Zemanta, a service that helps bloggers find related content as they write, launches new version of its service later today. As well as a general makeover designed to makes its widget lighter and faster, the big change is that Zemanta is opening up its recommendation engine to no longer just include so-called 'professional media' but also content from its community of users. This, says the company, will create a level playing field, giving community content the same chance of being featured as more established sources as long as it's deemed relevant. However, it's not yet clear if all community content will make it into Zemanta's index.For those that do, however, being regularly featured as a 'related content' source could drive significant traffic for a small blog, and presumably that's Zemanta's gamble. While it risks diluting the quality of those links, it gives joe-blogger another reason to keep using the service.

  Twinity, the virtual world that mirrors the real world, has finally launched a beta of virtual London. And if mirroring the real world includes replicating London's reputation for delayed construction works, then Metaversum, the company behind Twinity, is doing just fine.The virtual world, which distinguishes itself from the likes of Second Life by building exact replicas of well known cities, launched back in 2006 and while London was always planned to follow Berlin and Singapore, it feels like it's been a long time coming. And tough luck if you are on a Mac - the 3D browser only supports Windows XP and Vista.Even now, virtual London is incomplete. Initially, users are only able to visit London's famous Soho district, "stretching virtually from Oxford Street down to Trafalgar Square including the world-famous Piccadilly Circus and China Town." However, Oxford Street in particular is at the heart of London's shopping region and the home to many famous brands. And that's probably the point. Virtual worlds are all about business and Twinity is no exception.

  Last week I met with Stephan Uhrenbacher, the founder and chairman of Qype, the European startup which competes most directly with Yelp in local reviews and listings. He revealed to me some exclusive information about where Qype is now.In Jan 2009 Qype had 8m uniques across Europe. As with Yelp, Qype members evaluate businesses, places or services such as bars, restaurants, you name it. Today it has 17.7m uniques and the split is now: 5 million in germany, 4 million in the UK and 4 million in France. Spain is on 1m uniques. It now has reviews of 450,000 businesses in Europe from over 50,000 cities. Currently Qype has more than 10,000 businesses each month that sign up across whole network.

  JanRain has always been on the forefront evangelizing OpenID, the decentralized authentication method for the new Web, as a founding member of the OpenID Foundation. But the company is not a non-profit, and aims to turn the deployment of online identification technology in enterprise environments into a viable business.JanRain just got a vote of confidence from three U.S.-based venture capital firms: we've learned that the startup has recently raised a $3.25 million Series A round of financing led by DFJ Frontier with participation from RPM Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.

  I thought December was supposed to be a quiet month, where people go on vacation, and companies don't launch new things. I was wrong. This week is shaping up to be a very busy one for Google as they could have as many as three substantial launches in three days.Monday: Tomorrow morning, the company is holding an event in Mountain View, CA to talk about the evolution of its search product over the years. That may sound ho-hum, but they are also promising to introduce a "few new features that we hope will change the way people search in the future." Presenting will be no less than Google VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, and Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra. All heavy hitters.

  Pretty big capital raise today. Clear2Pay, an electronic payments company, has secured $74 million (€50 million) to fund its next stage of growth and potential strategic acquisitions. The investment was led by the New-York based Aquiline Capital Partners and previous investors. Clear2Pay, which is profitable, specialises in secure electronic payments and disrupts the existing legacy payment silos in banks. This investment is taking place in the context of the sale of all shares held by Belgium VC Gimv to Aquiline. The sale has a positive impact of €2.2 million (EUR 0.10 per share) on Gimv’s last published equity value at 30 September 2009.

  At Google I/O this year, one demo booth stood out above all others: The Holodeck. It was basically eight giant, long screens arranged in a circle that displayed Google Street View imagery. When you stepped the contraption, it was a bit like zooming around outside. Today, Google has taken the time to explain the project a bit, which it now calls "Liquid Galaxy."Apparently, the reason for the name change is that the booth now displays much more than just Street View. Google has made a modified Google Earth client so that you can go anywhere in the world in the device now. And you can even go to the Moon and Mars with it. "It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship. As a result of this totally seamless, immersive experience, we decided to name it the Liquid Galaxy," Google writes.

  Back in March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt caused a little controversy when he was quoted as thinking of Twitter (and the other micro-messaging services like it) as a "sort of poor man's email systems." He later clarified his remarks a bit. Tonight, he has joined the service.Current Googlers such as Hunter Walk (YouTube) and former Googlers such as Chris Sacca welcomed Schmidt to the service tonight, pointing to his account, eschmidt0. Yes, you'd think he could have gotten a better name (for example, ericschmidt is currently suspended, and presumably available). But maybe he's continuing Google's love affair with 1s and 0s.

  What if every store had a bar-code sticker on its window so that you could pull out your iPhone, wave it in front of the bar code and get all sorts of information about that business—the telephone number, photos, customer reviews? Starting on Monday, you'll be able to do that at up to 190,000 local businesses throughout the U.S.Google has mailed out window stickers with two-dimensional bar codes (aka, QR codes) to the most-searched for or clicked-on businesses in its local business directory. Anyone with a QR code reader in their phone can scan it to call up a Google Mobile local directory page for one of these "Favorite Places," which generally includes a map, phone number, directions, address, reviews, and a link to the store's website. (It's a mobile version of Google Places).

  Social search service Aardvark is considering accepting a $30+ million offer by Google, say multiple sources close to the companies (one source says it's $40 million). The company, which was founded by ex-Googlers, has raised around $6 million in venture capital to date.The company is also talking with other potential buyers, say our sources. And even if no one else comes to the table, they have a difficult decision to make. At least one venture capitalist has offered to put new money into the company at a similar valuation, and the founders may be in a position to sell some of their personal stock in that round as well.So the decision comes down to sell now and take the guaranteed money, or roll the dice and go for the big win.

  As you may have read by now, Apple decided to grace The New York Times with its presence for a long post about the App Store this weekend. There's really isn't anything new in the story (though a side story does reveal what apps Apple SVP of Product Marketing Phil Schiller actually uses), but there are a handful of quotes from Apple executives about the store. At one point, Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president for iTunes, compares the App Store to a rocket ship and notes, "We’ve been able to leverage a lot of our iTunes technology for the App Store."That speaks to what I think is an obvious, but largely overlooked part of the success of the App Store. While Apple's two sexy devices (the iPhone and the iPod touch), make apps very simple to use, it's the iTunes experience that makes them easy to obtain. Without the latter, the former simply wouldn't matter.We've spoken previously about how Apple's tight control of its ecosystem and its competitors lack of such structure has helped build the App Store into what it is, and insured that it continues to outpace its rivals. But at its core, the App Store works so well because it was built upon a foundation that was proven: iTunes.

  Usually when Twitter goes down it happens in the middle of some sort of event that causes a rush of tweets. Today is just a regular old lazy Sunday, and yet here we are, with it being down.It's so lazy, in fact, that no one is even bitching about Twitter being down on FriendFeed, even though it has been for a good 30 minutes now. There is also no update on the status blog. It's weird. It's eerie. Twitter is quietly down.

  The internet (the blogosphere to be precise) is still a bit of a mystery to many in tech and entertainment. It's weird to think that companies whose job it is to reach tech-savvy consumers aren't using this tool correctly, but it's also no secret that the biggest and most influential companies are often the slowest to adapt. At any rate, they're learning, but some are learning faster than others. Here I chronicle just a few standout cases.Note that many companies are bunched under the PR heading, which is in the second half of this post for reasons which will become obvious. Also, it's a bit awkward talking about the "new media" right after I denied its existence, but for the purposes of this post please just consider it to mean big blogs, news aggregators, and social or bottom-up media.

  Envision a web service that lets you record and share your entire life online: That's the lofty goal LIFEmee wants to achieve. The eponymous Tokyo-based startup behind the service (which is available in both English and Japanese) relaunched its site today with a redesigned interface and a set of new features. (LIFEmee launched back in September this year as a TechCrunch50 DemoPit company.)To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their "lifestream" (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.LIFEmee is still loaded with too many buttons and icons, but the new site is much simpler to use than the TechCrunch50 version. The site's co-founders say after having collected feedback from early users all around the world, they tried to make it more accessible, integrate it with existing social networks and redesign the entire layout. A Japanese version was added a few weeks after TechCrunch50, too (at the event, LIFEmee launched in English only).