Beema, a 3D animation studio that has been working in the corporate space for the last decade, has released a new platform in beta that allows users to generate 3D speaking avatars with only a phone call.

During signup, users enter their phone numbers and carrier information, which is tied to their account. From then on Beema makes things easy - you simply call their free 800 number which prompts you to leave a voice message. A few minutes after leaving the message, Beema sends you a SMS text and email containing a link to your rendered video, which you can distribute as you see fit.

For the time being users are limited to Beema’s avatars, which consists of hundreds of possible choices that range from 3D wizards to Orson Welles. In the future users will be able to upload their own images, and the company hopes to introduce copryrighted characters as an option (for a small fee).

Beema isn’t going to win any awards for originality - there are a number of avatar sites that have very similar features, including Vidiator and Oddcast’s Voki platform. But the site does win points for its simplicity, forgoing Flash (which is standard for most avatars) for the standard 3GP video format, which gives users much more freedom with their videos (and also works on the iPhone). On the other hand, there’s no easy way to embed a video - there is no widget available, so you’ll have to upload your video to YouTube yourself.

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A while ago, CG’s Matt Hickey got a packet of screenshots of a squat green iPod from an anonymous source. That same green iPod got us a C&D from Apple and was finally proven to be the iPod Nano. Well, Matt just got another packet of photos and aside from a few discrepancies with might just be looking at a mock-up of Apple’s marketing collateral for the new iPhone. What does it include? GPS, 3G speeds, a front facing camera for video chat, and iChat for — along with iChat for Windows to complement the new hardware.

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Will bus stop and subway advertising to the tune of an estimated $250,000 per month help Google gain search market share against Russia’s home grown leader Yandex? The company is launching “”Moscow 2.0,” which includes over 5,000 outdoor advertisements across Moscow.

Yandex, with nearly 50% market share, is preparing a Nasdaq IPO. Google has around 31% market share.

Translated version of the story is here, and see the Quintura blog.

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But Loren Feldman, of 1938 Media, (the guy who always seems to be at Michael’s house) is going to be producing a weekly video for Cnet. Dan Farber, the bravest man in newsdom, is also trusting him with a blog. Congratulations.

I hope it involves puppets. Lots of puppets.

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Let me just say before I begin that I think everyone should come up with their own names. I could never understand why companies pay naming consultants to come up with empty product or company monikers that nobody can remember anyway. (Unless you are Altria, and you just want people to forget that you are really Phillip Morris). Well, now companies can ask strangers on the Internet to name their product. I’m not sure this is a much better idea, but it is more fun.

Crowdsourcing startup Kluster (which launched in February), publicly opened up a new site today called NameThis. It works pretty much like Kluster, except it is only for coming up with names for products or startups. A company pays $99 to put up a challenge describing the product or entity to be named, the community suggests names and votes for the best ones by investing their allotted ‘Watts.” The people who come up with, influence, or invest the most in the top three names split $80 among themselves, and Kluster keeps the rest as its fee.

There are obvious problems with this and with crowdsourcing in general (for instance, read about the implosion at Cambrian House). But one thing this has going for it is simplicity. Anyone can come up with a name. (Anyone can steal a name too, but that is another issue).

The site just launched today, so most of the “namestorming” challenges are just for fun. They include thinking up a better name for the Verizon G’zOne, Hot & Crusty Bakery, the Chevy Nova, Wolf Blitzer, and the Microsoft Zune. Some contenders so far: Divr (for Verizon), the Chevy Supernova, Wülf Blitzkreig (sic), and the Microsoft Rune (spelled correctly, but would be more apropos if spelled Ruin). There is even one real company that needs a name for a universal inbox service.

Just to see what people would come up with., I asked Kluster to put up a challenge to rename our recently launched video site TechCrunch Elevator Pitches. We went through an internal debate of our own before settling on that name. And some of our rejected candidates, like CrunchTime and PitchCrunch, have already come up independently on NameThis. There are also some we didn’t think of: IdeaCrunch and LaunchCrunch. Most of the rest are subpar. But you only need one good name.

Did we pick the best name or is the crowd coming up with better options? (Not that we are going to change the name. This is purely an exercise.)

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More details on the some of the interactive new media properties being created by Katalyst Media (the production company created by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg).

Last week Kutcher and Goldberg gave me a preview of some of the new properties and the business model behind it. Next week the two will be meeting with a number of big media buyers at Internet Week in New York to show them five or so of the new properties.

One of the properties they’ll be showcasing: Blah Blah Blah (to be at the domain Blahgirls.com per the image above, but the site is not yet live). It will be a daily cartoon gossip show hosted by “Britney, Tiffany and Krystle” that aims to be “like if Beavis & Butthead were drama queens, had PMS, cat fights, fashion reports, shopping sprees, and of course, lots of juicy…GOSSIP!” The show will be set in Krystle’s bedroom - the preview version I saw had them watching a real video on a cartoon television and commenting on it. And yes, it was pretty funny.

Katalyst is also saying they’ll be packaging the episodes for television as well, and have a deal with a network in place. Comedy Central or MTV are the obvious guesses, but I actually don’t know who they’re partnering with.

We should have more next week.

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If more people are searching on Google for “Obama” than “McCain” does that mean he is more likely to win the election?

Not every voter in the U.S. uses Google, or even uses the Internet, for that matter. But enough of the population does use Google that its search patterns cannot be ignored by either candidate, the press, or anyone interested in the outcome of the election. Fortunately, Google lets anyone see the relative popularity of different search terms on Google Trends. The screen shot above is from a comparison I just did between “Obama” and “McCain” in the U.S. over the past 12 months. If search volume is predictive of election results and the elections were held today, Obama would win.

More traditional polls come to the same conclusion. A CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted June 4 and 5, shows Obama ahead by 47 percent to McCain’s 43 percent (Ralph Nader has 6 percent). And a Gallup poll shows a tighter race, with Obama at 46 percent verses McCain at 45 percent. Obviously, it is a close race and sentiment can go either way between now and November. And there is a likely correlation between search volume and news mentions, which are also compared in the graph above (by pulling in data from Google News).

What is great about Google Trends, though, is that you can drill down by state. An in-depth analysis of how predictive Google Trends was during the primaries (by Michael Giuffrida, a student in Virginia) shows that in at least half the cases for the Democratic primaries, Google Trends did a good job predicting the outcome. Update: Just to clarify, the analysis looks at both Democratic and Republican primaries. For the Democratic primaries 37 states were analyzed, and five of those had to be thrown out because of insufficient data. Of the remaining 32, Google Trends correctly predicted 27 of the primary elections, or an 84 percent success rate. For the Republican primaries, 29 elections were analyzed and Google Trends correctly predicted only about half (the data wasn’t as good for a variety of reasons).

Below are two of his comparisons of Google Trends and actual election results in Missouri (where Obama won) and Florida Nevada (where Clinton won). Google Trends appears to be more predictive the higher the search volume (i.e., the more data points). Some states had more searching than others, but you’d expect election-related searches to spike across the board as the general election nears. At the very least, both campaigns would be wise to use it as a sanity check on their own polling on a state-by-state basis, if they are not doing so already.

(via Slashdot).

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Recently people have been noticing that the Google favicon, the small icon in your browser’s address bar when you visit a Google site, has changed from the familiar upper-case G to a lower-case one. Google has not changed this design in over eight years, so the change caused speculation that more design changes might be afoot. Well, it turns out that the new Favicon is part of a new family of icons Google has designed for use in different situations, from its logo to the browser favicon to mobile applications. Marissa Mayer explains on the Google Blog:

The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.

Above are some of the different candidates out of the hundreds that Google tried out. And below are the current five. I’m just glad Google didn’t go with the rainbow theme. It would have been way too unicorn. The favicon could still change and Google is looking for feedback as the design process keeps on evolving. Maybe it should try a crowdsourcing approach/contest to coming up with the new icon, and allow people to actually submit their own entries.

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FanFare, SanDisk’s free, ad-supported content portal, has been shuttered along with their ill-fated TakeTV video solution. TakeTV was a little device that you plugged into your computer, filled up with media, and then carried to your TV. FanFare was supposed to supply exciting, free content for the player. Anyone who knows anything about the average consumer would tell you that making someone use SneakerNet to watch Iron Man bootlegs on their TV is a losing proposition.

From the original release:

The first U.S-based content partners on the Fanfare BETA platform include: CBS, Jaman.com Inc., Showtime Networks, Smithsonian Networks, The Weather Channel and TV Guide Broadband. Among the programs available immediately are CSI, Survivor China, Dexter and Sleeper Cell.

Poor FanFare. It never even made it out of beta.

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Our visit the other day to the GooglePlex was extraordinary on a number of levels. At its simplest, the Gmail group opened its kimono to bloggers and what’s left of the mainstream media - full stop. We were asked not to live video the announcements of Gmail Labs, and to clear photographs with the team in case we accidentally revealed some strategic details. But the tour of the Gmail team cubicles, the Google Reader unit, the spam guys, and the user testing facility was fascinating, particularly as it became clear how much was being done with a very small group of code warriors.

By contrast, when Jeff Raikes‘ replacement as president of the Microsoft Business Division, Stephen Elop, took over the unit encompassing Office, Dynamics CRM, and Unified Communications groups, ComputerWorld estimated he controlled at least 26,000 workers responsible for generating fully a third of Microsoft’s 2007 revenue. Certainly Gmail doesn’t represent all of Google’s Apps (Office) investment, but enough of it to make clear how devastating this nimble strike force is and how catastrophically it can undermine Office.

The “features” rolled out in Gmail Labs range from trivial to obvious, but the power is not in what Google engineers have produced on their 20% time initiative. Rather, it’s the feedback loop that results when users can recompile Gmail with a personalized addition of such features. First, they vote with their feet, sending signals to the team not just of what they pick but how long they use it, when they discard it, and what they pick next. It’s a million-plus user testing facility for free, an easy way of extending Google’s original strategy of scaling up as usage grows, and most importantly, a wedge for the viral Greasemonkey development community that the approach aims to stabilize.

Take the first 13 or so apps and throw them out; I like adding photos to chat and bookmarks to email yet probably don’t care if they go away. Now look at the functionality exposed in these sample tools: extending chat for example, which boasts in addition to Photos tools to hide status messages and add keyboard shortcuts to things like Focus chat contact search and the fascinating Focus last chat mole. Moles, by the way, are those little Gchat windows that open up and array intelligently at the bottom of the Gmail window or can be popped out to stand alone.

Let your mind wander a little and you can see how significant this granular control of the Gmail console can become. I asked product manager Keith Coleman whether a Labs feature could remember the position of chat moles once resized and placed outside the Gmail container. Add a focus pull to your favorite mole, say the Twitter XMPP gateway, and then use a version of status removal to filter Track messages. Well, you get the idea, and so did Keith. For free. From highly motivated Plan B users.

Of course, Google is not the only cloud that can take advantage of this iterative feedback loop. On Friday’s Gillmor Gang, I asked Google API lead (and former Hailstorm architect) Mark Lucovsky whether he agreed with many that Microsoft Live Mesh was just about replication of data, or like me, that it was the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg. Factor in Coleman’s insistence that any third party API was fair game for inclusion in a Google engineer’s Gmail Labs feature, and that would by definition include Microsoft Mesh.

Coleman owns Google Reader and Gchat as part of Gmail Plus, so it seems likely that future services will tie in Apps, aid in constructing enterprise versions filtered around information aggregation, automated push services out along the XMPP bridge, and even developer tools that use the combined services to fashion bug-tracking, code generation, and collaborative project archives. Today, it’s a personalized recompiled Gmail; tomorrow, it will be extended to affinity groups around gesture-mandated dynamic builds that adjust based on behavior and proliferation of open standards.

Part of Google’s impetus to do this was to route around the instability of Greasemonkey scripts which stressed out the Javascript architecture with ad hoc strategies. But Greasemonkey will return with a vengence as soon as developers outside the company realize they can take off from these approved experiments and wire up external API’s. Quick Links, for example, could be extended with a TinyURL-like bridge to encapsulate FriendFeed conversations and export them to the Twitter or Mesh cloud, or be written into Google Reader’s new Shared Item Notes and broadcast to Gmail contacts under user control instead of the current “Friend” contact mining that damages GReader’s privacy integrity.

Inevitably, the combination of user feedback and behavior and external pirate Greasemonkey innovation will reach a boil. Ray Ozzie and Stephen Elop are on notice, and have their work cut out for them. As Lucovsky notes, Redmond is not just sitting idly by: check out Scott Guthrie’s description of Silverlight networking improvements such as Cross Domain Sockets and Background Thread Networking. But while Gmail may not have a third of Google’s revenue, they now have a hell of a lot more developers working for them than last week.

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