High-school dropout and Tumblr founder David Karp is doing a presentation today at the Eventoblog conference in sunny Sevilla, Spain. In one of his first slides, Karp shared some statistics about Tumblr, which appears to be growing pretty well, pretty quickly.Last August, the Tumblr team shared some growth statistics and claimed 50 million visitors and a healthy 255 million impressions in July 2009. This month (which I reckon is not actually this month but rather October), Tumblr self-reports 20 million unique vistors and 420 million impressions.

  While Android 2.0 has been floating around on Motorola DROIDs for over a week now, one important chunk of it has been under lock-and-key: the source. Even amongst manufacturing partners, we're told, Google hasn't been completely open; outside of Motorola (and more recently, HTC), most of the other handset manufacturers have been left out in the cold with nothing to keep them warm but Android v1.6. Until tonight, that is.As the sun set over the Silicon Valley last night, Google pushed the source code for Android 2.0 to the Android Open Source Project. Within two hours, the endlessly able Android community had it up and running on the eldest Android of them all, the T-Mobile G1.

  Palm and Sprint have taken a very different approach to the launch of the Pixi than they did with its slightly older and slightly brawnier brother, the Palm Pre. In the days leading up to the Pre, both parties were on full attack mode; keynotes were held, massive tradeshow booths were built, full page newspaper ads were run, and countdowns ticked away. With the Pixi? They've got a commercial. Compared to Palm's last run, the marketing campaign surrounding the Pixi is decidedly more average - and after spending a few days with the phone, I'd say they made the right decision there.

  GURGOAN, INDIA-- Back in 1995, Deep Kalra knew that India had burgeoning consumer promise. So he took a risk, quit his safe-but-boring banking job and joined AMF Bowling—an American company that was aiming to bring bowling alleys and billiard halls to India for the first time.It didn’t quite scratch his entrepreneurial itch and the hobby was ahead of its time for Indians. So after four years, he headed back into the safe world of banking. And then, in 2000, with some money saved up, he decided to leave again and do things his way. Enamored by the Internet and frustrated by how hard it was to travel in India he opened MakeMyTrip.com. The site—as you might guess from the name—was like any of the online travel brokers started during the dot com bubble, only it was in India.Of course, that was a pretty crucial difference. What Kalra didn’t know back in those dark days was that he was about to benefit from a global Internet truism: Online travel is the ecommerce gateway drug.

  Over the last week Singularity University, an educational institution based at NASA Ames that draws some world's top technologists and futurists, has been holding an Executive Program with the goal of preparing executives for the "imminent disruption and opportunities resulting from exponentially accelerating technologies". The roster of instructors is impressive, with a number of top professors and executives covering fields ranging from stem cells to robotics.Singularity has been posting a series of articles from reporters who have been attending the event, and over the course of the next few days we'll be posting full videos of the lectures, as well as some 1-on-1 interviews with the instructors. You'll be able to find these videos by clicking the 'Singularity University' logo in the right sidebar, or by clicking this link.

  As any industry analyst will tell you, since its two journalists were returned from North Korea, Current.tv has been woefully overstaffed. The company simply doesn't require that many employees to edit YouTube clips for its audience of jobless hipster doucheballs who have fallen asleep in front of the television.And so it wasn't entirely surprising this week when TechCrunch reported on a 'bloodbath' at the company, with 80 people being laid-off across all departments.Current's COO Joanna Drake Earl (who is herself three separate people) insisted to Leena that the layoffs aren't a 'cost-cutting measure' but rather a 'shift in programming strategy'. In most other companies, this would be classic corporate bullshit, but in Current's case Joanna, Drake and Earl might actually have a point. After all, by creating 80 new unemployed people - unemployed people who actually know what Current is - they've just doubled the target audience for their programming. How's that for a convenient truth?

  On Friday November 20, Scribd is teaming with a bunch of other well known startups in San Francisco to hold a new event called Startup Crawl, where they'll be taking shuttles to check out the offices (and meet the teams) of a dozen different companies, including Engine Yard, Justin.TV, and Yammer.The event is contracting three or four 56 passenger buses, which will be driving in a circuit between the startups (you can expect a bus every 15-20 minutes, but many of the offices are close enough to walk between them). Each office will be doing something different, with activies including everything from hacking sessions to happy hours. The first shuttle leaves the Embassy Suites SFO/Burlingame at 5:30, and the last bus begins its last run around the circuit at 11 PM. To participate you don't have to start at the Embassy Suites — you can also show up at any of the participating startups beginning at 5:30.

  International music star Shakira is taking a new approach to releasing her latest music video: she's doing it through a live stream on Ustream, which will be emedded on her Facebook Page. According to Sony, this is the first time an artist has used the platform to debut a music video (Updated: Sony is wrong. Chamillionaire did it first, see below). Shakira (and her managers) are keen on the idea because it allows her and her fans to interact with each other in real time — something that's not practical on TV, where these videos have been making their debuts for decades. The stream will start here on Monday at noon, PT.The live video/Facebook combo is quickly gaining steam for artists looking to connect with their fans — we've recently seen the Foo Fighters stream a live concert using LiveStream, and earlier this week Jason Mraz held a couple live chat session with fans as well. Other sites that have also recently streamed live concerts include MySpace, YouTube, and Hulu.

  Last week we gave away a TwitterPeek device on a whim. It turns out giving stuff away for free is popular, so we're going to keep doing this every Friday until we forget to keep doing it. Up this week was going to be a shiny new pair of Facebook cufflinks. But at the last minute Sonos stepped in and is generously offering to give one of our lucky readers a $399 Sonos ZonePlayer S5 all-in-one wireless music system.Want it? It's yours. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We'll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible. Sonos is generously donating the device and covering the shipping costs as well. If you aren't lucky enough to get the free one, you can buy the S5 for $399 here.More details on the S5 in the demo video below. You can also read more about it on CrunchGear.

  SGN has just given us a peek at Skies of Glory, its upcoming dogfighting game for the iPhone that's the followup to its hit game F.A.S.T., which was released last June. That app proved to be a run-away success, pulling in over a million dollars in its first six weeks of release. Skies of Glory takes the gameplay that made F.A.S.T. a hit and builds on it, adding much improved graphics, more missions, and a World War II setting. The company is targeting an early December launch date.Here are some of the details;Battle up to three human opponents around the world or up to seven locally over Wifi connection10 Campaign Missions to complete (Battle over Britain or the Pacific)Skirmish Mode, including single player Teams, Free For All and Capture the Flag.100 missions to perform in Training exercises.

  I've mostly been a spectator in this whole Rupert Murdoch de-indexing his news sites from Google circus. First because I didn't really believe he even knew what he was talking about (or how much traffic he'd lose), and more recently because Erick Schonfeld took the story here at TechCrunch.But suddenly this is a fascinating story to me for a bunch of reasons. This may be less about the self destruction of traditional journalism and more about the search wars.Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch's Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a video last week (embedded below) with a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it. TechCrunch Europe's Mike Butcher has been sniffing down a similar trail.If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn't. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites - if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft, just as bidding wars have broken out in the past over the right to serve search ads into third party publishing sites.If Murdoch is going to go through with this de-indexing Mexican standoff thing, he might as well do it the right way and drive the fear of God into Google. As a spectator, I'll enjoy watching the fireworks.

  Perhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.

  We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes' powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code "WASABITC." As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a "smart reader" view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

  There's a certain type of man that wears cufflinks. Don Draper, for example, wears cufflinks. But he's also a fictional character set in the 1960s. In the real world, these days, it's usually the well-off that wear them. Basically, you need to have enough money to not care about spending hundreds of dollars on buttons.But CuffLinks.com appears to be going for a new crowd with its latest design. The "Facebook Me" cufflinks are $50 and feature yes, the Facebook logo on them. They are approximately 3/4" by 3/4", are "Rhodium plated" and feature a "Bullet back closure." One cufflink features the Facebook "f," the other reads "me." Classy.