A buddy pinged me tonight with the video below. It’s of an iPhone called Puff! that basically allows you to blow into the iPhone microphone or push your finger up the screen in order to get a Japanese girl’s skirt to blow up into the air, revealing her underwear. I’m watching this video, and thinking of my headline for this story. Here’s what I had: Well, Here’s An App You’ll Never See In The App Store.

The only problem? This app is in the App Store. As in it it right now, live. In the U.S. too! What the hell, Apple?

Let me just get this straight: A hilarious satirical app made by the Someecards guys cannot get approved because it contains cards that, for example, mock Hitler. But an upskirt app is just fine? That is so ridiculous.

Now, to be clear, this Puff! app contains no nudity, but I think we all know what this type of app is implying, and who this type of app specifically appeals to (hint: some may be found in this app). This app is rated 17+ for “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity” but Someecards app was also submitted with the same rating, but just for satire (so basically, language), and it was rejected.

Apple is either extremely hypocritical, asleep at the wheel again (remember Baby Shaker?), or both.

Look, I’m all for all kinds of apps getting into the App Store, including porn apps as long as they’re correctly rated. What I’m not for is Apple’s totally uneven rules for what apps get in and what don’t. And today has brought two perfect examples of that.

I still think it’s time to tear down the App Store wall. I just wonder how long it will take Apple to realize that they have to because the approval situation is untenable and ridiculous? Maybe when they hit a million apps in the App Store? 2 million? Until then we’ll just have to deal with this BS, I guess.

[thanks Sean]

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Let’s say you have an idea for a startup. How do you begin the process of finding cofounders and employees, creating a corporation, handing investors, growing the company, etc.? There are lots of details about building a startyp that are usually a mystery to the newly initiated founder. Usually you have to learn this stuff on the job, making mistakes along the way.

But not anymore. Last night I saw a 45 minute presentation by Mint CEO Aaron Patzer at a startup competition event called Juice Pitcher on the Microsoft campus. The event, which is put on by TheFunded and Vator.tv, put a handful of new startups on stage to show their stuff and compete for a top prize. Between pitches, Patzer took the stage and told the story of Mint, in detail. His company just sold for $170 million to Intuit.

Patzer takes the audience (and now you) from the beginning of Mint, and gives some incredibly useful device. He talks about the early days of Mint, where he lived on $30,000/yr and hired engineers at just a little more salary by offering them significant equity. He also says that, as a rule of thumb, every engineer in a pre-revenue startup adds $500,000 in valuation. Every business guy lowers the valuation by $250,000, he half jokingly quipped. In its earliest days, Mint was burning $150,000/year, he says, for 2 founders and 1 engineer/contractor.

Patzer also spoke about financial modeling, keeping costs low throughout the life cycle of the company, and Mint’s revenue model. He also gives suggested goals and milestones for each successive funding round. One interesting fact – today Mint, which is free, generates $30/year/user from various offers and value added services.

There are lots of additional details, including, for example, various hidden costs in financings (mostly legal).

If you are a startup founder, you’ll want to bookmark this and refer back to it. It’s absolute gold.

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Developers love Engine Yard, the Red Hat for Ruby on Rails. And so do investors, who just plowed another $19 million into the startup, which hosts Ruby-on-Rails deployments.

New investors include DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures. Existing investors Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon also participated. The company had previously raised $15 million in July, 2008 from Amazon and NEA, and $3.5 million from Benchmark the previous January.

Ruby on Rails is a programming framework for Web apps that is fast and easy to deploy. Engine Yard offers a hosted environment for Rails apps that is stable and up to date.

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Earlier today, as Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt were holding forth before a dozen or so reporters in their New York City offices, a judge downtown was postponing a hearing on the Google Book settlement until November 9 to give Google and the Author’s Guild more time to change parts of the settlement. Because of opposition from the Department of Justice and others, the settlement is being amended.

But if you think that Google is about to cave in any major way, think again. Schmidt offered the following synopsis of the situation during the press conference: “We thought we were doing something appropriate. We were sued by a bunch of publishers, and now it has come before a judge. We don’t want to change it unless we need to.” (The “it” being the settlement).

Brin had already brought up the settlement at the very beginning of the meeting. It was obviously on his mind. He mentioned that the hearing was going on as he spoke. “Generally, that is something I am very proud of,” he said, “to make the world’s books accessible.”

Google has scanned million of books to make them searchable, and was subsequently sued by the Author’s Guild for violating copyrights. They settled. Now, the objections to the settlement center mainly around one part dealing with so-called “orphan works” (out-of-print books still under copyright, but whose owners are unknown). The settlement gives Google blanket protection against any future copyright lawsuits regarding any of these books.

Google’s competitors think that is unfair. “It doesn’t seem right that you should kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told a conference audience n June. The Justice Department also doesn’t like it and signaled it would oppose the settlement.

Which leaves us where we are today, with Google and the Author’s Guild renegotiating minor changes to try to satisfy the judge who needs to approve the settlement. Schmidt argued today that while the settlement is not perfect, it is worth trying to save: “The goal is to get all the books available and make sure the authors are compensated. The settlement was not a total solution, it was the best we could do.”

He also made the case that it will be good for consumers. “The scenario that is in front of us is probably the best outcome for someone who is looking for information that is not otherwise available,” he said.

Brin was equally defiant. His attitude seemed to be that Google has gone to great lengths to digitize millions of books, and if competitors don’t like that they should scan their own books. “The companies that are making objections about out of print books,” he said, “are doing nothing for out-of-print books, like Microsoft and Amazon. I guess they scanned 15 books.” They’ve actually scanned a little more than that, but the bigger point is that they don’t have any economic incentive to scan them. Nobody wants to buy these books (hence, they are out of print). But they are valuable in the aggregate to a search engine.

Schmidt noted that if they did not like the settlement, they should “make an alternative proposal that solves the problem.”

I asked how hard would it be to extend the terms of the settlement to other book digitizers so that everyone would benefit equally. “It would be legally impossible,” Brin stated. “You are looking at this as an either/or. [Our settlement] does not preclude other settlements, and will make legislation more likely. The companies complaining now, if they were engaged in the digitization process we were doing, digitizing 10 million books, there would be nothing stopping them from achieving the same thing.”

Does that sound like someone who is about to give in?

Photo credit: Flickr/Rob Milsom

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Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just can’t seem to stay out of the red light district, no matter how hard they try.

There’s no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for “pornography” queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the adult term.

Now, a new controversy has popped up around a Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content.

You can see the queries that were self-generated by Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn’t just R-rated run of the mill porn stuff. This is stuff that’s still illegal in some states. Particularly that top query.

Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they’ve taken down all of these ad units on all sites until they understand what happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site, which may be triggering the ad content.

Said Microsoft’s Senior Director Online Audience Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn’t too happy with the ad: “We are very cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it.”

My response – “well, at least it’s educational.”

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It seems pretty clear at this point that Apple is getting ready to release a new mouse, probably with some kind of multi-touch capabilities, that is probably attached to some new iMacs. No one is happier about that than me, as I hate the current Mighty Mouse. But it looks like Apple may not have a chance to create a device that lives up to that name this time around, as someone else has won the trademark for the name “Mighty Mouse.”

Man & Machine, a company which makes computer peripherals, says it has been granted the trademark on “Mighty Mouse” from the United States Patent and Trademark Office as of yesterday. Sure enough, it’s there on the USPTO site. For over 5 years, the company says that it has used the name for its line of mice that are “rugged, hygienic, waterproof.” The company has a press release for the trademark decision; clearly, they are jazzed about the win.

And they should be. Though they never mention Apple by name, they do say that “Others have used the name Mighty Mouse for their computer mice and have sought registration of that trademark, but now the United States government has spoken.”

Perhaps the U.S. government wasn’t a fan of Apple’s poorly executed mouse either. And now it looks like unless they want a trademark fight, or to pay Man & Machine a lot of money, the new mouse will get a new name. iMouse? Apple Mouse? Touch Mouse? Let the guessing begin.

It’s worth noting that “Mighty Mouse” was also the name of a cartoon series, and yes, parts of it are also trademarked, and Apple was using the name with CBS’ permission. But since the cartoon is not a computer peripheral, CBS didn’t have a claim to the name in that realm, apparently (though they tried).

[Thanks Clifton]

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A few weeks back, we got a press release from EA’s PR company. It was tucked within an attachment titled “Rock Band Verizon iPhone Fact Sheet_V3.docx”. As if seeing “iPhone” behind “Verizon” wasn’t strange enough, the rest of the press release made absolutely no reference to an iPhone release. The folks we talked to denied that an iPhone port existed, and we chalked it up as a really, really strange typo.

Looks like it was more of a Freudian slip.

With website URLs, one of the most common typos is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain. Huge sites where people generally type in the URL manually are usually pretty smart about it. For example, wwwgoogle.com points to Google, wwwyahoo.com points to Yahoo, and wwwmicrosoft.com points to Bing (though, interestingly, Microsoft does not own wwwbing.com, that’s a squatter). Someone pointed us to a great one of these today: wwwtwitter.com.

Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch.

No, we don’t own it, nor do we have any idea who does. The registration is set to private, but the redirect is being done through GoDaddy. It was registered in November 2007, and won’t be up for renewal until 2014. So, whoever the wily person is out there who did this, good looking out.

Here are some other incorrect www addresses:

• wwwapple.com is a Mac applications review site
• wwwtechcrunch.com is a squatter
• wwwmyspace.com is a squatter
• wwwfacebook.com appears to be broken
• wwwgmail.com appears to be broken
• wwwcnn.com appears to be broken
• wwwdigg.com is a squatter
• wwwning.com redirects to some site called Streetball.com
• wwwespn.com redirects to magazines.com and smartly features ESPN the Magazine

Update: As my colleague Robin Wauters points out, it’s also humorous that people own variations of twitter.com with more “t’s” up to twitttttter.com. Try them all! And yes, a squatter own twiter.com as well.

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For the last year and a half a startup called Quick Hit has been building a football simulator, looking to combine the impressive graphics gamers have become accustomed to with a casual experience for people who don’t have hours to dedicate in front of their video game consoles. And from the looks of things, they’ve managed to pull it off: I’ve spent the last few days playing around with the AIR-based game, and it sports a level of polish rarely seen in a free game. Quick Hit isn’t launching to the public just yet, but the first 250 TechCrunch readers to email community@quickhit.com will be invited to the private beta. The company expects to open to the public in the next week or two. Update: All the invites are gone, sorry folks.

To be clear, this isn’t a Madden-like video game where you’ll be furiously jamming on your keyboard as you try to get your players to do what you want (given the game’s graphics I suspect this may frustrate some Madden addicts). Instead, it’s a coaching sim: you pick a play from your playbook, your opponent picks theirs, and you watch the two teams duke it out on the field to see where your play calling got you. The game also shares many elements with fantasy football, featuring extensive stat tracking that effectively makes it a football RPG — your players gain experience points depending how they perform on the field, and you can boost their stats accordingly.

Quick Hit runs on Adobe AIR, but uses a browser interface for all the player management and stat tracking that goes on off the field. Getting started is fairly easy: you pick a team logo, name, and then from a few options that let you tweak your team’s gameplay style (for example, a run-heavy offense). Once you’ve finished this you’re thrown into the game’s lobby, where you can challenge other players to a match (you’ll have to download the AIR client the first time a match begins, but from then on it will launch automatically). The game’s graphics and UI are generally impressive, though I ran into a few slowdowns (I suspect these will be ironed out before the full release). To help keep matches balanced, Quick Hit rewards players for challenging gamers with a higher ranking than them, which discourages veterans from just picking on newbies all the time.

Quick Hit has a few plans to generate revenue: first, it occasionally shows advertising during games (Best Buy is already running a campaign). Quick Hit is also considering allowing brands to place themselves in the game — for example, an item that provided an energy boost to your team could be sponsored by Gatorade, or a stat-boosting uniform could be provided by Under Armour. Finally, the game will offer premium goods that will allow players to further customize and improve their teams (for example, you might be able to purchase extra special plays to suit your playing style).

All in all Quick Hit has built a polished product, but it has a few challenges to grapple with. For one, Electronic Arts has the exclusive rights to NFL licensing for official teams, stadiums, and players, which means other games have to use more generic logos and names. To help work around this obstacle, Quick Hit has signed on a number of high profile players and coaches, like Bill Cowher and Warren Moon, to help bring a more authentic feel to the game. It’s obviously not the ideal situation, but given that Quick Hit’s competitors have to deal with the same restrictions, it shouldn’t be a game breaker.

To date QuickHit has raised $13 million, including a $8 million Series B round last January.

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Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately.

Every time the suggestion came up that Google’s power is too pervasive, Schmidt knocked it down: “If we went into a room and were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed.”

He was, of course, speaking metaphorically (about the room, not the trust). “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus,” Schmidt assured everyone in the room (which was a bright and cheery conference room above Chelsea Market,not dimly lit or evil at all). Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pressed Schmidt on the fact that “you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools.” Google knows not only what you are searching for, but if you use Google Analytics, it knows about the traffic to your site, and if you use Google Checkout it knows about what you are selling. Isn’t there a closed loop here, he asked, where Google gives away free products, and then collects all the data which makes its search engine smarter?

Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in. “There is no closed loop,” he said, “there are competitors and we make it possible for you to get out.”

Brin elaborated on this notion, pointing out that the entire source code for its new Chrome operating system is open sourced. Schmidt picked up on that and argued that Google’s open nature will protect it from the evil room (which doesn’t exist anyway):

“Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.”

Google won’t be getting to 80% market share in desktop operating systems anytime soon. Even its Chrome browser seems to be barely making a dent, although Schmidt disputed that notion as well. When I asked him if Steve Ballmer was wrong to call the Chrome browser’s market share a “rounding error,” Schmidt snipped, “I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?”

(Photo credit: Flickr/Typicalgenius)

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