Common Paradox Tech Blog

The Mac community and TechCrunch love giveaways, but nothing beats the MacStories giveaway. MacStories is giving away over 450 licenses to Mac and iPhone applications, that total to over $10,000. Crazy, right?

The event, which is run by Federico Viticci, is called “The Christmas Apps Tree” and features interviews with designers, bloggers and developers, plus some cool guest posts and of course the big giveaway.

Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.

Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Appjet, another recent Google Acquisition, has a related product called EtherPad, although that team is reported to be working with Google Wave and the EtherPad source code has been released to the community.

DocVerse is a product Google is likely to keep. The company was founded by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. Shia drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server, $1.6B and $3.0B products, respectiveley. DeNui ran Microsoft SQL Server’s web strategy.

There’s no shortage of wine-focused iPhone apps that help users access listings, varietals and recommendations on the go. Wine.com, a popular wine retailer with a fantastic domain name, is launching it’s own free iPhone app to help wine lovers everywhere find the perfect bottle.

You can research and buy from Wine.com’s database of 45,000+ wines, save them to your “cellar” to keep track of what you like and buy, create wish lists and more. The app also provides nifty recommendation lists, such as “90+ Point Rated Wines Under $20.” There are definitely practical uses of the app, which could be useful when you’re out at a restaurant and need more info on a particular wine, or want to compare prices and see how much the wine has been marked up.

Rummble, the location-based social ratings mobile startup, has just released a new version of its iPhone app containing what is effectively its answer to Foursquare.

The feature is called “Local Heroes” and is billed as “the fun side of Rummbling” but it is quite obviously going to be Rumbble’s way of attacking the buzz surrounding the game of checking-in and becoming a “Mayor” of a location as propogated by the New York-based Foursquare. Local Heroes is a feature listed under “Empire” which suggests that there will be yet more gaming elements introduced.

Rummble has until now relied on its users to create content about places they visit and rate their friends’ ability to do so – what it calls the Rummble trust network. But clearly that’s not quite enough in the face of big players like Qype, dominant in Europe for local reviews, and Yelp in the U.S.

So Rummble is entering the social location gaming pushed by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla.

Another day, another Rackspace outage. The hosting company had a complete and total failure today that took down a number of big sites on the Internet, including ours. This has been happening all too often in recent months, including downtime just last month.

The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains.

PayPal is finally extending its money transfer system to the BlackBerry, with a new, free Send Money app for the Blackberry. The app will let you access your PayPal account and easily send money to a recipient. You can find on the BlackBerry App World here.

The app will also tap into your contact list on the phone making it simple to choose a recipient to send money too. Users can also access their recent PayPal transactions and monitor their account balances directly from the app.

It’s just after 12 o’clock here on the left coast, which means Operation Chokehold should now be in full effect. What that means (if anything at all) is still up in the air — which is why we’re turning to you for a status report.

For the uninitiated: Operation Chokehold is a sort of cyber-protest against AT&T, as conjured up by some dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. For one solid hour between 12 and 1 Pacific, angry iPhone owners are supposed to gobble up as much data as they can in an “attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees.”

Over the last few years, Facebook has held a semi-regular conference called f8, where hundreds of developers come to learn about the site’s development platforms. The event has also been home to the launches of Facebook’s most ground breaking products that have turned the site from “just” a social network into something far more powerful. Today, Facebook has announced the dates of the third f8: April 21-22 , in San Francisco.

In May 2007, Facebook used the event to launch Facebook Platform, which has spurred the creation of 500,000 Facebook apps to date. A year later, the second f8 saw the debut of Facebook Connect, which has since been used to integrate Facebook’s social graph with 80,000 sites (including TechCrunch). Suffice to say, we can probably expect something big coming this April.

Twitter app directory oneforty has raised $1.6 million, according to an SEC filing. Of that, a previously undisclosed $375,000 is in the form of convertible debt already raised in a couple of angel rounds last year (which are converting to stock). So the company was able to raise $1.25 million in new money, and the filing indicates that the total offering amount will be $2.4 million, meaning that more might be on the way before the current Series A round is complete.

Oneforty currently lists more than 2,000 Twitter apps and ranks them based on both their popularity on the site and across the Web. The company makes affiliate revenues for paid apps (mostly on the iPhone), but could eventually charge app developers for featured spots on its homepage. Rumors surfaced in October about Twitter buying the service, but that never happened.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve never played Doodle Jump. Why? Because if you had ever played Doodle Jump, you’d probably still be playing it. The game is addictive gaming at its finest; it’s drop dead simple, yet ridiculously tough to put down. If I had to babysit a kid, I’d just hand them Doodle Jump and then go off and do something else for a few hours – they wouldn’t even notice I left.

Being insanely catchy has paid off. This morning, Doodle Jump’s developers, Lima Sky, are announcing that they’ve smashed through the 1 million download mark – an especially impressive feat when you consider the circumstances.