Is an iPhone price war about to break out in the UK? After Vodafone and Orange bagged the iPhone – when O2’s two year monopoly expired in September – we learn today that Tesco, the UK supermarket leviathan, is to sell the iPhone on Tesco Mobile, its MVNO joint venture partnership with O2.

This news just sent the iPhone directly into the mainstream. UK iPhone app developers are looking at an even bigger gold rush than before.

Both iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS handsets will be sold in Tesco Phone Shops and online through Tesco Direct in the UK, possibly before the Christmas holidays.

Tesco Mobile normally focuses on the low end of the market with voice and text, and we’re told the prices will be “competitive”. As an MVNO, Tesco has a fairly free hand regarding the the markets it goes after. O2 says it has sold over one million iPhones since September 2007, clearly to early adopters.

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KIDO’Z, the Israeli company behind the eponymous media browser for kids, has released a new version of its program and insists that we now refer to it as a Web OS for kids instead.

It’s certainly not an invalid point, since the new KIDO’Z incorporates communication features besides content consumption elements only, and the company is making strides in signing up computer manufacturers to have the platform pre-installed on machines.

KIDO’Z (an Adobe AIR desktop application) has put a social layer on top of the content part, enabling kids to communicate with each other as well as their parents aside from browsing pre-approved websites and playing videos or games online. Clearly, this is an oft-requested feature, as we’ve noticed when KIDO’Z competitor KidZui recently implemented a bunch of sharing and communication options as well.

Parents can now approve ‘friends’ for their kids to socialize with, which can be other children, the parents themselves, grand parents, and so on. A newly integrated Mail application enables kids to send and receive e-mails, e-cards, drawings, animated backgrounds, stickers etc., allowing the children to express themselves creatively even if they haven’t yet mastered reading or writing skills.

Also new is the addition of Places, which are essentially virtual rooms where kids can socialize with others in a cartoonesque setting. Kids can create an avatar and visit and create their own rooms, and communicate with other kids or exchange virtual gifts in a safe, child-friendly environment.

The Israeli company behind the application has now also added a premium version dubbed KIDO’Z PLUS, enabling parents to unlock more features (statistics, advanced security settings, etc.) for a monthly fee that ranges from $4.18 to $7.5 depending on how long you’d like to subscribe.

The company informs us that KIDO’Z already comes pre-installed on over half a million MSI computers, and that it expects to be on 6 million computers next year. Also worth noting: the startup has managed to attract former National Geographic Kids Entertainment President and Founder Donna Friedman Meir as its Chief of Content and Strategy.

Give KIDO’Z a whirl and let us know what you (and your kids) think.

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You would think that, almost exactly 4 years after opening up to the public, WordPress.com would have a way for people to subscribe to blogs by e-mail, right? You’d be wrong, at least until today.

While there has always been the possibility to subscribe to blogs by e-mail using FeedBurner or other RSS facilitators, WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic has now added an email subscription feature to the popular free blogging service.

To enable this, simply install the Blog Subscription widget on your WordPress.com blog and you’ll enable anyone to get updates from your blog in their e-mail inboxes, whether they’re WordPress.com users or not, on a per post basis, daily or weekly. Evidently, all subscriptions require confirmation by the address owner and can be canceled at any time.

E-mailed blog posts will come in as HTML, although users can opt to receive them in plain text too should they still be using a mail client sans HTML reading capabilities (seriously, does anyone still use those?).

I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that Automattic has only added its very own e-mail subscription feature now, on the verge of entering the year 2010. E-mail is such a huge deal still, and shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought even by ‘new media’ companies like them.

Good thing they ask us to stay tuned, because they have a ‘lot more plans for email’. What, like the ability to send in blog posts for publication by e-mail like Posterous and Tumblr have been doing for quite a while? Update: as Automattic’s Ranaan points out in comments, that was already possible, my bad. Looking forward to their future plans with e-mail.

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Like a love child of eBay and CouchSurfing.com or craigslist, AirBnB lets anyone that owns space fit for accommodating travelers – be it a couch in a small apartment or the master bedroom of a 19th-century castle – post that space as a listing on its website and connect potential renters to its respective owners.

Once called Airbed and Breakfast in full, AirBnB aims to provide a secure online marketplace for these types of transactions and make people ‘travel like humans’ again.

Now the startup, which came out of Y Combinator’s winter 2009 class, is making it easier for people who share interests (e.g. photography) or have another connection with each other (e.g. alumni who’ve attended the same university) to share travel accommodation and recommendations thanks to the addition of Groups.

Basically, the groups feature lets travelers form virtual tribes made up of peers, and exchange rental space among each other through the AirBnB system. The idea behind that is that connecting to someone with similar interests or lifestyle improves the chances of coming to a mutual agreement, and traveling that much more fun. Amusing factoid: there’s also a Y Combinator and Hacker News group, whose members regularly host each other when traveling the country to go pitch somewhere, meet up with partners or attend industry events.

AirBnB is also expanding geographically: it now lists properties in over 100 countries and more than 1,700 cities. In case you’re interested, the most popular is New York City with 1,500 listings, and the most popular international city is Paris (hint: Le Web). Since its soft launch, over 2,500 people have joined 53 groups.

One of the startup’s founders who we spoke to, Brian Chesky, declined to share specifics but informs us that revenue has gone up 10% every month since its April launch.

Which group are you going to join for your next trip? I picked mine:

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The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well. If you get the torrent version, you’ll see it’s in a .BZ2 format. You’ll need to extract it. Macs should be able to do this automatically, but for Windows you may need a tool like Win Rar.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine.:

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on ThePirateBay.

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We’re only about five weeks away from Christmas, so now’s as good a time as any to talk about (drum roll, please) e-books. Amazon kick-started the e-book market (with apologies to earlier e-book readers) with the introduction of the Kindle in the fall of 2007. Two years later, Barnes and Noble, IREX, and Sony announced new or updated e-book readers of their own.

The question becomes, which e-book reader is right for you? The truth is, they’re all very similar, so it should come down to what books their compatible book stores carry. Oh, and price, of course.

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Founder’s Fund managing partner Sean Parker gave a provocative presentation entitled “The New Era Of The Network Service.” In it, he argues that so-called “network services” like Facebook (which he helped start) and Twitter will soon dominate the web, rather than “information services” like Google and Yahoo.

It’s a very interesting idea, to say the least, and obviously you’re interested in it, as about 200 of you commented on it yesterday. So we’ve obtained Parker’s full slide deck from his presentation. Find the full presentation embedded below, definitely worth the read.

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Last week Apple surprised the iPhone’s developer community with the annoucement that it was finally allowing free apps to offer in-app purchases. The move will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way developers conduct businesss on the App Store (we’ve already begun to see some changes). I sat down with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar to talk about the annoucement’s effect on SGN’s upcoming games, as well as its impact on the market in general.

Pishevar says that he was estactic when he heard the news — he almost immediately recorded a video sharing his elation that he sent to all of SGN’s 100+ employees worldwide. He explains that this is really the announcement that he’s been waiting for, but that he had no expectation that Apple might do it so soon. Now the company is working at a brisk pace to take advantage of the change: it will soon be releasing a new free version of its smash hit game F.A.S.T., which has done over $1.8 million in sales before Apple’s cut. The new version of F.A.S.T. will feature an extensive array of virtual goods, which users will be able to purchase once they’ve downloaded the core game, which will be free. I also suspect that many (if not all) of SGN’s games will be released for free from here on out.

After discussing the impact on SGN’s apps, the conversation turned toward how this will impact developers in general. The App Store is going to see some major changes, and some of those won’t necessarily be for the better. For one, it will become even harder for premium applications to get noticed — before now they only had to compete against other ‘paid’ apps for a chance to appear on the Top Apps list. Now many of them will be migrating to the much more crowded ‘free’ section, which means they’ll be facing off with the vast array of ‘fun’ apps that are so enticing for impulse downloads. There’s also the possibility that the store will become flooded with applications that you can download for free, but really offer nothing of value until you start paying for features, despite what users may have been led to believe (a so-called ‘bait and switch’).

Pishevar agrees that the new market may pose a challenge to new developers, who may have trouble getting noticed and establishing trust with users. But he says that the development houses that can establish a relationship with users will be able to rise to the top, even more so than before. That scenario would obviously put SGN, which has millions of installs across all of its games, in a good position.

But Pishevar emphasized that SGN isn’t going to be content to simply rest on its laurels and exploit its large audience by rehashing games that have already been successful (he notes that the the highly derivative nature of many games on Facebook was one of the reasons SGN decided to shift over to the iPhone). Instead, he says he wants to push the limits of the iPhone, and eventually other mobile platforms. And to prove that wasn’t just marketing talk, he gave me a sneak peek at some of the projects that SGN has in the works. I’m sworn to secrecy on those for now, but suffice to say, SGN has some seriously cool things in the pipeline right now that really will take mobile gaming to the next level.

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Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo’s board of directors. According to MarketWatch, he said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” at Yahoo anymore and that he’d rather focus on other companies. The subtext there being that either A) he feels that his work is done and he can move on now that the search deal with Microsoft is moving towards government approval, or B) he can make more money by trying to control some other company.

Icahn wrestled his way onto Yahoo’s board last year when Jerry Yang was still CEO. Initially, he wanted to try to revive Microsoft’s interest in acquiring Yahoo outright, but when it became clear Microsoft didn’t want to do that deal anymore, he supported the search deal as the best way to move forward.

It’s hard to determine whether Icahn is throwing in the towel on Bartz or this is actually a vote of confidence. If he really believes in where Bartz can take the company after the search deal is done, then you’d think he’d keep his board seat to have a stronger influence on the company’s direction. But Icahn has always been a transaction-oriented investor. He tries to push companies to do things that will move the stock in a big way, and then he takes his profits and he leaves.

More likely than not, Icahn doesn’t see another big shift he can push the company to take that will affect the stock in any major way. And with the stock price moving in the right direction, he probably doesn’t see the need to keep shaking the boat. It is much easier for him to just keep selling his shares (he sold almost $180 million worth in August alone) and move on. With the stock trading at $17, some of Icahn’s shares are still underwater, but he also bought a bunch at $10 last November. At this point, he’ll probably be happy just to get all of his initial investment back, which he is still far from doing.

(Photo by Sam Lustgarten)

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The new design is a compromise between the ‘old’ News Feed, which used algorithms to present stories Facebook thought you’d find interesting, and the feed Facebook rolled out back in March that consisted of a Twitter-like stream of recent updates. Since this year’s redesign Facebook has used the ‘Highlights’ section at the right hand side of the screen to present items you may have missed, but this was never an ideal solution: for one, you couldn’t see your friends’ comments on these posts, and the small space afforded to Highlights made it easy to pass over.

Today’s change will make the Highlights section redundant, so it will be removed (everything below it will also be shifted higher on the page, which means the ‘Birthdays’ and ‘Events’ sections will no longer be buried). Facebook’s post also notes that the News Feed will include more events, including when your friends become fans of Pages, add friends, or RSVP to an event.

The change has been a long time coming — reports about the merging of Highlights back into the feed emerged as far back as June.

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