Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we've heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay's Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos. Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale. Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.

Regular readers will know my love for all things location. In particular, these check-in location-based services fascinate me, mainly because I see them as a bridge between social networks as we've known it, and actual social interaction in the real world. Foursquare has been my app of choice over the past year (it launched almost exactly a year ago at SXSW). But the latest version of Gowalla has me thinking about switching sides. At the very least, I'll be using both at all times now. Gowalla version 2.0 for the iPhone just hit the App Store today. With it, you'll notice a few different things. First and foremost, the overall look has been updated from a sort of Army green, to a more subtle light green that is much easier on the eyes. More significantly, the toolbar has been reworked so that now social activity is front and center when you load the app, while your own activity is the last tab. Both of these changes are things I've complained about since day one with Gowalla, so they're certainly welcome. But that's not why I'm excited for the app. I'm excited because it takes the idea of the check-in and extends it.

Newly independent Aol is still struggling with the fate of Bebo, the social network they acquired for $850 million in 2008. No one argues that Aol overpaid for Bebo. And the social network has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was acquired to just 14.6 million today (Comscore worldwide). But even so, Bebo clearly has some value on the open market. Despite that value, Aol's best financial option for Bebo will likely be to abandon it rather than sell it, say corporate tax experts we've spoken with.

With the iPad hitting pre-order in two days and shipping in April, it's important to think about when and why to buy the iPad. Based on our understanding of the product lifecycle and expected moves by Apple's competitors, we foresee big changes in the ultraportable landscape with the ultraportable/netbook as we now know it mutating - or branching - into a new species of media oriented Win7 and Android devices. Here's what we can expect. April 3, 2010 - Big launch. Light crowds at the Apple Store. This isn't huge-huge. It's medium-huge and I don't think you're going to see an army of the pasty arriving at your local shop clamoring for iPads. This is Apple's wait and see product, although I don't doubt between 3-5 million won't wait and see in 2010. May-June 2010 - Chinese knock-offs will flood the market and we'll see a nice collection of weird, mutated slates hitting the more esoteric sites. Nothing major and no big sellers. Summer 2010 - Dell and HP release their devices. Dell's is called the Mini 5 AKA the Streak and HP's as of yet unamed. These guys will wait until the waters have been fully tested before they move with their devices.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings. But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking. Editor's note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website.

Eyeblaster, an online advertising firm, has filed for a $115 million IPO according to a recent SEC filing. This is actually Eyeblaster's second bid for a $115 million IPO — they filed for one at the same price early in 2008, before the IPO market dried up. The company makes a variety of products, including MediaMind, which is an ad serving and campaign management tool. Last year the company earned $65.1 million in revenue, up from $44.7 million in 2007. The New York-based company was founded in 1999 and has 36 offices around the world.

While California and New York tend to get the most attention as technology hubs, other states are quietly hosting their own vibrant communities around technology and innovation. Utah is one of these states. Utah is home to tech giants Omniture (which was acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion), Novell, Symantec. And today, Utah is getting its very own startup incubator, BoomStartup, which is a seed capital and mentor-focused investment program for web and software start-ups based in Utah. Based in Orem, Utah at the Canyon Park Technology Center (the original site of WordPerfect Corporation), BoomStartup is a full-time program that will run from May to August and provides each selected company with seed capital (up to $15,000), mentoring from entrepreneurs and technologists, free office space and resources, and education that takes them through the various steps of getting a tech startup off the ground. For its first rounds, the organization will choose eight startups to participate in the program. Applicants for BoomStartup must have a founding team (two or more individuals) and an idea with a focus on web, mobile, software, and non‐hardware tech. Startups can apply here.

Google launched a new service today in from its Labs called Google Reader Play. It is a more visual way to browse through the most popular items being saved and shared on Google Reader. When you launch it, you are presented with a large photo, video, or text excerpt on the main part of the screen, and can flip through by clicking on arrows or selecting an item from the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen. Google Reader Play doesn't require you to sign in, but if you do then you can star, share, and like items, and it starts to recommend things to you based on what your friends share, star, and like in Google Reader. The user interface seems to borrow a lot from StumbleUpon, with its concept of randomly flicking through the best stuff on the Web. In particular, it's very similar to StumbleVideo, except it includes more than just videos. It is very image-heavy. The user interface reminds me of some elements of enjosythin.gs as well in the way that it presents images and text excerpts in a blown-up manner. The arrows are very Fast Flip, another Labs experiment for the Google News in making magazine and newspaper articles more visually browsable.

IT software giant CA has acquired cloud monitoring startup Nimsoft for $350 million according to a release issued today. Nimsoft offers performance monitoring software to businesses. CA is making a big move towards the cloud. The company just bought up 3Tera, Cassatt, NetQoS and Oblicore.

Today during a panel on disruptive game platforms at GDC's GamesBeat, a panel of gaming execs took the stage to talk about the current situation in gaming. The standout speaker so far has been hi5 President and CTO Alex St. John, who has not pulled any punches in his criticisms of Facebook and other companies. Moments ago, he just attacked Zynga, calling its games mediocre and saying that its success stemmed from spamming users. Here's what he said (paraphrased): "Zynga makes mediocre games. What Zynga discovered is that Facebook had left an opening for spam. They acquired a lot of audience from a security loophole that Facebook has since closed. And they aren't social. Their only social game is Poker — it's the only one that you can chat in. All subsquent games are turn based and spread over days."

If you're excited about the mysterious array of special Foursquare badges promised for this year's SXSW, then you'll probably want to skip this post. Otherwise, read on. A site dedicated to Foursquare badges appropriately called Foursquarebadg.es has taken advantage of a technical glitch this morning to identify 15 special badges that will be available during this year's SXSW conference, which starts this week in Austin, Texas.

When Blippy launched a few months ago, the idea was to get the site up there as bare-bones as possible so it was simple to people. That makes sense since the idea of sharing your credit card transaction data was (and remains) highly controversial. But despite the controversy, users have embraced Blippy. So now it's time to give it a fresh coat of paint — and a new privacy feature. Today, Blippy has undergone a massive redesign. Previously, Blippy was a stream of your friends' transactions and little else. Now, it's much more robust. In fact, it looks very similar to the most recent redesign of Facebook. You'll notice the new update indicators next to the logo that get badged with a number when there is an update. You'll also notice a search box front and center (for now, this is only to search for businesses or users).

No wonder Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement over its Android phones. In the three months between October and January, Android's overall share of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. rose 4.3 points to 7.1 percent, according to mobile market share data released by comScore.  Android showed the biggest single gain of any of the top five smartphone platforms.  Apple's share was virtually flat at 25.2 percent (up 0.3 percent), while RIM's Blackberries saw a 1.7 percent gain to 43 percent.

2009 TechCrunch50 winner Redbeacon, a service that pairs consumers with service providers, is releasing a number of new features today, launching a distribution relationship and sharing key data from their beta trial. The 50,000 foot view is, this startup has legs. Users go to Redbeacon and search for real world service providers (housekeepers, plumbers, handyman, personal trainers, etc.). The service sends you firm quotes from local service providers, based on price and other factors, such as previous reviews and expertise with the specific job you want done. You can book an appointment online, and Redbeacon takes a 10% fee from the service provider. The service first went live in the San Francisco bay area in October, and now has thousands of local service providers.

Yesterday brought news that Facebook is planning to launch its location offering at its f8 conference in the end of April. In first reporting the news, the New York Times noted that "the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla." From what we're hearing, that's true — because they could be using some of those services to federate check-ins. How do we know? Because it appears that a Facebook employee has been showing the app around to friends. One person who has seen it notes that the icon for the location feature has a pushpin on a map. This was apparently a beta version of an app, but the functionality, if Facebook chooses to go with it, would likely be built into the massively popular Facebook iPhone app.

In the second installment of a series of open interviews with government leaders, YouTube is going to field questions to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, following the launch of the National Broadband Plan next Tuesday (The FCC is the federal agency that oversees all elements of the U.S. communications sector). The plan aims to connect all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

During the GamesBeat keynote at GDC today, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman took the stage to showcase the company's game streaming technology, which allows gamers to play high quality 3D games without a console — OnLive does all of the intense rendering in the cloud, then streams it back to a lightweight client that will work on nearly any computer (it will work on TVs as well with an adapter). We've been hearing about the service for quite a while now (as well as its competitor, OTOY), but now OnLive finally has a solid release date: June 17, 2010. At launch, the service will be available in the 48 contiguous states. The service will have a $14.95 per month base service fee, and then users will purchase games and rentals on an a la carte model on top of that. You'll be able to purchase multiple months at a time to get a discount on the service. As a special for early users, OnLive is going to waive the service fee for three months for the first 25,000 users to pre-register at this page.

One of the most detailed 3-D mapping apps on the iPhone is UpNext, which lets you click on 3-D buildings and see a list of the businesses and offices inside. Up until now, however, it only covered New York City. A new update adds three new cities: Boston, Washington, D.C., and Austin (just in time for SXSW, of course). The Austin map won't be available until later tonight, where it will appear in the app's city selection screen. UpNext lets you zoom around the city in a very Google Earth-like fashion, search for restaurants, bars, and stores.

Weebly, the startup that allows users to build rich websites using a straightforward drag and drop interface, is about to get a lot more colorful. The site has opened a new Theme Community, allowing any of its 3.5 million users to submit their own themes for use by other Weebly members. To help launch the new feature, Weebly is holding a contest where it's giving $10,000 to the top submitted design, as determined by a panel of professional designers. This is a pretty big deal for Weebly. Up until now, users have had around 80 themes to choose from, which pales in comparison to the number of themes available for some other site building platforms, like WordPress. You've always been free to use your own custom CSS styling, but many of the site's users are using Weebly specifically because they don't want to have to deal with that sort of thing. Now they'll have a lot more variety to choose from, with no mucking around in CSS required.

Two years ago customer support startup Get Satisfaction turned its ear to Twitter to help its clients monitor Twitter for mentions of brands. Get Satisfaction makes a network of customer support forums where customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product. Companies can also claim their board and put their own employees on to moderate the boards. Tapping into the conversations taking place Twitter and other social media sites is now integral to brands and customer support, as we've recently seen with Southwest Airlines. Get Satisfaction is extending its social media coverage today by rolling out the ability to add a support tab to Facebook Fan pages. As companies turn to Facebook Fan Pages to connect with customers, consumers are increasingly voicing their issues with a particular product or brand on the brand's Facebook page. But often these complaints or opinions can get lost in the stream. That's where Get Satisfaction comes in. The startup now allows brands to create a tab on their fan pages, which can be a portal for consumers to express their opinions, complaints or issues with the brand or product.

Facebook-based mobile app directory Mplayit is launching a new way to discover mobile apps today: App Gurus. The new feature draws recommendations from experts in the mobile space. The experts, which include blogs and technology writers, will rate and comment on apps in Mplayit’s catalogs. Last year, Mplayit launched its Facebook app that allows users to discover, share and recommend a variety of mobile apps back in November and covers apps available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Mobile (Java) devices. Mplayit’s directory of apps includes a dedicated page for each app where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from various app markets, including Apple's App Store and the Android Market. Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site.

You might want to take a different approach when shopping for a 3D TV than a standard HDTV. Instead of just looking at the picture quality, you should also take a serious look at the brand's 3D glasses. Some show some clear advantages to purchase that brand's 3D TV and until there's a standard format for 3D glasses, each brand requires its own unique glasses, thereby locking you into that manufacturer's products. Yeah, it's a bit messy right now. Click through for details on all of them.

Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting. Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. Editor's note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com.

Brands are engaging in the conversations that are taking place on social media sites now more than ever. But in order to tap into the social conversations that are taking place on the web, brands and agencies need to have a powerful tool to track, measure and engage sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others. One of the leaders in the social media tracking space, Radian6, is launching a new Engagement Console to streamline this process. A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.

I’ll say this about Brazilian startups—they’re certainly not dominated by Web copycats. Perhaps it’s because there aren’t a huge number of Brazilians who’ve made it big in the Valley transmuting the local way of doing things back home or because there’s not a lot of US venture capital flooding into the country. Perhaps it’s the country’s noted isolationist streak, or perhaps it was just the startups I lucked into meeting. But whatever the reason I saw fewer “We’re-the-fill-in-the-blank-Web-company-of-Brazil” ventures than I have in any other market to which I’ve traveled in the last few years. Many Brazilians I spoke with said it’s just part of their nature, that they’re not competitive (tell that to fans of opposing soccer teams), and that they’d rather chase “green field” - or, as they say, "blue ocean" - opportunities. See, they don’t even use the same color to describe opportunities. No matter the reason, after nearly 30 weeks of emerging market travel it was refreshing to go to a country and see things that are unequivocally new, even if risky and a bit, well, wacky. To make the point, here are three of my favorites: Companies that make bugs, houses and diamonds.