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Google, It Wasn’t Broke
 Bucket tests and experimental products are one thing. But to mess with the real Google search is serious stuff. Why did they do it?
Google's overall search share has grown substantially this year (and all other years since it went live). Their share of search advertising dollars is likely even higher.
The changes Google made to search today certainly make it more interactive and social. I can now write comments on search results, and read comments from everyone about TechCrunch (or anything else - see the awesomely useful TechCrunch comments in the image below) and vote them up or down. I can move search results around on the page - up, down, or off the page entirely. I can also add other URLs into search results.
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Yieldex Takes Top Prize In Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge
When we announced the 7 finalists of Amazon Web Services' Startup Challenge two weeks ago, we dubbed Yieldex an "online ad optimization engine for Web publishers". It's time to take a closer look at what that means, because the company has just been awarded the top prize in the contest, bringing home $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in services credits plus an investment offer from Amazon.com.
Yieldex has a solution for managing ad inventory, enabling Web publishers to allocate advertising campaigns more efficiently by forecasting overlapping inventory and predicting how ads are going to deliver. All in all, it seems like a nice solution to hmm ... yield more revenue out of premium ad inventory, but I'm left wondering if ensuring optimal ad campaigns isn't something that's baked into most ad serving solutions already, or at least should be? I mean, it's one of the core reasons for using an ad serving system, right?
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Orb for iPhone Launched: Stream TV, Video, Music from Your PC
Orb, a $9.99 iPhone application that should be familiar to home networking buffs, is available now and will stream music from your home computer, photos, and live television from a TV tuner card - all over the Internet. It can even stream input from a webcam to your phone.
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BringIt Invites Your Gamer Friends to, in Colloquial Terms, “Bring It”
Even before "The Wizard" enchanted and inspired the gaming generation, gamers have sought that final prize: making a living playing video games. Unfortunately, dreams of professional-gamerism have been shown to be as elusive as dreams of being a professional gambler. Luckily, startup BringIt is attempting to make both those dreams a little more attainable. BringIt made the connection between the huge online gambling market and the exploding online gaming community, and has created a site where gamers can challenge one another with cash on the barrelhead.
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iPhone Update 2.2 Now Available: Google Street View, Walking Directions, Rate-on-Delete
The calendar now reads November 21st and, just as expected, iPhone firmware 2.2 has been released to the masses. Seeing as a pretty good number of developers have had their hands on test versions of 2.2 for sometime now, and as NDAs generally turn to pudding after a few hundred people are in on the secret, we've had a pretty good idea of what this release would bring to the table for a while.
For the sake of those who may have missed a day or two, though, we'll recap: Safari's address bar/search has been tweaked a bit, apps now request a rating upon deletion, over-the-air podcast downloads (which, oddly, works over 3G, though podcasts downloaded over radio can't be over a certain size, determined by the carrier), various video and audio quality tweaks, and assorted bug fixes throughout. Oh, and Google Maps has been upgraded to include Street View and directions for public transit and walking - if you have an iPhone rather than an iPod Touch, that is.
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New Beta Version Of m.yahoo.com In The Works - We’ve Got Screenshots
Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn't a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo's Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the beta announced to the public back in January.
Where as the public beta can be found at beta.m.yahoo.com, our tipster dug up the new version by instead navigating to beta2.m.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, it seems we weren't supposed to see this just yet; within a half-hour of us reaching out to Yahoo! for comment, the page had become password protected - but not before we snagged a couple screenshots.
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Stalk That Twitterer
 A new site called TweetStalk is in private beta. It allows you to "follow" Twitter users without them knowing you are doing it (Twitter tells you when someone new has subscribed to your data). It's all through a Firefox Add-On and appears to modify the Twitter page itself via Greasemonkey or otherwise. You are then able to follow the person without them knowing, and the service provides a RSS feed as well.
This isn't as bad as it sounds. Twitter pages are public by default so all the content is there for everyone to see anyway. Twitter should probably just implement a private follow feature of some sort to allow this anyway. But until they do, you've got TweetStalk.
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