What site has jumped five spots between August and September to become the 13th most visited site in the US, leapfrogging properties like New York Times and Viacom Digital? Here are some hints: It's listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in Israel and its R&D center is located in Jerusalem. It has raised funding from high-profile angel investors Dr. Yossi Vardi and Ron Conway. Can you name the company?

  BEIJING, CHINA-- Kai-Fu Lee may have left his post as president of Google China, but he didn’t go very far. While still president he learned that Google was going to give up some of its space at Beijing’s Tsinghua Science Park. He called the landlord and told him he’d take as much as he'd give him. And now he's in the next office, hoping a Chinese version of Larry or Sergey walks through his door.As we reported a few weeks ago, Lee is also taking a few Google China staff members and indirectly some of that Google cash in the form of an investment from YouTube founder Steve Chen, among others.That elbow room won’t last: Lee's new venture Innovation Works got 7,000 resumes on his first day of business and has gotten some 40,000 total.

  Social productivity startup Spigit raised $10 million in Series B funding from private equity firm Warburg Pincus. This brings Spigit's total funding up to $14 million. Spigit's CEO and Founder, Paul Pluschkell says that the company will use the funds towards product development, and sales and marketing efforts.Spigit's products help businesses and teams contribute ideas, offer feedback and evaluate concepts to streamline idea generation and promote innovation. Spigit recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, which includes a dashboard that provides real-time updates on activity, hot topics and employee contributions within a business, an advanced analytics engine that identifies the best ideas among all contributions and a customizable workflow systems to manage ideation. The software also evaluates employees and offers an incentive and rewards program.

  In some circles, money is known as "cheese." As we all know, Twitter has yet to make any of it. But they are now making something that pairs nicely with cheese: Wine.No, seriously, Twitter has its own wine label, Fledgling Wine, which it's launching today in partnership with San Francisco-based winery Crushpad. Right now you're thinking one of two things: 1) Is this the new Twitter business model? 2) Is Twitter completely insane? Actually, neither. Instead, this is a side venture for a good cause. All proceeds are going to Room to Read, an organization that encourages literacy for children around the world.

  Turns out our source had it right: Microsoft engineers who worked on the Danger/Sidekick meltdown have been able to recover "most if not all" of the data that was lost during last weekend's catastrophic server failure.In a statement, Roz Ho, Corporate VP of Premium Mobile Experiences addresses the unfortunate T-Mobile Sidekick customers and apologizes for the massive fail:(after the jump)

  We've been reporting a lot about Chrome OS the past few days. Possible features, screenshots, early builds — lots of good stuff. And tomorrow was promising to bring even more as yes, there's an event partially dealing with Chrome OS scheduled to take place on Google's Mountain View campus. But sadly, we've been banned from the event.Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yesterday we were confirmed as attendees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.

  So imagine a service that downloads files from Rapidshare for you, then saves them on your 50GB account. Or forget about Rapidshare, maybe it collects files from Bittorrent automatically. Or lets you watch a DivX video online, without downloading it to your computer, in high quality, and listen to your music files inside your browser. Put.io will be launched as a paid service. The service is in private beta right now, but they soon plan to accept beta users.

  It's fall, and that means it's football season. And while Madden has long been the dominant force in Football video games, he's getting some new competition this year that's looking to tap into the same market that has made fantasy football and coaching sims incredibly popular. One of these games, which we covered last week, is called Quick Hit. And today sees the launch of another: gaming studio Challenge Games has just launched GridIron Live, a Facebook-based football coaching sim that features 3D graphics.For those that aren't familiar with the genre: GridIron Live and QuickHit have the same high quality graphics as most modern video games, but they don't feature the twitch-based gameplay you'll find in Madden. Instead, you act as your team's coach, picking plays and watching as your digital players fare against your opponent's play calling. This can be a bit frustrating at times when something out of your hands goes wrong, but that's true for any coaching job. And it's a genre that's become quite popular, though most of the other coaching sims have been far more basic.

  Take this with a grain of salt, because we haven't been able to confirm it with Microsoft, but we've heard from a source that employees inside Microsoft who are working on the Danger/Sidekick meltdown are optimistic that they'll be able to recover all of the data that was lost during last weekend's catastrophic server failure. That's a big change from what we were hearing a few days ago, when T-Mobile said that the data was "almost certainly" gone for good.Since then, T-Mobile's tone has changed: there have been reports of some users turning their Sidekicks on to find that their data had been restored, and earlier this week T-Mobile issued a new statement that said "Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible."

  One thing about MySpace - they've always had far more colorful executives than the more buttoned up Facebook exec team. Of course, those partying and committing federal crimes days are history with the new team in place. Or so we thought...A new group of execs were brought in today. And among them are the cofounders of music startup iLike, Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi. As usual, we peruse the MySpace profiles of new execs because every once in a while we find a new exec hire that hasn't actually ever used the service. All the new execs appear to have MySpace profiles. But just before I signed out of the last one i checked, Ali Partovi, a video he uploaded caught my eye. He says "Here's a little video I just made for the MySpace sales conference next week (Oct 13-15). They told everybody, "make a video showing how MySpace is YOUR space"....."Anyway, meet your new SVP Business Development at MySpace, who is most definitely not buttoned up and boring. We've also added this video to his Crunchbase profile. Because we can never, ever let him live this down:

  The Android robot that graces Google's front lawn got a new dessert friend today: a giant Eclair, drizzled with some chocolate syrup. The Eclair now sits alongside two other over-sized confections: an enormous cupcake and an intimidatingly large donut. You can see a video of the upwrapping of the new treat below, taken by Android engineer Dan Morrill according to Androidandme.The dessert trio is, of course, a product of Google's quirky sense of humor: each Google Android release has a dessert codename (Cupcake was 1.5 and Donut was 1.6, and Eclair is 2.0), and the Android team puts out a new giant sculpture to coincide more or less with the software's release.

  I spend a good amount of time on Twitter, and a lot of links go to websites, videos, and pictures. One of the leading services that lets Twitter users upload pictures is TwitPic. TwitPic was one of the very first companies to let Twitter users enable photo sharing, and due to the amount of traffic and traction TwitPic was getting, their servers couldn't handle the load. From that point, many other services have come out, and it looks like yFrog is now leading the pack.Hosting can be expensive — I know. But do you really have to take it this far, TwitPic? Upon looking at TechCrunch Developer Andy Brett's photo hosted on TwitPic of Michael's dog, Laguna, I was unpleasantly surprised with a huge overlay ad of Second Life. The whole point of Twitpic is to see pictures posted by people you (kinda) know. Blocking those pictures with a gigantic overlay ad showing avatars of people you don't know is counterproductive.

  The Short VersionMotorola has released the phone it should have released a few years ago to compete with phones like the Helio Ocean and feature phones from LG and Samsung. Android brings this phone into the 21st century and the QWERTY keyboard and BLUR UI tweaks will please those looking for a keyboard Android phone with social networking features.

  MySpace has just announced the appointment of four new members to its executive team, which saw a major shakeup last April. The new hires include Nada Stirratt, who will serve as Chief Revenue Officer and Dustin Finer, who is now Chief People Officer. Joining them will be iLike founders (and brothers) Ali Partovi, who is now SVP of Business Development based in San Francisco, and Hadi Partovi as SVP of Technology, based out of Seattle.MySpace acquired streaming music service iLike in August for $20 million.