Over the last twelve weeks, 24 startups have been working out of Facebook’s old headquarters in downtown Palo Alto as part of fbFund REV, Facebook’s startup incubator program that’s jointly run with Accel Partners and Founder’s Fund. During that time the startups have receieved mentorship from some of Silicon Valley’s elite, as well as help from Facebook engineers. Tomorrow, they’ll be presenting at the program’s Demo Day (we’ll have full coverage beginning tomorrow afternoon). In light of the close of this session, we’ve compiled a number of the mentor presentations given thoughout the summer, and sat down with fbFund team member Dave McClure, who outlined what made the program unique.

As most Mac users have undoubtedly read over the past few days, there are some pieces of software that are a bit buggy with the latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, which was released on Friday. Applications that have been having issues include the developer builds of Chrome and Chromium for OS X. While these versions are obviously still not complete yet, there are more and more people using them as they had been becoming increasingly stable and usable under OS X Leopard. And today, Google rolled out a bunch of bug fixed to keep it purring along in Snow Leopard as well.

Specifically, version 4.0.203.4 of the Dev channel build of Chrome fixes a host of problems, ranging from text being garbled to favicons no longer working. Find the full list of changes here.

It’s no secret that Apple’s App Store has been leaps and bounds more succesful than Android’s comparable Market, but it isn’t often we get concrete data that shows just how poorly Android’s store is faring in comparison. Today Android developer Larva Labs has posted some of the sales figures for its top applications, and the results are not impressive: Larva has two apps in Android’s top paid apps list called Battle For Mars and RetroDefense, ranking #5 and #12 respectively, and between them the company has raked in an average of $62.39 per day over the last month. Ouch.

Yazzem, the simple topic creator for Twitter or FriendFeed, has launched version 2 of their online service. Yazzem allows you to start topics about anything you want, basically creating a new way to interact with both Twitter and FriendFeed. Once the topics have been created, anyone can join your topic to connect and discuss about it in 140 characters or less. Yazzem launched in June 2008, and has picked up quite a user base for a very specific core audience.

Launching in version 2 of Yazzem is a redesign of the Yazzem site, themes that users can choose from for their page, and latest activity streams for all your friends. Also launching with this version is subscribers, which is similar to Twitter followers or FriendFeed subscribers. Another key feature that is launching is user stats, so now users will be able to see information like number of subscribers and activities a particular user has deciding whether or not to subscribe to them.

Are you addicted to FriendFeed? Can’t get enough of Robert Scoble’s incessant posts? Want to keep up with them even when you’re on the go? Are you praying to the heavens that Facebook doesn’t screw up FriendFeed post-acquisition? Then Stir (iTunes link) might just be for you. Created by StructLab Stir is an iPhone app that allows you to get your fill of FriendFeed anytime, anywhere. You can use it in the bathroom at work (guilty), while watching a lame chick flick with your girlfriend (guilty) or if you’re on the couch and don’t want to walk the 10 feet to your desk (umm, yes, guilty).

Of course, it is hardly the first FriendFeed app for the iPhone, but it’s the first one I’ve looked at and it’s pretty damn good. Mind you, I only started using FriendFeed last week. Twitter is still my micro-blogging platform of choice, but I quickly noticed that FriendFeed has some obvious benefits. And Stir takes advantage of all of them.

We just wrote about the dominance of number of .com domains and we’ve also reported that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. Today, another .com domain passed the million dollar mark, with Call.com selling for $1.1 million via domain brokerage Sedo to an undisclosed buyer.

The domain was sold by Live Current Media, which had sold, then reacquired the domain over the past years. Live Current apparently sold the domain as part of a package of domains including Makeup.com, Automobile.com, and Exercise.com. Part of the deal was that Live Current would get royalties from any revenue earned from the domains. The company ended up buying back Call.com in 2006, and nullified the royalty stipulation. According to Domain Name Wire, the value of the royalty stream was $250,000 in future revenue, which makes the $1.1 million sale a good bet. Live Current also recently sold Cricket.com for a cool $1.75 million. Last year, Live Current experienced some financial difficulties and was looking to raise cash to survive by liquidating its domain names.

On its iGoogle Developer Blog today Google issued a warning to developers: Optimize your gadgets for speed, or we’re labeling them as “slow” in the directory.

Starting in late September, Google says that any widget that doesn’t meet a speed requirement, will get a nice “slow” badge attached to its directory listing. The only detail it gives about the requirement is that it will get the badge if it’s “slow enough to cause speed-related user dissatisfaction.“

NTT America announced today that it has leased a new 15,000 square foot data center in Santa Clara, CA. Big deal, you might think, a network provider expands its capacity. Except this network provider has a very high-profile client: Twitter.

Though Twitter is never actually mentioned in NTT’s press release, the blog Data Center Knowledge put two and two together, recalling a quote in June from NTT America COO Kazuhiro Gomi: “traffic generated by Twitter is getting so big, it’s basically eating up a lot of our data center network resources, especially the segment where Twitter is hosted. Other customers are riding on the same segment.“

“That’s right. That’s - that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?” - Ted (Ben Stiller), There’s Something About Mary

The more top level domains that are approved by ICANN, the less each of them is worth. People continue to flock to .com: 82 million of the 111 million non-country specific domains registered are .com. Everyone else splits what’s left, with .net and .org taking the bulk of the leftovers.

That means if you’re running the, say, .biz or .info domain registry businesses, with 5 million and 2 million domains registered, respectively, it’s time to come up with some marketing genius.

.Biz is first to market with, yes, one character domain names. These domains, previously reserved, will be auctioned off on September 23 at 12 noon EST via Sedo. A total of 36 domains will be sold (26 letters and 0-9). If you want to be the proud owner of 1.biz or whatever, the details are here.

A week ago I had a chance to sit down for a hour-long one on one interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. There were no rules, and the whole interview was on the record. Part of the interview was on video as well.

There’s so much material that we’ve broken the interview notes up into a few different subject areas. We’ll post separately with his thoughts on the future of search, books, news, mobile and more. Schmidt also spoke candidly about the Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance, Twitter (he mentioned them before I did!) and Facebook.

What Is Google?

I started the interview with a simple question: What is Google?

Most people think of Google as a search engine, a place to start and end the day. People also think of it as an advertising company. But Google is obviously more than that.

Google says its mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But that’s too much of a 50,000 foot view of the company - and it’s so vague it’s not very useful.

Schmidt describes Google:

Yahoo India has decided to shut down SpotM, the social network it launched less than a year ago in India. According to the site, SpotM. which never exited private beta, will be shut down on Sep. 1. Yahoo launched SpotM as a social network for the 16-24 age bracket in an attempt to capture the growing market in India.

It appeared that SpotM had potential to take off due the popularity of social networks in India and the addition of a few differentiating features. Yahoo said that SpotM would allow users to make friends with other users and if they wanted, to make those friends private so other users wouldn’t know about the relationship. SMS integration with anonymous chat would let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number.

Of the 7 bookmarklets I have installed on my web browser, the Facebook Share one is the one I use the least. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of sharing stuff on Facebook, but the Share functionality is too slow and too clunky. Today, Facebook is trying to improve it — but it’s still won’t be as good as the functionality of the company it just bought, FriendFeed.

From what it has written on its Facebook Developers site today, it sounds like most of the Share changes will be happening functionality for buttons partners can install on their sites. If you have a Share button installed, for example, users should see a dialog box that pops up to post an item to their profile. The dialog box is said to be “more consistent with other forms of sharing on Facebook.“

While Google Translate is certainly not perfect in many of its translations, the site is undoubtedly an incredibly useful tool when trying to interpret a word, phrase or entire site in a different language. Today, Google has added nine more languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish, bringing the number of languages that are supported up to 51.

Google says that with the latest addition, the site now supports all 23 of the official EU languages. And following the events in Iran during the elections, Google added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. Google warns users that quality of the translation for the new languages is still basic and may have some glitches.

We’ve just received a pair of screenshots that may be of Google’s upcoming Chrome OS operating system. Google announced the entirely browser-based OS in July, and since then a number of alleged screenshots have popped up that have ranged from laughably bad to somewhat plausible. Because we haven’t seen any confirmed screenshots from Google, anyone with a copy of Photoshop can throw together some Google icons and claim to have the goods, so take these with a grain of salt.

The screenshots below depict Google’s Chrome browser, with a dock of unnecessarily large app icons lining the right side of the screen (including what appears to be a Google media player app). Thing is, Google Earth, which is included in the dock, primarily uses a downloadable client, as does Picasa. This doesn’t really mesh well with the fact that Chrome OS is a browser OS. On the other hand, Google does offer a browser plug-in for Google Earth, and you can use a web version of Picasa to browse albums, so they’re still within the realm of possibility.

Maybe it’s because they are cheap. Maybe it’s because they are small. Or maybe it’s just because people don’t need computers for much more than Net access these days. But the popularity of netbook computers keeps growing.

In the second quarter, netbooks accounted for 22.5 of all portable computer shipments worldwide, according to market forecaster DisplaySearch (which is part of the NPD Group). That is up from 5.6 percent a year ago, and 17.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009.

Tesla Motors has hired Ricardo Reyes away from Google as the company’s first Vice President of Communications. Reyes is currently the head of global communications and public affairs at YouTube. Reyes will officially join Tesla on September 14.

Tesla has been on a roll recently. They announced profitability, secured $465 million in government loans to build their next car plant and raised another $50 million in equity from Daimler that valued the company at $550 million.

Last week, the Italian government began an investigation into Google and Google News about allegations of anti-competitive behavior. (For more details, read Google’s initial response or Danny Sullivan’s take). Italian newspaper publishers claim that Google News is stealing readers from them who skim the headlines on Google News and never bother to click through. It is a familiar refrain, to which the obvious response is: If newspapers want readers to click on their headlines, maybe they should write better headlines.

But implicit in these arguments, and an investigation into how Google News is somehow stifling competition in the Italian news industry is that Google News dominates the news in Italy, at least online. That is not the case. According to comScore, the Italian audience of Google News is smaller than at least two of the largest Italian newspaper sites, La Republicca and Corriere Della Sera. In July, Google News had 2.4 million Italian readers versus 3.8 million for both of those Italian newspaper sites. (These numbers reflect only visitors from Italy).

So it looks like the rumors of an Apple event on September 9 are true. This event, themed after a Rolling Stones song seems to involve some classic tunes. It also a music-focused event so that means new iPods. But what else can we expect?

Fans of the television show Lost will remember that a big part of season 2 revolved around the pushing of a button. Every 108 minutes you had to enter numbers and push the button or the world might end, was the line of thought. Of course, as time went on, people started to wonder if it wasn’t just some psychological experiment. A new iPhone game that involves pushing a button, is a psychological exercise, of sorts.

Called Button, the game is about as simple as they come. There is a big button on the screen, and when it lights up, you push it. So why would anyone want to play that game? No, the world isn’t going to end if you don’t, but you will potentially miss out on some free prizes. And pushing the button may just help you get through some mundane tasks throughout your day as well.

Oh, Gene Munster. You keep popping up like the loose Cheerios my nine-month-old daughter drops at breakfast. What are you up to this time, you little scamp?

Munster of Piper Jaffray “predicts” that AT&T will lose its iPhone exclusivity by the end of 2010, thereby rendering the company impotent and insolvent. Some contenders for the iPhone throne include Verizon. This ignores the fact that AT&T is fighting like a champ to keep the iPhone until 2011 but it seems the popular perception of AT&T as a pile of fail may put a damper on Apple’s wish to stay put.