Streaming music startup Spotify has confirmed that its CTO hasleft, effective today. Andreas Ehn tweeted about his departure this morning, in a move which has taken observers by surprise. The company is currently prepping a big launch in the U.S., a watershed which would normally suggest that this is a moment to have all hands on deck. Losing your CTO right now is probably not the best timing, to put it mildly.However, a Spotify spokesperson has told me that they'd "like to thank Andreas for all his brilliant work" and "everybody at Spotify wishes him well in the future as he seeks out new and, no doubt, extraordinarily complex challenges!" I'm sure this isn't meant to sound back-handed but Ehn's tweets paint a slightly less rosy picture.

  Tomorrow at the eComm Europe 2009 event, Brussels-based provider of international VoIP origination services and telephone numbers Voxbone will be officially announcing that its global phone number service iNum now supports high-definition voice calling between Skype (which now boasts over 521 million users worldwide) and dozens of VoIP networks. Voxbone will be transcoding between Skype’s wideband SILK codec and the HD codec G.722, with support for additional codes planned for the future.

  On the heels of its recent acquisitions of microtransaction platforms Twofish and N-Cash, Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is seeing success in managing virtual economies for online games, virtual worlds and social networks. In conjunction with game makers, Live Gamer’s platform lets online game players trade virtual goods they earn in games. The company is using Twofish and N-Cash's micropayments technologies to power commerce in these gaming marketplaces. Gaming customers including Everyplay (Finland), friendscook, Fotochatter, Hangout, Hooked and Radius IM (United States), ph03nix (Canada) and GPM (Korea) are using Live Gamer's virtual goods exchange to power an economy platform around their games. Live Gamer's platform includes virtual currency and virtual item systems, inventory management, publisher-sponsored secondary market trading, analytics, fraud management and support features.

  Gazopa, a search engine that uses features from an image to retrieve similar images, has been in private beta since it launched during TechCrunch50 last year. To recap, Gazopa lets users upload a picture, enter a URL of an image, create a drawing or right-click on an image anywhere on the web (via a plug-in) and retrieves similar images. A thumbnail of a video is enough to look for similar videos. Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web - without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though).Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America, the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site's design and add a number of features in the past year.

  Browser maker Opera has released its latest 'State of the Mobile Web' report this morning, claiming that there was a huge surge in mobile web usage past September. Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That'd be 2,000 terabytes.

  We've spent the past several months closely tracking the progress of Chrome for Mac. Well over a year after its release for Windows, there hasn't been so much as a beta version for Mac (or Linux, for that matter) yet. Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin expressed his displeasure with this last week. But Brin also noted that he was using the pre-beta version of Chrome for the Mac, but warned that it was unstable. After months of using Chromium builds (the open source browser that Chrome is based on), I decided to give the developer version of Chrome for Mac a try once again. The results have been very good.While recent Chromium builds have been a little shaky with a mixture of UI failures, bugs, and a nasty habit of "Chromium Helper" (the name of separate tab processes in Chromium) eating up your CPU, Chrome itself feels much more stable. It would seem that at some point recently, Google flipped the switch to push Chromium 4.0 releases into the Chrome for Mac developer channel. These don't come daily like the Chromium builds, but only seem to pop up as an upgrade option when a stable build is found on the Chromium path. For example, right now, Chrome for Mac is 4.0.223.11 whereas Chromium for Mac is currently 4.0.226.0.

  Adeo Ressi's Founder Institute is steadily expanding, with a new outpost opening up in Seattle. The startup incubator, which just completed its first successful "semester" in Silicon Valley, recently announced expansions to both Washington DC and San Diego, California.The program was first announced in March 2009. It is a semester-based startup camp for very, very early-stage entrepreneurs and students who have basic ideas for potential startups but have not yet founded a company. 198 founders applied to the program. 79 were accepted, and 66 graduated. 31 companies have been incorporated by these founders so far, and a handful have actually launched (including Skimble and Molo Rewards).

  Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, the service has an ability to scale out across computational, memory and storage requirements while still being treated as a single db instance by the end user. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.

  Google Voice is a great way to manage phone hell by giving you a single phone number that automatically rings your mobile, home, work and other phones based on your choice of rules and settings (who's calling, when, etc.). But people are still stuck with their legacy phone numbers, and moving completely away from them is difficult.I solved the problem by simply porting my mobile number away from AT&T over to Google Voice, a feature that Google says will be launched more broadly eventually. Others solve the problem via the Google Voice application on various phones. But even then, if someone calls your old mobile number and leaves a message, you have to deal with it separately.Not any more. Tonight Google is launching a third option, a new feature that allows mobile users to move their voicemail away from their carrier and over to Google Voice. The benefits: your mobile voicemails go into your Google Voice inbox along with other voicemails and text messages, plus you can create custom greetings for callers and your voicemails are all automatically transcribed (sometimes hilariously).

  Netpulse, an interactive media platform for fitness equipment, has secured $3.1 million in Series A funding led by Javelin Venture Partners with DFJ Frontier participating. The company says it will use the investment to further development of its interactive entertainment platform, which is specifically designed for integration into fitness equipment and screens cardiovascular machines like treadmills and elliptical machines. While many gyms and fitness equipment include screens to watch TV nowadays, Netpulse's technology gives users access to live HD television, a touch screen, on-demand videos and music, and provides iPod/ iPhone connectivity, and personalized workout data. Netpulse's screen has not yet been launched in fitness centers and will be rolled out various gyms later this year.

  The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released the numbers for the top 25 daily newspapers in the U.S. based on their weekday circulation numbers. Not surprisingly, the numbers are bad — okay, awful. Exactly one of the top newspapers has shown growth when compared to where they were 6 months ago. That paper is The Wall Street Journal, which is now the number one paper in the country thanks to USA Today's staggering loss of nearly 20% of its readership the past 6 months.And it's not like WSJ is growing like gangbusters, it grew 0.61% in the last six months.

  Orkut continues to undermine Google’s Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to "make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products". Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends' contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug. The timing of the bug was more than a little suspect — Orkut has been hemorrhaging users lately in India and Brazil as people flock to Facebook, which takes advantage of Orkut's friend export tool to help users make the switch. Now Julio Vasconcellos over at Armchairfounder has noticed how Orkut managed to fix their bug while still making it harder for members to switch to Facebook: the tool works, but it no longer includes your friends' Email addresses.

  I've always considered the Grooveshark web app's UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service's new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.In case you're not familiar with Grooveshark: it's a great web-based music search, play and management tool that's been around since April last year. You can use the app to instantly look for and listen to music, and there's the quintessential social component that allows you to interact with people from its community and discover new music from others’ choices.

  Startup oDesk received rave reviews at this years TechCrunch50 conference thanks to its innovative workplace platform. The startup was voted as demopit winner with the launch of a new iPhone application that allows project administrators to monitor the work stream of their team members while they’re on the go. Today, oDesk's "oConomy" meter, which is the amount of money that is earned from workers on oDesk, hit $100 million. The oConomy showcases data from the work activity of 350,000+ oDesk users in over 150 countries.