From the National Journal : Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., secured $30 million in federal funding for the State Department’s efforts to promote Internet freedom as part of the agency’s fiscal year 2010 spending bill. The program must be approved by the full Senate and the House before it makes its way to President

Today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event in Redwood City, CA, Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor are kicking off the show by talking with angel investors Ron Conway and John Borthwick about the opportunity for investment in real time. Below find some live notes (paraphrased): Note before: Conway invested in Google at a $75 million

New stats from monitoring service StatCounter suggest that for the second time since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing has surpassed Yahoo Search as the second most used search engine in the United States. Shortly after publicly debuting the new service , Bing already jumped over Yahoo Search - if only for one day - which many attributed to

One of the startups launching today at the Real Time Stream CrunchUp is Lazyfeed , and it is also opening up its service a bit this morning. We have exclusive invites for the first 300 TechCrunch readers to sign up at the site with the promo code “lazytc”. Lazyfeed is an interest feed for blog items. It indexes about 100,

Scribd , the popular document sharing service that’s recently made moves into the Ebook market, has just launched the latest version of iPaper, the site’s online document viewer. Scribd originally debuted iPaper in February 2008, after deciding that the existing Flash Paper viewer developed by Adobe didn’t perform well enough or offer enough

Back in June of last year, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake , the husband/wife team that started Flickr, left Yahoo to pursue other interests. We already know what Fake’s new project is, the just-launched Hunch . Now we know what Butterfield’s new project is. Or, at least, what it’s called: Tiny Speck

An interesting tidbit from today’s Naked Truth event in Seattle : Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said his company just turned profitable. Since I was sitting next to him on the panel, I asked him off microphone what revenues were. He said the run rate is around $15 million. 2007 revenues were $5 million , 2006 revenues were $1 million

The Data Portability wars just got a little more interesting. Power.com , the service that lets users aggregate their social networks into a single hub, is countersuing Facebook for restricting users’ ability to export and move their own data. The company is claiming that Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (

I’m largely seen as FriendFeed’s #1 cheerleader and customer #1. But it isn’t catching on . Rackspace’s President, Lew Moorman, and I have been having an interesting debate. He even wrote up his thesis : that FriendFeed should just become a great Twitter client to become relevant. I have got to be honest: it’s worse than that