Whether you love TechCrunch or hate it, you must admit that the TechCrunch50 conference does a decent job of generating exposure for startups. I had never heard of this year's winner, RedBeacon, before TechCrunch50, and I have no doubt that the publicity the company gets from the event will be at least as valuable as the $50,000 prize. RedBeacon is a local business finder that TechCrunch describes as comparable to OpenTable, but for booking services instead of making dinner reservations. You can enter the type of service you want, and it will give you a list of recommendations to browse, with reviews, hours and even how each business is rated on Yelp.

Like last year's winner, Yammer (a Twitter for businesses), RedBeacon is best described by comparing it to an existing product. At least this year's finalists, while derivative, seem like they fill important gaps in our online lives. Threadsy aggregates incoming messages from all your social networks. AnyClip attempts to beat YouTube and Hulu at showing you the specific movie scene you're looking for (although I have no idea how they're going to get that past Hollywood lawyers). Although it's not the most glamorous of the bunch, my vote would go to CitySourced, a mobile app for photographing and reporting issues like potholes to your city government. Not only does it feel like the freshest concept out of the final four, it also might do some civic good.

There's been plenty of vitriolic heated discussion in Tech circles recently over Twitter's recent security breaches and the subsequent publication of certain documents. Whilst we're not all that interested in the documents, we're always game here at Download Squad for a little light-hearted time-wasting over the latest blogosphere outrage.

That's where The EV Files comes in. A quick and easy Flash game from Popjam, your mission is to aim iPhones at TechCrunch's Mike Arrington in a bid to stop him publishing Twitter's documents. And that's it. Sure, there's not much to this one - and we'll be honest, it's only really one for those who're in the know about the whole Twitter breach hullaballoo - but who knows: maybe it'll offer some light relief to the folks at Twitter HQ over the weekend...

[Ironically via Mike Arrington on Twitter]

Some internal Twitter documents were recently compromised by a hacker who offered them to various tech websites for publication. Other than the illicit way they were obtained - via some weak passwords set by Twitter employees, Biz Stone suggests in a blog post - the documents are pretty boring. TechCrunch, as you might expect if you're at all familiar with that blog, has gone ahead and published some of them anyway, because Twitter's financial projections and the details of the Twitter TV show pitch have "so much news value."

Most of the arguments against revealing this information have been made on ethical grounds, resulting in TechCrunch's Mike Arrington responding with a lecture about the history of news, and citing cases where published info has been obtained in similarly shady ways.

Fair enough. That's the news business sometimes, and Twitter can take action if they don't like the decision to publish. In fact, Biz's blog post suggests they're looking into it. "We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents," he writes.

My problem with sites that publish this stuff is that it's ultimately pretty boring, and the attention and extra pageviews that come their way are because of the controversy, not because of some inherently interesting new story. The story here is "hacker compromises Twitter documents" not "we now know a little bit more about the Twitter TV show."

Wake me up when this is all over.

UPDATE: The hack wasn't due to weak passwords, says Twitter's Evan Williams.

Remember the panic a while back about social music site Last.FM supposedly leaking listener data to the RIAA? TechCrunch sure does, because they started the rumor, and then faced accusations of shoddy reporting from basically the whole Internet when it turned out to be false. Well, now TechCrunch have uncovered some new information that shows they were right after all ... sort of.

Last.fm's parent company, CBS, was the source of the leak to the RIAA. Last.fm didn't know about it at the time, having just turned over the data to CBS, which explains their vehement denials. TechCrunch isn't saying Last.fm lied, but they are saying that CBS duped them during the reporting for their original story, asking TC to attribute a CBS quote to Last.fm.

The reason for the link, according to Techcrunch's source at CBS, is that the requester (it could have been the RIAA, or an individual label) had the ability to hurt CBS/Last.fm on streaming rates. The source also claims that Last.fm premium accounts aren't making any profit, and the leak was made with the intent of protecting Last.fm from increased rates that could put it out of business.

No comment from Last.fm yet, but it's still early (and a three-day weekend) at their headquarters in the UK. We'll know more when they've had a chance to respond.

TechCrunch is at it again, posting things about companies that the companies themselves aren't even aware of. This time, it was a report that the popular social browser Flock, which is currently built on Firefox, is switching to Chrome. Not so fast, Flock says. TechCrunch updated their post with this comment from Flock CEO Shawn Hardin: "We haven't ceased development efforts on the Mozilla platform. Our upcoming release of Flock 2.1 is built on the Mozilla platform. Having said that, the browser space is heating up, and we've seen a variety of exciting technologies emerge over the last several months that are appealing."

A friend at Flock tells me that no final decisions have been made about Chrome. It looks like Flock's CEO isn't being dodgy when he says it's too early to comment; they really haven't made the final call yet. If Flock makes a decision, we'll be sure to let you know. For now, any speculation is just jumping the gun.

Have you torrented the new U2 album? We won't tell, and neither will Last.fm, if those unreleased tracks show up on your listening profile. That's not what TechCrunch is saying, though. Earlier today, they incorrectly reported that Last.fm turned over listener data to the RIAA as part of an investigation into piracy of the U2 record. According to TechCrunch's anonymous source, "I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks."

But according to one of Last.fm's founders, commenting on the TechCrunch post, "This is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a "tip" from *one* person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11." I'm not attacking TechCrunch's reporting here, I'm just doing some reporting of my own to make sure everyone knows that this story should apparently be downgraded to rumor status, and there's no need to dump your last.fm account over it.

UPDATE: Despite it being past 1AM at Last.fm's London HQ, the Last.fm staff have posted in their forums: "Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."

Don't worry, we're not going all Valleywag on our loyal readers, but with a bucket-load of photos from the Crunchies (and ensuing party) we thought it wise to separate the sober from the (Myspace-sponsored) party photos from San Francisco's City Hall. Thanks to all at TechCrunch for welcoming us Download Squad-ers to the event!

Friday night saw myself and our intrepid leader Victor Agreda Jr swing by the Crunchies. In amongst the swathes of free, MySpace-sponsered beer, we rubbed shoulders with many of the stars of Silicon Valley and acknowledge some of the notable services and devices of the last 12 months. Stay tuned for yet more photos from the after-party later today!

Yesterday might have been a US holiday, but the Twittering and blogging masses were awakened (by quacking claxons, I'm sure) to the inadvertent leak of Google Chrome, the oft-rumored browser from the search giant. Naturally, everyone wants a piece of the action. Here are a few of the stories we're digesting:

TechCrunch has some juicy first pics of the browser. They snagged a few blurry YouTube screenshots before the demo video was pulled as well. Is "blurry" and YouTube in the same sentence redundant?

Not everyone is enamored with Chrome. Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine provides tonic to those who think this is a real game-changer. He makes some great points.

At the moment, the Google Chrome comic book page on Blogoscoped is down because the "server is a bit stressed right now." I need 90cc's of Google juice, stat!

If you think Quikboy has something to say about Chrome, you haven't read the thread over on Slashdot. Go ahead, we can wait.

Yes, there's already a Wikipedia page!

Don't forget Mashable's take, our old buddy Marshall Kirkpatrick runs down the top features and Ina Fried (Webware) points out what everyone has been repeating: Redmond, volley off the port bow.

Google News has a little over 1,000 stories on Chrome, all within 24 hours. So who's not interested in this thing?

The read link on this post takes you to our Google Chrome page, and we'll be liveblogging around 2pm to cover the press conference via those who are there. Will September 2 be a watershed day online, or is Google's browser destined to be an also-ran? Leave your thoughts in the comments, as always.

UPDATES:
Chris Messina chimes in, explaining why this is important to Mozilla and the open web at large.
Forgot to include Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who references her awesome interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly.
VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson pulls up a three-legged stool to explain what this means.
Switched has a post about Chrome as well.
Matt Cutts has a liveblog going of the announcement (thanks Ryan!)
Jack Flack deciphers the Googlespeak.
Ryan at CybernetNews asks if Chrome will eat all other browsers for lunch.
OStatic's Mike Gunderloy has a terrific browser scorecard with his predictions on how other browsers will fare after the Chrome hits the fan.

Microsoft became the market leader in operating system deployment largely by making its OS and software available to any hardware maker that wanted to license the technology. Apple, on the other hand, has always insisted the its OS should only run on Apple-labeled computers. So while Microsoft is often slammed for not being "open," the company owes much of what it is to early openness.

And it looks like Microsoft arch rival Google may be playing the same card when it comes to social networking. The company's OpenSocial social networking platform allows third party companies to partner with Google. While Facebook opened up its API earlier this year, allowing third parties to create applications, Google has attracted some major players, including MySpace, Six Apart, and Bebo, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5. That's sort of the equivalent of getting IBM and HP on your side.

But here's what makes OpenSocial different. You'll notice that some of the big names in there are other social networks. That's because OpenSocial is a platform, not a website. MySpace, Friendster, and other social networks partnering with Google will use OpenSocial APIs, meaning if you develop an application for one site it will function on all the other sites.

In other words, OpenSocial isn't a social networking site. It's a common set of APIs that will be used by social networking sites -- and Google is behind the initiative, which gives them the same kind of status here that Microsoft had in the early days of desktop operating systems. You know, if you think desktop OSes and social networks are comparable, which they're probably not.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo! has paid $350 million to purchase Zimbra. The official announcement isn't expected until this evening, but Arrington's in a pretty good position to pick up gossip today. He's hanging out with a ton of industry insiders today at a little software conference Arrington put together with Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis called TechCrunch40.

So we're going to assume his information is good and enter the world of wild speculation.

Zimbra makes some impressive open source communication tools for online/offline use. The company has a powerful e-mail client, calendar, and VoIP features.

While it's unlikely that Yahoo! plans to completely overhaul its e-mail client yet again, we could see Zimbra features showing up in Yahoo! services. Particularly the slick AJAX interfaces, the powerful collaboration tools, and the online/offline functionality.

If you believe the claims in an apparently "leaked" video from Google, there are a few updates headed Google Reader's way. More social features are coming, there will be a way for Reader to recommend feeds to users, and Google might add the ability to comment on shared items.

That last one caught the attention of Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch. The way he sees it, allowing users to share articles in a link blog style format already violates the copyright of blog and web site publishers by reproducing their work out of context (and devoid of any original advertising).

Of course, most web publishers have looked the other way so far, because nobody's making any money off of these link blogs, and while entire articles are being reprinted, there's clear attribution explaining where they came from and no way for users to add original content, thus making a link blog something less than a regular blog.

If Google adds the ability to comment on shared items, Riley suggests, then it will essentially be granting users the ability to publish their own blogs using content from others without permission.

Another way of looking at it is that few link blogs (Robert Scoble's included) have the readership of a popular web site like Engadget. If anything, when someone like Robert Scoble shares an occasional item from your feed, he's popularizing your brand and perhaps driving traffic back to your site. After all, he doesn't publish every article you've written, does he? And really, how different is a link blog from an feed reader? In both situations people are reading your content outside of the context of your blog -- because of the RSS feed you have provided them with.

What do you think? Is link blogging stealing? And should Google add a comment feature to Google Reader?

Just days after its launch, InviteShare has been sold for $25,000 to TechCrunch. InviteShare is a service that lets users trade invitations to online services that are still in private beta, like Pownce or Joost. Overall, InviteShare offers up invitations to 42 different sites at the moment, with the capacity to add new sites.

And odds are they will, now that TechCrunch is involved. The technology blog frequently writes about invitation-only online communities and services, many of which we could see added to the InviteShare pool.

Does this all sort of defeat the purpose of private beta tests where a limited number of individuals gets to test out a new product? Maybe. But the folks most likely to use InviteShare are the same folks most likely to be good beta testers; geeky and enthusiastic about new services.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington says the site had been planning to create an invitation swapping service of its own when InviteShare launched. After writing a positive review of the site, Arrington admits that he may have driven up the value of the site his company eventually purchased.

When it comes to web 2.0 startups, it may be that there really might be no such thing as bad press.

Last month Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors, a Reddit-like site that lets users submit rumors, which any user can vote on. The most popular rumors are pushed to the top. When we first told you about Truemors, we pointed out that it was severely lacking in quality control, and most of the rumors on the first day were spam. But the things is -- we did tell you about the site.

Now Kawaski has written a post that breaks down the site's launch by the numbers.

• Kawasaki spent just $12,107.09 on software development, legal fees, logo design and domain registration.
• He spent $0 on PR.
• TechCrunch wrote about the site 3 times (twice before it launched, and once to pan it when it opened).
• The Inquirer called Truemors the "worst website ever" two days before launch.
• Truemors got 14,052 visitors on its first day.
• The site got 261,214 page views on its first day.
• There were 405 posts on the first day.
• 218 of them were spam, which administrators deleted.

The site actually seems to have more "legit" rumors than spam today. Of course, you have to take everything you read on the site with a grain of salt, but salt is cheap.

In a move that many consider a long time coming, Yahoo! should be announcing the closure of Yahoo! Photos some time today. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch got the scoop last night at a CEO dinner for Outcast, a PR event, from Brad Garlinghouse (Yahoo SVP Communications & Communities) and Stewart Butterfield (Cofounder of Flickr). The two said Photos would be slowly shut down over the next few months, with options to switch not only to Flickr, but also Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery and Shutterfly. Of course, switching to Flickr will be a one-click process, but the other services have already built their own transitioning tools, and Yahoo! will be offering discounted prices on things like CDs and prints for Photos users. Showing an unusual openness to the competition during a transition like this, Butterfield told Arrington: "We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr... We want happy users."

This move was brought on largely because of a recent and steady drop in traffic to Yahoo! Photos. While the doomed service surprisingly dwarfs Flickr in terms of total uploaded photos - 2 billion / 500 million, respectively - Flickr very recently overtook Yahoo! Photos in terms of growth and unique visitor traffic. This closure should create a significant spike for Flickr over the coming months, as we're betting that most users will probably opt for the one-click transition instead of dealing with any potential quirks from using the tools built by competing sites. Of course, time will tell, and it will be interesting to see just how well the move goes.

Also mentioned in brief at the very end of Arrington's post is Butterfield's confirmation that Flickr will "soon" do video, though we have no details or ETA on this much-requested feature. However, once this debuts, Flickr will then have both a rich and talented photography community, as well as the potential to become a serious competitor to the likes of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook once video is edited into the mix - if the community approves. Between these two major announcements, we're a bit more interested in how video will fare on a photo enthusiast's site. Stay tuned for more details.