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Huzzah! It’s that time again! Time for TechCrunch50: where thousands of struggling entrepreneurs spend three grand they can barely afford to watch fifty of their peers dancing like malnourished bears for the approbation of Jason Calacanis! It’s like Christians and lions meets Satan’s own version of speed dating, with added Scoble! What’s not to love?

I’m sorry – you’ll have to forgive my cynicism, it’s just that I have to prove to you that I haven’t gone native.

You see, one of the main reasons I was hired by TechCrunch was for my traffic-driving habit of hurling faeces at unsuspecting industry conferences. Conferences like Jeff Pulver’s inexorably ill-planned 140 Characters in New York or Loic LeMeur’s très froid ‘Le‘ in Paris – both of which saw the sharp end of my tongue when I was at the Guardian. I learned there that no-one cares when I talk about interesting start-ups or noteworthy trends – but when I textually assault a hard-working event organiser, the page impressions flow like gravy.

And so you can imagine how worried I felt when I realised that the very first major conference to come along after I moved to TechCrunch would be the one that pays my wages.

For weeks friends have been responding to my protests of impartiality with wry looks and knowing chuckles. “Sure,” they said, “even if the wifi’s shit, the venue’s freezing and there’s no food, you’ll still have to say nice things. Arrington’s not going to let you publish a hatchet job about his cash cow. The man is a renowned megalomaniac; worse than Stalin and Kim Jong-il added together.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I argued back, “that’s just propaganda put about by jealous rivals at lesser blogs. Arrington hired me for my fierce independence, not just because he wanted to make sure I’d toe the line when it came to the most important event on his calendar. No one would be that cynical.”

Right?

Well, we’ll find out soon enough. In a bold journalistic experiment, this week’s column is split into several installments, of which this is the first. The others will be filed on Monday and Tuesday, live from the conference hall, or from whichever after-party or fringe event I find myself at when my deadline hits. I’ll be working overtime to bring you a true and complete picture of the event, so if you spot a hyper-focussed figure, hunched away from the main throng, obsessively pecking away at a laptop when he should be drinking and having fun, that’ll be me. (Or possibly Gabe Rivera; you’ll know for sure by the shoes.)

My original plan was to use this first installment as a prologue, to preview some of the companies that will be launching on Monday and Tuesday and suggesting which pitches you should definitely check out. I wouldn’t give too much away, of course, but hopefully I’d give you an idea of the 50 amazingly revolutionary products that will be competing for the $50k grand prize, plus $4.7bn in advertising credits, 3.76m Beenz and a share in the fortune of the late Dr Clement Okon of Nigeria.

There are just two problems with this plan. Firstly, with the exception of Penn and Teller, I have absolutely no idea what start-ups will be pitching. Really. In the interests of impartiality – and laziness – I’ve kept well away from TechCrunch HQ, where I understand frantic last minute preparations are underway to make sure this year’s event is the best ever. MG is charging his iPhones, Arrington is practicing his cynical stage-stare, Lacy is ironing her ‘I *heart* Brazil t-shirt, Daniel Brusilovsky and the interns are doing all the actual work – that kind of thing. But I’m staying behind my Chinese wall. Until yesterday I hadn’t even bothered checking that the venue was the same as last year, or confirming that I actually had a ticket.

(It is. I have.)

The second problem is that I strongly suspect this year’s companies will fall into the category of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Which is probably a good thing. The market being what it is, it makes a lot of sense to play safe: develop something that users and investors can easily get on board with, make some revenue, keep up repayments on your home, ride out the storm.

The fact that last year’s winner, Yammer, was an evolution (’clone’ is such an impolite word) of Twitter is a case in point, and it wouldn’t suprise me if the selection panel have chosen similar kinds of businesses this year. Which is great for those who value tried and tested ideas and solid business models but terrible news for a columnist who gets off on mocking the sick and jeering the lame.

But, then again, I could be completely wrong. I mean, if this year’s selection really does err on the side of caution, how does one explain Penn and Teller? These are hardly men renowned for safe ideas; the last time I saw Teller thinking inside a box, Penn poured in a swarm of bees and did something decidedly innovative with a can of gasoline. So perhaps their presence is a hint that this year’s event will be one filled with ridiculously bold ideas, chosen to inject a much-needed shot of adrenaline in the arm of an industry flirting with the doldrums.

And yet that possibility doesn’t quite feel right either. No, actually, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that Penn and Teller’s attendance is indicative of a much more cynical plot altogether.

Just consider the evidence: a few weeks ago when Arrington asked for my bio for CrunchBase, I mentioned the odd factoid that I used to be a magician. Four weeks later and – lo! – Penn and Teller, the magicians’ magicians, are slated to pitch at TechCrunch50. Coincidence? I hardly think so.

A far more likely explanation is that my friends were right about Arrington all along. The poor man really is so desperate to ensure that my TechCrunch50 review is positive that he’s selected each of the participating companies based purely on how likely they are to appeal to me, and me alone. The other 1999 attendees be damned, all that matters is getting my journalistic thumbs up.

It’s an audacious plan. And you know what? It might just work. Especially if he’s chosen such me-focussed companies as…

• DoucheBall
  An evolution of the Foursquare/Dodgeball concept, designed to appeal to men who, for whatever reason, want to avoid running into any of their ex-girlfriends. Whenever a previous flame checks into a venue, an alert is pushed to the man’s phone allowing him to stay well clear until the danger has passed. Much like Foursquare, there’s a fun game element too, with badges to be won based on certain patterns of behaviour. By default, all users are awarded the “Player, please” and “Coward, grow up” badges at sign-up.
• Am I Fired Or Not?
  You know how it is – you have multiple freelance gigs, any of which you could lose at a moment’s notice by writing unforgivably navel-gazing columns about yourself and your friends. Combined with industry-wide budget cuts and publication closures, keeping track of who still employs you can be a full time job. But not any more! Introducing ‘Am I Fired Or Not?’ – the Friendfeed of firing; the RSS of redundancy. Simply add each new employer as they hire you, and be instantly notified when – a few weeks later – they come to their senses and remove themselves.
• WhoreSquare
  Sure, services like Skimlinks provide a neat way for site owners to make extra revenue by turning key words and phrases into affiliate links. But some editors are uneasy at the idea of shilling to their readers under the guise of producing impartial content. If you’re one of those editors then WhoreSquare is your perfect compromise. Simply install this free plugin and every single word on your blog will be instantly transformed into an affiliate link to my brilliant book, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore. As an added bonus, every image, including your site’s own logo will be replaced with a gigantic animated gif of me holding the book, and waving. Sure, your readers are still being sold to but, trust me, they’ll thank you for it.
• BlackoutCast
  Heading out for a quick drink? Want to record everything you say and do after 10pm so you can play it back in the morning and remember all of the people you need to apologise to / pay damages to / add to your avoid list on DoucheBall? There’s an app for that.

Exciting products, all, as I’m sure you’ll agree. And each absolutely guaranteed to get a much-needed positive review from me next week.

Perfect! See you all on Monday! I’ll be the cold, hungry one in the corner, swearing about the fucking wifi.

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Last.fm's radio station will outsource programming to its online community by reflecting charts indicating what they like the most.

CBS is set to roll out over-the-air HD radio channels in the nation’s top four markets powered by the crowdsourced programming of Last.fm — apparently the first time a streaming site has morphed into a commercial radio station.

CBS purchased interactive streaming site Last.fm a couple of years go for $280 million with the goal of integrating it across its CBS Radio properties. Starting Oct. 5 it makes good on the initiative with the launch of an over-the-air Last.fm HD Radio channel in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

Listeners in those cities (who own HD Radios) will be able to tune in to the channel, to be comprised of “an eclectic mix of music aggregated and influenced by the service’s user-generated weekly charts, combined with live performances and interviews from the Last.fm studios in New York, and event updates,” according to Friday morning’s announcement. The station will also be available as a webcast on Last.fm and other CBS websites, of course, as well as through mobile apps for the iPhone and Blackberry.

It’s an interesting notion, to create one centralized station consisting of the top-rated and most popular stuff on Last.fm, because the whole idea behind web radio is that you don’t have to listen to what everyone else is listening to. On the other hand, Last.fm’s charts will surely do a better job of finding interesting music than the robots in charge of other radio stations will ever find.

Various hour-long blocks of programming will run throughout the day, said CBS spokeswoman Karen Mateo, including top artists, top tracks, “hyped artists” and so on. “All of the programming is derived from how people are using the site,” she explained. “The shows follow the charts.” British, LA-based DJ Sat Bisla will anchor the station’s flagship show, Last.fm Discovers.

That’s great, but who has an HD Radio?

Many in the industry are excited about the way HD Radio lets them offer pay-per-hear and subscription programming, as well as offering higher audio quality than plain old FM, but the format has languished a bit. If you’re going to upgrade from FM, you’re probably thinking about free streaming radio, an MP3 player, a smartphone that can stream music or satellite radio. CBS Interactive president David Goodman said he hopes the Last.fm station will encourage more people to buy devices with HD radio receivers, but it’s hard to imagine someone springing for a new kind of radio just to get a channel they can already get online or on their phone without purchasing additional equipment.

Nonetheless, if HD Radio becomes standard in more cars and devices (it’s on the new Zune, for instance), listeners could find they prefer Last.fm’s crowdsourced approach to the Top 40 fare and re-fried golden oldies that loop on most other stations.

The Last.fm station will be available on Last.fm and CBS Radio, as well as Yahoo and AOL Radio, which CBS powers. Or, if you’re in one of the top-four radio markets in the country and have an HD Radio, you can tune in to the Last.fm channel starting Monday, Oct. 5 on the following frequencies:

• New York: 102.7 HD2
• Los Angeles: 93.1 HD2
• Chicago: 93.1 HD3
• San Francisco: 105.3 HD3

See Also:

• Last.fm Arrives on Google-Powered Cellphones
• CBS Snaps Up Last.fm for $280 Million
• Last.fm Radio to Charge Outside U.S., U.K., Germany
• Triple-Digit Growth for Last.fm
• Warner Music Group Pulls Music From Last.fm

The startup incubator model pioneered by Y Combinator is quickly spreading across the country, with programs popping up in places well outside the Silicon Valley bubble, including Colorado and South Carolina. Earlier this week Capital Factory, an incubator based out of Austin, held its first demo day where the program’s five startups presented themselves to a number of potential investors and press. The demo day also included a discussion panel with six venture capitalists, who discussed some of the things involves in building a strong startup. We’ve embedded a video of the event below, along with a description of each startup.

Cubit Planning — Cubit Planning is a service that allows agencies to automate some of the more tedious and time consuming parts of writing NEPA documents — the documents that summarize how a project will impact the environment as part of the National Environmental Policy Act. The startup says that you can get “cut and paste ready” data for these reports in as little as five minutes.

Famigo is a gaming company that focuses on helping bring parents and their kids together. The company will soon be releasing an iPhone version of the game ‘hot potato’, which it plans to launch in the next few weeks. In the long run, the company plans to be a platform that other developers can leverage to help make family-oriented games. For more, you can see a video interview with the company here.

Hourville is a marketplace for local service providers, who can offer anything from private tutoring to haircuts and more. The site lets these service professionals create a sharable calendar so potential customers can see when they’re available, and allows customers to book online (service professionals will get Email alerts and phone calls when someone books a timeslot).

PetsMD is a new resource for pet-related health information. There are plenty of sites on the web that offer guidance for taking care of your dogs and cats, but these can be inconsistent and poorly organized. PetsMD looks to offer a comprehensive and accurate database of this data, and includes reports that have been approved by the site’s “Veterinary Review Board”. There’s also a Symptom Checker where you enter in the behavior your pet is displaying to see what the problem might be (the site recommends that you still visit a vet if there appears to be something wrong).

Sparefoot is a site that lets you rent out any extra storage you might have around your house — be it a shed in the backyard or a room in your house — and also gives more traditional storage facilities another marketplace to present their available space on. The site also features a site that lets users who are looking for storage to browser through the available offerings.

Over the course of the last ten weeks, each startup was given “up to $20,000″, along with mentorship, PR support, server usage, and legal help, while the incubator took a 5% stake in each company.

Other incubators we’ve seen recently include Y Combinator (demo day coverage here) , fbFund (coverage here), and DreamIT Ventures (coverage here).

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Dropbox, the impressive file syncing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has released a brand new version of its online interface. Today’s upgrade brings with it a number of new features that will make it much easier to manage the large number of files users often have on their Dropboxes.

Among the new features are the ability to select multiple files in the file browser and perform bulk operations on them. You can also select multiple files and have them placed into a new Zip file, which will make it easy to send multiple files at once. Other new improvements include a search feature, Gmail-style keyboard shortcuts, and a version of the site that’s been optimized for mobile phones. Of course, many people primarily use Dropbox through its desktop clients that integrate quite nicely with your operating system, but these are welcome additions for anyone who has to access their files when they’re away from their primary computer.

For those iPhone users looking to get their fix, Dropbox submitted an iPhone application to the App Store about four weeks ago which still has not been approved by Apple. This is just one of the many iPhone developers that has been waiting for more then the usual two week waiting period to get their app approved.

Dropbox launched almost exactly one year ago at TechCrunch50, and has grown quite a bit over the last year with over 1,000,000 users. Dropbox is based in San Francisco and has raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Editor’s note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. TechStars is a startup accelerator program that selects about ten companies and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from top investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders. TechStars operates annually in Boulder, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts.

TechStars has now been operating for three years. Three of the original ten companies from 2007 have already been acquired (SocialThing by AOL, Intense Debate by Automattic, and Brightkite by Limbo). In February, we covered the news that TechStars had expanded to Boston. Today, TechStars debuted nine new startups from the inaugural Boston class. The teams presented on Thursday to about 200 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Don was in attendance today and these are his notes on the startups that presented at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (MS-NERD)

TempMine is looking to change the temporary staffing market. The company believes that they’ve found a way to make the temps, employers, and agencies happier with a single solution. Temp workers create a profile on TempMine that is automatically updated as placements occur, providing more transparency and traceability to the process.  Employers can search directly for temps across the inventory of multiple agencies, finding the right fit. Agencies retain control over placements of their best temps. The temp agency only gets involved after the employer finds the exact temp they want. There is no cost to employers or temps to use TempMine, but they do take a 1% commission from the agencies. It is an $86B industry, so 1% can add up.

LangoLab is the most entertaining way to learn a new language—by watching popular TV shows and videos with subtitles. LangoLab leverages the American media machine that is constantly churning out entertaining content and then provides an engaging “watch and learn” experience complete with translations, definitions, user generated language notes, and self testing.  Many people have learned English just by watching TV with subtitles, and this is the online equivalent. English as a second language is the largest market. As an example, Rosetta Stone had $250M in revenue last year, and the total market is around $30B.

Localytics provides mobile usage data and analytics for the mobile market, similar to companies such as Flurry and Medialets. Localytics says that it has both real time and “deeper” analytics than the competitors, allowing you to slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to gain better and more immediate insight into the usage of mobile applications. They also explained that they’ve open sourced critical components so that developers can know exactly what they’re putting into their applications, and that their mobile components are highly optimized for performance. Localytics is cross platform and already supports Blackberry, Android, and iPhone applications, with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm planned for the near future. Localytics uses the Freemium model: free basic service, with paid premium services. They already have 60 customers, adding 10 new customers each week, and they just launched.

AmpIdea is working on web-enabled baby monitoring as a platform for delivery of various services such as video monitoring, sleep tracking and analysis, statistical comparison, music streaming, and even an integrated baby encyclopedia (Baby 411) which suggests techniques to soothe sleeping babies based on age. While they’re at it, they’re using wifi as the delivery mechanism for audio and video monitoring, which eliminates the static and range issues that plagues traditional baby monitors. For new parents money is no issue when it comes to safety and a good night’s sleep. The sleep scheduling monitor keeps a record of when the baby is sleeping and waking up over time. This helps the parents schedule when to put the baby down for naps and night time sleep. AmpIdea sells the monitor hardware and charges for additional services.

HaveMyShift has built a tool that allows hourly shift workers to trade shifts online. The company is using a grassroots approach and encourages employees to sign up and trade shifts with or without the blessing of the company itself.  They’re seeing strong viral adoption in the Chicago area market where, for example, 80% of Starbucks stores there already use the application. Many of the listings offer “bonus money” to tempt others who work for the same employer to pick up a shift, and last-minute shift changes can be filled with paid emergency promotional placement. HaveMyShift makes money by taking a percentage of the bonuses offered to other workers to cover a shift. Absenteeism costs US employers more than $200M every day. There are 74M hourly workers in the USA, working 888M shifts. HaveMyShift says that it’s simply facilitating a process that goes on anyway, and making it easier on everyone involved.

oneforty is creating an app store for Twitter applications, open to any developer who wants to build and sell a Twitter app. The company organizes the apps by category, allows for ratings, media coverage, profiles (showing what applications are used by various users), and the necessary e-commerce infrastructure. Oneforty takes a percentage of every sale. Funded by angel investors just 15 days after the start of TechStars, the company is also advised by Guy Kawasaki who says that oneforty founder Laura Fitton (@pistachio) was a major influence on his initial use of Twitter. Laura also taught Twitter for Business at Harvard Business School.

AccelGolf.  30,000 golfers are already using AccelGolf, after just 3 months in beta, for stroke tracking, range-finding, and personalized improvement of their golf games. The company showed off their BlackBerry and iPhone applications and explained that the heart of their system is really the community of avid golfers who are now connecting and building their own social network. AccelGolf offers personalized improvement tips by analyzing strokes of golfers who are just slightly better than you, and presenting areas for improvement based on your past performance.  AccelGolf suggests which club to use, and where to place the shot, based on your past performance on a specific course. In one example the company showed the iPhone application calculating odds based on past performance for landing a risky shot over a sand trap on a dog leg left. AccelGolf already has 70% of all golf courses loaded in their system. They use the GPS on your phone to determine your position and calculate distance to the pin.

Baydin uses email, and the words in the email, to create keywords to search for other relevant information. It is similar to Xobni, but goes beyond email data and searches all the files on your hard drive, and document repositories across your corporate network. It automatically launches the search in the background while you are reading the email, and presents the relevant results in a side panel in Outlook. The founder used an example from his first job where he designed a USB circuit board. He didn’t know that five other divisions had already designed similar boards. Baydin would have found references to this and saved him the effort of reinventing the same board. Baydin is an Outlook plug-in so it is easy to draw comparisons to Xobni here, but Baydin seems to be more focused on unlocking hidden corporate knowledge vs.. analyzing email that you’ve already received.

Sensobi bills itself as a personal relationship manager (PRM) and also reminds me a lot of Xobni , but it goes beyond email and looks at phone calls and other activity on your phone contact list. In practice, it’s a BlackBerry address book replacement that shows you the last time you communicated with your contacts, who’s falling off your radar, and who you need to get back to quickly. You can set a reminder for each contact to remind you to connect with them within a specific time interval. It does this by analyzing the email, contacts, text messages, and phone calls on your Blackberry and then presenting your contacts in a relationship-focused view. For any contact you can see the last several communications of any kind with them. The team edition takes this one step further and allows co-workers to share and leverage a unified view of communications with each contact. Sensobi uses the Freemium model, with paid premium services for $50 or $100 per year. Over 6,000 downloads in just 6 weeks, while still in beta.

TechStars plans to bring about a dozen of the 19 companies from Boulder and Boston to San Francisco on September 30th for a “best of” repeat performance. Here is coverage of the San Francisco TechStars event from last year.

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A few minutes ago we published a post about Facebook’s new Desktop Notifications app for Mac — a very slick desktop client that lets you monitor your Facebook notifications from your Mac desktop. We’ve been poking around the app’s page a bit more, and we may have stumbled upon something even more exciting: a directory of Prototype Facebook apps. You’ll notice that the page includes an option to “Browse More Prototypes”, which currently leads to a blank page.

At this point there are two possibilities: Facebook either has an internal directory of Facebook applications that are tested by employees and a bug let us access Desktop Notifications, or it’s preparing to give everyone the chance to try out these new experimental apps, while clearly specifying that they are an “experimental feature built by a Facebook engineer” so that it doesn’t have to worry about offering support for them. Given that the Desktop Notifications app has been public for a while now and Facebook hasn’t pulled it, I’m guessing the latter.

This would be similar to a model that Google has adopted with Gmail Labs, which it launched last summer and has led to a number of useful features. And it’s a model that would be perfect for Facebook, which is well known for running marathon ‘hackathon’ sessions during which its engineers cook up new features over the course of a few all-nighters.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It’s a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised.

The U.S. government pilot program will allow people to interact with various government websites using an OpenID or an Information Card, he nation’s information technology officer will announce Wednesday. These are two of the most popular emerging technologies that let web users manage their identities across multiple websites.

Under the new program, which will go into effect in the coming weeks, people will be able to sign in, request information, participate in forums and build user profiles on the government’s websites without having to set up a new user account. Anyone will be able to interact with the government sites using credentials provided to them by Yahoo, Google, AOL, VeriSign or PayPal, among others.

The pilot  is scheduled to be announced by the U.S. government CIO Vivek Kundra at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning.

The win here for the user is twofold.

First, you’ll have fewer logins and passwords to manage — your OpenID is a skeleton key that gets you in to every site. It eliminates the scenario where you’ll have to create one user account to interact with Homeland Security, another to access housing records, and another to ask a question about healthcare. Second, OpenID and the other technologies that support it afford you a high level of control over exactly how much information about you gets shared with the site you’re logging in to. Those who only want to pass along the minimum can do so, and those who want to build a fullblown user profile can do so, as well.

This initiative is a major step toward opening government services and making public data accessible on the web, according to Chris Messina, an OpenID board member and the CEO of Citizen Agency.

“The U.S. government taking real steps to adopt open technologies has the potential to enhance and simplify citizen engagement,” Messina said. Because it has blessing of the administration’s top techie, he stressed, “This isn’t just some little skunkworks project off to the side.”

It also comes at a time when public discourse over issues like health care reform, global warming and education are reaching a fever pitch and many citizens are itching to have their questions answered or their grievances heard.

The government agencies participating in this program are the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). All of their websites will begin accepting OpenID and InfoCard credentials within the coming weeks.

That’s only a handful of government agencies, but the OpenID Foundation, the nonprofit governing body that oversees the growth of the open source technology, hopes Wednesday’s announcement will kick off a domino effect across Washington, according to board member David Recordon, who now works at Facebook.

“For us, this is a helpful way of saying, ‘Hey all of you other government agencies, if you’ve been wondering what you have to do to adopt these technologies and increase public participation, here’s a stake in the ground you can point to that will help you get up to speed more rapidly,’” Recordon said.

OpenID is a digital identity standard that lets people use a single ID, like a Google username or an AOL profile, to log in to multiple websites. Several major companies are already OpenID providers, including Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace, and Microsoft. Facebook is expected to become a provider soon.

InfoCard is a similar standard, championed by Microsoft and Equifax, to help users manage their digital identities.

However, the new pilot program won’t allow users to log in using credentials from just any ID provider. People will only be able to use OpenID or InfoCard credentials provided by the ten companies in the pilot program: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, CitiGroup, Privo, Equifax and Wave Systems.

These companies have undergone a certification process — designed by the Information Card Foundation, the OpenID Foundation and the federal government — that guarantees certain privacy safeguards. For instance, the sites have to use SSL to handle logins, and they have to provide psuedonymous identifying information so the government can’t correlate user identities (and track a single user’s behavior) across multiple agency websites.

This trust framework is there to reassure to the public, says Recordon. “You shouldn’t have to sacrifice security and privacy to participate in open government,” he says.

Messina contrasted OpenId to Facebook Connect, the popular social network’s way of letting users log in to other sites such as news sites using their Facebook ID. Comments on that site can then be shared on a user’s Facebook page.

“Facebook Connect spews user data all over the net, but when it comes to the government, that’s the last thing you want,” Messina said. “Using OpenID, if you don’t want to reveal any information about who you are, you are completely pseudonymous.”

The feds plan to start small. One plan is to let users of the National Institute of Health website — which is full of detailed medical information — to save their research by bookmarking articles, without the government having any idea who actually controls a given account.

While that may not seem like a huge step, Messina says federal agencies are good at adopting what works at other agencies.

“Once we get a few successes going, this will happen very quickly,” Messina said.

Additional reporting by Ryan Singel.

See Also:

• As Facebook Connect Expands, OpenID’s Challenges Grow
• Facebook Throws its Weight Behind OpenID
• And Data for All: Why Obama’s Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov’t …
• The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?
• What Obama Is Learning from Facebook, Google and Ideo
• Gov 2.0 Summit – Co-produced by TechWeb & O’Reilly Conferences …
• OpenID Foundation website
• Get an OpenID

Steve Jobs returned to a standing ovation at Apple’s annual iPod event today, where Apple introduced version 3.1 of the iPhone OS and the next version of iTunes. With iTunes 9, Apple introduces a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 30,000 premade ringtones for $1.29 in iTunes. Version 9 of iTunes has also seen a major redesign. The application and the iTunes store now look much cleaner. Apple also introduced ‘iTunes LPs’ that will bring liner notes and artwork to digital albums (the much rumored ‘cocktail’ feature), as well as an app management for the iPhone and iPod touch that is built in to iTunes.

Sponsor

Note: we will continue to update this post until the end of the event.

iTunes 9: App Management, iTunes LPs, Extras

During the presentation, Jobs stressed that the Genius feature in iTunes will now be applied to other areas in iTunes. Jobs also announced that Apple has now received over 27 million libraries from its uses, each with about 2,000 songs. Building on top of this database, Apple is introducing ‘Genius mixes’ in iTunes 9. You can now basically create Pandora-like radio stations with the music you already own by giving iTunes a few songs or artists to start out with.

The iTunes store is also getting a make-over, though the most important new feature here is that Apple is introducing ‘iTunes LPs’ – the much rumored ‘Cocktail’ feature that will bring artwork and liner notes and other ‘memorabilia’ back to digital music (as long you purchase it through iTunes, of course). Apple is also extending this concept to movies and will bring DVD extras to movies in the iTunes store.

The store itself now looks a lot cleaner, and it does feature the rumored ability to send out tweets and Facebook status updates about songs.

We will have a closer look at the new iTunes and iPhone 3.1 update once it launches later today.

Home Sharing

In addition, Apple announced that users can now share songs, movies, and TV shows with up to 5 authorized computers in a household. Apple always allowed users to share songs on a local network, but this new features takes this a bit further as it also allows users to automatically transfer purchases between different computers on a home network.

Manage iPhone Apps in iTunes 9

iPhone and iPod touch users will also be happy to hear that iTunes now allows you to manage your apps directly in iTunes, making it far easier to arrange icons on the small screen than every before. iTunes will now give you an overview of all the pages you have filled with apps on the iPhone and lets your reorganize those apps right from within iTunes. You can also move a complete page around.

iPhone Games

During the second part of the event, Apple gave iPhone and iPod game developers a chance to showcase a number of new games, including the upcoming iPhone version of Madden 2010, Riddim Ribbon (a new take on the Guitar Hero/Tap Tap Revenge music genre and maybe the most interesting game demoed today), Assassin’s Creed, and Nova, a new first-person shooter from Gameloft.

Discuss

The annual desert art festival, this year themed “Evolution,” once again showcased human ingenuity, creativity, and of course, that all important element, fire.

Beatlemania is back — and in the age of media disruption, that means the long-awaited, digitally remastered version of Beatles songs set to go on sale Wednesday are already available as illegal downloads on BitTorrent and other file sharing networks.

The remastered Beatles tracks surfaced on a private BitTorrent tracker over the long weekend, according to BigChampagne. They then inevitably spread to publicly available torrent trackers such as The Pirate Bay, where people are sharing them as one big file and as individual albums (screenshot below). A Wired.com source confirmed that someone posted the remastered Beatles catalog on Monday on the Demonoid private BitTorrent service, where the mono and stereo versions are available in a variety of file formats.

Does this mean it is time to hope again that long-overdue legal digital downloads of The Beatles will be finally be available tomorrow?

The stars seem to be aligning well for that eventuality: Apple is holding a music-related event in San Francisco Wednesday. Also Wednesday: The heavily promoted The Beatles: Rock Band goes on sale.

Squabbling between stakeholders has kept The Beatles out of digital music stores, although, of course, it has long been possible to “share” digital tracks ripped from CDs. But the existence now of high-quality remastered tracks give The Beatles’ label (Apple Corps.), the band’s former label EMI, and Apple’s iTunes a new opportunity to exploit this digital bounty in a big way. Alternatively, they could leave it to file sharers to control the distribution channels, as they have in the past.

We’ve made confident (and incorrect) predictions about this before, so we are familiar with a bit of egg on the face. But, it has to be said: The Beatles and their labels would have to be crazy not to capitalize on this week’s hype to announce their music’s availability in iTunes. And there’s no better way to make that announcement than at an Apple event.

In November of last year, as rumors about The Beatles and iTunes swirled for the umpteenth time, Paul McCartney told fans not to expect it to happen any time soon. But Apple Corps., EMI and the other Apple have had almost a year to work it out. ”Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend,” wrote John Lennon. “I have always thought that it’s a crime, so I shall ask you once again.”

See Also:

• McCartney: No Beatles on iTunes in the Near Future
• Apple/Beatles Deal on Valentine’s Day?
• Apple (Most Likely) Scores Beatles for iTunes Store
• Jackson’s Death Puts Lucrative Beatles Copyrights in Play
• Report: Beatles Eye Rock Band, Guitar Hero
• Report: Beatles’ Rock Band Royalties Could Reach $40 Million
• The Beatles: Rock Band Set for Sept. 9, Includes Beatles-Style Guitar Controllers
• Rock Band Crowdsources Song Creation
• Beatles Version of Rock Band to Offer Unprecedented Gameplay
• Apple Corp., MTV Announcing Beatles, Rock Band Deal