TechCrunch

• As The DOJ Pounces, Google Makes Book Search Even Better - Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.
• Google Voice Now Lets You Change Your Number. It’ll Cost You $10. - When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn't think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there's an option to change it. The "Change your number" functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There's a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.
• Fitnio: Finally, An iPhone Exercise App That Gives You Control Of Your Music - Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone's integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there's been one annoyance that's aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you've launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch. Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone's music library. In order to play music as you ran, you'd have to first open up the phone's iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone's multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.
• Dice Reports Murky Waters For Tech Jobs - After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning's continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com. Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May's year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor's unemployment rate for the "Computer and Mathematics sector," (the area best associated with the tech sector). June's unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months.
• The Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco - July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party. There was confusion over the ownership of some pizza, and a riot almost ensued. From the Dovecote Blog:

  Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?” Kosuke and Paul look confused. Kosuke: Are you joking? Is this a joke? Woman: No this is definitely NOT a joke. I want to know who you are and why you’re eating our pizza.

• Twitter Makes Hashtags More #Useful - You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a "#" which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags. For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone's home page last April.
• One More Thing: The New Facebook iPhone App Will Allow Video Uploads - Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there was one thing Facebook developer Joe Hewitt didn't mention yesterday, and it's a big one: Video uploads from the iPhone 3GS. Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, "3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go -- didn't plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code."
• Google Blog Search Takes Two Steps Forward, One Step Back - Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site's frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it's subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site. That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn't been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn't been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.
• FriendFeed Makes Its Search Results Real-Time Too - Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That's because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment. Enter any query into FriendFeed's search box and you'll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog.
• Google App Engine Stalled Out For About 6 Hours Today - A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was "seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates." He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into "unplanned maintenance mode" — over 4 hours later, it's still not back up. That's a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups' web apps. What's worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.