Tomorrow, YouTube is going to release a very important addition to its suite of advertising products, and it has the potential to have a huge impact for politicians, brands, and charities alike. The funny thing is, you probably thought it was already out there.

The product’s official name is the Call-To-Action Overlay, and it’s about as straightforward as ads come: it’s a semi-transparent pop-up that links viewers to any website you choose. For example, I could place an overlay on a TechCrunch video inviting users to visit the corresponding post we wrote about it. Yes, it’s that simple.

It’s hard to believe, but you’ve never been able to do this on YouTube before now. If you ever wanted to drive users watching your YouTube video to another site, you’d have to include it as a link in the summary at the right-hand side of the page, which most people ignore anyway. Users can include links in annotations, but only to other YouTube videos. Think back to President Obama’s landmark election campaign, which was helped in no small part by his YouTube presence. If he ever wanted to direct visitors to one of his campaign homepages, he’d have to ask visitors to enter his site’s URL manually. That’s a pretty major hurdle to overcome. This gets rid of it.

Last month we wrote about OffiSync, a powerful plugin that directly ties Microsoft Office to Google Docs, allowing you to save your desktop files to the cloud automatically. Since launch the plugin has fared quite well, with over 50,000 downloads. And today it’s releasing a new version that could prove immensely useful for those of you that frequently use Office.

The biggest addition to the plugin is integrated text and image search. While Office comes with a directory of clip art, it leaves something to leave desired — I almost always find myself just going straight to Google Image search. Now, using OffiSync, you can search Google Images directly from within Office. The plugin supports advanced searches, like sorting by color, size, and usage rights. Once you’ve found an image you like, simply hit ‘Insert’ and the picture will appear wherever your text cursor was. There’s also an integrated browser: just navigate to the page you’d like to quote, highlight the text, and hit Insert.

URL shortener and analytics service Bit.ly has been working on a new set of products, being referred to as “Bit.ly Now” internally, which will define the next stage of the company’s growth. The company confirmed these plans to us today. The services will include both a destination website as well as a distributed service via expansions to the Bit.ly API.

The core Bit.ly service, which lets users shorten web URLs into something suitable for Twitter and other services with limits on characters per post, has continued to grow quickly. 7 million URLs are shortened via the service each day, the company says, and 2-3 million of those are unique URLs Bit.ly has not seen before. Those Bit.ly URLs are clicked on 150 million times per week across a wide range of services - Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, email, etc. Twitter itself now uses Bit.ly for URl shortening, and the service has quickly taken the lead in their market.

The magic behind Bit.ly are the stats that the service makes available on the underlying domains being clicked. Investor John Borthwick explained it all to investors in an email we obtained earlier this month:

Pleo is back, thanks to electronics and entertainment leader Senario, and we want to give you one.

The $349 artificial dinosaur hit the news this April when Ugobe, its creator, filed for bankruptcy. However, it is thankfully still available from web outlets such as Amazon, Target, Best Buy and BotaBingBotaBoom. In July, it will also be sold on QVC Live, followed by the Sharper Image’s Online Store.

They may be mysterious and perhaps even a bit shady, but secondary equity markets, which allow employees to sell off their shares to other buyers, are quickly heating up. Because of the rarity of IPOs and acquisitions in the startup world these days, early employees and founders are becoming increasingly anxious to convert some of their shares into cash (one need look no further than reports of employees selling Facebook stock at relatively low prices for proof).

Unfortunately, because these markets are trading shares of private companies, buyers and sellers are often left in the dark as to the worth of their stock. SharesPost, a private equity market that’s currently operating in public beta, is looking to help: the site has launched a publication platform for analyst reports meant to complement its equity market. And it’s offering a free two month membership to TechCrunch readers, which you can sign up for here.

As a teaser for what’s available on the platform, the site has shared two valuation reports on some of the world’s biggest social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn. You’ll want to check out the full reports here and here to read the full analysis and methodology (you may have to register).

Last week, Michael Jackson’s death caused sites to fail left and right. Today, it’s a very different problem. The hosting service Rackspace has been completely down for the past 30 minutes or so. Don’t believe us, just listen to Justin Timberlake or Michelle Malkin, both of which have sites on the service and took to Twitter to complain.

Apparently, it’s an entire network outage and so the usually very responsive Rackspace team cannot even respond to emails or tweet (though I’m sure we’ll be seeing some updates from smartphones shortly). Along with sites like Timberlake’s and Malkin’s, the popular event site, EventBrite, is apparently down as well.

At the beginning of last year, Yahoo made a fairly large acquisition with the purchase of online video distribution and advertising platform provider Maven Networks. Under the terms of the agreement, which we reported as a rumor the same day the papers were signed, the company acquired the startup for approximately $160 million. At the time, the press release touted the acquisition to lead to an expansion of the “state-of-the-art consumer video and advertising experiences on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s network of leading premium video publishers across the web”.

Now we’ve learned Yahoo is going to kill Maven Networks instead, the most recent in a long series of deadpooling of products and services by the Sunnyvale Internet behemoth.

We’ve been a bit baffled by the system Apple has in place when it comes to ratings for applications in the App Store. Is it allowing apps with nudity? Not allowing them? Allowing them with a 17+ rating? We’ve talked to some developers willing to break their NDAs because they think the App Store approval process in general is messed up, and would like to see Apple do a better job handling it. So here’s how the ratings system currently works for the App Store.

The Ratings

When you go to submit your app through iTunes Connect, one of the steps takes you to a ratings matrix that you must fill out. This contains 10 questions listed under “Apple Content Descriptions.” For each of the 10 questions you must say “None”, “Infrequent/Mild”, or “Frequent/Intense.” Depending on what answer you give for each of these, the rating of your app in the upper right corner will change. These ratings go from “4+” to “9+” to “12+” to “17+” to “No Rating.”

That last one is key. If your app gets the “No Rating” label, a warning written in red appears underneath it stating that: “This content will not be sold via iTunes.” So what triggers such a rating? Well, not a lot. Basically, it comes down to the final two questions in the 10 question matrix. Let’s run through them in descending order:

Digg founder Kevin Rose, Founders Fund partner Sean Parker and leading Israeli angel investor Yossi Vardi will return to our third-annual TechCrunch50 conference Panel of Experts September 14 - 15 in San Francisco. Our experts judge the fifty startups launching at the event and discuss each of the demos on stage as a group. Yossi, Sean and Kevin were experts last year and return based on popular demand with Roelof Botha, Marc Andreessen and Marissa Mayer. We have an amazing line-up of new and returning experts, and additional judges will be announced over the coming weeks.

If you’re a new startup, and want a shot to launch at TechCrunch50 and pitch our expert advisors on stage, you have until June 30 to submit your application. That’s tomorrow night.

All the details for the conference are here. TechCrunch50 is an action-packed conference where fifty new startups launch over two days. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue where we packed nearly 2,000 participants last year.

Tickets for the event can be purchased here courtesy of Eventbrite (extra early-bird pricing is available until June 30).

More on the TechCrunch50 blog.

LinkedIn has bolstered its position as America’s leading business social network by the month lately, with Germany-based Xing as the only company regarding itself a worthy competitor in the last few years. But now those days seem to be over - in the US and China, at least.

Today German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt published an interview [GER] with Xing CEO Stefan Groß-Selbeck (who recently replaced founder Lars Hinrichs), and he revealed a couple of interesting tidbits of information about the future direction of his company (find a horrible, Google-translated version of the full interview in English here).

Talking in broad strokes, Groß-Selbeck said 3.5 million of the 7.5 million Xing members are based out of Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. This isn’t really that surprising, given the background of the company. But the interview also marks the first time a Xing representative publicly (albeit indirectly) admitted losing in the USA and China.

Steve Jobs is officially back at work, according to Apple PR. Even though he had a liver transplant earlier this year, a detail which was leaked to the Wall Street Journal and conveniently reported on a Friday night after the markets had closed. Last week, Jobs was spotted back on Apple’s campus and was even quoted in a press release! Today, Apple is hammering home the message that Jobs is back on the job, telling multiple news organizations from ABC News to Bloomberg to the New York Times to Reuters the exact same canned quote (sometimes attributed to spokesman Steve Dowling, sometimes not).

Steve is back to work, Jobs is at Apple a few days a week and working at home the remaining days. We are very glad to have him back.

Facebook has just named former Genentech Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman as its new CFO. The news comes three months after Facebook ousted Gideon Yu from the position, citing at the time its desire to find someone with “public company experience” (which was bizarre given the fact that Yu had public company experience).

At the time of Yu’s departure there was speculation that he had been unable to secure investments at the company’s lofty $15 billion valuation established by the Microsoft deal, and that the company was considering an early IPO. Since then, things have changed: Facebook just raised a $200 million investment from Russian firm DST at a $10 billion valuation, which means it has plenty of money to keep its server farms churning and keeping pace with the site’s staggering growth.

A lot of people know that hunger is a major problem in Africa, but few people ever think about it, let alone do anything about it. One Twitter account claims to be trying to spread the message with the use of very straight-forward tweets pretending to be from a starving African.

The tweets range from “hungry,” to “really, really hungry,” to “belly. distending,” and variations on those. Whoever is in charge the the account writes in its bio, “Social commentary illuminating the startling gap between the haves and the have nots.” But is this just poor taste? Apparently the 300-some people that follow the account don’t think so.

Over the weekend, YouTube launched a new channel dubbed Reporters’ Center, which it hopes will prove to be a good way to educate existing and aspiring citizen journalists on how to report news in ‘the digital age’. The new resource will feature a host of top journalists and media experts sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting.

So far, there are 34 videos uploaded to the channel, featuring people like Facebook Marketing Director Randi Zuckerberg providing 8 tips on how to maximize distribution of your YouTube video on the social network her brother famously co-created.

Not only does Google want to organize all the world’s information, it also wants to make all that information available to everyone in the world. For the majority of the world’s population, that means making it available on a cell phone, and not a fancy iPhone or Android with a Web browser either. I’m talking about $10 cell phones with not much more than voice and SMS capabilities. If Google can reach people, especially in developing nations, with SMS, it can reach everyone with a cell phone.

In Africa, it is launching a suite of SMS services today, including SMS search, Q&A-style tips, and an SMS-based marketplace. The first country to get these services is Uganda.

If you were reading a major paper this weekend, you’d notice a striking ad. There’s the Palm Pre resting against an apple core with the words:

The Palm Pre does things the iPhone can’t. Run multiple applications at the same time with real-time updates and even save $1200 over two years. It’s the perfect time to join the Now Network, America’s most trusted 3G network, bringing you the first and only 4G network from a national carrier.

The real call to action was to iPhone users with lapsed contracts - presumably iPhone users who bought the original iPhone two years ago and never upgraded to the 3G - a cohort that I suspect consists of perhaps five Palm engineers and maybe our tech-savvy grandparents. It’s a small number, friends. A small number.

There has been no shortage of talk about the apparent demise of Userplane, the text, voice and video chat software provider that was acquired by AOL in August 2006 for around $40 million (the exact price was never disclosed).

Venturebeat ran a story on the property last May, citing sources and Userplane clients as saying the service had been “neglected if not abandoned by AOL”. Yet this morning, I exchanged some e-mails with Darin Ohlandt, General Manager of Userplane, and he responded to the rumors saying they are definitely not shutting down and will continue to offer the existing chat and IM services to third-party sites.

However, some writing on the wall suggests he may not be painting a complete picture of what is going on.

As Twitter becomes the default conversation spot on the Web, we’re going to start to see tools which combine site-specific conversations with Twitter. One example is Tweetboard, which creates a Twitter-powered forum for any site. Once a site adds the Tweetboard code to their site, a site-wide tab appears which allows visitors to have forum discussions by simply logging into Twitter (via OAuth). All the conversations are threaded, and comments appear on Twitter as well, potentially drawing in a larger audience into the specific conversation.

One of the difficulties of following a conversation on Twitter itself is that replies to particular threads aren’t threaded together. On Tweetboard, all the discussions are threaded and nested together, similar to what you’d find on FriendFeed or Facebook. Site publishers can choose to set up a Tweetboard using their personal Twitter accounts or create a new one specific to each Tweetboard.

Supposedly, the The Pirate Bay guys were found guilty in their recent trial in Sweden, and, supposedly, they got sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay $4.5 million in damages.

But back in the parallel universe which happens to be the real world, they’ve appealed the verdict and could probably keep doing so for the next few years. So in the meantime they need to keep busy, and what better way to do this than start a new user driven video portal to take on YouTube, called, predictably, Video Bay, allowing users to post and share video clips without having to worry about copyright violations. Seems reasonable. It’s not like they need to attract any more legal interest or anything.