There’s no official API for the text-to-speech service. But Weston Ruter noticed that anyone can access the service in the same way Google does: “Looking at the Firebug Net panel for where this TTS data was coming from, I saw that the speech audio is in MP3 format and is queried via a simple HTTP GET (REST) request: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text”

Translation: just change the URL to whatever you want it to say and you’ll get back a MP3 file. Example: copy the URL http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=I+love+techcrunch into your browser.

This is English only for now, and its limited to 100 characters. But unless Google shuts this down, third party applications can now use this in any creative way they want. Have at it.

Via Ajaxian.

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Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. At first the term was ironic. “Social networking” was anything but social in the traditional sense. But over time, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that you can do social activities such as play games, collaborate on work, and talk, online. And in fact, many times it’s even more convenient than doing it in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social.

Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. At one point or another I’m sure that it has been said that it would be both the downfall of mankind, and the thing that would bring the planet together. The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.

If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. Even if you all are having great discussions in the chat room, and not saying a word when you’re hanging out with one another, there is just something that’s different. Something that social networking will never be able to replace.

That’s where location comes in. It has the power to be the bridge between social networking and actual social interaction. We’re already seeing the very early signs of this with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude, to varying degrees.

To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networks used to be thought of in the same way. This will change.

The people who do use these services likely have at least one story about a situation where a friend saw where they were, or where they planned to be, and showed up to meet up. Some have many of these stories. And for some of us in cities where these services are popular, this happens just about everyday. And it’s really quite amazing.

Is it annoying if a friend shows up if you want to be alone or don’t want to see them? Of course. But that’s why it’s important that you’re in control of what location information you are sending out. Is it creepy if a stranger shows up to meet you somewhere? Of course, but that’s why privacy settings are so important. [more]

The new company caught our interest when we learned that AOL’s former chief life streamer David Liu had invested in the company. Stump and Galligan declined to comment on the company just yet (they’ll be launching at Under The Radar next month) but we were able to glean some information from Under The Radar’s directory of presenters.

SimpleGeo is ready-to-use location infrastructure. They currently have three products: a geo-spatial Context Engine, Storage Engine and a comprehensive SDK. The SimpleGeo Context Engine enables application developers to quickly and easily get relevant information about specific locales including (but not limited to) ZIP codes, real-time weather, and geo-tagged media. Additionally, the SimpleGeo Storage Engine makes it possible to store and query location data in a scalable fashion, as well as perform complicated geospatial operations effortlessly.

Located in Boulder, CO

It sounds like SimpleGeo is looking to become something analogous to an “AWS for location”. And that may well be a very smart move — Location based services are clearly about to explode as more mobile devices support GPS and fast internet connections. And you can be sure that the new startups and services that emerge won’t want to have to reinvent the wheel whenever they want to integrate location into their app. We’ll be keeping an eye for more on this one soon.

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Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

Fried also talked about the art of making money. He mentioned that making money is like playing the piano. If you started playing piano at 5, you have a lot of time to practice playing piano to get better. If you want to be a good piano player, you start young, and you practice. Same goes with making money. It’s a skill and a talent. The more practice you have making money, the more successful you’ll be.

Fried also used an interested analogy to crack cocaine, comparing crack to funding. Crack is like funding, because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money — they want you to be addicted to the money.

One of the major points Fried mentioned is picking the right price. You have to find the right price to sell your products to consumers. Customers will pay if it’s worth it. Don’t make products that aren’t useful for others — you have to have people using your product, and if they use it, charge for it.

Thing will go wrong as well. Be real and honest about your mistakes. Also, you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. Fried mentioned that 37Signals is based in Chicago, but they have employees all over the world. Location doesn’t matter to build great products. You’ll know if you have a great product if people use it.

Q: How do you know if your product is useful for a lot of people?
A:Build something you would use yourself. When you put stuff out for free everyone goes “ah, that’s cool.” Put a price on it, then you figure out if it’s really useful.

Q: Regarding virtual offices.
A: Need to find a good team. People who can work from their home a lot. We’re in touch all day using our tools, but you can put that away if you need to. You can’t put a ‘real’ office away like that. But some face time is essential sometimes. Should be the exception not the rule.

Q: Pricing?
A: First question is ‘would I pay for it?’ It’s a science. You have to worry about margins. Walmart doesn’t use 9s for their prices. They do 8. But for me, is it worth paying for. We have multiple tiers. Every price point is double, but you get more than twice as much in each tier.

Q: I’m a scientist, skeptical about luck.
A: I think luck plays a part somewhere. BUt I think for the most part make your own success. You can’t wait for something lucky to happen. Maybe timing/meeting right person is luck. I think it’s the kind thing to say, PC to say. But I think if you ask people honestly they won’t say that.

Q: How long did it take you from having idea to launching paid project?
A: We launched basecamp as a side project. We were a web design company at the time. We made it in a few months, then we put a price on it. Built it for ourselves, we needed it for ourselves. Hit $5k a month in about six weeks, has since increased. We don’t share exact rev numbers. Job wars made 1.5 mi. book material about a million. Advance from new book is handsome. We make millions in rev and profits. We did take one investment in 2006. We bootstrapped. We didn’t need the money (from Jeff Bezos). We did it for liquidity and someone like Jeff available, he’s built a business from scratch.

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Even though it is embroiled in a nasty legal battle with its founders over its future, Skype continues to rack up impressive numbers. In today’s third quarter earnings from eBay (which still owns Skype, but is preparing to unload it), the company breaks out Skype’s performance (see slide above).

Skype’s registered users grew 41 percent to 521 million people. That’s a stunning 40 million new registered users in the past three months. Revenues grew 29 percent to $185 million. Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74 percent to 27.7 billion minutes, whereas SkypeOut minutes (which is what members pay for) grew 44 percent to 3.1 billion minutes.

All of those SkypeOut calls translated to a healthy $185 million in revenues, up 29 percent from a year ago. If it keeps up at this pace, it should easily be able to exceed its $1 billion annual revenue goal by 2011.

Skype was one of the few bright spots in eBay’s earnings, along with Paypal, which brought in $688 million in revenues (up 15 percent). eBay’s bread-and-butter marketplaces business was down 1 percent to $1.365 billion.

eBay Q309EarningsSlides FINAL

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So imagine my expectations when I set out to see BYD’s “Village of the Future.” BYD—for those who don’t know—is a Chinese powerhouse of battery innovation with more than 130,000 employees, roughly 10% of whom work in R&D. The company is a living, breathing reality check to Westerners who think Southern China is merely a hub for assembling the technology U.S. designs. My BYD guide told me that the company gets at least one member of Western media coming through the office a week, many of them shocked that a Chinese company could be so innovative.

In recent years, BYD’s founder Wang Chuan-Fu has leveraged an un-sexy expertise in lithium electronics batteries into an electric car business. And, now, the company is harnessing that same technology to make solar panels that can efficiently store solar energy and manage it. It’s impressive enough stuff that Warren Buffett paid $230 million for 10% of the company in 2008, spurring every major media organization to start taking BYD seriously. (According to a great article in Fortune, he wanted even more.)

But you want futurism? Go somewhere else. This house of tomorrow—totally powered by solar power and piped with recycled rain water—looks just like any suburban house in the world. (See picture above. Yep. That’s it.) Turn on the tap and it’s just like turning it on at home. The air conditioning sounds and feels like the AC in my hotel. The company uses the top of the concept house for executive meetings. The conference rooms only stand out in their unremarkableness.

And, while it may make for uninteresting photos, that’s what makes BYD so impressive, and part of what would attract someone like Buffett to break the same cardinal rules of investing that convinced him to avoid the late 1990s dot com mania: Stay away from what you don’t understand. When my guide was taking me through BYD’s “museum” of its products, she waved her hnad dismissively at a sexy electric convertible, saying the ho-hum practical sedan was the company’s best-seller. What sells in a country where millions are scrambling into the middle class is practicality, not sex appeal.

Similarly, BYD’s house of the future is steeped in practicality, not look-at-me tree hugging or science fiction. That’s something that could actually make a difference for the solar industry and for smoggy, energy-guzzling China.

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If you missed the company’s great demo at TC50, here’s how it works: RedBeacon has spent the last few weeks building out a directory of local service providers, which encompass everything from Accountants to Yard Workers and unskilled labor (Cofounder Ethan Anderson says it already includes providers from several hundred categories, including video editors, makeup artists, personal trainers, and many more).

Beginning today, users will be able to submit requests to these providers for whatever it is they need done. Need to tidy up a house in time for dinner? Submit a RedBeacon request for a Maid. Want some cookies baked by the weekend? Sign up for a baker, and so on. Each time you submit a request, RedBeacon creates an auction and alerts providers that there is an available job. These providers quote prices for the job in question, which you can see appearing in real time (providers can also ask you follow-up questions if they need more details). Once you find a provider and price you like, you can end the auction and schedule the job.

I just tried setting up an order, and found the process to be quite easy. To begin with, RedBeacon asks you to type in whatever kind of service you’re looking for. As you type, it presents a list of matching options (so “Tutor” would bring up results for “Biology Tutor, Math Tutor, and teachers for a host of other subjects). The site also uses some intelligence to help match similar job categories (a query for “Transcriptionist” will suggest “Typist”).

For our example, I decided to try ordering some cupcakes for delivery from Kara’s, a premium cupcake maker about a mile away from TechCrunch HQ. I began by typing in “Delivery person”, which the site changed to a more appropriate “Courier”. I filled out the job description with some more details and our address. The site offers two options for timing: you can either send out a RedBeacon Alert, which notifies providers in the area that there’s a job to be done immediately, or you can schedule it if you’d like to give more providers time to respond. (I chose Alert) After that, I was done — the site is currently polling local providers to see if they’d like to bring TechCrunch some cupcakes. I’ll update with the results later on.

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iTwin takes the idea of remote connection and transfers it to hardware. A simple two-part USB drive allows one user to plug it in to one computer and then snap off and hand the second part to someone else with another computer. They will then have instant access to the other computer. It’s as if there was a hard line cable connecting two computers anywhere in the world, but there is no cable, just the USB drives and the Internet. As iTwin puts it, they’re the “cable-less cable.”

The idea came to the team when they realized that remote access to a second computer was simply too complicated for most users. Everyone gets how to use USB drives, but those simply either don’t have enough storage to share an entire other computer’s hard drive, or are not secure enough (you could lose the drive, etc). So iTwin combines the two technologies.

This is a product totally designed for the mass market, not the techies, though they’re obviously welcome to buy and use it as well, iTwin notes. Next year, some 200 million flash drives are expected to be sold, that’s the market iTwin is looking at.

The plan is to launch iTwin in the first half of 2010 for $99. CEO Lux Anatharaman and COO Kal Takru presented the company today. They are based in Singapore.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.

Q: Security is a big concern.

LA: Everything is encrypted.

Q: What happens when I lose the other half?

LA:You just pull out your half and your data is safe.

Q: How many people are in the company?

LA: Two of us and three engineers.

Q: Does this kill remote desktop?

LA: It certainly could.

Q: How much does this cost?

LA: Eventually if we make enough of these it will be super cheap to make. We will distrupt portable storage.

Q: What distribution channels?

KT: We will initially sell it online through our own web store. The initial launch with be in Singapore, in 6 months in U.S. and Europe.

Q: File sync is a big problem. How do you compete with what Microsoft is doing with Live Mesh, with its free offering.

LA: Uploading a terabyte to the cloud is still too time consuming and expensive. This is a two-person device to give people a very easy and tangible way to save something.

Q: Would you take another meeting with them?

DD: Pass
YV: Pass
RC: I’m software too but I would consider
GZ: I would take another meeting
JH: Cool technology but retail is tough.

Video

Other Coverage:

TC50: iTwin allows encrypted, cableless file-sharing VentureBeat.

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