Webcards (the product) have actually been a part of Smalltown since the site launched in October of 2006. Now, however, with an extremely easy-to-use online builder, users can create their own in a few easy steps. Even if businesses are based in a town that doesn’t have a Smalltown community (the service is still only confined to the Bay Area), they will now be able to make these cards.

I met with Smalltown founder and chief executive Hal Rucker who explained to me that a Webcard can be thought of as a Flash widget that can be embedded in any webpage. One of the major benefits of this embedding is that when you change your Webcard, it changes across all the sites it’s featured on. An example usage for such a feature would be a company coupon or promotion that was constantly updated.

I did a walk-through for creating my own Webcard, it was seamless and extremely simple. Utilizing the Webcard Factory, users can have a card ready to go in as few as ten minutes. Rucker expressed that simplicity was important because so many small business owners in these smaller communities do not have the time or quite often the patience to sit through making an extensive advertising campaign.

[Above: a Webcard]

The eventual idea behind Webcards.com is that Smalltown will see which areas people are using the service the most. These areas will then be considered prime targets for expansion of the Smalltown brand itself.

That will be the big question. Will users outside of Smalltown’s Bay Area constituency use the product? Initial launch integration with services YellowPagesLive, Trulia and WebVisible should help the service gain some traction.

Mixpo is one competitor in the small to mid-sized business online advertising game, however it is much more focused on video rather than card-based dynamic information.

Smalltown raised a $3 million Series A round of funding back in 2006 from Formative Ventures. It followed this up with a Series A extension for an undisclosed amount. There is some thought about a Series B in the coming Fall depending on how things go with the new Webcard product.

The site is the brainchild of Armen Berjikly, a 28-year-old Stanford University graduate. He started working on his first social networking site more than five years ago, when one of his friends was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The site, ThisisMS, was a gathering place for information on the disease. But one of its most active parts was the anonymous forum. Berjikly saw how much more honest people seemed to be because of the anonymity. He took that learning and started Experience Project.

“Anonymity is incredibly important because you can more freely talk about what you’re passionate about,” he said.

Other sites have picked up on this from the tawdry Daily Confession to 43 Things, where people write about their aspirations. Post Secret is another site where you can put up a post card with an anonymous note on it. And JuicyCampus has anonymous tales entitled “the most hated sluts on campus.” Anonymous posting and the Internet go well together, and that makes for a crowded market.

In contrast to those other sites, Experience Project is really much more about deep conversations and positive support. Berjikly says that many of the posts draw more 20 to 100 comments. And many of those comments are long. While mature subjects are permitted, the site’s members and moderators don’t tolerate illegal activities or those that are overtly pornographic. Subjects such as recovering from drug abuse, however, are fair game.

Berjikly declined to disclose the number of members, but he said that millions visit the site a month. Each post has its own forum for comments and can run content-appropriate advertising, which is one of the ways that the company makes money.

The company has six employees and is based in San Francisco. Berjikly says that he will hire more engineers to improve the site. The site is not yet profitable.

D.E. Shaw Group led the round. Other investors include Maples Investments and Baseline Ventures. Despite the tough economic environment, Berjikly said the deal was done in just a week.

McCain praised wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies as affordable and attractive alternatives to fossil fuels that could help revamp the country’s failed energy policies and significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

In an effort to sway moderate and independent voters, McCain stressed his environmental bona fides and sought to distance himself from the Bush administration’s record — calling for a return to 1990 emissions levels by 2020 and for a 60% cut below 1990 levels by 2050.

Citing the success of the sulphur emissions trading program, instituted under the Clean Air Act, in reducing acid rain, McCain said a cap-and-trade system would have an “equally dramatic and permanent effect on carbon emissions by setting clear limits on emissions levels, while giving companies a financial incentive to reduce them.

Such a system would have the added benefit of fostering innovation and entrepreneurship among companies looking to make a profit from the sale of their permits, McCain said. “It is very hard to picture venture capitalists, corporate planners, small businesses and environmentalists all working to the same good purchase. But such cooperation is actually possible in the case of climate change,” he added.

Over time, the government would sell an increasing fraction of permits through an auctioning system to maximize federal revenues. Some of these proceeds would be used to fund advanced carbon capture systems and renewable energy projects, as well as promote the development of promising new technologies like hydrogen-powered vehicles. The rest would be invested in the country’s creaking electrical infrastructure, or used to bring clean energy to the states that need them.

A working cap-and-trade system would also help bring China, India and other developing nations to the table by demonstrating the U.S.’s firm commitment to emissions reduction. The U.S. will need to lead by example by fulfilling its obligations under a future successor to the Kyoto Protocol and by pushing for closer technological and political cooperation. While he stressed the importance of speaking to different nations’ interests, he called any comprehensive plan that did not include China and India a failure.

A McCain administration would use the government’s full purchasing power to encourage greater demand and adoption of the “best technologies and practices in energy conservation” and lean on Congress to eliminate some of the energy bill’s subsidies and tax breaks — even those for clean energy. When interviewed by Grist last October, he said he was opposed to subsidies for wind and solar technologies.

The Arizona senator is a strong advocate of nuclear energy, however, and has hinged his support for the Lieberman-Warner climate bill in part on a provision granting nuclear operators more perks. In fact, McCain has made nuclear energy a central component of his climate agenda, arguing that the U.S. — which currently has 104 reactors in operation — should ramp up the construction of new reactors.

He mentioned the progress made by France and Belgium, which derive over half their electricity from nuclear energy, in reducing their emissions. Under a cap-and-trade system, he said, the costs of building new plants would be much lower. Further research and technological innovation would help overcome nuclear energy’s main drawback — the storage and disposal of waste.

We won’t know for sure what a renewable energy infrastructure could look like under a McCain administration until early June, when he will deliver a speech dedicated solely to his energy policy. At that time, he will lay out some more specifics on his government’s approach to fossil fuels, nuclear energy and renewables. Given his strong backing for the nuclear sector, however, it’s likely that we would see a lot more nuclear reactors popping up around the country under his presidency. His stated opposition to subsidies and tax breaks casts some doubt on the continuation of government tax credits, which could crimp growth prospects for the renewable sector.

Barack Obama’s climate and energy plan, which he unveiled last October, differs in several key respects. He has said he would push for deeper emissions cuts; invest $150 billion in new infrastructure and so-called “green-collar” jobs over the next decade; place a stronger emphasis on energy efficiency; and make explicit the country’s reduced dependence on foreign oil sources.

Under his proposed cap-and-trade system, emissions would have to be cut 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Like McCain’s, it would start by mandating a return to 1990-level emissions by 2020.

A more accurate way of representing Obama’s plan is to call it “cap-and-auction“: Unlike his Republican rival, Obama endorses a “100% allowance auction” system in which all carbon permits would be auctioned off — rather than giving a portion away for free, as McCain’s system would — to ensure all companies are required to pay for each ton of emissions they produce.

A fraction of this revenue would be used to offset the costs of energy efficiency improvements for lower-income homeowners by expanding the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and establishing a dedicated fund to provide continuing assistance. Such programs could prove especially beneficial for solar installers like SolarCity and Sun Run, which are aggressively promoting new lease programs for homeowners to purchase solar panels.

In general, Obama’s expansive agenda contains many more specifics about the key areas of research and development his government would pursue and the carrots it would dangle before companies to encourage clean energy technologies and efficiency gains. In its current form, the plan contains goodies for a range of industries — from nuclear and biofuels to solar and wind — so we could expect to see many more solar farms, windmills and bio-refineries sprout up under an Obama presidency.

Venture capitalists and private equity investors, who have warmed to his candidacy, hope that, as a new face in Washington, he will be more open to their entreaties — and cleantech portfolios. The Democratic candidate’s ambitious proposal to create millions of green-collar jobs would be a boon to both established players and startups that have been struggling to recruit skilled workers.

We’ll have a better idea of McCain’s approach to energy policy in a few weeks, at which point we’ll revisit these issues in more depth.

So did I jump the gun? Was I (along with Eric Schmidt, chief executive at Google, which invested in the deal), “snookered”? I’m not convinced, nor were a couple wireless experts VentureBeat spoke to. Schonfeld certainly does a compelling and thorough job of outlining the many risks and unknowns involved in the deal, but he may be missing the bigger picture: Despite the risks, the deal is a calculated gamble that could pay off.

Schonfeld’s biggest argument is that WiMax has until now been a “fixed” wireless technology (in other words, it provides wireless service in your home and office), rather than mobile, and it hasn’t proven itself as a workable business in that field, either. For example, Clearwire’s network will be the heart of the new partnership, yet Clearwire lost $727 million last year. Also, in order to work, WiMax chips must be installed on laptops and cell phones, which hasn’t happened much yet.

These are all fair points, but I’d argue that collectively they mean the fate of the partnership is unclear, not that it’s a guaranteed failure. For one thing, it’s a mistake to assume that Clearwire and WiMax’s history are good predictors for how this new company (which will also be called Clearwire) will perform. After all, the deal brings plenty of new players — such as Google, Intel Capital, Comcast and Time Warner, who are all investors — into the mix, not to mention $3.2 billion of fresh funding.

“[Schonfeld is] assuming that Clearwire’s current model will be the one going forward, which is highly unlikely,” says Paul Grim of SunBridge Partners. “The name on HQ may be Clearwire, but the $3.2 billion raised suggests the other parties may have a say in how things play out.”

It’s also worth noting that WiMax may be relatively unproven, but the new company will still be deploying ahead of the competing LTE technology, which is a smart move. As Intel Capital’s Arvind Sodhani told us, “We can’t wait three years.” (Keep in mind that Sodhani has a horse in the race, since Intel is a leading provider of WiMax chips.)

Finally, as Rich Wong of Accel Partners told us, the investment makes sense as a calculated gamble as part of Google’s efforts to ensure open mobile networks.

“Consider that one of their alternatives would have been to try and build a complete network off of 700 Mhz spectrum,” Wong said. “This is a far more cost-effective way of driving to this form of open standard.”

So, yes, that’s a lot of money to pour into an unproven technology. But there are plenty of reasons to be excited too, and I’ll wait for more warning signs before joining in TechCrunch’s doom and gloom.

Google extends its lead in online video in March, according to new figures from comScore. People watched about 11.5 billion videos in March, with Google accounting for 38 percent of the entire tally. YouTube, in turn, accounted for 98 percent of Google’s results.
Jeff Raikes has been named CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is committed to improving health in the developing world. Raikes is retiring as the president of Microsoft’s business division and will work as a full-time philanthropist along side Bill Gates, who is also joining the foundation full-time in June. Raikes will start in September. Reporters asked on a phone call if the foundation will take on the same culture as Microsoft as a result. Will we see the Gates Foundation, which has an endowment of $37.3 billion, make a hostile takeover bid for the Ford Foundation — and then give up?

XM Satellite Radio posted a wider loss that missed Wall Street estimates. But the CEO Nate Davis said he expected that the merger with Sirius Satellite Radio will be approved in the second quarter. Clearly, running a business on its own isn’t going so well, with a loss of $129.3 million and rising costs for acquiring new subscribers.

Apple is reportedly in talks with Time Warner’s HBO division to sell popular HBO programs such as “Entourage” on Apple’s iTunes service. Apple may charge a higher price of $1.99 for HBO videos. This may be the first time that Apple has created a separate price structure with a content provider, signaling the importance of the HBO content. I guess it shows there is life after the Bada bing.

Virtual world mania is spreading far beyond Linden Labs’ Second Life. Knowledge Adventure, the maker of kids’ educational-game software JumpStart, will begin selling virtual-world software aimed at three-year-olds to five-year-olds. The JumpStart Advanced Preschool World will encourage kids to learn their ABCs by playing games in a 3-D version of a beach or a jungle.

Hackers managed to steal the identities of six million Chileans, including the daughter of the country’s president. The data included identity cards numbers, addressses, phone numbers, e-mails and academic backgrounds. The data was taken early Friday from servers at the Education Ministry, as first reported by the daily newspaper El Mercurio.

Get ready to see more visual search engines. Picitup is launching a beta of its search engine for finding matching images. It can be used for celebrity face matching and a variety of other image related functions. It reminds me of the combination image-text search engine under research at the Palo Alto Research Center.

Advanced Micro Devices shuffled the deck chairs today as it announced Randy Allen, formerly head of the company’s server chip business, will be the senior vice president of the computing solutions group. He replaces Mario Rivas, an apparent victim of Intel’s spectacular success against AMD. AMD has had a tough time competing because of delays in launching its Barcelona products.

This new version, found at http://www.google.com/reader/i/ is simply awesome. It takes the desktop experience and translates it onto the iPhone’s screen. One big problem I had with the app before was that it was entirely too hard to star anything. As I wrote last November:

I would still like to see a bit more prominent way to star and share stories (and a way to do so without having to click in to the story - for those of us who star things to read later).

That’s exactly what Google has done. Now, it’s a large, very finger-tappable star — and yes, you no longer have to click into a story to star it. But the best part of the app? Its speed. This thing is smoking fast.

The team that updated the app clearly took cues from the excellent iPhone version of Gmail. It’s simple really, just make the iPhone version act like the regular version, but with larger areas to click on. The “share” link still could be a bit bigger, but there is only so much screen real estate to work with.

This version also works with the new “Notes” feature of Google Reader.

You won’t yet find the new Reader on the iPhone Google Apps toolbar area (it will still take you to the old version), so be sure to use the link above.

Waiting in line will never be the same again.

Here’s an audio post as I test it out:

[photo: Google Reader Blog]

There’s a small batch of tickets left for the event. To get one of the ones that remain, click here.