After a short period of near-mandatory private beta, Bellevue, WA-based BigDoor Media is today introducing the public beta of its website and mobile app monetization software solution. In addition, the upstart is announcing that it has raised early-stage funding ($250k) from Seattle's Founder Co-op and a dozen angel investors, many of which are local Internet/tech CEOs.

  When was the last timeyou actually looked in the phone book to find someone's number? For anyone under 40, the Web has already replaced the phone book with people search. But the listings are not always complete or up to date. One of the largest people directories online, WhitePages, is adding consumer-editing capabilities to make its people database more accurate.You can now edit your entry, and control to some extent the information that is shown on the site. For instance, you can correct and update any addresses or phone numbers associated with your name. WhitePages also lets you hide your contact information and be contacted instead through WhitePages, which acts as a communication proxy on your behalf. (It forwards contact requests via email or text message).

  Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the two European entrepreneurs and angel investors who famously co-founded companies like Kazaa, Skype, Joost and JoltId, have played an instrumental role in setting up and funding a new music startup called Rdio, the NYTimes reported earlier this morning. Little is known about the 'secretive' startup, and its website reveals nothing but the logo at this point. NYT reporter Brad Stone writes that the upstart boasts offices in both Los Angeles and San Francisco and that it's going to offer a paid subscription-based music consumption and purchasing platform for both PCs and mobile phones, starting early next year.

  The once immensely hyped and heavily-funded video company Joost continues its unceremonious journey to the deadpool.TechCrunch Europe has learnt that the startup, famously co-founded by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, put its UK subsidiary into liquidation at the beginning of this month. The reasons that are given are not all too surprising: the liquidator says the company has "failed to sustain a significant share of the internet video industry and was unable to address this effectively through a re-positioning of its services."We've also learnt that the office furniture of Joost UK Limited, registered in England and Wales with number 05821718, has apparently already found its way to another startup, namely Songkick (also based in London).

  GOOD, an integrated media platform for people who "want to live well and do good", has announced that it has recently closed a Series A round of funding led by its co-founder and CEO Ben Goldhirsh and a number of angel investors including Nicholas Negroponte. While the amount remains undisclosed, newly appointed President Craig Shapiro says it was in the "single digit millions".The company - not to be confused with Good Technology - is also consolidating several of its brands (Reason Pictures, GOOD Magazine and GOOD Digital) under a single entity dubbed GOOD Worldwide.

  Over the last few weeks Google has apparently started rolling out a new set of advertising formats on its search results page, introducing product listings that include price and other details in the Sponsored Links sidebar. For example, a query for "shoes" is displaying a list of different shoe models, their prices, and retailers directly within the search results, as opposed to the the more general text links we've grown accustomed to, which lack such information. Google is also apparently testing these ads with photos alongside the product listings for some queries.Our tipster says that he's only seeing the new ads in the developer version of Chrome, but I'm seeing them as well in Safari, though some TechCrunch staff aren't seeing them in any browser. Google is always switching up ad placement and formats in various bucket tests, some of which are browser-specific, so the inconsistency isn't surprising.

  Technorati relaunched its site tonight, changing and adding key features. Most notable is an expanded and fresher top 100 blogs list, and a new feature that lets authors post their content directly to the site.In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times. Here's the first. And the second. The last change, made under the direction of incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra, has stayed more or less constant since then.In the meantime, Technorati has focused on expanding it's business in other areas, particularly in handling advertising for other sites. Today, only a small percentage of Technorati's total network traffic of 25 million U.S. unique visitors per month actually visit Technorati.com.But that doesn't mean the flagship site isn't an important asset. And those of us blogging for more than a couple of years can remember the days when Technorati was a key blogging tool, providing, among other things, a high quality real time search engine back when Google only indexed most blogs every few weeks.Today Technorati still provides a great blog search engine and keeps what many call the definitive Top 100 list of blogs. With the new site, they are focusing more on direct Technorati content (more on that below), and properly categorizing the more popular blogs. Go check it out yourself, and here's a rundown of the new features:

  Blog search engine (and more recently blog/social network advertising network) Technorati has raised a new round of financing - $2 million from existing investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. This is, the company says, an extension of their Series D round from June 2008, where they raised $7.5 million at a roughly $35 million valuation. The company has raise a total of just over $32 million to date (much of that at a much higher valuation).The company is also in the process of raising additional capital via commercial debt, we've heard separately but haven't confirmed.This funding should get the company to profitability, says CEO Richard Jalichandra. He won't say what revenues are, except that it has more than doubled each of the last two years. He also points out that Technorati's network, with 25 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, is now the 5th largest social media property on the Internet.In addition to its flagship site, Technorati suppliesadvertising to 450 or so websites - about half blogs, half niche social networks.

  Here's the next contestant in the never ending stream of music services, each of which, inevitably, slide into financial disaster at some point. Music service MOG says they'll launch MOG All Access by Thanksgiving this year. It's an on demand music streaming and Internet radio service that will cost $5 per month. The four major labels - Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Music are on board, plus thousands of indie labels via IODA and Beggars Group.Sounds great, except users can listen to streaming on demand music for free today at MySpace Music and Spotify, which is preparing to launch in the U.S. Will MOG's user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?In January we first heard MOG's plans for the service. At the time it sounded compelling - it combined a great user experience with a free streaming model. But the crucial part of that service has vaporized - it's no longer free. And non-free music subscription services don't work, despite years of attempts by major companies and startups alike.We've championed MOG in the past, but this looks like yet another music failure to us. Too bad the labels didn't agree to a pure revenue split, which is what CEO David Hyman was hoping for back in January.

  Following our post about Chrome OS yesterday, it looks like those wily folks at Google have removed the "chromeos" folder from the Chromium build folder. Too bad. But luckily, before they did, TechCrunch reader and Linux user, Jonathan Frederickson, was able to grab the code and managed to install it. He has posted some results in our comments section and even more on his blog.It would seem that the result is the browser aspect of Chrome OS running inside of Linux. As you can see in the screenshots below, it looks very similar to Chrome, the browser, on Windows (still the only officially released version of Chrome), but there are some key differences.

  In the endless game of cat and mouse that is Apple vs. the jailbreak scene, the cat just put a pretty nasty gash in the mouse's face.For the past seven months, jailbreaking (opening an iPhone to applications not signed by Apple for installation) has relied on an exploit dubbed "24kPwn". We'll skip the technical voodoo for the sake of not putting you straight to sleep, but here's the important bit: in the latest batch of iPhone 3GS units to hit the shelves, the exploit has been fixed. Unless a new exploit is discovered (and, with each patch, this is becoming less and less likely), any iPhone 3GS to ship after last week will not be jailbreakable.

  We've all grown accustomed to Twitter's website going down. And even Facebook is often less than reliable. But tonight a big boy has crashed. Apple.com is completely offline right now.

  If you run a website that others are going to use, there's probably a desire to find a mixture between user-customization and putting forth your content. For simple sites, that's easy enough, but what if you want to change the design of pages, and put in elements like new widgets? Netvibes now has a way.

  At TechCrunch we've been big fans of Dropbox for a long time now — the company launched at 2008's TechCrunch50, we use the service to share images and documents on a daily basis, and we're even impressed by the demo video they put together to help explain what the service does to newcomers. But there's one thing we haven't liked: Dropbox has been using the domain GetDropbox.com for years. Granted, it's not a difficult URL to remember, but we've sometimes accidentally visited (and even occasionally linked) back to Dropbox.com. Now it looks like that is no longer an issue, as Dropbox has apparently acquired Dropbox.com. Right now the URL redirects to GetDropbox.com, but I'll be surprised if the site isn't ported over shortly.