Google Street View may get a bad rap from some overzealous privacy watchdogs and conspiracy theorists, but it just helped police save a young girl who had been kidnapped over the weekend.

In the case, which involved a woman who allegedly kidnapped her granddaughter, Athol Police Officer Todd Neale managed to track down the missing girl by obtaining coordinates of her cell phone from the phone’s carrier. Neale contacted Deputy Fire Chief Thomas V. Lozier who worked with him in trying to figure out exactly where the missing girl was being held.

The two men found that the phone’s coordinates kept coming in within 300 feet of each other at an intersection in Virginia. Unfortunately they were located in Massachusetts, so they couldn’t just drive to the other side of town to take a look. So they turned to Google.

Using Google Street View, they virtually “looked around” the intersection, when they noticed a large building nearby where the pair might have been staying. They subsequently identified the building as a motel (again with Google), and then confirmed that the motel was nearby using Google’s satellite view. The pair notified the Virginia state police of their findings, who then found the 9-year old girl and her grandmother in the motel.

For the full story, check out this Telegram Article.

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Nearly a third of a million votes have been cast over the last couple of weeks, and a number of the categories are still very, very close. You can vote here until midnight California time tonight, then we’ll cut it off and tally the votes.

After the awards are given we’ll all head over to City Hall’s Rotunda for an awesome after party and lounge co-hosted with MySpace and Microsoft BizSpark. Enjoy celebrity DJ DJ ZTrip while sipping specialty cocktails and Cannonball wine. ZTrip did the music for Obama’s Election Night Celebration in LA on November 4 (download the mix here). This guy has opened for the Rolling Stones in front of 500,000 people.

For those few of you who won’t be cutting up the dance floor, Instant Action leads the game room, get your revenge with Tapulous and have fun with other traditional games of chance. PicApp, Animoto, Zivity, BuildASign and FutureWorks are sponsoring a photo gallery to make sure you properly memorialize the evening.

Thanks to Crunchies Award benefactors: Founders Fund, CRV, Mayfield, and BlueRun Ventures help make it all possible. Get tickets via Amiando or tune in on Friday via Ustream.

There are a handful of tickets still available. See you Friday.

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Gigya, the Israeli startup that helps other companies easily distribute their widgets, has released some of its latest figures on the recent holiday season.

Most notable: December 23rd set the new record for total number of widget installs in a single day, with 900,000 widgets installed across all of the service’s supported blogs and social networks. Gigya obviously doesn’t account for every widget on the web, but it does help distribute content from a wide array of partners including Electronic Arts, RockYou, MTV, and Sony BMG (you can see a full list of partners here).

Through its Wildfire service, Gigya allows content providers and widget developers to easily syndicate their content to a variety of places online, including many popular social networks, blog platforms, and customized homepages like Pageflakes. Users typically only need to enter their login credentials, and the widget will be automatically inserted into their profiles (as opposed to manually copy and pasting an embed code).

Gigya has also shared some early stats for ElfYourself, the viral dancing elves videos made by OfficeMax that saw an incredible amount of traffic over the last holiday season, with numbers that rivaled Facebook’s visitors (at least for one month out of the year). For this year ElfYourself partnered with JibJab to produce the online videos, and the stats are similarly impressive. During the last three weeks of December, the new ElfYourself widget was installed nearly one million times-an impressive feat given the fact that embeds weren’t even available for last year’s videos. If you’d like to see some of the TechCrunch team get elf’ed, check out this video (warning: it isn’t pretty).

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What’s weird about the redirect is that there’s a delay, so you’ll actually see the Corkd website for a second before it switches to the adult website. If the domain name would just be pointed to the Adult Friend Finder site, that wouldn’t happen. We’re trying to find out if there is malicious intent at play here, or that the site owners configured the redirect intentionally for whatever reason.

Update: the site now reads a message that they’ll be back shortly, so it was definitely a malicious act. We’re confirming this with the owners of the site right now.

We’ve had incoming tips before about Corkd going the way of the dinosaur, but apart from the fact that it’s been quite some time since the site received an update, we didn’t really see any reason for us to deadpool them, also considering the fact that the company never responded to our requests for information.

Update 2: Web celeb Gary Vaynerchuk’s WineLibrary actually acquired Corkd back in May 2007, we’ve contacted him to see if he can tell us more about what happened. This Twitter message of Gary Vee kind of says it all, though.

Update 3: see Gary Vaynerchuk’s video comment below.

Update 4:

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Self described reformed crack dealer/New York Times columnist David Carr continues the fine tradition of bad video creation by New York Times writers in a post in today’s Carpetbagger (The paper’s Oscars blog).

What is he saying? Why is he saying it? I don’t know. No one knows.

No more complaints about TechCrunch, people. This is what you get when old media tries new things.

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This post was written by guest contributor Mark Brooks, an analyst/consultant whose blog Online Personals Watch summarizes the daily internet dating industry news.

Earlier this week InterActive Corporation (IAC), which owns and operates popular paid dating sites Match.com and Chemistry.com, launched a completely free dating site called DownToEarth.com (you can check out an ad for the recently launched site here). The somewhat counterintuitive move is IAC/Match.com’s answer to Plentyoffish.com, a popular free dating site that was long run by one man out of his apartment (he now has an office and a small team).

DowntoEarth.com was started by Jacob Solotaroff who spent a year as the Director of Product Management and Member Integrity at Match. Now he runs the site out of Dallas, where Match is also based. Apparently IAC believes if someone is going to put Match out of business, it might as well be Match.

The most interesting feature on the new site is the RealRatings user ratings system for ranking the accuracy of people’s profiles against real life. Users who post inaccurate photographs and profiles of themselves are ratted out by other users who have been on a date with them. Users can grade the accuracy of profiles on a scale of 1 star to 5 stars once they’ve been on a face to face date. 1 star means “not even close” and 5 stars mean “true to life.” Could this be the end of white lies on dating profiles?

Here’s a look at how some of the free competition DowntoEarth will be facing off with in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada.

The top free dating sites in the USA are currently:

#1 Plentyoffish (#2 overall in the internet dating category in Dec ‘09, #2 in May ‘09)
#2 Adam4Adam (#5 overall in Dec, #6 in May)
#3 Date Hookup (#6 overall in Dec, #7 in May)
#4 OKCupid (#12 overall in Dec, #14 in May)
#5 Mingle2 (#13 overall in Dec, not in top 100 in May)
#6 MatchDoctor (#32 overall in Dec, #33 in May)
#7 WebDate (#33 overall in Dec, #22 in May)
#8 FriendsReunitedDating.co.uk (#41 in Dec, not in top 100 in May)
#9 Woome (#46 in Dec, #79 in May)
#10 Connecting Singles (#53 in Dec, #55 in May)

And in the UK the top free dating sites are:

#1 Plentyoffish (#1 overall in Dec, #1 in May)
#2 Person (#2 overall in Dec, #13 in May)
#3 FriendsReunitedDating.co.uk (#8 overall in Dec, #12 in May)
#4 Smooch (#9 overall in Dec, #15 in May)
#5 Freedating.co.uk (#14 overall in Dec, #16 in May)
#6 ProfilePic (#27 overall in Dec, #68 in May)
#7 Flirtomatic (#29 overall in Dec, #36 in May)
#8 OKCupid (#31 overall in Dec, #32 in May)
#9 Speeddate (#44 overall in Dec, #71 in May)
#10 Midsummers Eve (#53 overall in Dec, #43 in May)

And in Australia:

#1 Plentyoffish (#4 overall in Dec, #7 in May)
#2 Person (#7 overall in Dec, #6 in May)
#3 Matchfinder.com.au (#22 overall in Dec, #32 in May)
#4 Speeddate (#23 overall in Dec, #38 in May)
#5 OKCupid (#27 overall in Dec, #30 in May)

90% of the top free dating sites in the USA and UK moved up rankings from May to December 2008.

Data: May and December 2008, Hitwise Competitive Intelligence USA, UK and Australia rankings by market share of visits, which is the % of online traffic to the category.

And in Canada:

#1 Plentyoffish (#1 overall in Nov)
#2 Kijiji.ca Personals (#3 overall in Nov)
#3 Speeddate (#8 overall in Nov)

Data: November 2008, comScore Media Metrix Personals category for Canada.

Disclosure: Plentyoffish and Webdate are clients of Courtland Brooks, Mark Brooks consultancy.

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The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker has been updated accordingly.

Engine Yard, which essentially delivers a platform to build, manage and host Rails applications, raised raised a $15 million Series B round of funding from new investors New Enterprise Associates and Amazon last July, with investor Benchmark Capital also participating. The round brought its total amount of funding to $18.5 million.

Competitor Heroku also attracted substantial funding in 2008, but they have been spared from significant lay-off rounds so far, at least to our knowledge. Other alternatives to Engine Yard include Joyent and Rails Machine.

Unsurprisingly, Lance Walley added that the lay-offs are part of a ’slight course change’ that had been in the works for several months already, and that Engine Yard is in perfect health. Also noted is the fact that Walley is no longer the CEO of the company, and that they’ve appointed John Dillon to assume leadership of the company in order to meet new profability (and other) goals.

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Jobs are available in Toronto, New York, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, or Seattle.

(Here at TechCrunch, we’re looking for a Rails Developer.)

Some other jobs currently on CrunchBoard:

• Director of Product Management
  Patch Media - New York, NY

• Senior Ruby on Rails Programmer
  HealthLeap - New York, NY

• Web Designer/XHTML/CSS/Ninja
  Filemobile - Toronto, Canada

• Business Development Lead
  GoodGuide - San Francisco, CA
  

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

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The defamation suit, filed in Manhattan, seeks a court order compelling Google and its Blogger service to identify the anonymous blogger. Google declined to discuss any specifics, only responding to the claim by saying they sympathize with victims of cyberbullying but “take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order”, so we’ll leave you with a quote from Cohen instead:

“I’m tall, I’m blond, I’ve been modeling for many years, and people get jealous,” she said. “If I had to deal with everyone who is jealous, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.”

While some people are quick to dismiss that the model would have a case, and that she’s just looking for attention, I’m not so sure. It’s nearly impossible to identify bloggers who don’t reveal their real name without the help of the companies that maintain publishing platforms, and a line has to be drawn somewhere regarding what people can say anonymously just because they’re using the internet to say it.

The attacks on the blog are rather personal and vicious, and they’re targetting Cohen almost exclusively. As Ars Technica points out, the model will need to demonstrate defamation twice: once to show that she has a sufficient case that the identity of the blogger should be unmasked, and then again for suing the blogger directly.

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Under the terms of the proposed deal, the investment group would make a takeover bid for Yahoo at a relatively low premium of around 20% to its current price of around $13 per share, valuing the company at just over $20 billion.

A complicated financial structure would be put in place to finance the deal, but the bulk of the cash for the transaction would come from Microsoft as debt.

The commercial debt markets are largely closed for M&A transactions today, requiring a creative way to finance this deal. Microsoft would supply the bulk of the purchase price from their $23 billion cash hoard in return for a fixed return on the debt that is tied to Yahoo’s future cash flow. Yahoo has continued to create cash even during this crisis - that cash will be used to pay debt obligations to Microsoft.

Simultaneous to the transaction Yahoo’s search and search marketing business would be sold to Microsoft under terms similar to what Microsoft proposed in June 2008 (and nothing like the bogus reports from The Times in November).

Following the transaction the new executive team would take over the top ranks of Yahoo. A key goal of the new team would be to attempt to attract back much of the executive talent that has fled Yahoo in the last year.

This would leave Yahoo as an independent entity, albeit one closely tied to Microsoft both financially and through the search and search marketing products.

The deal, which is being characterized at this stage as a proposal to Microsoft, absolutely hinges on their involvement. It certainly brings everything the Redmond giant has asked for, namely a way to control Yahoo’s search properties without having to own the rest of the company.

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After being sued by Facebook in December for violating its terms of use, social-networking aggregator Power.com is now close to settling the dispute, we have been able to confirm. The final settlement terms are still being ironed out, but are being reviewed by both sides.

Power.com lets you sign into multiple social networks and manage them from one place, but it did not use Facebook’s API or Facebook Connect. As part of the settlement, Power will access this data via Facebook Connect. Power was scraping the data from Facebook and caching it, which it won’t be allowed to do with Facebook Connect.

Facebook is very particular about how it wants other Websites to access its user data. Facebook had similar problems with Google’s Friend Connect, although it simply banned Google from using its API rather than bring a lawsuit.

For Websites and services that want to tap into Facebook’s rich trove of user data (it now has 150 million active users worldwide), it has to do so by Facebook’s rules. But one of those rules, in particular, many partners are finding restrictive. They are not allowed to cache any data, so they cannot build their own user profiles or make their services smarter over time. There are good privacy reasons for not allowing other (possibly unscrupulous) sites to cache the data, but it also serves to limit innovation.

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So for the year, that’s six IPOs (down 93 percent) and 260 M&A deals (down 27 percent). The proceeds from those six IPOs brought in $470 million, down from $10.3 billion in 2007. That is the smallest amount of IPO dollars since 1979. The M&A activity was a little better, bringing in $13.9 billion (for those deals with disclosed values). But even that was down 51 percent.

The IPO window was completely closed in 2008, and will likely remain closed throughout most of 2009. That leaves M&A transactions as the only exit for startups. And even those might not rebound until the second half of 2009.

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The acquisition deal is structured as an asset purchase between UGO Entertainment, which itself was acquired by Hearst Corp back in July 2007 for a reported $100 million plus, and the Ziff Davis Games Group who owned the 1UP Network. Sadly, the acquisition also meant a number of lay-offs at 1UP, with the ‘1Up Yours,’ ‘1Up FM’ and ‘1Up Show’ podcasts being terminated.

In addition, Ziff-Davis has made official the closure of gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly. Its January issue will be its last after nearly 20 years of publication, so it’s going in the deadpool. The demise of print media continues.

(Very cool image by Kotaku)

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MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.

All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.

Now they’ve created a new music streaming product that breaks away from Rhapsody and its limitations. Like competitor ilike, which also uses Rhapsody, users can only stream 25 songs per month for free. That doesn’t compete well with free streaming services like MySpace Music, iMeem, Last.fm and others.

The new service, dubbed Mog 3.0 internally, is a fully free music streaming service that lets users play whatever songs they like on demand. The user interface is as good or better than LaLa, a service that we love despite the fact that streaming isn’t completely free. Founder David Hyman and VP Product T Jay Fowler gave me a demo of Mog 3.0 earlier today.

The service combines the ease of use of LaLa with free, which is enough to get our attention. But it also has a recommendation service that rivals Pandora when it comes to discovering new music.

The interface is genius. Users search or browse songs, artists or albums and then start listening to the music. More songs from that artist are suggested and added to the results as you play the songs. And if you move the slider to the right (see image to right), related music is added as well. That lets the user decide if they want a playlist-driven on demand music experience, or to change things up and add Pandora-style related music to the mix.

It doesn’t stop there. Users can also create playlists with the best tool on the market - it’s easier to create and share playlists than even Project Playlist offers, and users can associate a name, description and image with each playlist as well.

MOG plans to make other changes to the service as well, including adding streaming music to content pages, and creating user profiles that highlight the music you listen to and like. It brings in the best social aspects of Last.fm.

The product is compelling.

But it will quite possibly never launch.

MOG has label deals with Sony BMG and Universal locked up. They’ll provide streaming music rights for free in exchange for a revenue share. But Warner and EMI remain on the sidelines, and MOG says they won’t launch unless and untill they have all four major labels under agreement.

I, for one, really hope to see MOG 3.0 launch sometime soon. And if the last two labels don’t jump on board, MySpace should strongly consider buying MOG. MySpace has label deals locked up but their product continues to have unacceptable technical glitches. The music player is very slow to load and songs have an annoying tendency to skip during playback. Perhaps the MOG team can put that right for them.

More screen shots below - top image is the playlist tool, below that is a user profile page.

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But listings are spread across lots of sites - what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It’s also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.

That’s just what Otalo, which just launched, is doing. They are starting off with 200,000 listings. The company was founded by Michael Giles (the founder of Furl) and Baer Tierkel. The name Otalo comes from the Zen symbol enzo - “O” - with the Finnish word for house - “talo.”

The company will earn commissions from the referral of customers to the various vacation rental sites. By the way, if you always stay in hotels on trips, you should try renting a house sometimes. It’s much calmer and usually a lot cheaper. You can also get great deals at the last minute.

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This isn’t much of a surprise - we speculated on his future back in July when he announced (internally) the shuttering of four of his products (Xdrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile). That still left him with AOL Mail, MYAOL, the AOL client, Userplane and Truveo, among others. But each of those products seemed to be a better fit in a different organization.

CEO Randy Falco’s memo to AOLers:

Dear AOL colleague,

I’m writing to tell you that Kevin Conroy has accepted a position as President of Interactive Media at Univision. I want to thank Kevin for all he’s done on behalf of AOL during his time here, particularly over the past two years. I’m proud to have worked with Kevin and happy for him as he takes on this new role.

When I arrived here two years ago, I asked Kevin to take on one of the most important and difficult assignments – to completely revamp and revitalize AOL’s suite of products, while at the same time globalizing product development and expanding our reach across the Web. I knew Kevin had the drive and discipline needed to meet and exceed this challenge.

Under Kevin’s leadership, for example, AOL Mail made a dramatic turnaround, with a steady stream of upgrades and globalization (it’s available in 48 locales) that generated a 31% increase in page views last year. Our products are now more open to developers, more widely distributed through widgets and gadgets, and are at long last back on the Mac. The iPhone apps developed under Kevin’s leadership have been huge hits, generating millions of downloads. AOL now has a strong position in video and video search, an innovative partnership with CBS Radio, a strong lineup of toolbars, reinvigorated Winamp and SHOUTcast products, and the all-new AOL Desktop. At the same time, Kevin refined our product lineup so we could devote more resources to our key products.

Having done all this and much more, Kevin told me that he very much wanted to return to his media roots. If you don’t know, Kevin came to AOL eight years ago from BMG Entertainment, and his first assignment at AOL was to build AOL Music, which is now the leading music destination on the Web. At Univision, Kevin will be responsible for developing both online and mobile experiences for the nation’s fastest-growing audience. While we’re saying goodbye to Kevin, it’s my hope that we’ll continue to work with him in his new role.

We’ll be providing transition details about the Products organization soon. In the meantime, please join me in offering Kevin our very best wishes on his future endeavors.

Randy

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Today’s keynote presentation by Phil Schiller has been widely regarded as a relatively lackluster affair. That isn’t to say it went badly - I’m genuinely excited about some of the new software updates. But the Macworld keynote in years past has been home to some very major product announcements, including the Macbook Air, the MacBook Pro, and perhaps most notably, the first iPhone. Investors have learned to expect big things from Apple every January, and for at least the last four years their reactions to the keynote have weighed heavily on Apple’s stock price.

Except for this year. And that’s no accident.

A site called the Keynote Index Fund has tabulated just how big these stock swings have been over the years. In 2006, Apple launched some of its first Intel-based computers, and was rewarded with gains of 10.3% over the two days following the announcement. The next year, the launch of the iPhone and the Apple TV was met with an increase of a whopping 13.5% over the same time period.

But the stock has taken a major hit whenever the keynote didn’t live up to expectations. Last year, Apple released products including Time Capsule, Movie Rentals, AppleTV 2, and Macbook Air - an impressive lineup to be sure, but nothing that could live up to the iPhone release of the year before. The stock subsequently took a 10.7% loss over the next two days.

In the weeks leading up to Macworld 2009, it looked like this year’s show might be headed for a similar fate. Rumors of new products were few and far between, and it seemed like Apple simply didn’t have much to announce. And then Apple dropped the bomb: this would be the company’s last Macworld, and CEO Steve Jobs wasn’t going to be giving the keynote. This spawned countless distasteful rumors regarding Jobs’ health, but it also served to lower expectations. Leading analysts went on to report that “no significant new products [were] expected“. So when Phil didn’t whip out the third generation iPhone this morning, nobody was surprised. The stock dipped a bit, but little more than it would on a typical day.

So what was the damage? A loss of $1.56 (-1.65%). Nothing to cheer about, but looking at years past, it could have been much, much worse. Granted, the figures stated above were averaged over two days, so we won’t know until tomorrow just how big the swing was, but given today’s performance I won’t be surprised if any change is relatively modest.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever know if Steve Jobs pulled out from the show with the direct intention of lowering expectations. But can you picture him presenting a keynote whose major highlights were an 8-hour laptop battery and some software updates? I don’t think he could either.

Update: Apple closed down -2.01 (-2.16%) on the day following the keynote. Again, nothing to celebrate, but compared to past years it could have been worse.

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Pandora Radio, the personalized internet radio service that has remained among the most popular iPhone apps on the iTunes App Store since its inception in July (and that I’ve previously called the iPhone’s killer app), will be releasing its most significant update yet later today.

Dubbed Pandora 2.0, the application will now include artist biographies, streaming samples for songs you’ve bookmarked, and perhaps most notably, the ability to create a station using a single song (much as you would using the iTunes Genius features). Other features in the new release include a CoverFlow-like view for song history, the ability to share stations with friends using Email, and a song progress bar (which has long been annoyingly absent).

Pandora has been around for years, offering a very powerful music recommendation engine powered by The Music Genome, which employees professional musicians to describe each song using over 150 attribute (or “genes”). Its iPhone app closed out 2008 ranked as iTunes’ top free application overall, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

Update: It looks like you can download the application now here. The application page still shows the older version, but you’ll download the 2.0 version of the app.

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In fact, the whole Netbook market may be making them nervous. Despite the fact that they power most of these devices with their new Atom chip that handles some PC chores well and uses a lot less power (so batteries are smaller and last longer). Intel sees Netbooks as devices for people who can’t afford normal laptops, or as second devices. But it’s clear that a lot of people are buying them instead of normal dual core machines, despite their very serious limitations.

That means that for the most part, every Netbook sold is one less Dual Core that Intel can sell at a higher price and higher margin. Which explains exactly why the company has been publicly criticizing the performance of the machines. “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out,” said Intel VP Stu Pann at an event last year.

Intel also wants to keep Netbooks at 10 inches or less. Some PC companies we’ve spoken with say that Intel doesn’t want Atom chips in devices bigger than 10 inches, and puts incredible pressure on them to keep Netbooks at 10 inches or less. Dell’s Inspiron uses an Atom chip anyway, but Samsung is using Via’s competitive (and less expensive) chip, the Nano.

We asked Intel if they forbid manufacturers to build Netbooks with larger than 10 inch screens, which is what those manufacturers are telling us (Dell notwithstanding). Their answer: “Intel defines a netbook as a 10″ or smaller screen size. We recommend that OEMs and netbook manufacturers use that guideline as well in order to get the best user experience.”

That’s a nice statement but it’s complete rubbish. There is no performance loss with a 12 inch screen v. a smaller screen (other than power usage). A 12 inch Netbook is just as fast or as slow as a 10 inch one. The only difference is that the user is even less likely to buy a low end laptop with a dual core.

Netbooks are clearly here to stay, and the new models with larger screens and larger keyboards solve two of the three problems I have with them (the last issue is Vista and XP, which runs poorly on these devices, but people are fixing that problem, too).

We’ll soon see 13 inch and larger Netbooks, despite the pressure Intel is putting on manufacturers to keep them at 10 inches. Intel may not agree to have their chips in these devices, but Via, with their excellent Nano competitor, seems more than willing to fill the void.

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