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I know where I am going to be checking to see what people are saying about TechCrunch50 this week. The TechCrunch50 Aggregator. It is a site developed by Sean Percival to collect all the Twitters, FreindFeed comments, blog posts, news stories, photos, videos, Diggs,and Techmeme headlines that are tagged “techcrunch50″or “tc50.”

Even right now, in the middle of the night before the show starts, you can see a picture of the team still unloading boxes, read Robert Scoble lamenting via Twitter that nobody has yet leaked the list of TC50 finalists (ha!), and other various opinions.

The site is laid out in a Netvibes-like grid, with tabs across the top to narrow the results by source. If this helps filter and focus the noise around TechCrunch50, the same approach could be used for other events and topics as well.

What tags should Percival aggregate next?

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The TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco next Monday through Wednesday is now oversold. We had originally anticipated as many as 1,500 attendees (50% more than last year), but we blew through that number earlier this week and are now at around 1,650 attendees. The venue actually holds this many people without any problems, but we have to order more infrastructure stuff to accommodate everyone.

We will be cutting off ticket sales tonight at midnight or when we hit 1,700 attendees, whichever comes first, to get a final attendance count. So if you plan on attending, get on the ball now.

The final agenda is now on the TechCrunch50 site as well. Check the blog for regular updates.

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TechCrunch50 starts next Monday in San Francisco. We’re on track to sell out the 1,500 available tickets sometime in the next 48 hours. We’ll have a bunch of updates for attendees here and on the TC50 blog over the next few days.

Here are two updates now: We need more student volunteers, and we’re opening up the last five demopit spots to non-TC50 applicants.

Student Volunteers: Here’s the deal - work a day for us and enjoy the other two days free. Alternatively you can register for all three days for just $150 and skip the work. Frankly, volunteering for a day is actually fun, and you get to see the inner workings of a conference (ever hear about making sausage?). Either way, it’s great to have a lot of students at the event to round out the audience. Plus, everyone is trying to hire you. If you want to volunteer, email Tanya at TechCrunch dot com.

DemoPit: The TechCrunch DemoPit is a way for the 1000+ startups that applied to TechCrunch50 but didn’t make the final cut to participate. You get tickets for half the normal price and you also get to exhibit your company for one of the three days. Just like last year, you collect poker chips from attendees and whoever gets the most gets the last spot on stage at the end of the conference. We’ve sold most of these spots, but five are left and available to startups who want to pitch something new. Email Dan at TechCrunch dot com if you want to be considered, no later than Tuesday afternoon. After that we go to the printers for signage, and we need some time to review the requests.

More news soon. See you next Monday.

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On Facebook, there is no shortage of apps that tell you what celebrity you look like based on your photo (FaceDouble is the most popular), but in Japan we like our vanity apps on our mobile phones. After all, the camera is built in. Take the case of Kao Chekki (Face Check) by J-Magic, a web company that was totally unknown until the end of April 2007, when it caused a Japan-wide frenzy with its free Kao Chekki service. By June 2007, the mobile site had registered an incredible 20 million requests, and continues to be popular to this day.

The service is quite simple and cleverly plays with human vanity: People submit their photograph from their cell phones to check which (Japanese and international) celebrities they resemble the most. Kao Chekki scans the pictures and emails back the top three celebrity matches, including percentage match, a few moments later.

Kao Chekki works very well with Japanese faces (trustme on that one), but seems to have slight problems with foreigners. Michael and Erick really don’t resemble Gori-san and Kiyokiba-san, respectively, do they? Although, Gori-san is known as a cut-up.

The site’s overwhelming success spawned a number of copycats, including a rather bizarre service called Koe Chekki (Voice Check): Here, users call a phone number, leave a short message and are then emailed back to their cell phones with a list of celebrities with similar voices. Okay, maybe that one won’t translate overseas.

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Over one billion cell phones have been sold worldwide in the last year, but in the US or Europe, the mobile Internet is still catching on relatively slowly. There even was a heated debate in the blogosphere just recently whether the mobile web has a future at all.

However, this has never been a question in one specific region of the world: In Japan, since 2006 more people have been accessing the web through cell phones than through PCs. Is this a picture of things to come in other countries?

Not necessarily. The interplay of five specific factors paved the way for the success of the mobile web in Japan (where I live) and largely explains why it hasn’t taken off yet elsewhere:

• the ubiquity of advanced cell phones combined with a vast selection of tailor-made services
• tech-savvy customers who often had their first web experience on a cell phone
• a reliable technical infrastructure
• symbiotic business relations between carriers and content providers
• relatively sound regulatory policy

Three catalysts for growth: superior phones, a lot of content and demanding customers
Japan’s image as a high-speed testbed for the world’s most advanced mobile technology is well-deserved. A staggering 90 million 3G handsets are currently in circulation. Over 70% of people in this nation of 127 million are subscribed to mobile web data plans. By way of comparison: The 3G penetration rate stands at 23.8% in the US (where 52 million 3G handsets are on the market) and at 11.1% in Europe. 15.6% of American mobile subscribers use the mobile web.

The country’s three main carriers (SoftBank, KDDI au and market leader NTT Docomo) are churning out around 100 different Internet-enabled 3G handsets per year, each equipped with a whole array of flashy functions (the iPhone made its debut in this country only last month). Japanese people use their “Keitai” for over-the-counter payments (e-wallet), as a commuter pass in public transportation, 2D barcode reader, health control terminal, dictionary, karaoke player, digital TV, music player, e-book, and much more.

Some handsets even feature video transfer from Blu-ray recorders, alarm buzzers with direct connection to the nearest police station or voice-to-text translation. In June, Docomo introduced a home service for owners of Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones to access mobile web sites at a maximum of 54 Mbps.

The availability of cutting-edge phones is one reason why many Japanese people don’t own a PC but would rather browse the web exclusively on mobile devices. And it’s not just for short bursts. They never write SMS either but rather thumb-text push-mails, often containing little icons, emoticons and coded youth slang acronyms. Booking flights online, ordering clothes, auctioning off used stuff, gaming, paying for movie tickets via direct debit: all of this has been possible on Japanese mobile phones for years now.

Semi-walled gardens in a flawless technical environment
Japanese companies never tried to duplicate the wired Internet experience but rather developed unique mobile ecosystems specifically for deployment on cell phones. Docomo’s i-mode kicked off the boom when it launched in early 1999 and was quickly followed by proprietary web systems established by competitors.

Today, the mobile web in Japan is fast, sophisticated, technically stable, and easy-to-use. Users press one dedicated button on the phone and are online within seconds, usually starting to navigate via menus predetermined in the carrier’s landing page. Alternatively users can type in URLs directly to get to mobile web sites, which can then be conveniently browsed by using one-key shortcuts.

Accessing the fixed Internet is also possible. Docomo, for example, uses a mix between a modified version of HTML and several i-mode-only protocols. This means that au’s EZweb subscribers are fenced out of Docomo’s web system (and vice versa). By the way: WAP never gained a foothold in this country.

But even in Japan’s mobile industry all is not well: Developers frequently deplore insufficient CSS, a lack of cookie and scripting support and restrictions imposed by operators and the Japanese government, i.e. especially with content regarded as harmful to children.

Powerful trio: Forward-looking politicians, carriers and content providers
Next to charging end consumers for their services, Japan’s mobile web operators generate revenue by making sites and content providers pay considerable fees for prominent positions in their default menus. Carriers also double as centralized billing institutions, significantly facilitating transactions conducted on cell phones. If a user downloads a game from an i-mode site, for example, Docomo keeps about 10% of the fee for itself. The content provider gets the rest, while the user conveniently pays the total via the monthly phone bill.

This means the business of operators and content providers alike is based on a 3-pillar kiosk model.

Carriers provide:

• stable connectivity and technical infrastructure
• system of timely and correct payment flows (for subscribers and content providers)
• willingness to share revenues

This framework motivates content providers to ensure:

• development of compelling content
• advertising of their services
• willingness to pay billing fees to carriers

This development was spurred by the Japanese government: To politically boost 3G adoption, carriers never had to pay a single Yen for mobile phone bandwidth. By way of comparison: In 2000 and 2001, the 3G licences in the UK and Germany were given out for $58 billion and $78 billion, respectively. In Japan, government policy was aimed at kick-starting a market, not to filling its own coffers. And it worked.

The country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications says business carried out through cell phones in Japan was worth $106 billion in 2007 (up 23% from 2006), with m-commerce accounting for $67 billion and the mobile content market for $39 billion. Just one example: Cell phone owners downloaded music worth $10.2 billion, 42% more than in 2006.

Japan quickly managed to transform into a super-mobile society and this development might be hard to replicate, at least in the same way. What will be interesting to see is whether the mobile web emerging in the U.S. and elsewhere can leapfrog Japan by embracing more open standards and doing away with walled gardens. The jury is still out on that one.

In the meantime, Japan wouldn’t be Japan if it wasn’t thinking even further ahead. Think next-generation mobile networks: In March already, Docomo successfully transmitted 250Mbps packets in an experimental Super 3G system, planning to end preparations for the eventual launch by 2009.

(Photo by Matsuyuki).

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Y Combinator startup TicketStumbler has launched today. The Boston based company is an aggregator for the secondary ticket market, collecting tickets from brokers like Stubhub and Razorgator into one searchable database. Think of a kayak.com for sports tickets. The service essentially aims to spare users the trouble of searching through different secondary ticketing sites to find specific seats and prices. TicketStumbler has landed partnerships with several ticket brokers, and is working to expand their repository. They currently have 1.5 million listings representing 7 million total tickets.

TicketStumbler, founded by Dan Haubert and Tom Davis, is looking to take the forefront of the market by providing precise search options and solid user experience. The company’s main competition comes from Tickex, who also extends their service to concerts, but for the most part the space has relatively few contenders.

When comparing search results between the two sites it is clear that TicketStumbler provides a less cluttered interface without ads, ebay listings, and extraneous add-ons. Search results can also be viewed by seating location, allowing users to navigate through different sections to find the prime combination of price and location.

TicketStumbler hopes that by aggregating ticket listings they will spur competition between brokers and decrease transaction prices. They believe the service can further drop prices by driving traffic to brokers’ web sites, making them more willing to sell cheaper tickets. Depending on the broker, they will be taking 6-15% of the ticket sales that are conducted through their site.

The founders claim that the next steps involve pulling from more brokers and extending the service to cover more professional and college sports, with concerts and other types of events in the distant future. Secondary ticketing is a multi-billion dollar industry, so the revenue source is clearly there. Attracting users may well come down to having the most extensive ticket listings rather than the most user friendly service.

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We’ve never been big fans of ChaCha, the human powered search engine that pairs you up with a “guide” who attempts to answer your questions in real time. The search model was obviously unscalable from the outset, but ChaCha’s botched implementation hasn’t helped much. When it first launched, ChaCha allowed users to initiate full on chat sessions with their guides, which predictably led to a flood of pranksters who overwhelmed the service.

After a year of trying to make the ridiculously flawed system work, the company abandoned the chat sessions in favor of one-off question and answers, primarily targeting users through a mobile service.

Despite its glaring issues, ChaCha has managed to ring up $16 million in funding, which is probably why it has survived this long. And to the company’s credit, it has amassed a following of loyal “guides” - the people who do the heavy lifting and find the search results for visitors to ChaCha.

Many of these guides are only interested in making a quick buck, which is why there are so many laughably bad search results. But for some, ChaCha is an extension of the workday, offering some relatively easy money to help supplement their incomes. And now ChaCha is going to screw them.

Yesterday ChaCha sent out a message to its guides explaining that it was introducing a “Pay-For-Performance” system that was designed to improve search quality - not a bad idea, given the shoddy results we’ve seen before. Unfortunately, it seems that ChaCha has blundered this plan too.

Under the new program, “Top Guides” will receive 20 cents per question, which has been the standard rate for experienced guides for some time. Everyone else gets 10 cents per question - half of what they would have gotten under the old system. To become a Top Guide, users must do the following:

* >95% Quality Measurement.
* 95% and above completion of answers to questions:
* Minimum 300 Searches a week.

That’s a lot of searches, given the fact that most experienced users average around one search per minute. In effect, ChaCha is forcing users to work five or more hours per week if they want the higher payrate - something that will totally alienate the site’s more casual (but accurate) users. What’s worse, there’s currently no way to readily see your accuracy score, so users are forced to trust ChaCha’s word.

Users are up in arms on the site’s private forum (you can see some of the complaints here), with many planning to abandon ChaCha entirely. It’s clear that ChaCha is trying to trim their workforce down to a small army of accurate and hardworking searchers, but enraging its entire community only seems to solidify its place in the Deadpool.

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Here are some of the jobs listed on CrunchBoard over the last week:

• Senior Java Web Engineer
  TinyPictures.us - San Francisco, CA
• Backend Web Developer
  SlideShare - San Francisco, CA
• Developer
  SNAP Interactive - New York, NY
• Product Marketing Manager
  Mimeo - New York, NY
• Front End Ninja
  Uptake - San Francisco, CA
• Directing Engineer
  ZOOSE - San Francisco, CA
• Systems Engineering Developer
  Digg - San Francisco, CA
• National Sales Executive
  Liquidity Services - Washington, DC
• Interaction Designer
  Lunch.com - Manhattan Beach, CA
• Manager, Engagement Management
  Organic.com - New York, NY

Additionally, we’re looking for a Ruby Developer to join us here at TechCrunch HQ (Atherton, CA).

International readers can check our British and French job boards as well.

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One of the conferences we're supporting this year is Defrag. The topics that Defrag explores are very close to our hearts - OpenSocial, Attention, Next-Level Discovery, The Implicit Web, and more. One of this year's Defrag sessions that caught my attention is entitled: Fixing Foundational Information Channels -- Email, Calendars, RSS, etc.

On the Defrag blog, my eyes could cope with the stark white text on pitch black background just long enough to read this description:

"...this session starts with the premise that something is broken in our foundations. Email imagines every message as a letter (a discrete object vs. a thread or networked send). Calendars are silo'd islands of non-interoperability that hearken back to days of paper and the rolodex. And RSS, new as it is, is still delivering us "object-oriented" feeds, and not contextually-driven usefulness."

Defrag has snagged some interesting folks that "you don't normally hear from": Ilya from AideRSS, Yori from Timebridge, Deva from ClearContext, and Pete from Mailana. The moderator will be Jeff Nolan.

This sounds like a fascinating session. I still struggle with email overload, even despite my love of Gmail. Calendars are a mix of paper and web for me, which is an indication that I'm not fully satisfied with existing web calendars. And the point about RSS delivering us "object-oriented" feeds is a very good one - and an issue that we at ReadWriteWeb are intensely aware of and wanting to solve on our own blog.

We certainly don't have the answers, but the panel members are well informed with this issue of "foundational information channels". Perhaps our readers can suggest, in the comments, things for the panel to discuss.

Defrag is being held November 3-4 in Denver, Colorado. You can register for Defrag here. Entering the code "rww1" will get RWW readers $100 off of the early bird price.

Think you’ve got the gift of foresight? The Washington Post has partnered with Predictify, an online polling service, to create a “Prediction Center” that allows readers to vote on possible outcomes for selected stories. Users will be able to leave their predictions and discuss their beliefs on an integrated comment thread, with the most accurate participants appearing on a leaderboard. You can access the main Predictify hub here.

Predictify, which launched in 2007, goes beyond basic polling systems by integrating discussion features and monitoring a users’ accuracy score across the entire service. While there isn’t currently a way to weight one question more than another, the site’s algorithm does take into account the type of question and the accuracy rate of participants. Besides the Washington Post, Predictify is also found on The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle’s sites.

To offer an incentive for users to take part in the polls, the site has also implemented a premium program that allows companies to sponsor a poll and reward the most accurate participants with cash. In return, these sponsors are entitled to the demographics data that the service asks for with each vote. CEO Parker Barrile says that at this point it isn’t clear if the Washington Post will be making use of this feature, but if it does it will clearly distinguish sponsored polls from normal content.

While this partnership isn’t groundbreaking by any means, it serves as a reminder that “old media” is willing to embrace the interactivity afforded by the web. Whether or not the Washington Post’s implementation of Predictify will be popular remains to be seen, but for now it’s a big score for the service.

Note: TechCrunch is syndicated to WashingtonPost.com.

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Piczo, a social network with a strong teenage following, has launched a new developer platform that allows users to quickly generate content from partner sites while helping brands increase their exposure on the network. Piczo has never reached near the popularity of mega-networks like MySpace and Facebook, but it continues to draw a sizable audience, primarily from the teenage demographic. In conjunction with the platform, the site is also launching “Piczo Powered Pages”, which effectively integrate the social network’s features into other sites. Users can try one out at eSPIN, a social network owned by Hearst Magazines that has already made use of Piczo’s featureset.

Included in the API are three new features: “Post to Piczo”, “Create a Page”, and “Piczo Toolbar”. The “Post to Piczo” function allows users to post items to their Piczo accounts from external partner sites, which include Meebo, Widgetbox, and Clearspring. “Create a Page” allows users to use pre-designed templates to generate new Piczo pages containing partner content. Finally, developers will now be able to partner with Piczo to become part of the page editor’s toolbar, which the site says allows them to become an “integral part of the Piczo product.”

Unfortunately, this new platform doesn’t share much in common with the dev platforms seen on Facebook and MySpace. Instead, it’s more like a handicapped API that doesn’t have much flexibility. The site may well expand this functionality over time, but for now, don’t expect to see a developer community spring up around Piczo.

That said, the new features should help make Piczo more competitive with the larger, more popular social networks like Hi5, Facebook, and MySpace. ComScore data shows the site slipping off over the last year, dropping from 12.9 million users in April 2007 to 8.4 million globally in June 2008. However, the site has seen impressive growth in the United States, growing from 655 thousand to 1.4 million in the same time span.

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Slide was not too happy when Facebook temporarily pulled one of its most popular applications, Top Friends, from the social networking site for exposing too much profile information to people who were not friends.

Ahead of today’s F8 developer conference, I asked Slide CEO Max Levchin what Facebook could do to make developers’ lives easier. Not surprisingly, he’d like to see clearer rules about what is and is not allowed, as well as more formal, contractual partnerships between Facebook and app developers. (Facebook is expected to announce a tiered partner system today, and Slide may not qualify as one of the “preferred” partners because of the issues that led to Facebook’s police action).

Slide’s VP of Strategy, Keith Rabois, goes even further. He warns that if Facebook keeps shifting the foundation on top of which app companies are built it will threaten their viability. This might all sound like sour grapes, but coming from the biggest provider of apps on Facebook it does carry some weight.

Levchin, who was one the co-foudners of PayPal, also thinks that Facebook needs a universal payment system so that developers can start charging for apps like they can on the iPhone. The question is whether anyo