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When it comes to winning in the App Store, one PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple’s App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client’s applications. Yeah, that 5-star iTunes app review you saw for the once top-5 paid app Enigmo? It might not be written by a real user, but rather by Pangea Software’s PR firm. Reverb isn’t the first to try and game the user review process, but they are definitely one of the most blatant cases.

Reverb Communications is an extremely successful PR firm that claims to have “first party” and “personal” relationships with Apple. Aside from representing Pangea Software, one of the more successful App developers for the iPhone (they made Enigmo, which was featured during the Apple WWDC Keynote 2008), they also represent Harmonix (the Guitar Hero and Rock Band guys), MTV Games, and a host of iPhone game developers. Additionally, they’ve managed to do an impressive job at courting the press: clients have had iPhone apps featured in just about every major media outlet known to man, including Forbes, MTV, G4TV, NBC (in fact, all the examples were for one developer: Publisher X, which Reverb happens to own). Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 Billion of product under their watch.

Have you ever wanted to rearrange your applications on your iPhone, but ended up messing up pages of apps? Well, now there is a solution for that, and it’s called Movement. Movement essentially lets your rearrange all of your applications on your iPhone or iPod Touch, straight from your Mac. Seems too good to be true, right? Of course, there’s a catch. It requires a jailbroken iPhone.

MG Siegler wrote about iTunes 9 a few weeks ago on TechCrunch, with the possibility of app organization, but it’s all up in the air right now.

Overall, Movement is very cool. It provides a tool that many iPhone and iPod Touch users want, but under a cost of jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod Touch. Movement is developed by indie Mac developer Jeff Stieler.

As a necessity for human life, sex has been a popular topic of conversation undoubtedly since the advent of communication. And thanks to various technology, things like phone sex are a part of our culture these days. So why not explore sex with the newest emerging form of communication: Twitter? Behold, Twitt Sex.

The site is very barebones at the moment, but it appears that it is hoping to be the the adult version of Twitter. But rather than being one of the countless sites built on top of Twitter’s APIs, it looks like Twitt Sex wants to be its own contained site that simply mimics much of the Twitter functionality in its own contained environment. And it actually has its own API.

Right now, there are only 2 users of Twitt Sex and creating a new account doesn’t appear to work correctly yet. But one of the first two tweets on the service shows what it will be about. It looks like the service will let you attach sexual pictures to your tweets, which then display in others streams. That should make tweet sex (the action, not the service) decidedly more visual and interesting — and should help with that whole 140 character limit thing (though being unable to test it, I’m not sure if Twitt Sex has that same limit).

While the service’s about page has no information yet, oddly, its Terms and Conditions page seems to be from 2007. Also weird is that its Privacy Policy page makes numerous references to Twittr.com, which may look like the old name for Twitter, but it’s not (that would be Twttr). While you might assume this is just an old site that never launched, the first tweets are from today and yesterday.

I’m shocked that it has taken this long for someone to come out with a Twitter for sex. But then again, there are plenty of people out there using the regular service for that purpose. Violet Blue wrote a good overview about it back in January in the San Francisco Chronicle.

When Todd Chipman, co-founder of San Jose, CA-based Spreezio, noticed more and more merchants were going out of business where he lives and works as a result of the recession and other factors, he started thinking about ways to make shopping locally more social and personal for both buyers and sellers.

Spreezio is the startup that came out of that idea, and today Chipman is announcing that he’s not alone in thinking it’s a good one.

He has just managed to sway Rich Garwood, a President of Verizon Wireless, into leaving the company he spent 20 years working for and joining the fledgling company as COO. Enough for us take a closer look at what they’re building, even though the service is still in alpha and only expects to hit public beta sometime next month.

Spreezio basically wants to make it easier for shoppers to make deals with local merchants.

Here’s how it works: you sign up as a shopper, and browse Spreezio’s product database – over 35 million items strong according to the company – to find what you’re looking for, using the category icons or search bar. Once you’ve found a corresponding item, you can indicate how much you’d be willing to pay for it or what percentage of discount you’d expect in order to get you to go out and buy it from the merchants who can supply it. After some fine-tuning, you can send out your deal proposal to the merchant(s) Spreezio will locate on a map, and once they get back to you accepting or rejecting your proposal, you can decide if you want to make a short trip and purchase the item(s) either way.

All in all, it’s a solid idea: shoppers tell merchants what their buying terms are simply by clicking a couple of buttons on a web service, while local sellers get qualified leads and still be in a position to negotiate. Spreezio touts their service as a cure or anti-dote for the economic recession, which is evidently a bit over the top, but if it manages to get the necessary traction (which is going to be their main challenge) it could well be a big help for a lot of local merchants struggling to stay in business.

And you can could a good deal on that flat-screen TV you’ve been wanting to buy, too.

If you haven’t seen the movie (500) Days of Summer, you should, it’s a great movie. But I’m not giving anything away (that the trailerdoesn’t) by saying it’s the story of a relationship that ends for seemingly no good reason. And following the release of the documents sent to the FCC, it would seem that we’re in the midst of watching the same thing happen between two tech titans that previously had a close relationship, Apple and Google.

The statements by the two to the FCC are full of information — except for the information that Gdacted, I mean, Google, declined to release to the public. We’ve already written about some of what Google likely has in its missing portions, but the most interesting aspect of it may be why they chose not to release those portions. The answer may well be because those portions go against some of what Apple is saying, and that would put both companies in a tough position. And it would put further strain on their relationship.

This is a story of software company meets hardware company

A few years ago, much of the tech world looked at Apple and Google as the two companies that could possibly take on the Microsoft juggernaut. Apple would take on Microsoft’s heart, Windows, with its OS X. And Google would kick out its legs by taking on Office with Google Docs. The two were perhaps best suited for such a fight because each had other revenue streams to sustain a war against Microsoft (Apple with Mac hardware sales and the iPod, Google with search and more importantly, search advertising).

And the two grew closer together. In 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board. “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead,” Steve Jobssaid at the time. “Apple is one of the companies in the world that I most admire,” wrote Schmidt in a statement. Alongside Schmidt on Apple’s board was Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, who was also on Google’s board, and former Vice President Al Gore, who also was acting as a senior advisor to Google.

Apple started launching products that were closely tied to Google. iMovie could export directly to YouTube. iWeb offered easy embeds of Google Maps and AdSense ads. Apple TV got a special YouTube channel. And of course, the iPhone featured Google search as the default, made it easy to access you Gmail emails in mail, came with a YouTube application, and had a Maps application that used Google Maps and in fact, was built with the help of Google. It’s also interesting to note that the all of the YouTube integration required (and still requires) Google to encode videos in the h.264 format because the iPhone doesn’t support Adobe Flash (which is how YouTube videos play on the web).

Then there were the less obvious connections. Multiple reports now point to Apple asking Google not to include multi-touch support in the first Android-based phones, and Google complying, much to the dismay of many customers. And then there’s the unwritten agreement that the two sides apparently had stating that neither would hire one another’s workers.

Yes, when you used to think of the relationship between Apple and Google, the term “buddy-buddy” came to mind.

So what happened?

In (500) Days of Summer, when the main character, Tom, asks his girlfriend, Summer, what went wrong with her previous relationships, she responds, “What always happens. Life.” The same may well be true for Apple and Google, though seeing as they are giant companies, it may be more appropriate to replace “life” with “growth.”

While Apple and Google both benefitted from their close ties, both still existed as separate companies with their own agendas. While Apple was primarily a hardware maker, and Google an online software company, the two had few conflicts. But mobile changed all of that.

The iPhone launched in 2007, and the first Android phone the following year. Still, the two companies got along just fine. Sure, Schmidt found himself having to exit Apple board meetings when the iPhone was brought up, but both sides clearly saw it as a small price to pay for Schmidt still being on the board. But then the iPhone exploded in popularity, to the point where it’s now Apple’s second biggest business (behind Macs, ahead of iPods), and it’s certainly not crazy to think that one day it could be the biggest.

While Android phones haven’t exactly taken off compared to the iPhone, the platform is making progress and Google is poised to release another dozen or so Android phones before the end of this year. With all due respect to the BlackBerry (whose apps are generally considered to be sub-par), Android and iPhone are seen as the two mobile platforms right now. Some people are iPhone people, some are Android people. They are competitors. And so by extension, Apple and Google are competitors.

Yes, they have different models for how they want to do things in mobile. But it’s not entirely dissimilar to the Apple and Microsoft battle in the 1980s. Microsoft built an OS that they wanted to get on as many machines as possible, Apple built a hardware and software combination to provide the best controlled experience. These days, in mobile, Google is taking the quantity approach, with Apple sticking to its quality approach.

Meanwhile, outside of the mobile sphere, Google continued its growth despite an economic slowdown and decided the time was right to start branching out. And while it’s not ready yet, the announcement of Chrome OS is another element of its business that will directly collide with one of Apple’s. The impact might not be so big on Apple, but when so many parts of your businesses start to collide, one can imagine that it’s hard to stay so buddy-buddy.

And the Chrome OS bombshell had much larger fallout. It intensified and perhaps even reinvigorated the FTC’s investigation into the relationship of Apple and Google, and specifically their interlocking directorates. And then Apple rejected (or “didn’t approve” depending on who you believe) the Google Voice app, prompting an FCC investigation into the relationship between the two companies as well. A few days later, Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board.

The missing app that gets no love

But let’s not forget that before the whole Google Voice thing, Apple “requested” that another application Google made for the iPhone instead be made into a web app, Latitude. While it’s not entirely clear if Google submitted that app and Apple rejected/didn’t approve it, it really doesn’t matter. It is another example of Apple shooting down a Google app, turning one incident into a pattern. And that pattern points to something. (As does the fact that Google mentioned Apple’s “request” very publicly in a blog post.)

As we have heard from multiple Google sources, it would seem that Apple is getting paranoid about Google taking over the iPhone. Maps, YouTube and Search were apparently fine, but with new apps like Latitude and Voice, it was certainly starting to look possible that eventually Google apps would take up the entire first screen of apps on the device.

And while most companies may not mind that, and would let the customers decide, Apple is not most companies. Their stated reason for both the Latitude and Voice removals say more or less than those apps would cause confusion with consumers because they are similar to core iPhone functions (Latitude is like Maps and Voice is like the phone). And no matter how buddy-buddy Apple and Google were, no company likes the idea of another company controlling so much of its product.

Naturally, if someone else controls your product, your product may be in trouble if they pull support. Or, and I’m just speculating here, maybe Apple felt that Google was using the iPhone as a gateway drug of sorts to give users a taste of what their apps can do, get them hooked, and then getting them wanting more with more functional versions of the apps on the Android platform.

Just look at some of the examples, Gmail works on the iPhone, but it doesn’t have push support for some unknown reason. On Android, it has push support and better label support and star support, etc. Maps work on the iPhone but doesn’t feature Latitude, on Android, it does. Further, Latitude would have worked on the iPhone (and does through the web browser), but it’s a lame version. Android, which allows apps to run in the background, has the better version. Same with Google Voice, even if it was on the iPhone, it would not run in the background.

The bottom line

The real bottom line for all of this is money. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense why Apple would want to reject the Google Voice app. It actually would have made more sense if Apple worked with Google to integrate Google Voice into the iPhone, giving them more leverage over the carriers that Apple still very much relies on for its device.

While Google Voice still requires the carriers for its functionality, eventually, it’s not hard to see it having a VoIP component that bypasses the carriers. As we learned from all of the open spectrum stuff, Google clearly envisions a future where there isn’t just a handful of carriers that control all wireless access in the U.S. Instead, it wants a more open system with many different providers. And there won’t be confusing and ridiculously priced voice and data plans in their system, there will just be fairly-priced data plans.

Of course, all of that sounds great to us, but Google has an agenda too. They want all of this because they believe that easier access to the web means more people using Google, which helps their bottom line.

So why wouldn’t Apple want to help Google in shaking up the system? Because doing so would hurt its own bottom line. Where do you think Apple is making all of its money off of the iPhone? It’s making it on the subsidy that AT&T pays them every time someone buys an iPhone.

The first version of the iPhone didn’t have a subsidy, and at $600, not surprisingly, not as many people bought it. So Apple switched things up and agreed to waive the money it gets per month from AT&T contracts, in exchange for AT&T subsidizing each phone and paying Apple the difference. If AT&T (or any other carrier that eventually gets the iPhone) doesn’t exist with the outrageous rates they charge, they don’t pay Apple the huge subsidy. And if they can’t charge the ridiculous rates (which they wouldn’t be able to do and survive in Google’s dream scenario), they can’t subsidize the phone down to $200, and pay Apple the difference. If the phone isn’t $200, not as many sell. And so on…

And so now we see a few different ways in which the Apple/Google situation has become complicated. And any combination of these can certainly sour a relationship — even one that looked so promising for so long. It would seem that the story has turned to one about growth, control, and above all, money. Those aren’t exactly the things that love stories are made of.

[images: Fox Searchlight]

tweetphoto logo

I know, I know. I’m growing a bit tired of having to sift through e-mails from iPhone app developers who have seen their fruits of labor (big or small) rejected by Apple’s team of mobile software scrutinizers myself too. But I keep being amazed by the reasons Cupertino puts forward for not allowing apps into the App Store, and this is another classic example: TweetPhoto, a TwitPic competitor that lets Twitter users share photos quickly and easily, saw its first ever iPhone app barred from entry because its logo is slightly reminiscent of a Polaroid photograph.

That’s right, this is what Apple told the small startup almost 4 weeks after they put the app up for approval: “We’ve reviewed TweetPhoto and determined that we cannot post your application because it appears to include features that resemble Polaroid photographs. Polaroid has previously objected to other applications that include features that resemble Polaroid photographs, and believes that such features infringe its rights.”

Okay, but how did an app like Polarize make it into the App Store then? As TweetPhoto points out, they use the trademark Polaroid shot in their app logo as well, and furthermore, they are all about giving your photos that ‘true Polaroid look’. Compare that to TweetPhoto, which only features a mild resemblance to a Polaroid shot in its logo, something I only noticed when they pointed it out specifically.

Either way you look at it, it’s ridiculous for Apple to block TweetPhoto’s iPhone app but not Polarize. Another testament to the company’s blatantly inconsistent policies, so here’s to hoping Phil Schiller manages to fix things over there.

Here’s an innovative idea – charge users to beta test a product.

Last week I wrote about a snappy new bookmarking tool called Pinboard. The best way to describe it is Delicious before Yahoo mangled that product into an over-featured sluggish shadow of its formerly zippy self.

Founder Maciej Ceglowski, a former Yahoo and Twitter engineer, noted a surge of new account request in a blog post, noting that he was putting new resources in place to take on the new users.

Today, though, he sent out an email to people requesting accounts telling them they’ll need to pay a “small signup fee” to create a new account:

Hello,

You’re receiving this letter because you recently signed up to help beta
test Pinboard.

While we have enough testers for the time being, the site is now also open to
regular users. If you’d like to create an account, please visit the following
URL:

http://pinboard.in/signup/

You’ll need to pay a small signup fee (around three dollars) through Amazon to
create the account. This money goes towards the costs of running the site,
and the fee helps to discourage spammers.

As I make more features available, I’ll announce them on the Google group
(http://groups.google.com/group/pinboard-dev) and the site blog (http://pinboard.in/blog/).

You can also find me on IRC: irc.freenode.net #pinboard

If you find bugs while using the site, please send me an email and I’ll try
to fix them as quickly as I can.

For things that are not bugs (feature requests, critique, suggestions,
questions) please post to the Google group so that everyone can pile on.

Thanks again for joining me on this project, and happy bookmarking!

Maciej Ceglowski

This is a side project for Ceglowski, so charging a fee for new users certainly isn’t a dumb business move. And if enough people pay to use the service, maybe it will signal to him to move this front and center on his priority list. I would have done things a little differently, though – let people in for free and charge them after a week or so or shut down their account. That lets people try it out before they open their wallet.

Animoto is turning into a cult favorite web app – upload a few pictures to the service, pick some music, add some text and get a really cool video slide show back. They made my annual “can’t live without” list last year based on their obsessive desire to perfect a single product. Many, many users agree.

Last month they announced a new round of financing and turned cash flow positive. Users are flocking to their iPhone application that lets you create slide shows from events even before you get back to your computer. And soon, CEO Brad Jefferson tells me, they will let users upload video clips as well as photos to make their slide shows.

They actually showed the feature last month in a promotional video for the Webbies, which shows photos as well as short video clips.

The feature is near-ready to launch to users, Jefferson told me last week. I was on a Southwest flight with him and Wired editor Fred Vogelstein (see his recent Facebook article and a 2007 article on TechCrunch) on the way back from an event in Seattle. Jefferson showed me some of the Animoto clips with video, and even showed off a 3D product they are working on. I took the video above when we landed at Oakland airport, much to the amusement of a few late night passengers hanging out near us. Make sure you watch to the end – Vogelstein is hilarious with the 3D glasses on.

Here’s what’s great about Animoto – these clips take just a few seconds to create. Animoto does all the hard work for you. And the demo videos show clips with mixed images and short video clips put together into a seamless product. You will actually be able to create these right from an iPhone using the app, the camera and the new video functionality, and then share them with your friends and family.

Twitter has hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel, we’ve confirmed. Macgillivray is still an employee of Google, and his start date at Twitter has not yet been determined.

We’ve been sitting on the story all day and were trying to talk with Macgillivray because our understanding is that he may not have told Google that he was going to Twitter and we didn’t want to be the one’s to break the news. But the story broke on the NY Times, so I’m guessing they know all about it now.

We’ve also confirmed that Twitter is aggressively hiring across the board, including top executive spots. A number of candidates have been interviewed for the CFO job in particular.

Macgillivray, a former Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati attorney, has been a key figure in Google’s legal battles over their book scanning efforts. The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the matter.

Macgillivray is leaving Google at a crucial time. The books settlement is a key antitrust issue that needs to be handled delicately, and he was leading the charge (or, perhaps, retreat). Google will be scrambling to fill his role.

One problem Twitter has had in attracting key executives, multiple sources have told us, is the impression that they may sell the company sooner rather than later. They have told candidates that they intend to stay in it for the long haul, and don’t plan to sell any time soon.

We’ll see.

Finnish startup Linkotec is close to debuting the public beta version of dazzboard, a browser-based media manager that it says has all the goodness of iTunes but without the disadvantages of Apple’s closed environment.

Granted, we hear that a lot, but I’ve been invited to take an early peek at what they’ve been cooking and came away fairly impressed.

Dazzboard is currently invitation-only but is shooting for a Wednesday release of the public beta version. TechCrunch readers with limited patience (yes, you there) can already sign up to take it for a spin before that: 500 of you can register for an account right here. Note that the web application currently requires Windows – a Mac-compatible version is in the works – and works best when you’re using the latest Internet Explorer or Firefox browser.

With dazzboard, you can plug a wide range of mobile devices into your computer and easily transfer multimedia content like photos, videos and music to the web-based management interface, after which you can organize all your files and seamlessly share them through a variety of social networking services. It goes both ways: with the use of the ‘Dazz me’ bookmarklet you can download content from the Web to the media manager and distribute it to your favorite social network or your mobile device once it’s transferred to your account.

Dazzboard supports any portable device that can be used in mass storage or media transfer mode. The company divides the range of portable media players and mobile phones it supports into two groups: full supported devices (supported and maintained by the Dazzboard database, meaning no specific user action is required) and so-called generic devices (not fully supported by Dazzboard so handled as a generic media hub). In the latter case, it’s possible not all functionality of the media manager will work without any glitches.

All in all, dazzboard worked as advertised with the few portable devices I used to test it, and it does a great job syncing media content from and to social networks like YouTube, Flickr, etc. Of course, supporting ‘thousands of devices’ means that the company risks getting flooded with just as many device-specific support questions on a daily basis if it takes off. There’s a reason why closed platforms sometimes win.