Netlog, the company that sagely changed its name from Facebox in 2007, is taking this gaming thing pretty seriously.

While the bread and butter of the Belgium-based operation is still social— with 69 million members on its youth-centric social network— gaming is now nearly 20% of revenues and climbing, according to Netlog founder, Lorenz Bogaert.

Twenty percent is fairly significant when you consider that its gaming operation, Gatcha!, launched just 8 months ago. At its core, Gatcha! is a gaming distribution platform.

The service creates its own in-house games but the bulk of its business is helping other developers add social layers to their games and achieve distribution across the major social networks such as Facebook and Netlog. Gatcha! gets a cut of the developer’s advertising deals and those highly lucrative micro-transactions, the developers get Gatcha!’s support and easy entry into Europe’s market— Bogaert says they can get a developer in front of a large European audience within 24 hours.

At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long. The next question may be: will Twitter follow suit?

It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that Twitter first announced their intentions to enter the location space. At the time, this simply meant that the API would start supporting longitude and latitude coordinates attached to tweets which third-party developers could expose if they chose to. Now, obviously, twitter.com has this element baked in, as does Twitter for iPhone (the app which Twitter purchased that has long had the geotagging feature). But this is still just a layer of meta data, there is no explicit way to “check-in” as it were.

Editor’s note: Jonathan Askin is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at Brooklyn Law School and Founding Director of the Brooklyn Law and Incubator Policy Clinic (BLIP). He previously worked at the FCC and for the Obama campaign on telecommuncation policy.

I can’t help but analogize Google’s role in the Net Neutrality Wars with Anakin’s shift to the Dark Side in Star Wars.

I’m watching the discussion about the policy framework to govern the Internet with the repelled fascination of a guy who, as a child, loved Star Wars Episodes 4-6 and now, as an adult, begrudgingly watches Episodes 1-3.

In the present drama, Verizon plays the Emperor, Google plays Anakin, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plays the Old Republic, and Internet-Company-Not-Yet-Born might play Luke Skywalker—if the FCC is not blinded by the Verizon-Google Jedi mind trick and can formulate a forward-looking Internet policy framework that will foster competition and innovation.

SEO consultant Rob Ousbey has noticed an interesting thing happening to his search results, live updates of results as he types in every letter.

Google has confirmed to TechCrunch that the above video is in fact real. Is this capability imminent? Sources familiar with Google product developments could not say whether imminent productization in the cards.

So basically this guy ran into a pretty significant Google experiment in the wild. Seeing as though only Ousbey has made noise about this so far, it’s safe to assume that it’s being rolled out to only a tiny fraction of users.

George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU. Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU. You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you so chose.

Facebook showed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projections of a U.S. map showing where people were checking just moments after Places launched. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.” But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Michael Cole, Managing Director of RightSite.asia, China’s largest online marketplace for commercial and industrial real estate. Cole has also successfully launched, grown and profitably exited from media ventures in China.

After a modest amount of time observing China’s economy it becomes clear that the government likes to arrange organized competition in industries it considers strategic. Thus the country gets three major airlines—China Eastern, China Southern and Air China—as well as three major mobile phone networks in China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.

Now, with the recent announcement of two major new search engine companies, it appears that search is joining transportation, phone networks and Internet service providers as a strategic industry to be managed more directly by the government. And maybe China will soon have three search giants to match up with its telephone and airline triplets.

Silicon Valley’s vitality depends on a constant influx of bright people who challenge its inhabitants to work harder and think smarter. And, as I noted in my last post, America’s economy depends on startups to create jobs and innovation. Skilled immigrants have provided both. So, given the miserable state of the economy, we should be laying out the welcome mat for the world’s best and brightest.  Yet they’re doing the exact opposite. Meanwhile other countries have figured out the secret of the Valley’s success and are laying out their red carpets and welcome mats, not only for the foreign skilled workers we’re turning away but also for our techies.

Fifty-two percent of Silicon Valley’s startups from 1995 to 2005 were founded by foreign-born workers. And in 2006, 26% of America’s global patents—including 40% of those filed by the U.S. government, 72% of Qualcomm’s, 65% of Merck & Co.’s, and 64% of General Electric’s—were invented wholly or partly by foreign nationals residing in the U.S. You would think that we would develop policies to bring in more of these people. Yet, sadly, the only immigration legislation our political leaders have been able to agree on, unanimously, is to hire 1000 more border-patrol agents and to fly drones on the Mexico border—like the ones we use to kill terrorists in Pakistan—to keep the nannies, gardeners, and farm workers out. Ironically, to pay for all this, the new border-security law levies taxes on companies that the bill’s sponsor, Senator Schumer (D-NY), calls “chop shops”—because they bring in tech workers who compete with Americans and supposedly “take their jobs away”. These “chop shops” are Indian companies such as Infosys, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro—which have the best employee-training and -development programs, and are amongst the best-managed companies, in the world. They compete head to head with American “chop shops” such as IBM Global Services and Accenture, and increasingly with management consultants such as McKinsey & Co and The Boston Consulting Group. (In the U.S., the term “chop shop” is typically used to describe an illegal business which disassembles stolen cars for selling off the parts.)

Foursquare may have a tenuous partnership with Facebook Places— but don’t let the Kumbaya presentation fool you, these frenemies are gunning for the ultimate mayorship and Dennis Crowley is feeling very confident.

On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath.

“It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.” Video ahead.

As we noted a couple days ago, the video Facebook made to explain their new Places feature was a bit Apple-esque. But something else they pulled off recently was even more Apple-esque: the secrecy surrounding their location launch.

Sure, we spotted the code for it months ago when an overzealous engineer likely pushed the code (but not the actual feature) to the touch.facebook.com version of the site a bit early. And everyone generally knew that something in the space was coming from them. But what’s odd is that we hadn’t heard from anyone who was actually using it out in the wild in the past several months. The best we got was all the way back in March when someone saw a very early beta of it. As we noted at the time:

Lady Java, whose whiny drone is making me pretty nostalgic for the days when non-developers thought Java was a kind of coffee, is the creation of the supremely dorky folks over at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway. And while you might argue that the Java developer community is still small and tight knit, that thing is currently rounding out 100,000 views on the originally posted YouTube video and countless others on repost.

“I want to program like they do at Oracle …”

I personally blame Twitter for killing geek culture. You know who else has a combined love for coding and Lady Gaga? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who yes, follows her on Twitter. You know how I know that? Yes, again Twitter.

In honor of the launch of ioSafe’s new SoloPRO rugged fireproof/waterproof hard drive I present to you the “Win a 1TB Hard Drive Plus Nirvana Weekend Giveaway.” What can you win? Well, a 1TB hard drive, for starters, and you can choose either the eSATA or USB 3.0 model. You also win true happiness and enlightenment, although the attainment of these things requires years of right practice.

Kentucky senate candidate Rand Paul is being partially bankrolled by the porn industry, apparently. At least that’s the story that the AP’s Bruce Schreiner is pushing today. This is what appears to be the AP’s most recent hit job on Paul. Schreiner in particular has been accused of subtle bias (compare the headline to the text) in his Rand Paul reporting even before this story today.

What’s the evidence for today’s story? Zivity cofounders Cyan Banister and Scott Banister made personal donations to the Rand Paul campaign totalling $4,800. The Paul campaign has raised a total of over $3.5 million. Donors must state where they work, so they wrote down Zivity, says Cyan.

It’s a pity readers don’t want to pay for stories about the death of traditional media, because otherwise journalists and commentators would be riding a big fat cash cow.

In recent months it’s been impossible to open a newspaper or magazine without being drenched by a tidal wave of “waaaaah”s and “woah”s and “oh my God we’re all doomed”s from those of us who make our living selling words. If it’s not newspapers – the fall of advertising! the rise of paywalls! the death of columnists! the birth of citizen journalists! – then it’s magazines – no more long-form writing! the iPad! – or movies – piracy! Netflix! – or cable news – Twitter! YouTube!

This week it’s books (again), and a stark warning from the Wall Street Journal’s Ron Adner and William Vincent to anyone who prefers literature unsullied by full-page ads for SUVs and tobacco.

“With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.”

Oh my God! Lock up your Little Women! The Mad Men are coming!

Have the failures of Evite turned you off online invites entirely? Don’t despair, the other, prettier invite service Pingg has launched a Threadless-type Pingg Studio platform for artists and designers. And while the crowd-sourced content model is one of those that everyone is eager to copy, courting the design community is an interesting move for Pingg, which competes with Evite, Facebook Events, and My Punchbowl.

“In terms of a service where anyone can load their profile and send traffic to their e-card. We’re the only ones doing this,” says co-founder Lorien Gabel.

What’s even more interesting is that Pingg is currently doling out cash to its community of designers, with a rewards program that pays designers $50 if they’re chosen for a Staff Pick, $100 as Top Designer, and other sums if they win the Pingg Design Challenge. Gabel says he’s considering eventually expanding the bonus program into full store model, “You inevitably pay for really good content.”

This week for OMG/JK, the show on TechCrunch TV that I do with fellow writer Jason Kincaid, we decided to switch things up a bit. Because there was a major announcement, Facebook Places, that we both covered, we decided to devote the entire show to that one topic. Yes, it’s a little longer than usual (about 20 minutes), but I think the conversation is pretty interesting and dynamic.

Obviously, we talk about what Facebook’s entry into the location space means for all the other players that are already there — namely, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google, and Twitter. Are Foursquare and Gowalla dead? Are Google and Twitter screwed? Has Facebook already screwed up the privacy aspect of this? Watch us debate it above.

It’s official. Google has acquired Like.com. In a post on Like.com’s homepage, the company’s CEO and Founder Munjal Shah writes that the visual search engine has been bought by Google. We originally reported the acquisition last weekend. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, we’ve heard it’s valued at upwards of $100 million.

Shah’s message doesn’t really give us any hints as to what Google will be doing with Like.com but he alludes to the fact that he (and his team) will continue to work on visual search and cross-matching in e-commerce for the search giant.

TinyChat, a straightforward chat platform that lets you create a throw-away chat room in a few clicks, is on a roll. The company has surpassed 1 million members in the 75 days since it began accepting user registrations, and is adding around 12,000 new members a day according to cofounder Martin Redmond (the service has been around for much longer than 75 days — it just didn’t promote user registration before then). Registration is optional, but it affords features like the ability to ‘follow’ other users and to tweak your site layout. And today TinyChat is launching a feature that will likely see that growth jump even more.

It’s hard to believe, but cofounder Dan Blake says that TinyChat has had almost no social features to speak of beyond its core text and video chatrooms. You’ve been able to ‘follow’ other users on the service which allowed you to send them private messages, but before now there hasn’t been a notion of presence.

Contextual search startup InfoAxe has raised $3 million in Series A funding today from Stephen
Oskoui, CEO of online advertising company Smiley Media. The startup had previously raised $900,000 in seed funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels and Amidzad Partners. Gokul Rajaram, the “godfather of Google AdSense, has joined InfoAxe’s board.

InfoAxe, which launched in 2008, offers an alternative search engine that focuses on indexing your own browsing history to provide you more contextual results in searches. The site essentially delivers personalized recommendations based on your past browsing history. The site also offers a toolbar that allows users to ‘record’ public web browsing sessions, which they can search through their personal history from the toolbar itself or the Infoaxe website.

It was almost exactly two years ago that Flixster bought one of the original popular movie apps for the iPhone from a college sophomore. Now, two years later, their Flixster iPhone app is the top movie application on the platform. It’s also the top movie app on the Android and BlackBerry platforms as well. All told, the app has just crossed a massive 20 million installs.

What’s perhaps even more incredible is that among these users, 70% of them are active in the past 90 days. CEO Joe Greenstein credits the companies combination with popular movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (which they acquired from News Corp. in January).

With Groupon now expanding into Japan and Russia, the company’s plans for world domination continue apace.

In this week’s episode of our (newly retitled) show, we spoke to Chairman and COO, Rob Solomon about the strategy of expansion-by-acquisition, the risks of fraud, what keeps Solomon awake at night — and why China is conspicuous by its absence amongst the company’s recent launches.

Video below.