not web connected your OS choice doesn’t count. Quantcast measures ad supported sites, so huge traffic sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others don’t supply statistics. TUAW Quantcast: Apple share of OS growing while Microsoft shrinks slightly originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

Efficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly. It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and the “ready, fire, aim” game plan of Facebook and the other young guns is eating their lunch. Even the massive Google is still trying to shake things up with new and controversial products. Yahoo’s strategy seems more like “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…” Yesterday Jordan Rohan at Thomas Weisel Partners described Yahoo in his first analyst report on the company. He thinks this is the right management team to bring more efficiency to Yahoo. But he spends most of his time talking about the negatives, and there’s no excitement around new products or ideas: For the record, we happen to believe the current management team is the right one at this stage in Yahoo!’s corporate evolution. The team is bringing efficiency to a massively inefficient company. Yahoo! is weighed down today by dozens of code bases, thousands of revenue-producing properties, at least three sales force factions (display, search, ad network), and a few thousand “extra” employees needed to run the media company today due to its complicated legacy assets and far-flung acquisitions. On the upside, he notes that a cyclical upswing in advertising is likely to help Yahoo. Here are a few of the negatives: “Morale may have rebounded a bit from the trough, but our conversations reveal that morale has a long way to go.” “Our recent discussion with Yahoo! management focused more on costs and efficiency than growth.” “User behavior is shifting strongly to social and mobile media and away from traditional portals.” “Efforts to become more meaningful in social media have been unsuccessful” “U.S. assets make up only about onethird of Yahoo!’s $21 billion value today” “Yahoo!’s stock compensation expense is approximately equal to 25% of its annual EBITDA, compared with 11% for GOOG and 13% for EBAY” More worrying are the metrics comparisons to Facebook. Rohan notes that total minutes spent by U.S. visitors to Facebook are set to surpass Yahoo. And the worldwide numbers are even worse. Facebook now has 160 million daily visitors and 227 billion monthly page views worldwide (Comscore), compared to 160 million and just 94 billion for Yahoo. Yahoo still has tons of daily visitors, but they are spending 12% less time on the site in aggregate compared to a year ago. In the same period Facebook has grown total page views by 217%. Yahoo will continue to shrink as sites are sold off and shuttered, and CEO Carol Bartz works on those efficiency gains. But this is no longer even close to an exciting company that thrives on chaotic creativity. Yahoo’s foundation is rotten. They have no plan to get back into the game. Or if they do have a plan, no one knows about it. Sadly, the first site many of us ever visited on the Internet is turning into little more than a business school study in financial engineering. It deserved a better fate. CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase

Yesterday, I wrote that location was going to be this year’s Twitter at SXSW . Today, my inbox exploded. It seems that just about every company, advertiser, and even plenty of users associated with the location space emailed me with pitches, ideas, thoughts, etc. To say that space is red-hot right now, is putting it mildly. One of the companies that reached out to me was Brightkite , one of the earliest hot location players. CMO and co-founder Rob Lawson admits that the network has been “pretty quiet for a while,” but hints at some exciting stuff coming up for March (yes, around the time of SXSW). But he also wanted to share some things they’re working on right now, and a few interesting bits of data. Notably, Brightkite has over 2 million active users currently around the world. While that might seem small compared to the bigger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that’s actually four times the size of the newer rival Foursquare, that is getting much of the hype these days. Another interesting tidbit: Brightkite has had localized promotions in place for some time now, and they’re seeing strong usage. What users of Foursquare may know as check-in or mayor special, Brightkite calls Local Promotions. And they have a page on the site where local businesses can sign up for free. On that page, they note: We would love to help your bar, cafe, coffee shop, or business reach out to the local community through local promotions. We’ll let nearby Brightkite folk know your business gives them preferential treatment, and that they should stop in for a visit. Fill out the form below to get started. Brightkite says these promotions are seeing a lot of interest from all types of brands. And usage is strong with over 100 brands including big ones like Gap, Ben & Jerry’s and Time Warner Cable, seeing over two percent response rates when these notifications are inserted into users stream. And the best ones are seeing five to ten percent. When compared to more traditional ads, those numbers are very solid. Like Foursquare check-in and mayor specials, the Brightkite deals offer things like free (or heavily discounted) drinks and meals, but also extend to things like discounted hotel rooms, car rentals, and even dry cleaning. So is Brightkite making any money off of these? Yes. While many of the smaller local businesses use the service for free or close to free (to both prove the model and drive growth), Lawson notes that some of the big national brands are spending some big time money to advertise locally. These campaigns range from $10,000 to $200,000, Lawson says. Something else that interests me about Brightkite is their unique approach to social relationships. When it started, Brightkite had a symmetrical model, much like Facebook and Foursquare, which requires users to accept each other as friends. But late last year, the company switched the model to be an asymmetrical one, like Twitter, where one party can follow another without permission. This may seem like a horrible idea for a location-based service given the privacy implications, but Brightkite’s is a bit different of an asymmetrical model. “ Our model is asymmetrical (like Twitter), but reversed. With Twitter, you decide who to follow but anyone can see your content.  With Brightkite, you decide who to share your content with, but you can only see others if they decide to share with you ,” Lawson notes. He continues, “ We are convinced this is the right model for location based services – people want to be in control of who knows where they are. We turned away from the handshake model (Facebook, Foursquare) because we found users didn’t like the social pressure of having to accept a friend request. Just because you are happy to share your location with me, doesn’t mean I want to share mine with you, even though we want to maintain a relationship. “ As someone who has dealt with this many times before , I see his point. Lawson says that generally Brightkite users have been receptive to the changes, but says that some older users liked some of the more advanced features of the old model better — and Brightkite is working to get some best-of-both-worlds options for them. Brightkite merged with another location-based network, Limbo , last year and raised some new funding. They face a battle in warding off the fast-charging hot location networks like Foursquare and Gowalla (not to mention Yelp and the new Google Buzz ), but all of them appear to be benefiting from brand interest in the local advertising space. CrunchBase Information Brightkite Information provided by CrunchBase