With the launch of Skype integration, Truphone’s mobile VoIP service is fast becoming a unified client for other VOIP and messaging services. As well as the ability to make low-cost calls over Wi-Fi or GSM networks and send cheap SMS, it is now supporting Skype and other messaging services via its application for the iPhone or iTouch. The software comes out on Jan. 12, at which point you’ll be able to make and receive Skype calls and IM to other Skype users. Truphone has also added full two-way instant messaging over MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk on the iPod touch as of now and on Jan. 12 for the iPhone. Admittedly you can already use Fring or Nimbuzz iPhone apps to access Skype, but neither of these also integrate VOIP or GSM voice calls as seamlessly. Truphone has already added Twitter integration.

Clearly the idea of all these new services is to keep users inside the Truphone app for longer and thus garner more revenues from users making calls over their Truphone account [For current Truphone call rates, see here]. However, the introduction of Skype calling will likely be a double-edged sword for Truphone. People may stay in the app for longer, but Truphone won’t make any revenues out of its users using Skype. In addition it remains the case that Truphone won’t run inthe background, so you really do have to keep the app open all the time if you are waiting for a Skype call. Still, it’s a welcome new feature and strong incentive for people to download the app in the first place.

In December, Truphone re-vamped its iPhone app with two crucial new features. The first, dubbed Truphone Anywhere enables iPhone users to make low-priced international calls via the GSM network even when they are not connected to Wi-Fi. Prior to this you needed WiFi. The second is that inbound Truphone calling on the iPhone was added. In addition Truphone are able to indicate ‘presence’, as in ‘available’ or not.

The new year sees Truphone hunkering down for the economic downturn. Last year CEO James Tagg moved downwards to Chief Architect. New CEO Geraldine Wilson was brought in from Yahoo’s mobile division to shake up the company and set it on a more commercial path. They also moved from plush offices overlooking London’s Tower Bridge, to more spartan offices nearby. Truphone has £31.5m funding.

Handing your Twitter account to minions to post for you is common in the celebrity game, though some, like UK TV presenter Jonathon Ross, like to do it themselves. That latter strategy may well have been proved to be the wiser one. The perils of handing the Twitter keys to others has just been proved by singer Britney Spears.

Most people know that it is her staff, not her, that updates her Twitter account, but today that may have proved to have been be a bad decision. Very bad. Her latest update, said: “HI Yall! Brit Brit here, just wanted to update you all on the size of my vagina. Its about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth.” [Screen grab below]. The update has now been removed.

Britney has 14,095 followers on Twitter. If this is an employee and not a hacker, something tells me she’ll be running the account differently in future.

Update: It looks like it was in fact a hacker. Obama and US TV presenter Bill O’Reilly’s twitter accounts have been got at as well. TechCrunch.com has more.

Privately backed LiveAps Liveaps is a drag’n'drop page webpage builder not unlike a kind of Dreamweaver for those who want to build a site visually. There are a number of competitors out in Europe these days, not least of which is Webnode which showcased at Le Web in December.

However, LiveAps founder Paul Christian tells me the site has been re-jigging its model since last year and will now be based on subsciption revenues (£30 a year for a fully hosted, unlimited pages drag’n’drop website), not advertising, and is contemplating sharing software revenues with franchises/partners on a by-country basis.

They are giving away 500 1,000 free accounts for 2009 (priced at £30 for the year each) available exclusively to TechCrunch UK readers - use ‘TC’ as the promo code when registering at liveaps.com. Might be worth grabbing one for yourself or someone you know.

Here’s a video of how it works:

A gremlin inside Facebook - or more likely a disgruntled employee - briefly hacked Facebook in the last few hours. They went in to the Facebook advertising page and changed the title description from “Advertising” to “Lying”. How do I know? An observant informant emailed me the screen grab before the page was changed. Nice start to 2009 for Facebook! [Update: Socialmediocrity also captured the page before it was changed.]

However, this small incident serves to highly a couple of more serious points.

First, it proves the Facebook machine isn’t prone to a few gremlins now and again. If an employee can run riot like this, who know what havoc they might wreak on the rest of the system.

Second, it merely continues to highly the fact that Facebook’s advertising targeting is legendary for being bad. As Guardian journalist Jemima Kiss recently Tweeted: “Consecutive ads on Facebook: ‘Essay writing - we’ll get you a 2:1″ and Bad credit? Get a credit card with 39.9% APR!’. Classy.”

The thing is, social media has rarely found its feet in online advertising. The extra data that exposing the social graph was supposed to provide has yet to translate into far more targeted advertising.

If Facebook knows I write for TechCrunch (it’s in my profile) and often post things on Facebook related to technology and business, then why do I get shown ads for Credit Rating Reports, as I did today?

On thing’s for sure - the economic downturn means sites like Facebook can ill afford to laugh off this sort of incident forever.

“My name’s Scott. I’m 13 and have launched a web startup.” So began an email exchange over last weekend which culminated with me chatting to Scott’s mum today to verify, that, indeed, he was actually 13 and really had launched a blogging site for people in Scotland.

ScotBlog.net is essentially a social network for people in Scotland and anyone of Scottish heritage. Based on a group Wordpress blog, users can create a profile, join user created groups, send private messages, add friends and blog. Scott says: “We have some users in Glasgow, while we have some from South Carolina and even California”.

The point about this story is that not only has this teenager gone and created ScottBlog, but he had the get-up-and-go to find out who writes about startups, write a press release and email them. He’s even put himself on CrunchBase. A lot of older people than haven’t done that much.

Scott lives with his mum, Susan Campbell, who confirmed to me today that he is who he says he is, but he couldn’t come to phone today as he’s at school.

I used the opportunity to ask Susan about how she feels about the recent debate about government plans to give cinema-ratings to web sites in an attempt to protect kids when they are online. She said she doesn’t worry about him as he’s “very sensible”, but she thinks there is a role for schools in educating children about safe web use, rather than a top-down approach from government. Indeed, it’s not Scott’s mum who is doing the educating about the Web, it’s Scott. In 2006, he was a runner up in the BT Internet Rangers competition, where he won a laptop for helping his family with the Internet.

Ok, now I’ll admit, if a 13 year-old can launch a startup then the barrier to entry may be a lot lower than we thought! And I daresay ScotBlog has a ways to go in finding a business model beyond advertising, and admittedly he has no startup costs - these are paid by his mum! However, It’s great to see Scott show this kind of initiative and I think it’s worth-while encouraging teenagers in the UK to be more entrepreneurial.

Just in time for those new year resolutions, PushupFu is a new paid-for iPhone/iPod Touch application designed to get you fit, via press-ups. There are now a lot of fitness apps available for the iPhone. Current leader WeightBot lets you weigh yourself daily. Other like iPump let you email your progress to virtual Gym buddies. However, there are none I know of which have turned exercises into a Wii Fit-style game where you can pit yourself against others on the same service - exactly what PushupFu does. The app was conceived, designed and coded by UK-based geekpreneurs Jof Arnold and Benjie Gillam under a new boostrapped venture, FuApps, which will produce exercise apps and mini-games based on fitness.

Using PushupFu is pretty fun. Once the iphone or iPhone Touch is strapped to your arm, PushupFu uses the device’s accelerometer to count your pushups. It will even shout instructions like “Slower!” and bitch at you if you don’t get it right, just like a personal trainer. Once you’ve completed a set of pushups your progress is recorded for you to monitor. The difference is that you can actually uses these stats to challenge a friend to a pushup battle from within the application. With the iPhone acting as a third party verification that you did actually do the pressups, you effectively get an instant gaming network. You score points for doing pushups and more for winning battles. A bit like the “100 pushups” meme meeting the Wii Fit. That’s assuming they get enough people to fork out the £1.79 / $2.60 first.

Right now Uk iPhone owners have to browse to the app from the App Store > Categories > Health and Fitness > Release Date (tab at top) - PushupFu is currently the 3rd entry. US visitors can get it direct from this link to the App store.

It will cost £12 billion, be run by private companies and track every move you make on the internet, every call, text message and every transaction. Yes, this is the UK government proposal to manage and run a communications database that will make Chinese attempts to control and monitor its citizens look like “light touch” regulation.

The only difference with one-party states like China (ok, so apart from the summary trials and executions) is that the government claims that it will not look at the content on our every electronic interaction, but merely at the points of entry. The “pings”, if you like, to use a geek term.

Of course, this is incorrect. By building up a database about our movements - our morning rituals of checking emails, visiting web sites, buying online - this will build up a pattern. This in itself is “content”. This will create a pattern of recognition about our movements. Plus how long would it be before they start to argue that they need to see the content as well? Curiously, because so few people in China - relatively speaking - are online and/or using credit cards, China will look pretty free compared to our electronically driven society.

I could write a 1,000 more words more on this subject. For now the scale of the project beggars belief. From a government which has presided over countless numbers of security breaches, including a missing CD containing every child’s name and address in the UK, it is an amazing act of hubris. Plus, it comes in the wake proposals by the Ministry of Truth (Ok, so the Department of Culture, Media and Sport) to regulate content. So now we are watched as we go online, and the content we view is to be rated and standardised. Welcome to Britain in the 21st Century.

The more salient point to note for TechCrunch readers is that the impact on British online business will be significant. At a time when one of the few areas of growth in the economy is the digital sector, the UK government wants to look over the shoulder of the consumer when they go online. Will this make them feel safer, or preyed upon? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Demotix, a new startup coming out of London, is taking a pretty interesting approach to reinventing the newswire and with the wave of news coming out of the Israel/Palestinian conflict right now it is coming into its own. If you ever wanted to know what life and death was like on the ground in the middle of a war, this is it.

The idea is simple: anyone can shoot video or photos at a news event like a protest and upload the content to the site. The site only takes photos right now but text and video are due soon. Everyone who uses Demotix will keep the copyright and the right to remove the images from the website. The non-exclusive images will be sold for anywhere from between $150- $3,000, and videos will be sold by $500-$1,000/minute. Demotix shares 50 percent of the revenue from each sale with the person who contributed the content. Demotix has six-full time staff members and six full-time interns. The site has launched in Beta but in the next fortnight launches a full version, along with an Arabic version.

Founded by Jonathan Tepper and CEO Turi Munthe, the latter is a former journalist who realised that with old media declining in revenues the consequent impact on on-the-spot reporting and investigative journalism is huge. In its place has come what he calls Churnism - re-publishing AP or Reuters-like wire stories and pulling journalists out of the world’s hot-spots because they are just too expensive to run. In 2007, there were only 141 U.S. foreign correspondents in print and broadcast media, and there are currently only four newspapers that maintain foreign bureaus (The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times). In the UK, The Independent is in the process of cutting more than 60% of its staff, including 60 reporters.

Demotix doesn’t need to maintain a global network of staff reporters and its contributors get paid when it does. However, with many potential contributors living under repressive regimes, Demotix goes to some lengths to protect identities. Metadata inside photographs about the time of day or event or the owner are removed before the image is uploaded to the site. And the site uses a Tor system to scramble IP addresses from where photos are uploaded.

But the history of “UGC photo agencies” is patchy. Kyle MacRae founded a similar UGC picture agency in 2005 called Scoopt after realising that CNN’s coverage of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami had largely consisted of photographs or videos by people caught up in those horrific events. It also sold pictures direct to newspapers and magazines, splitting the fee 50/50 with the photographer. However the site ran out of steam, largely because the idea was pretty ahead of its time. Camera phones are only now common place in global hotspots. The site was bought by Getty Images last year and MacRae left to pursue other ventures. There are now other similar UGC photo agency sites. For instance, Yahoo runs You Witness News in partnership with Reuters.

However, Demotix might now get traction because the core technology - better cameraphones - is now commonplace.

And the content is pretty raw as you can see from this kind of imagery (warning NSFW) from Gaza, and above.

Munthe, an English-French-Swedish raised in London, has also worked at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. His research into the radicalization of terrorism lead him to believe that the aggressive approach, such as sanctions and bombs, doesn’t work. He thinks the “civil society approach”, where populations are allowed to vent their frustration via media, works better and takes “the lid off the pressure cooker.” Who knows if social media can actually help, but the idea that the suffering of your community can be communicated to the world may be of some consolation, however limited.

The site’s name, Demotix, is derived from the word ‘demotic‘, meaning ‘of the people’, a description coined by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC to describe the form of writing used and most easily understood by the man in the Alexandrian street in 196 BC.

Update: As a commenter below points out there is also a French start-up called CitizenSide (formerly Scooplive).

Update II: This post caused a lot of controversy because in its original form it showed some very graphic pictures from the Israel/Palestinian conflict happening at the moment. Something you’d expect when a war was happening. Unfortunately the detail of the post was lost in the debate about the appropriateness of the imagery, plus I was accused of favouring one side over another. This was profoundly not the intention, but it was clear I had stumbled unwittingly into a political area because the post largely carried pictures of Palestinians under siege and no pictures of Israelis under rocket attacks. Unfortunately this was not done to favour one side - I simply couldn’t find any of the latter kinds of pictures on the site, simply because no Israelis had uploaded any at that time. This is clearly a failing of a picture agency which relies purely on user-generated content, in that it leaves it to “the crowd” to gather the footage - and the crowd is not usually out to be balanced. I’ve now removed the imagery, other than the original, to illustrate the piece.

As an after-thought to this weekend’s story about the UK’s Culture Secretary desire to regulate Web site content, compel sites to remove offensive material and strengthening Britain’s iron-fist libel laws online, I decided to claim his Twitter account.

Now, of course he could claim any other account and call it his own, but he won’t be able to get the name he is known by (”Andy Burnham”) because it’s in the hot little hands of a UK blogger who has the intention of educating him about the ways of the Internet - since he doesn’t seem to have quite picked up some of the essential truths that have been around since long before he became Culture Secretary.

However, the People’s Popular Front For Teaching Andy Burnham About The Internet (or “PPFFTABATI” for short) is not a violent group. We seek merely to re-educate the Minister in question.

As such, I will be using the account to follow some of the Web’s leading commentators in the UK, so that when he does want it back, it will be pre-packaged with people who can direct mesage him a few salient thoughts about the Web, at least before he makes policy on the hoof.

All suggestions about what to do with the account - until he notices it’s gone and asks politely for it back - are welcome in the comments below.

In the US tech scene you have weekend “bitchmemes”. In the UK, there is a kind of equivalent known as “government minister opens mouth and inserts foot”. This weekend it was the turn of Andy Burnham, the secretary of state for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS), and as such supposed to take an interest in the Internet. Unfortunately his weekend interview with a newspaper betrayed the simple fact that he knows nothing at all about the internet. Nothing.

Burnham gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph newspaper saying that the UK government is considering “the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.” There would also be “child-safe” internet services run by ISPs and the “option” of introducing age ratings for websites. “This is an area that is really now coming into full focus,” he said. He said some content, such as clips of beheadings, was unacceptable and new standards of decency were needed. He also plans to negotiate with the US on drawing up international rules for English language websites.

Burnham also mooted other safeguards including “compelling websites such as YouTube and Facebook to remove offensive material within a specified time after they have been alerted to it, and changing Britain’s libel laws to make it cheaper for people to sue publishers if they have been defamed online.”

Let’s deal with the main point first.

Ratings for websites are insane. One minute you have a site showing pink rabbits. The next minute one page of it, buried in millions, could display porn. Films don’t change once they’ve left the cutting room - web sites do. Furthermore, Web sites even have difficulty making allowance for browser compatibility let alone content ratings.

And there is of course the small issue that you can’t regulate content on servers held on other countries. That is unless you are a one party state like Saudi Arabia, nearby Qatar or China. Even there they have problems. And of course, a government saying that it has the matter of Internet content in hand means parents would become reassured that their children are safe to surf the web unsupervised. Not a good idea.

And with the economy collapsing, and the tech sector one of the few showing any signs of having some slim chance of weathering the storm, the last thing we need are government regulations slowing everything down.

Regarding making it easier to sue online. Yes, well, Britain’s libel laws are bad enough as it it is. They are based on Victorian concepts of public reputation and the onus is always on the writer/publisher, not the person being written about. This is the reverse of US law, hence why libel tourists like Hollywood actors like to sue on British courts, not American ones. Add the internet to this heady mix and you have a pretty scary recipe, especially if it gets easier to sue.

At least there is some sense inside government. Tom Watson, of the Cabinet Office, has invited views about Burnham’s comments on his personal blog - so far he has 78 comments - and he will forward the comments to Burnham. Needless to say most of the comments aren’t exactly supportive of Burnham’s ideas.

However, there are legitimate concerns to be addressed, such as those of parents. But there are obvious, existing solutions: desktop ‘net nanny’ software is commonly available. Then there is the small fact that THEY ARE PARENTS AND MAY JUST POSSIBLY BE EXPECTED TO BE IN CHARGE OF THEIR KIDS.

But more seriously, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created PICS some time ago. The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content. It was originally designed to help parents and teachers control what children access on the Internet, but it also facilitates other uses for labels, including code signing and privacy. However, a quick perusal of the site show that it is in a bad way, and has largely proved too slow to cope with fast moving nature of the Web today.

But the final solution to rating Web content is actually probably going to be an opportunity for a startup. So for example, sign up to Walt Disney Content Label Scheme? Or one run by the BBC? Or Playboy even.

In the meantime, I have kidnapped Andy Burnham’s name on Twitter (more useful than his lame site), until such time as he’s prepared to sit down and listen to some real feedback about his ideas. Then he can have it back.