Apple and Google have exchanged harsh words over the fight to get Google Voice approved for the iPhone, but a new Web version of the application will end the dispute.

YouTube took another step toward conquering the entertainment sphere today with the launch of YouTube Music Discovery, a Pandora-esque music video suggestion tool courtesy of the video service’s program lab, TestTube.

The video-sharing website has been taking several strides as of late into the realms of both music (with Vevo, a music video website it launched along with Universal) and its recent foray into movie rentals. Now, YouTube is giving sites like Pandora, Songza and Last.fm a run for their money with Disco.

Disco, much like streaming music sites, finds videos by your preferred artist, and then suggests similar musicians. I tried it out with a recent fave, The Black Lips:

Although the design leaves something to be desired (in short, it’s just plain ugly), YouTube did find an impressive selection of videos by the artist, seemingly filtering out fan-made vids in favor of official versions.

My main qualm, however, was that the majority of the videos suggested were from the Black Lips. If this is truly to be a music suggestion tool, I feel like it should, well, suggest more music. Still, I feel like this had to do more with my music selection than anything else. When I tested it again with Eminem, I was given more suggestions — still, said suggestions included three Soulja Boy Tell Em videos in a row, so I’m still dubious.

All in all, this promises to be a rather intriguing tool. Also, I can wager that instances like OK Go’s recent embedding fiasco will become more and more common as people get hip to Disco. Clicking through the Black Lips’ vids, I noticed that the majority had embed codes (legitimately, too — they’re signed with Vice Records). As music videos become easier to find — and share — I can see more record labels wanting their slice of the money pie.

Tags: disco, music, video, youtube

Different territories demand different marketing approaches. Google, for instance, has been spotted taking the unusual route of promoting their search engine and Chrome browser with print advertising campaigns in India and The Netherlands, respectively.

And now a reader informs us that Facebook is buying Google ads on the search giant’s India portal (Google.co.in). You can see some examples embedded in this post or on our tipster’s blog.

It’s impossible to determine if this is new, but perhaps Indian TechCrunch readers can tell us if these just started popping up or if they’ve been running for a while. I’ve been trying out searches for people on a couple of other country portals but haven’t seen any Google AdWords campaigns from Facebook at first glance. We’ve contacted Facebook for more information.

The move is fairly ironic for two distinct reasons: first, because Facebook has been struggling to become the leader in social networking in India at the expense of Orkut, which is of course a Google service (it depends on who you ask which one is effectively leading, but Facebook has definitely been making strides all around the world).

Second: in June 2009, Facebook hired away Google’s Grady Burnett, who had been leading the Mountain View company’s AdWords business in Ann Arbor, Mich. He’s now Director, Global Online and Inside sales at Facebook.

Also noteworthy: when you effectively click through on one of these Facebook ads, you don’t actually run a search query on the person you’ve been looking for – it just redirects you to the Facebook homepage where you have to renew your search to find him or her. Surely, there must be ways to improve that process?

Have you spotted any Facebook advertising on Google in your country? Let us know.

Update: these ads seem to appear on the Google Brazil search portal as well according to commenters on this post and on Twitter. This would make sense, as Orkut is also huge in those parts.

(Thanks for the tip, Ricky)

As you can see in the picture, Twitter has started to roll out its new Local Trends feature which takes the standard Trending Topics data and uses Twitter’s geolocation functionality to make it based on location. Twitter team members Ryan Sarver and Raffi Krikorian have confirmed it is starting to roll out. We noted this feature back in November when Twitter said there would be an API for it, but unlike actual geolocation, they’re clearly going to be featuring on the main website as well. This is a big part of Twitter’s effort to clean up the Trending Topics area which has become overrun with spam.

While only a limited number of users can see it right now, user LisaBarone was able to capture it in action. As you can see, she only captured the ability to switch your city or country to find trends based on the location. Look for more screenshots soon.

Update: And here’s another from Barone.

Update 2: Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver has tweeted us a bit more information about the feature. Apparently, “Coachella” is a term only trending in LA and San Francisco, which makes sense since it’s a concert based in California. As you can see in the screenshot below, “LAFD” is also trending in LA.

It appears that the Nexus One’s speech-to-text function performs the digital equivalent of washing your mouth out with soap.

Reuters discovered that the innovative voice recognition feature converts swear words into a string of # symbols when rendered into text.

Why the censorship? A spokesperson from Google says the “feature” is less about sanitizing users’ speech and more about making sure curse words don’t accidentally appear in transcriptions erroneously, a real possibility given the early and not always accurate state of voice recognition technology.

“We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent,” the statement said.

Fair enough. Although that seems to imply that one day, when the technology improves, Nexus One users may see their right to be foul-mouthed returned. One can only ###ing hope.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Tags: android, cursing, Google, nexus one, trending, voice recognition

Google just announced an interesting update to Google Reader. Google’s online feed reader now allows you to track changes on any page - even those that don’t feature an RSS feed. Google will create its own custom feeds for these sites and update the feed whenever it notices a change. Google Reader will display a short snippet of the page changes in the RSS feed.

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Until today, Google Reader would simply respond with an error message if you tried to subscribe to a site that didn’t offer an RSS feed. Now, Google will simply create a new feed for the site and track updates. It’s not clear how often Google plans to ping these sites, however.

Thanks to this, you can easily track the latest discounts on Macys.com or updates to Zillow.com’s homepage.

As far as we were able to see, Google Reader creates very clean RSS feeds for these items. While Google doesn’t make it obvious, you can find the newly created feed by clicking “show details” in Google Reader. Thanks to this, you can subscribe to this new feed in any feed reader and not just in Google Reader.

There are, of course, a number of other sites that also allow you to track when something changes on a site. ChangeDetection.com, for example, is a popular online service that will alert you whenever a page changes. Unlike Google Reader’s new feature, ChangeDetection.com also gives you a very detailed overview of of what exactly changed and what the page looked like before. The service also offers an RSS feed of these changes.

Discuss

The web video behemoth has begun experimental support for HTML5 video playback, letting users watch movies in the browser without Flash. Too bad it doesn’t work in Firefox.

Video site Vimeo will begin rolling out support Thursday for HTML5 with a new player that runs natively in current generation browsers.

By Nick Bilton, Reporter, New York Times

Consumers are witnessing the beginning of a new war between computer companies. Instead of the Apple-Microsoft conflict of the early 1980s, this fight is taking place between Apple and Google.

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