Barnes & Noble and Best Buy have teamed up to sell B&N’s Nook ereader on April 18, just as we predicted. As the press release states, this is just in time for Mother’s/Father’s Day, graduation, and the Feasts of St. Apollonius the Apologist and St. Wicterp. The Nook will cost $259.99 and will be available in Best Buy stores.

As you recall, the Nook has generated quite a bit of buzz but folks across the country have had trouble finding them in the wild. By selling them in Best Buy, B&N is at least assured of a relatively larger audience of tech-savvy consumers walking past its displays. However, because Best Buy is also selling the iPad, I suspect those same consumers will find the Nook – heck, even the Kindle – a hard sell after eying Apple’s latest creation.

As we mentioned before, Kindle and Nook are excellent ereaders with great battery life. However, I’m concerned that smaller, cheaper ereaders, some without eink screens, will be taking their share of this sub-$300 market from Amazon and B&N.

Big news from Asia Internet industry today: Korea’s web behemoth NHN has sealed a $68 million deal to acquire major Japanese Internet service provider Livedoor from parent company LDH Corp. (whose stakeholders include Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs). LDH also plans to pay a dividend of $32 million ahead of its sale to NHN.

LDH’s main asset is the eponymous portal service whose 30 million unique users per month make it one of the biggest in Japan (it’s ranked No. 7 on Alexa Japan). LDH, formerly known as Livedoor Holdings, delisted in April 2006 in the wake of an accounting fraud scandal. It’s still embroiled in post-scandal lawsuits filed by Livedoor shareholders.

ZoomSafer, developer of safe driving software for mobile phones, has raised an additional $1 million round of financing from SugarOak Holdings. Daniel Baker, CEO of SugarOak Holdings, has joined the company’s board of directors as part of the funding deal.

Zoomsafer markets what it refers to as a “personal safe driving assistant”, software for mobile phones that aims to prevent distracted driving.

We’re just over a week away from GeeknRolla the annual conference from TechCrunch Europe which brings together Europe’s technology startups and investors in London. We have an amazing line-up of speakers, panels and startup judges on April 20. We’ll be launching around 15 startups in front of a panel of around 18 judges. There will also be a DemoPit for startups not selected to appear on the main stage.

Plus, we just released only 100 tickets to the now legendary Afterparty where you can join the 350+ delegates from the main day – I’d grab one of those before they all go very shortly.

The start-studded line-up includes: Tommy Ahlers, ex-ZYB now Vodafone; Morten Lund, Skype investor & serial entrepreneur; Stefan Glaenzer, Angel; Brent Hoberman, MyDeco & PROFounders; Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp; Mattias Ljungman, Atomico Ventures; Lukas Gadowski, Team Europe; Anil Hansjee, Google; Irena Goldenberg, Highland Capital Partners; Daniel Heaf, 4IP; Ari Wegter, LoveFilm Co-Founder and Alicia Navarro, Co Founder, Skimlinks. As with GeeknRolla’s fast pace style, the speeches will be fast, furious and fulfilling.

I’d strongly advise you get a full day ticket. Last year we more than sold out. Check out our awesome sponsors and partners after the jump.

I’m starting to think Steve Jobs is getting a real kick out of replying to random customers’ emails and watching the blogosphere go nuts over it.

The Apple CEO has now apparently replied to a user’s question about future support for the first-gen iPhone (2G), MacStories reports.

The customer, an unidentified German that goes by the name ‘Niko’, sent Jobs the following email: (after the jump)

Google has purchased mobile visual search startup Plink for an undisclosed sum, the UK-based company has just announced on its blog and Twitter account (via The Guardian).

The company’s two founders, PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin, will work on Google Goggles and help enhance the search giant’s visual search applications.

Since Foursquare never officially checked-in to Germany, another company has decided to become the local Mayor. The clone company Friendticker came out its beta on Friday with a banging underground party in one of Berlin’s secret club locations. Officially, the business of ruling Germany’s location wars starts today.

As is generally widely known, Germany has a very environmentally sustainable economy. There are recycling bins everywhere. So it’s nice to see the recycling has extended to the layout and functionality of Foursquare. Friendticker’s site and iPhone app resembles Foursquare with only minor changes and the browser bar’s favicon looks very much like Facebook’s – only in purple. However, look under the hood and Friendticker has features you won’t find in Foursquare and Gowalla such as a greater emphasis on loyalty rewards and a full-blown Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to allow local businesses to control their offers.

Excellent news for Wii-owning Netflix subscribers: the company has just announced that it has commenced shipments of instant streaming disks to all members who want to start streaming movies and TV shows from their Nintendo console.

Nintendo and Netflix initially announced partnership plans in January and are making Netflix on the Wii fully available as of today, after putting out a teaser and sending out disks to a subset of members a couple of weeks ago.

Digital shopping and fashion empire Like.com is hoping to solve a problem for anyone who has ever stood in front of their closet and wondered what they should wear. The startup that has brought us visual shopping engine Like.com, shopping personalization engine Covet.com; street style social network Weardrobe, and visual styling tool Couturious, is now launching a tool that any fashion-minded individual needs: a live personal stylist and wardrobe consultant. Like’s free iPhone app, called Ask A Stylist, gets you real answers from a Glamour Magazine-trained stylist in real time from your mobile device.

Once you open the application, you can take a picture of your proposed outfit or clothing item, choose your destination (i.e. dinner at a fancy restaurant, concert, picnic in the park) and ask your fashion question. Within minutes a real-life stylist will send you an answer and, if applicable, a recommendation on other items to complement your look. You will receive a push notification alerting you that your response is ready. If push is off, then you can get a notification via SMS.

One thing Zynga loves are the “ville” games. Farmville now has 80+ million monthly users, and they’ve go FishVille, YoVille, PetVille, etc. as well as lots of other games. Next up, it looks like, is FrontierVille And as ridiculous as these games are, people love them, sometimes they get addicted to them, and the revenue keeps rolling in.

Next up is FrontierVille, if the screenshots I saw while logged in to Facebook as a Developer Test Account are to be believed.

idealab, the incubator behind the company that invented search engine marketing as we know it today, is launching a new startup that they say is applying some of the same business mechanics to the Twitter stream. The new startup is called Tweetup.

Let’s zoom back to 1998 for a minute. Search engines at the time had no real way to monetize traffic beyond normal ads. Then Goto.com came along and turned that world upside down by allowing people to bid to be at the top of search results for whatever keywords they wanted.

The rest is, well, history. GoTo was renamed Overture, went public and was later acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion. Google later settled IP litigation with Yahoo over Overture patents for 2.7 million Google shares.

It’s fair to say that GoTo was the seed that launched tens of billions in search revenue, and it is the standard way that all major search engines today make most of their revenue.

EdgeCast has secured $10 million in Series C funding from an investor group led by Menlo Ventures. The content delivery network has raised a total of $20 million since 2007, counting Steamboat Ventures, Mark Amin (Vice Chairman of CinemaNow) and Jon Feltheimer (CEO of Lionsgate) as investors. EdgeCast, which has been profitable since 2009, says the funding was necessary due to a surge in consumer demand and the need to scale up.We have an e-mail from a senior executive.

This post was written by 21 year old Cody Brown, the founder of kommons and NYU Local.

So much has been said in the past few weeks about how the iPad will change the book industry but in almost all of the tweets, posts, and articles I’ve come across a simple questions seems to be completely dropped. Why do we have books in the first place?

Paul Carr of TechCrunch published a post this morning that raised this question inadvertently. His argument went something like this:

For one reason or another, I’ve spent the past few weeks down at the TechCrunch offices. As a result, it’s proved almost impossible to avoid iPad fanboy hysteria. Mike has already said that the device “beats even my most optimistic expectations”, Jason was one of the first in line at the San Francisco launch and even Sarah – who until now didn’t have an iPhone – has succumbed to its charms as a work/play device for long-haul travellers.

And then there’s me.

I’m still not convinced.

No. Strike that. I am convinced. And that’s what worries me.

From Zach Iniguez:

Hi TechCrunch,

I’m a huge fan of your blog and read it every day, and I thought you might be interested in this. This weekend I brought my girlfriend to a local ice cream shop where we had our first date. I also brought along my iPad, since I wanted to “field test” it, as I told her. We sat outside on the same bench we had 2 1/2 years ago, and I asked her to put on earphones. I then handed her the iPad and played a slideshow with music and photos of the two of us together, with a message at the end: “will you marry me?” I got down on one knee and proposed, and fortunately she said yes. Maybe Steve Jobs was right–the iPad is magical!

Thanks for providing me with years of news and entertainment.

Zach

Over the weekend, I attended the China Social Game Summit 2010 in Beijing, a two-day event that attracted over 400 international attendees and 80 speakers. According to the organizers (China’s leading social game service provider Appleap and Tokyo- and Beijing-based VC firm Infinity Venture Partners), the event is the biggest of its kind in China.

Thousands of game developers are toiling in this country (nobody at the summit dared to make a better estimate), churning out dozens and dozens of games for local and international social networks each month. Some attendees at the summit estimated the market for virtual goods in China to be worth to the tune of $5-7 billion, whereas Americans spent $1 billion on virtual goods last year. (That sum, however, is just one yardstick to measure the value of the social game market, as most yuan are being made outside the social game sector, i.e. through “traditional” online games – which aren’t played within social networks – or through avatar-related sales in instant messaging services.)

More information and all six demos after the jump.

Read Part 1 of this series by Adam Hocherman.

I am sitting in the lobby of the Royal Plaza Hotel in Mong Kok waiting for the owner of the factory that makes our Neverlate and Quad-Timer items to pick me up. The final legs of my journey were largely uneventful although it was nearly 2am local time before I finally closed my eyes to go to sleep last night. Dealing with the jet lag on the way out is easy. I basically stayed awake the entire time, dozing in out of a half-sleep the way that someone who is over six feet tall does on airplanes. Some five small airplane meals later, I had lost track of what meal I was supposed to be on. Acclimation to the time zone on the way back is much more difficult and if you’ve ever been to the International Pavilion at the CES you can attest to this first-hand through the observation of countless sleepy Asian booth attendants nodding off in uncomfortable plastic rented chairs.

Before I continue where I left off from last time, I’d like to pause to address the question that was the inspiration for writing this article. That question is why? Why “go it alone”? Why take the route that I’ve taken rather than license your idea (actually, let me be more specific – your product concept) to another party? I am of the opinion that there is a place for licensing, but it is not for low cost – say, sub $100 – consumer products. If you have a proprietary technology – something that you embed in another product then, by all means, license it. If you have an idea for a consumer product and the desire/willingness to put for the effort to bring it to market, then you should go it alone. The reasons are many, but the main ones are (1) IP, (2) margin and (3) control. Let me speak to these one at a time.

Thirty five years ago, give or take, I was presented with my first etch-a-sketch. And it looked a little bit like the iPad. Which makes me qualified to declare the iPad the future of media.

Or at least, that’s the logic of an article in today’s Guardian by Alan Rusbridger, who says that a block of wood that he saw sixteen years ago showed him the future. And that future was the iPad.

“My personal journey to the iPad began around 16 years ago in Aspen, Colorado,” Rusbridger begins. He saw a website showing a newspaper online and was duly impressed. “But the real excitement lay in Aspen, where the Knight Ridder newspaper chain had set up a “laboratory” to study the future of news. It was rumoured that they had built a “tablet” – a portable screen on which people could read newspapers.”

The tablet he saw was a block of wood with a printout of a newspaper glued on the front. No, I’m not kidding.

The flash sales space is growing rapidly, with Gilt Groupe , Vente-Privee, HauteLook and others seeing millions of consumers flocking to their sites. There’s even a sample sale aggregator, MyNines, that’s joined the mix. A new player is joining the online sample sale space, called Mintbox, that aims to give users rewards and cashback for shopping on the site. You can sign up for the Mintbox here.

Gruuuuubeeer! Why do you force us to listen to your reasoned, intelligent arguments explaining the odd language in the new iPhone SDK guidelines outlawing outside iPhone compiling methods, including .NET and Adobe’s own Flash-to-iPhone tools? If we follow Godwin’s law to its obvious conclusion, we can only say that you are a collaborator with enemy forces!

For those of you not following along, the story is this: Apple’s new SDK guidelines state, in no uncertain terms, that you can only use Apple tools to compile and submit iPhone and iPad apps. Nothing else is allowed. To many this is an affront to the general dignity of man and a call to arms. To others, and I suspect many others, it’s not a really a BFD.