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Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world, according to the annual Forbes list of billionaires.

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While California and New York tend to get the most attention as technology hubs, other states are quietly hosting their own vibrant communities around technology and innovation. Utah is one of these states. Utah is home to tech giants Omniture (which was acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion), Novell, Symantec. And today, Utah is getting its very own startup incubator, BoomStartup, which is a seed capital and mentor-focused investment program for web and software start-ups based in Utah.

Based in Orem, Utah at the Canyon Park Technology Center (the original site of WordPerfect Corporation), BoomStartup is a full-time program that will run from May to August and provides each selected company with seed capital (up to $15,000), mentoring from entrepreneurs and technologists, free office space and resources, and education that takes them through the various steps of getting a tech startup off the ground. For its first rounds, the organization will choose eight startups to participate in the program. Applicants for BoomStartup must have a founding team (two or more individuals) and an idea with a focus on web, mobile, software, and non‐hardware tech. Startups can apply here.

BoomStartup was founded by Utah angel investor John Richards who invested in Omniture. BoomStartup is made up of seven other mentors and investors in the fund. Each investor-mentor has contributed $15,000 in the fund. Investors include Omniture co-founders Josh James and John Pestana, Ralph Yarro, Nobu Mutaguchi, Martin Frey, and Rod Watson.

It’s always great to see investors and former tech executives investing time (and money) in promising startups and ideas. And we are seeing a plethora of innovative startups emerging from a variety of incubators around the country and world, including Y Combinator, TechStars, The Founder Institute, Launchbox Digital and more.

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Continued Richards: “This group of investor-mentors has a track record of growing successful businesses and creating innovative technologies. Their expertise and vision will be invaluable to the selected companies, and give them the know how to overcome the obstacles they might confront, whether that be on the business or technological side.”

BoomStartup will host a series of “Meet the Investor-Mentor Days” through the April 12, 2010 deadline; the first will be held Friday, March 12, 2010 at 4 p.m. at the Canyon Park Technology Center, Building J (1401 N. Research Way, Orem, Utah). Investors-Mentors will be on hand to talk with prospective applicants about business, technology and discuss strategies for their businesses.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has confirmed Amazon.com's controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.

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63% of mobile web consumption is performed on Apple's iPhone.

Still, Google's Android OS is starting to gain share after a couple years of lagging far behind Apple.  Google's share increased about 8% in February 2010 to 15.2% of the market and has nearly doubled in the past year.  Apple's share decreased 3.2% from January to February. 

Source: Quantcast

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Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen.

Google Reader Play doesn’t require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it’s very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

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Fox is the most pirated broadcast network on YouTube, according to new data from TubeMogul. 

Fox gained the top spot thanks to the popularity of "Glee" and "American Idol," as well as a hands-off approach to pulling down clips. The numbers below are based on the top ten primetime network shows.

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IT software giant CA has acquired cloud monitoring startup Nimsoft for $350 million according to a release issued today. Nimsoft offers performance monitoring software to businesses.

CA is making a big move towards the cloud. The company just bought up 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore.

Nimsoft’s solutions gives companies visibility into the performance and availability of their customers’ business applications across both internal and external IT infrastructures. Nimsoft has developed monitoring and reporting solutions for public cloud and on-demand offerings like Google Apps for Business, The Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com, as well as internal applications, databases, and physical and virtual server environments. CA says that Nimsoft will help the company capitalize on the growth of cloud computing. Nimsoft has approximately 800 customers.

Founded in 2002, Nimsoft raised a total of $22.3 million in funding and acquired Indicative Software in 2008.

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The big story in search right now is that Microsoft's Bing search engine is steadily taking share away from Yahoo, its new search partner. (Click here to see how Microsoft is doing it.)

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OnLive, a streaming video game platform, will be released on June 17, the company announced today.

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It's been two months since Google threatened to end its business in China. Thus far, nothing has changed.

Speaking with reporters in Abu Dhabi, Eric Schmidt promises something will happen "soon" though.

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Today during a panel on disruptive game platforms at GDC’s GamesBeat, a panel of gaming execs took the stage to talk about the current situation in gaming. The standout speaker so far has been hi5 President and CTO Alex St. John, who has not pulled any punches in his criticisms of Facebook and other companies. Moments ago, he just attacked Zynga, calling its games mediocre and saying that its success stemmed from spamming users.

Here’s what he said (paraphrased): “Zynga makes mediocre games. What Zynga discovered is that Facebook had left an opening for spam. They acquired a lot of audience from a security loophole that Facebook has since closed. And they aren’t social. Their only social game is Poker — it’s the only one that you can chat in. All subsquent games are turn based and spread over days.”

The audience’s response? A round of clapping.

Earlier in the panel, St. John said that Facebook was somewhat schizophrenic, offering users both more professional features and gaming. Of course, hi5 is now a dedicated gaming platform, so he isn’t exactly an unbiased observer.

Media companies are excited about Apple's iPad, which launches next month, as a potential way to save their dying magazine and newspaper businesses.

One way they'll eventually want to do that is by enhancing the advertising experience, so they can continue to charge high rates for ads. Some of that will be achieved through targeting an audience better than they were ever able to do in print. But some of it could be achieved through interesting, new ad technologies.

Apple itself could be working on some of those technologies. It recently acquired a mobile advertising company, Quattro Wireless, and its mobile ad boss Andy Miller reports directly to Steve Jobs. And the iPad's browser will continue to display many Web ads, including Google text ads. (Though like the iPhone, it won't support multimedia ads that use Adobe's Flash plug-in.)

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If you’re excited about the mysterious array of special Foursquare badges promised for this year’s SXSW, then you’ll probably want to skip this post. Otherwise, read on.

A site dedicated to Foursquare badges appropriately called Foursquarebadg.es has taken advantage of a technical glitch this morning to identify 15 special badges that will be available during this year’s SXSW conference, which starts this week in Austin, Texas.

The criteria needed to unlock some of the badges are still unknown, but some of them are pretty easy to guess based on their titles. Hangover is apparently earned by checking in late at night and then early the following morning. Karaoke RV is earned by taking a ride on the infamous vehicle, which cruises around downtown Austin as its occupants belt out bad renditions of Journey. There’s Panel Nerd, which the site guesses is earned by heading to the Convention Center before noon for three days during the conference. And Early Adopter goes to the not-so-elite crowd that was checking in at SXSW using Foursquare last year, when the service was just getting started. For the full list, check out the Foursquarebadg.es page.

Personally, I stopped caring much about my Foursquare badges around 9 months ago (hence my previous post on why I think this model will grow old, and why Foursquare needs to innovate beyond just making new badges). That said, I’m sure the rampant use of Foursquare at SXSW by fellow techies will rekindle my competitive attitude for at least a few days. And for no apparent reason, I really want to get the still-mysterious special  Swimmies badge.

CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase

When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it’s time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature.

Today, Blippy has undergone a massive redesign. Previously, Blippy was a stream of your friends’ transactions and little else. Now, it’s much more robust. In fact, it looks very similar to the most recent redesign of Facebook. You’ll notice the new update indicators next to the logo that get badged with a number when there is an update. You’ll also notice a search box front and center (for now, this is only to search for businesses or users).

More important than the redesign is the new feature Blippy is launching. Starting today, you can manually review each purchase before it’s displayed on Blippy. This is an important step in the direction of better privacy controls. Previously, you could pick and choose which sources you imported your transaction data from, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. You could remove items after they appeared in your stream, but not before. Now you can do that by approving each one. A bit of a pain? Sure, but for some who are really concerned about privacy, this is a welcome addition (of course, you may wonder why they’d be using Blippy in the first place, but hey, people are weird).

This new setting will be displayed when users hook up their credit card or e-commerce account for the first time to Blippy.

Blippy has already streamed about $15 million in purchases, co-founder Philip Kaplan notes. “Today, thousands of people are automatically sharing purchases on Blippy. I think of it as ‘a stream of cool stuff my friends are buying.’ The additional level of control we’re introducing will make it even easier for people to share just want they want to share — whether a new iPhone app, movie from Netflix, favorite bar or restaurant, or grocery store run,” Kaplan says.

In January, Blippy raised a $1.6 million round of funding. The company is also getting some traction with retailers — though not all of them.

CrunchBase InformationBlippyInformation provided by CrunchBase

No wonder Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement over its Android phones. In the three months between October and January, Android’s overall share of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. rose 4.3 points to 7.1 percent, according to mobile market share data released by comScore.  Android showed the biggest single gain of any of the top five smartphone platforms.  Apple’s share was virtually flat at 25.2 percent (up 0.3 percent), while RIM’s Blackberries saw a 1.7 percent gain to 43 percent.

Overall, 42.7 million people in the U.S. owned a  smartphone during the period, up 18 percent. So even though Apple’s relative share didn’t go anywhere, it still grew with the market.  But watching RIM and Android phones take share cannot be pleasant for the folks at Cupertino.  The iPhone still rules the mobile Web, but again here Android is catching up fast.  Time to release a new iPhone.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Palm saw drops in their shares.  Windows Mobile was down 4 percent and Palm was down 2.1 percent.

Top Smartphone Platforms

3 Month Avg. Ending Jan. 2010 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Oct. 2009

Total U.S. Age 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers Oct-09 Jan-10 Point Change Total Smartphone Subscribers 100.0% 100.0% N/A RIM 41.3% 43.0% 1.7 Apple 24.8% 25.1% 0.3 Microsoft 19.7% 15.7% -4.0 Google 2.8% 7.1% 4.3 Palm 7.8% 5.7% -2.1

Photo credit: Flickr/svensonsan.

CrunchBase InformationiPhone 3GSAndroidResearch In MotionInformation provided by CrunchBase

2009 TechCrunch50 winner Redbeacon, a service that pairs consumers with service providers, is releasing a number of new features today, launching a distribution relationship and sharing key data from their beta trial. The 50,000 foot view is, this startup has legs.

Users go to Redbeacon and search for real world service providers (housekeepers, plumbers, handyman, personal trainers, etc.). The service sends you firm quotes from local service providers, based on price and other factors, such as previous reviews and expertise with the specific job you want done. You can book an appointment online, and Redbeacon takes a 10% fee from the service provider.

The service first went live in the San Francisco bay area in October, and now has thousands of local service providers.

Most queries receive firm quotes within an hour, they say, and many get quotes within minutes. 100% of queries have received firm quotes, and “a very high percentage” of users are then booking appointments, says cofounder Ethan Anderson.

But the beta period has given the company much needed feedback, too. Service provider profiles need to have a lot more information, they say, for users to feel comfortable booking with them (and perhaps bringing them into their home). So the company has greatly expanded profiles to give that information. Redbeacon has also created better tools to allow users and providers to communicate before, during and after a job.

User can now upload more information on a job, such as a picture of the problem (a hole in the wall for a handyman, etc.). That leads to more and better quotes, says Anderson. We sat down with him at TechCrunch yesterday to talk about the company:

New Features, New Deal

Today Redbeacon is adding a social feature to the product that allows users to ask friends about which quotes they should accept, or to recommend different providers. They’re doing this through Facebook Connect, and allowing users to post their questions directly onto Facebook. This has the added benefit of viral marketing, of course.

Recent studies have shown that people love to ask their friends for advice when it comes to buying goods and services, and the success of services like Aardvark, which allow exactly that, aren’t surprising.

Redbeacon is also adding organization memberships and badges for services providers (BBB, etc.). This gives extra assurance to users that the provider is legitimate.

First Distribution Deal

Redbeacon is also announcing their first third party distribution deal, with Bigtent. These deals push the Redbeacon product directly into third party sites in exchange for a revenue share with the partner. Look for more of these over time, says Anderson.

The Value In Redbeacon: Real Reviews

Redbeacon provides a valuable service that blows away things like the Yellow Pages. But there’s also a hidden gem – the service knows for sure when a transaction occurs, so a review by a user is going to be legitimate. All those problems with fake review on Yelp will be avoided on Redbeacon.

Redbeacon pulls in review from Yelp, Google, etc. as well. But over time the review data they gather will be far more valuable than those services, simply because of verified transactions.

What’s most amazing about Redbeacon is that the startup has held off on raising any outside capital at all until now, despite a feeding frenzy around the company (multiple venture capitalists and angel investors have begged us for introductions over the last few months). I’d imagine that fast will soon be over. Now’s the time to raise a good round of financing and push Redbeacon to multiple markets beyond the bay area.

CrunchBase InformationRedbeaconEthan AndersonInformation provided by CrunchBase

Yesterday brought news that Facebook is planning to launch its location offering at its f8 conference in the end of April. In first reporting the news, the New York Times noted that “the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.” From what we’re hearing, that’s true — because they could be using some of those services to federate check-ins.

How do we know? Because it appears that a Facebook employee has been showing the app around to friends. One person who has seen it notes that the icon for the location feature has a pushpin on a map. This was apparently a beta version of an app, but the functionality, if Facebook chooses to go with it, would likely be built into the massively popular Facebook iPhone app.

When reached for comment, all Facebook would say is, “We are constantly experimenting with new ideas and products internally. We don’t have anything more to share at this time.” That’s not exactly a denial at all.

What Foursquare and Gowalla (the two location apps specifically cited by a source) had to say was more interesting. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley danced around the idea of working with Facebook on such a feature, but notes that anyone can access their check-in data through Foursquare’s API. And in fact, plenty of users are already pushing their check-ins to Facebook through Connect, he notes. Also, this page is sort of interesting. It’s what we call a placeholder.

Meanwhile, Gowalla founder Josh Williams said a bit more:

It’s no surprise that Facebook is wading into the location waters (cannonball!) — our ultimate goal at Gowalla is to provide the easiest and most fun way to share location with friends, regardless of where that information is distributed… Facebook, Twitter, etc. It will be important for folks like Facebook and Twitter to clearly spell out how this information is used and displayed.

That suggests that both Facebook and Twitter have been looking at ways to import check-in data. Twitter already syndicates the data through its Geolocation API, but as more and more players get involved in the space, it wouldn’t be surprising at all for the upstart players like Gowalla and Foursquare to ask the platforms (Facebook and Twitter) to make it more clear which data is being sent from where. And make no mistake, based on what we’re hearing, that’s exactly what Facebook aims to be with location: a platform. Yes, like their good buddies Twitter.

[photo: flickr/24oranges.nl]

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In the second installment of a series of open interviews with government leaders, YouTube is going to field questions to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, following the launch of the National Broadband Plan next Tuesday (The FCC is the federal agency that oversees all elements of the U.S. communications sector). The plan aims to connect all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

Similar to the question and answer session with President Obama following the State of The Union speech, users can submit video or text questions on CitizenTube via Google Moderator You can then vote on your favorite questions submitted by the community. YouTube will present the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in the interview next Tuesday. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 14 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Google and the Obama administration have been working to incorporate the social video sharing site into government events. YouTube also aired the debate between President Obama and lawmakers over the President’s proposed healthcare reform at the Healthcare Summit in February. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid answered select questions submitted via Google Moderator at the end of the summit.

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Microsoft's Bing search engine continues to gain share in the search market, thanks to organic growth, lots of advertising, and clever tricks like stuffing MSN.com full of links to Bing search queries.

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• February Search Results Are In: Bing Is Up Again, Yahoo Is Down Again
• Google Turns People Into Screaming Monkeys In Bing's New Commercial

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