After a 15-minute private demo of Cisco’s Umi, the company’s latest video calling system, I was fairly impressed with the unit’s sharp 1080p HD resolution and the natural feel of the audio (which is apparently designed to elevate human voices and suppress background noise). Then again, that level of quality is no real surprise given Cisco’s history in telepresence technology and their popularity on the enterprise side.

However, the main problem with Cisco is not innovation, it’s getting outside of the boardroom and finding a real place in the consumer’s living room— and no where is that gap more apparent than in Umi’s sticker price. As CrunchGear reporter Devin Coldewey lamented, it’s a consumer-facing device priced for the office at $599 for the system and $24.99 a month.

After the presentation, TC TV got a chance to catch up with Marthin De Beer, Cisco’s SVP of the Emerging Technologies Group, and asked him to justify Umi’s price. See parts of our demo and the interview with De Beer ahead.

The Verizon iPhone rumor is as old as the iPhone itself. So whenever anyone trots it out, you take it with a grain of salt. It’s like The Beatles coming to iTunes. It will happen eventually, but who knows when. That said, today’s Wall Street Journal report about Verizon readying to launch the iPhone in early 2011 has all the makings of a good old Apple-controlled leak once again. And so it may be time to really believe.

Now, I of course don’t know for sure that Apple fed WSJ this story — but let’s look at the recent history. In January, as rumors were swirling about the iPad, the WSJ had a story suggesting the tablet computer could run around $1,000. At the time, I pointed out why this reeked of Apple setting expectations low so they could blow them out of the water. A few days later, a former Marketing Manager at Apple backed this up. The result? Steve Jobs on stage announcing the iPad would start at just $499. Boom.

Google has Google Instant. Bing has guided search and (soon) swimming whale videos on its home page. Yahoo, well, Yahoo now has an expanding accordion search box. Starting today, when you do searches related to music, movies, or news, a set of results will be packaged together at the top in a box with vertical tabs along the side. It is similar to Google’s Universal Search Onebox and the Bing Box, except that the vertical tabs create four or five expanding search boxes in one.

When you do a search for “Lady Gaga,” for instance, the default box is an overview with an excerpt from her bio, link to her official site, and photos, but there are also tabs for nearby events, albums, videos, and Twitter. The Twitter tab is further divided into her official Tweets, Tweets from Hollywood Insiders, and Tweets from “Everyone” (although it is not really from everyone, Yahoo filters out spam and bots).

It looks like Digg is trying to resurrect inactive users, according to an email sent to us by a reader. Apparently Digg sent out the email to users in hopes of trying to get those who are inactive back to the site. As the email states, “Come Alive On Digg. A Lot Has Changed Since You Were Last On Digg. Resurrect Yourself.”

It could be a joke alluding to Halloween, which is just around the corner. But even if it is a play on the upcoming holiday, the image is a little morbid considering the recent course of events for Digg. Since Digg launched its new site design in August, the site has been plagued with trouble, including backlash from users, downtime and an executive shuffle. According to ComScore, Digg’s U.S. unique visitors dropped from 14.3 million in January to 8.8 million in August.

Earlier today, Facebook held a special event to unveil a totally revamped Groups product, a new data export option, and a dashboard to help you monitor third-party apps that you’ve linked with Facebook.  In short, it’s a huge day for the company  — the result of a 60-day Lockdown period this summer, during which Facebook employees had their noses to the grindstone even more than usual (the sign above is actually hanging inside of Facebook HQ).

Following the event, I had the chance to sit down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Shaffer, who founded Hot Potato (which Facebook acquired in August) and is now Product Manager for the revamped Groups. The interview, which you can read in its entirety below, touches on a few topics:

Parenting focused e-commerce site EcoMom, which provides a curated shopping experience for moms, has just received $1.1 million in Series A funding from angels and VCs alike. Investors in the round include Dan Gould (founder of Newroo and Namesake), Cyan and Scott Banister, Dave McClure, Paige Craig, Sizhao Yang and David Pell as well as several angels from Angel List.

Like a Zappos for new parents, the six person company sells things to new moms keeping in mind the following strictures, “Are the products safe?” “Are the products useful?”

“And now this post will be TechCrunched and the Internet will go into an infinite loop and explode from the sheer weight of navel gazing.”

3-2-1 … Nope. No explosions. Nothing.

Yup, still here.

For those out of the (infinite) loop, we just wrote a post about attempting to break into the rapidly exploding and private Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook. And then we did, hence above.

Hiring? Then you should definitely scroll through this impressive recently inaugurated group of Yahoo alumni, currently up to 183 members despite it being less then three hours old. At the rate group membership is exploding, we’re thinking this could easily surpass the 500 mark in the next 48 hours.

No word on whether “Yahoo Alumni!” is the fastest scaling Facebook Group since Facebook launched the feature, but it is probably the most bittersweet, as there is nothing on Yahoo that would currently support this use case and, from what we’re hearing, Yahoo is pretty interested in building a Groups-like product itself.

We just noted that Twitter quietly rolled out an entirely new search backend over the past few weeks, and nobody seemed to notice. That’s actually great news, because it means nothing went terribly wrong in the transition. But now comes the real challenge for Twitter: making search useful once again.

Twitter Search has long held the promise of something great. Original born as an independent company, Summize, when Twitter bought them in 2008, it seemed clear that they were about to get serious about search. But as scaling problems continued and escalated, and as the user base continued to grow, search took a backseat. I would bet that if you polled Twitter users now about one thing they’d like to see improved, it would be search.

A lifetime ago, back in 2004, I became a book publisher: co-founder of The Friday Project, a publishing house that promised to adapt the web’s creative talent into awesome books. This wasn’t print on demand, it was real, live publishing: we paid our authors (including the occasional advance), we partnered with publishing giant Macmillan for distribution and our books could be found in actual book stores.

It’s hard to say if we rode the bloggers-with-book-deals wave or if we helped precipitate it. All I know is, for a brief period starting about five years into the present millennium, every online hack and her dog was being offered a six figure sum to turn her livejournal about love or sex or working in an office or cooking like Julia Child (or all of the above) into the next bestseller. Big online brands got in on the action too with Gawker and Postsecret and every other site north of a million page views being handed a fat check. There were even agents who specialised in blog-to-book deals, most notably ICM’s Kate Lee who achieved her own meta-micro fame by helping high profile bloggers break through.

Twelve months later came the deluge of remaindered books.

While everyone was busy trying out New Twitter or tweeting about how they want New Twitter, Twitter itself was doing something secret behind the scenes. The startup quietly flipped the switch on an entirely new backend for their search, they reveal in a blog post today.

“One of our main goals, but also biggest challenges, was a smooth switch from the old architecture to the new one, without any downtime or inconsistencies in search results,” they write in the post. Mission: accomplished, it seems, as no one outside of Twitter even seemed to be aware that they switched anything.

Now I’m not sure if he was actually paid for this, and it genuinely looks like former Black Eyed Peas artist will.i.am loves Twitter. But something’s up with this 1:27 long entreaty to “check it out,” which includes such gems as Will tweeting “Can I get a redesign up in here?” and showing off the geolocational features, how to create a list and how to complete a vanity search in case you can’t figure it out. To Will’s credit, #NewTwitter is, admittedly, complicated.

Also bizarre: The Samuel L. Jackson “Check this motherfucker out” at the end. I basically can’t get it out of my head now.

Located on a nondescript block in San Francisco’s Mission district is HipMunk HQ, a simple townhouse with a dark green trim. The travel startup’s operations are concentrated in just the first two rooms on the first floor— the rest is living space for Hipmunk’s co-founders, Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman, formerly of Reddit. The approximate 300 square feet is more than enough space for the fledgling flight search engine, which is made up of three full-time employees (including the co-founders) and a couple of part-time workers.

The idea is to outgrow the space as cash trickles in from the site’s flight purchases (according to the team, they’ve been technically profitable since their August launch) and their latest angel round, a $1 million pool backed by investors like Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Paul Buchheit.

So why the fuss? Why do we care about a stylish, ambiguously hip-ster(?) chipmunk with an obnoxiously adorable periwinkle scarf? TC TV dropped by 75 Sharon St. to find out. Video ahead.

PayPal first announced the eventual roll out of a specialized micropayments product in August, which would allow businesses to collect micropayments on the web via PayPal. Today, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch that it will be launching a ‘digital goods optimized product,’ a.k.a. a payments technology for micropayments, in a few weeks at the company’s developer conference, Innovate,. PayPal has also formed a number of high-profile partnerships with companies to implement the digital goods product, which will also be announced at the conference.

In order to best understand how big this feature could be, it’s important to know what PayPal includes in its definition of “digital goods.” According to the company, the new product will include specialized payment support for micropayments for online video, music, games (including the sale of virtual goods and currencies), paid content, books and software.

The third quarter IPO market is like looking at a Rorshach test: You can find data to support that liquidity is getting better or data to support that it’s getting worse.

Here’s the reality check: There is an increase in deals– a big increase if you look at the first nine months of the year and compare it to the first nine months of 2009. And the pipeline is building: 67 new companies entered IPO registration since July, and if they go out, they could be the biggest issues so far this year.

Let’s hope that’s the case because the downside to the news is that deal value is falling substantially year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2010, there were 32 IPOs, compared to just 20 in the third quarter of 2009. But only one was valued at more than $500 million. (All numbers are courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s third quarter IPO watch.)

Last night, we noted that after a two-month “lockdown” Facebook was emerging with the fruits of their labor today. We heard that the likely result would be a site redesign, but obviously, that didn’t come. Instead, Facebook rolled out a few new features such as a way to download your information, a dashboard for connected apps, and, most notably, a completely revamped Groups feature. That being said, the redesign is still coming, we hear. And it shouldn’t be too long.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the event today by acknowledging that they have been in what they call “lockdown” for several weeks. And he indicated that the result of it would be several new launches over the coming weeks and months. One of those will be a redesign, which is meant to unify the look of the site.

At the huge Facebook overhaul event in Palo Alto today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a feature that allows users data portability (hallelujah). One thing that Zuckerberg kept emphasizing during this talk was that Facebook Connect was one of two pronged ways that people could use Facebook to leave a footprint on the web, as it is now being used on over one million sites.

According to Whois, there are 123,309,807 live .com, .net, .org, .info, .bis, and .us domains on the Internet currently, so we’re guestimating the service is now live on less than 1% of all top level domains.

Along with the barrage of news today, Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the social network will start implementing a “social captcha,” to verify identities of members if they are logging on from different places. Specifically, he said that members would have to answer questions about their friends or identify them in a picture to download your data from Facebook.

Apparently, when you choose to “Download Your Information” from your account settings, Facebook will implement the Captcha. Facebook actually filed a patent for social captchas back in September.

Here it, ladies and gents. The Logitech Revue. The device’s minisite just went live ahead of the official unveiling at 3:00 PM EDT today and that’s fine by us. The site itself doesn’t talk all that much about Google TV — at least there isn’t anything here that wasn’t on the Google TV minisite — rather it’s devoted to Logitech’s Google TV offering, the Revue.

The box itself is listed as capable of outputing a 1080p@60fps signal, though we’ll see in person how smooth it actually is. The I/O ports are as expected with HDMI 1.3a in and out, along with 10/100BaseT Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, S/PDIF, 802.11b/g/n connectivity and the Logitech Harmony IR blaster port. The Revue even ships with a compact keyboard complete with integrated remote and touchpad, HDMI cable, and one IR mini blaster. All good stuff, but it’s the HD camera we’re excited about.

Today at the event at their headquarters in Palo Alto, Facebook unveiled a completely revamped Groups feature. With it, you can add people from your social graph to a new area of Facebook where you can more easily communicate with them. Below, find an initial walk through of some interesting things. (The feature is available to some today, and will be fully rolling out over the next few weeks, Facebook says.)

Here’s the Create Group pop-up: