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You might find this suprising, but the top social gaming companies on the iPhone are not the same ones you know of from Facebook and MySpace. Zynga, despite $54.2M in funding, has hardly made a dent on the iPhone. Neither has Playfish, which was recently bought for $300M. Playdom hasn't done squat, either. Although "the big three" of social gaming are great at online games, they aren't doing too well on the iPhone. For example, Zynga's Mafia Wars game hardly hit the top 25 throughout its time on the App Store.

A round-up from Shakil Khan, effectively Spotify’s consigliari today in London opened the kimono a little on where it’s at.

Speaking at the new NOAH Conference in London, the headline points from his talk were that we can, as we expected, see a U.S. launch in Q1 2010 as well as a launch in Germany and China in Q1/2 (so no pressure then). Spotify will also extend from its existing handset deals into premium services on other platforms in 2010. They are talking to TV manufacturers about embedding Spotify into internet-enabled TV sets and Khan said they now get “a call a week” from games console makers which want to add Spotify to their service.

He also went through a round-up of its stats and model to date.

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There were some interesting panel discussion today at the NOAH conference – a new event in London aimed at presented tech companies to the private equity and banking sector – but the plethora of suited and booted attendees were shocked out of their chairs a little when Klaus Hommels, (one of the first angel investors in Skype, QXL and XING and recently a venture partner with Balderton (formerly Benchmark Capital Europe) spoke his mind.

The panel he was on had been beating about the bush on investing in tech startups, until he broke into the discussion to make some salient points:

“Structurally we fucked it up. European tech companies would normally have been picked up by media companies in Europe but they are in such a bad state this is not possible. So before anyone puts money into new companies, we need to ask: who is going to by all the shit in our existing portfolios?!” (I think he might have meant to say ’stuff’, however…)

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Rumors have been swirling that IBM will be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue is reportedly shelling out $225 million for Israel-based Guardium. This year alone, IBM has acquired six companies, including RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The Market reports that Guardium is profitable, with sales in the tens of millions per year.

Guardium, which was founded in 2002, has raised a total of $21 million in funding from Cisco, Cedar Fund, Ascent Venture Partners, Stage One Ventures, Veritas Venture Partners and others. IBM is furthering its strategy of investing in systems software for the enterprise, as opposed to hardware.

IBM refused to comment on the acquisition of Guardium but the deal is expected to close in the next few days.

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As more consumers turn to sites like Yelp and Citysearch to find restaurants, it’s important for establishments of all sizes to have a website. While larger restaurants may have more resources to create an informative consumer-facing site, the mom and pop restaurants out there need an easy way to create a presence online. GrabMyTable is hoping to be a resource for restaurants to create websites easily as well as a restaurant discovery platform for consumers. We have free lifetime subscriptions for the first five TechCrunch readers and restaurateurs who sign up for GrabyMyTable here.

GrabMyTable was designed with the small restaurant owner in mind who doesn’t have the time or money to put into developing an established site but still wants to maintain an informative website. The platform lets administrators with no HTML knowledge create a site with contact details, photos and videos, menus, specials, and even lets users add a customer review system that can be controlled by the site’s administrator. The service costs $60 per month per site. The startup is also including a consumer-facing directory of all sites created with its technology broken down by city/regional area.

Of course, for the directory to be useful for consumers, GrabMyTable’s technology needs to be widely adopted by restaurants all over the world. In this space, the site will have trouble competing with Yelp, Citysearch and others which already have established marketshare in the listings and review areas. Plus, OpenTable is the go-to resource for bookings while Menupages.com lets users access menu for most restaurants in their coverage areas. Letseat.at also offers an easy portal for restaurants to create websites, but its offering is free.

While GrabMyTable faces stiff competition from a variety of sources, the site has experience on its side. The startup’s parent, iFoods Limited owns and operates several other food-focused websites including Twecipe.com, Lookandtaste.com. Vidvend, and foodandfizz.com.

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Streamreaders just keep getting better and better. A new version of TweetDeck is rolling out today with some major improvements, including support for Lists, Retweets, maps for geo-tagged messages, and LinkedIn streams. TweetDeck has already been downloaded more than 10 million times, and its active user base is in the low millions so this is a significant update.

As soon as Twitter launched Lists (the ability to create and follow groups) as a regular feature, all the stream readers rushed to incorporate it. TweetDeck already let you create Groups in separate columns, and is now replacing that with Twitter Lists. Existing TweetDeck Groups will still work, but from now on when you create a new group it will be via the official List functionality and available for all other Twitter users to see if you choose to make it public. You can also export your old groups as a List.

TweetDeck, however, goes beyond simply letting you add Lists as columns. You can edit lists in a pop-up lightbox, weeding out people from other people’s lists or using existing lists as the basis for entirely new ones. There is even a suggested users feature which suggests people to add to a list you are creating based on the existing members of the list you are starting with, as well as the name and the description. This is a first step towards creating dynamic lists.

The one issue TweetDeck (and all desktop Twitter clients) will run into with lists is that they eat up the allotted API calls for each client. Since there are so many users in each list, sometimes hundreds, and lists update with each of their Tweets, it goes through the allowed number of updates pretty quickly. Web-based stream readers such as Seesmic Web don’t run into this issue because they are all centralized on one server rather than making millions of separate API calls from each downloaded client (Seesmic’s desktop apps,however, currently do run into the issue).

TweetDeck handles Retweets really nicely as well. There’s been some confusion about how Twitter handles Retweets because people you don’t know all of a sudden appear in your main Twitter stream. TweetDeck alleviates this confusion by showing two small, overlapping avatars of both the person being retweeted and of the person doing the retweeting. It also lets you choose whether you want to retweet the new way or the old way, by editing first and then retweeting.

For all the Tweets that now have geolocation enabled, TweetDeck shows a small red drop at the bottom. When you click on it, a Yahoo map comes up showing the location. This is quickly becoming a standard feature.

Finally, TweetDeck is adding LinkedIn streams via LinkedIn’s new APIs. In addition to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, you can now have a LinkedIn column as well. One stream reader to rule them all.

Here’s a video showing off some of the new features:

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It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.”

But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”

And with that, the entire project self destructed.

Neither we nor Fusion Garage own the intellectual property of the CrunchPad outright. Fusion Garage has a team of 13 or so employees, currently working here in Silicon Valley out of a home they rented and in our office. Their team has mixed with our CrunchPad team, which is led by Brian Kindle, the former Vice President Hardware Engineering and Manufacturing at Vudu and an early hardware engineer at TiVo. Development expenses have been shared, and our team has spent time in Singapore and Taiwan, and their team has spent time here. We chose to work with Fusion Garage on Prototype C and the launch prototype after we finished Prototype B internally.

We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark.

So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement.

We’re still completely perplexed as to what happened. We think they were attempting to renegotiate the equity split on the company behind CrunchPad, which was to acquire Fusion Garage. Renegotiations are always fine. But holding a gun to our head two days before launching and insulting us isn’t the way to do that. We’ve spent the last week and a half trying unsuccessfully to communicate with them. Our calls and emails go unanswered, so we can’t even figure out exactly what’s happened.

Yesterday Chandra sent an email saying “Following our phone discussion, I had another round of discussions with my shareholders. The shareholders are not willing to move from their position as they believe their stand is justified. On the other hand, there isn’t an alternative offer on the table from Crunchpad.”

My response: “We have not come back to you with any counter offer to the email you forwarded because you and your shareholders have communicated to us that moving forward without us is something that you consider to be a legitimate and legal option. In other words, your “counter” offer is theft of intellectual property.”

Ultimately there are two sides to every story, and they’ll certainly have their side. We will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandra and his shareholders as individuals, shortly. The legal system will work it all out over time.

Mostly though I’m just sad. I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money. It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible. And I’ve also lost a friend – Chandra spent months in our office this year and, until a week and a half ago, was the kind of young, determined entrepreneur that I admire. I thought we’d be friends for the rest of our lives.

And what’s really sad about all this is the incredible support we were getting from companies and people around the world to launch this device. A major multi-billion dollar retail partner has been patiently working with us for months, giving advice on manufacturing partners and offering to sell the CrunchPad at a zero margin to help us succeed in the early days. They were also willing to pay for the devices on order instead of 30 days after delivery, a crucial cash flow benefit that would allow us to ramp up volume without putting ourselves our of business. They were even willing to fly the devices from China on their own planes to eliminate our shipping costs. Intel, which would supply the Atom CPUs to power the device, has assisted us repeatedly with engineering and partner advice, and gave us pricing that was ridiculously generous given our projected first year sales volumes. Other partners were eager to promote and sell the device for little or no benefit on their end other than “supporting the project.” We even had sponsors lined up to help us sell the device near our $300ish cost.

And money wasn’t a problem, either. We had blue chip angel and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley waiting to invest in the company since late Spring. We were simply holding them off until we launched, to eliminate some of the risk.

It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so…final…is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just…sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.

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[France] A commercial court in Paris has fined eBay €1.7 million euros (roughly £1.6 million) for allegedly not sticking to an injunction banning users from selling on products of luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH in short). Allowing the LVMH perfumes and cosmetics to be purchased by Frenchmen on its French and UK website according to the ruling violated a prior court order to remove all such postings (June 2008), part of a €38 million verdict saying eBay had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeited LVMH items.

Nearly five months after launching a free, ad-supported application for iPhone and iPod Touch, eBuddy is today introducing a paid version of the program, which enables users to communicate with contacts across various instant messaging clients.

Priced at $4.99 (iTunes link), which in my opinion is fairly expensive, the app lets you chat with friends on Facebook Chat, ICQ, Gtalk, AIM, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger alike.

Unlike its gratis counterpart, eBuddy Pro for iPhone and iPod Touch is advertisement-free, and boasts a couple more features that the company hopes people will be willing to pay for:

- push notifications for incoming messages when the app is closed (for up to 3 days)
- the ability to transfer photos from the device to friends without leaving the app interface
- the option to set your display picture from your camera or photo library

The application also lets you switch between chat conversations by swiping the screen of your iPhone or iPod Touch (handy) and sends out a buzzer when the device is shaken. The Netherlands-based company promises more features will be included in future updates (e.g. landscape mode).

Ebuddy says over 2.5 million people have download the free iPhone application to date, while (only) some 180,000 downloads have been registered for the Android app. The free iPhone app was ad-free until today – and the company recently partnered with India’s InMobi to increase its mobile advertising revenue and will start doing that now that the premium app is available in the App Store.

Alternatives to eBuddy Pro include IM+ and Beejive (both cost more – feature sets vary).

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As we’ve noted, Chrome for Mac is getting very, very close to its official beta launch. The team is down to a mere 8 bugs to fix before it’s ready (and it looks like the list has been trimmed to 7 as of a few hours ago). This is great news for Mac users who want to try out the Chrome experience that PC users have had for well over a year now. But still, the product will be in beta, and it will be incomplete.

It’s been known for a while that Google would have to trim some features from the initial Chrome for Mac beta launch to get it out before self-imposed “end of the year” deadline. But what’s on the chopping block? A scan through the Chromium logs on Google Code seems to reveal what will and won’t be a go for Chrome for Mac beta.

So what’s out? The biggest feature that is currently not slated to be done in time for “milestone 4″ (aka Chrome version 4, which Chrome for Mac beta will be, at least initially) is the Bookmark Manager. Current Chromium (and dev Chrome) testers will know that this option has been grayed out forever on the latest builds of the browser, and as of September, it was moved from a M4 (milestone 4) to a M5 target. It would appear that Google will launch Chrome for Mac beta without it working.

Another feature moved to M5 is App Mode. This is the Chome mode that allows you to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Fans of Fluid, a free program for OS X that works with WebKit-based browsers, will appreciate this being built into the browser eventually, but it doesn’t appear that will be ready for the beta launch either.

Likewise, the Task Manager has been moved from M4 to M5, but recent chatter about it makes it seem like it’s possible that it could be done in time.

Gears, which allows for offline web app functionality, is completely off the table as a Chrome for Mac feature right now, according to project lead Mike Pinkerton (he actually noted this back in July). Apparently, Google plans to push ahead with full HTML5 support rather than rely on Gears, at least on the Mac.

Sync for Mac (bookmark syncing) is another feature that currently works on the PC version of Chrome, but is slated to be a M5 project for the Chrome for Mac team. Still, this thread shows that significant progress has been made on it, and it looks like you can even enable it to try it out, but it won’t be on by default yet.

Multi-touch gestures that are built into OS X and used by MacBook trackpads and the new Magic Mouse are another M5 project. The two listed gestures, “Three-finger-swipe up” and “Pinch in/out to zoom in/out” are still being debated as to what they should actually do.

While one of the highly touted features of Snow Leopard is that it’s 64-bit, Chrome for Mac beta will not be initially supporting it. In fact, this may not even be a M5 project, it all depends on how well Google’s V8 JavaScript engine is able to perform in a 64-bit environment, apparently.

Full extension support will also not be a part of Chrome for Mac beta, Pinkerton tweeted out tonight. While many extensions are working in the latest builds of Chromium for Mac, some are apparently not. Pinkerton promises that the team will get to this “soon,” but needed to “draw a line somewhere.”

Another feature currently disabled in the Mac builds of Chromium is Full Screen mode. It would seem this too has been pushed to M5.

So those appear to be the big features that will be missing with the launch of the Chrome for Mac beta. There’s a larger list of other M5 projects here. Again, Chrome for Mac beta will be a M4 (version 4) release, so all of these appear to be off the table for now.

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