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Toronto Star introduces the reader to the ghost technology that it thinks is bound to disappear soon. And it’s not Betamax or Windows 98 that the paper feels negative about - it’s the plasma TV sets: “LCD is now in plasma country, and this means war - a war some say plasma can’t hope to win.” The real world sales data published this week seems to agree: LCD TVs maintained 22% market share of all TVs sold in the second quarter of 2006, while plasma was significantly behind with 5%.

Product search on Yahoo! Tech got a bit more helpful today with the introduction of articles and Q&A (provided by Yahoo! Answers) on the sidebar. Hopefully it’s a step closer in making searches beneficial to the user, as whether you’re looking to buy a tech product, or research something you already own, articles and blog posts provide educational material, and Q&A provide the real-world experience from other users.

Wall Street Journal talks about the point systems and gaming them in the online world exemplified by Yahoo! Answers:

When Yahoo Answers was launched in December, Answerers were given points for asking a question. After all, what better way to populate the site with interesting questions? The result, though, was a deluge of easy questions, like those involving the color of the sky. You could also get two points for answering a question, a good thing since the whole premise of the site is to bring askers and answerers together.

But that caused a run of answers along the lines of, “I don’t know,” or “That’s a good question,” or even, and more cynically, “Thanks for the two points.” The software monitoring things would see that an “answer” had been posted. It didn’t have the smarts to understand how bogus the answer really was.

Sony paid $65 mln to buy Grouper.com, an online video sharing site, according to Reuters. The differentiating point of Grouper among other video sharing site was the automatic conversion for PSP and iPod video formats.

Grouper, founded by Josh Felser of Spinner.com and AOL fame, seemed to gain traction in April of this year:

Most of the high traffic stuff seems to involve the legal music videos and celebrity sightings. The blog, which surprisingly misses the acquisition news, is here.

Whether it’s the frequency of shopping or the amount of boxes received, but it looks like I got on Amazon’s good side enough to cause someone in the organization called Jeff Bezos to send a large gift basket to my home address. Like in the good old days, when the local grocer would send the best customers some gifts, Amazon introduced its Grocery store by sending a sample selection of the products being sold online. They even sent a flashlight with batteries included.

David Pogue of the New York Times warns us about the smallest and cheapest high definition camcorder hitting the store shelves pretty soon. Canon HV10 will sell for the list price of $1,500 and will record to a MiniDV cassette. The biggest deal? No bluriness even for the shakiest hand:

So the front of the HV10 bears a special external sensor that, when you change your aim, handles the bulk of the refocusing extremely rapidly. A standard through-the-lens focusing system does the fine tuning after that. Together, these two mechanisms nearly eliminate the awkward moment of blurry focus-hunting that mars other camcorders’ output. (Take care to avoid covering the focus sensor with your fingers as they wrap around this vertically oriented, chunky camera.)

Amazon already has the item for pre-order at $1,300.

The TechCrunch party at August Capital yesterday was great. August Capital building is quite easy to miss, but a steady stream of cars moving in the same direction down Sand Hill Road provided a clear marker of where the things were happening. There are quite a few photo sets on Flickr from Dan Farber, Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, Dave McClure and official photographer of the TechCrunch part Scott Beale aka Laughing Squid. The TechCrunch party has grown quite far from small 1-2 person startups presenting in Michael Arrington’s living room while cursing the wireless keyboard to the full-blown tents and stands as well as professional DJing by Pandora.

So who was there among the startups?

StashSpace is filling a niche that for a while has been empty. While quite a few places allow the user to upload the video to share it with the world, the uploading limits and the default public settings might not be what we’re looking for with personal videos. Wedding or birthday videos should preferably be uploaded in the highest resolution possible, then shared with the friends and family, but not everybody around the globe. StashSpace will launch with that personal video storage locker in mind. StashSpace is powered by HomeMovie.com, a company that recently got recognition by the New York Times as the pioneer of high-tech business world in the rural areas - HomeMovie.com is based in Twisp, Washington, a rural site in Washington state which has only native American reservations and fiberoptic cables.

FiveRuns was also a presenter, a system management company with easy-to-use client and hosted Web 2.0 interface. According to the company, “FiveRuns Systems Management delivers a simple and straightforward solution for monitoring, analyzing, reporting, and predicting. Users are able to quickly identify problems in their environment and take proactive steps to improve overall system performance. Two months after its beta launch, FiveRuns exceeded 1,500 beta subscribers, fueled by its simple, attractive user interface (UI) built on Ruby on Rails and Ajax.”

I didn’t catch what TheFind is doing, but their Web site promises “shopping search reinvented”. With recent innovations by companies like Kaboodle and sites like Yahoo! Tech the company would be interesting to watch.

Wink was there demoing their social search, where friends let friends see one another’s searches and preferences. Soonr was giving away free t-shirts to anyone with a mobile phone with Web access who would sign up for a Soonr account. The t-shirts ranged from mild navy blue to bright orange. Most of the TechCrunch party attendees went for navy blue.

Meez - has a solution in the form of 3D avatars, but looks like it has yet to find a problem to solve. Plazes is a real-time social network built on top of WiFi hotspots around the world. Any time you log on to the wireless Web, whether through a hotspot in Starbucks, T-Mobile paid hotspot, or free Google WiFi in Mountain View, Plazes asks you where the hotspot is located and creates a database of unique hotspot IDs and their geographic location. On the site you can see which friends of yours are logged into which hotspot and track where people hang out.

Genius.com was pitching two products - MarketingGenius and SalesGenius, and the reps seemed to use the phrase “It’s going to be big” in the presentation a lot. From the looks of a tool it seems that the company is allowing everybody to write and deliver an e-mail with trackable beacons that integrate into the Web site, and therefore the analytics tool will pick up the response from e-mail campaigns and their efficiency once the customer arrives to the Web site. From the demo one would think this was revolutionary, I guess anyone can join the demo and find out.

Odesk is the new project of Dave McClure of Simply Hired fame. Briefly chatting with Dave, I found out to my delight that SearchSIGs are going to be back, as both him and Jeff have been away for the summer. So what’s Odesk? It’s a marketplace for software developers and other intellectual workers. What, another one? Dave is going after the per-hour market, since fixed bid projects pushed on other programming sites are usually trivial due to the constraint of deciding on final amount to pay. So what happens after the coder signs up for a per-hour project? Isn’t there a potential for abuse and overbilling? Odesk creates screenshots of the developer’s desktop and sends it back to the customer, so that the paying boss can verify the hour has not actually been spent playing PSP. Isn’t it too Big Brotherish? Dave agreed it sounds like it, but hey, no one is forced to bid on per-hour projects on Odesk.

ConceptShare’s Scott Brooks is the ultimate evangelist for the company, surviving quite a few demos with the same vigor and vitality. ConceptShare is now launched, and it’s a collaborative space for design projects, where customers can markup any piece of the graphic design, share the updated copy with everybody in the company, and collaborate over a single document. In the process of setting up the company Brooks and others hired someone else to do their logo, since they wanted the efforts to be concentrated on the product development. So the correspondence on the dozen or so logos that the graphic design firm made for them went in Word documents with the graphics as attachments sent back and forth. The communication is a bit hard at this point as points like “this green color in the heading is too bold” creates confusion if there’re several green items, if the definition of “bold” is not clear, etc. ConceptShare is written in Flash, and allows multiple people to work on the same product, annotate it and write their comments as they move along.

Podango is trying to organize the world of podcasts by allowing the users to create their own guided stations. You choose the podcasts you like, unite them into channels, and then link to your stations, which could be topic-specific, or preference-specific, to allow others to share your tastes.

The Real Time Matrix is trying to learn your preferences from analyzing your RSS feed, and then designs the set of your personal channels that it then fills from the information on the Web. Basically, the idea is that you let Real Time Matrix to read your RSS feeds, and then it delivers you the items you might be interested in.

The weirdest presentation was held, however, outside the August Capital complex. Apparently unable to make it to the oversubscribed party, dCongo, a social network founded by two cheerleaders, and targeted essentially towards the same market segment as the founders, was distributing free pink wristbands and cheerleading dances with the names of the guests incorporated. Marc Canter, who was heading down to his car at the same time as me, gave the two cofounders an exhaustive lesson on pitching their stuff to the VCs, insisting, however, on calling the side kodungabunga. The girls politely corrected him, at which point Canter did his spiel on how kodangubunga needs to use open formats, be RSS-compliant, and generally play well with other social networks. One of my suggestions to dCongo was to emphasize the LAMP architecture, to which Canter replied that it’s the openness that matters, they could go with .NET, if they wanted. The cheerleading co-founders did not seem to share the same excitement for the .NET vs LAMP debate, and they quickly told Canter “someone else” was handling all the technical stuff.

Who else attended: Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Rob Christensen, Martin Wells, David Beach, Guy Kawasaki, Jeremiah Owyang, Thomas Hawk, Scott Beale, Dead 2.0 Skeptic, Jeremy Wright, Matt Marshall, Mario Sundar.

Forbes magazine runs a feature on robotics, where they feature seven robots that will change your life. And it’s not just Roomba, it’s this friendly cyborg as well: “HAL turns its wearer, if only temporarily, into a cyborg, boosting strength and endurance: Your arms can lift an extra 88 pounds beyond what you can lift without it. Nurses can move patients from their beds with greater ease. One day HAL may even let recovering stroke victims and paraplegics walk again.”

In an article on recent growth and current downfall of EarthLink the New York Times puts a price tag on the cost of development of municipal WiFi.

The idea behind the networks is to provide a wireless alternative to broadband for city residents and give tourists and business travelers a place to log on for the day. The projects are expensive: $85,000 a square mile, or $10 million to $15 million to cover all of Philadelphia, for example.