In the spirit of my trademark watch this morning:

Earlier this week, Apple filed a U.S. trademark for ‘VOICEPASS’, in the ‘Construction and Repair Services’ category. Bloomberg casually mentioned the trademark filing earlier today, as did one iPhone tips and tricks blogger and Patently Apple.

The thing about the trademark is that while it was pretty easy to find out what it is for, I haven’t seen anyone discussing its impact and potential. So here goes.

Skype users has been experiencing a lot of connection problems in the past day or so, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. The service is now slowly crawling back into the land of the living.

The Skype team has been doing a pretty good job keeping people informed about the problems, although they’ve been unable to say when service will be restored for everyone.

The company has just announced that an estimated 10 million people are now back online, although they’re unable to obtain an exact figure because of the way the software works.

Oh man, it’s going to be hard not to let my feminist side shine through writing about this topic, but I’ll try my best! Ladieshoesme is a brand new French dating site, launched officially on December 13th, where ladies pick a man as if he were a pair of shoes…literally.

Members essentially have to identify themselves as a pair of shoes on the platform. That means, when you create your profile, you also have to include a picture of your favorite pair of shoes. Don’t have one? Not to worry, the site has a selection you can choose from. Plus, you have to also include some information in your profile regarding shoes and feet – like “For me, shoes are…(fill in)” or “What I really hate to see on someone’s feet is…(fill in).” It’s kind of silly and kind of fun, but does this whole expressing yourself via shoes business really change that much?

William Albano checks in to tell us that Facebook is blocking all j.mp links in status and page updates (but not profiles). Sure enough, I tried to post a j.mp link in a status update just now, and I got an error notice saying:

“This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.”

Grab ringside seats to the death of optical media with one of three new Blu-ray players complete with 1 year Redbox subscriptions. The folks at Redbox, who are running some other kind of concurrent Blu-Ray promotion, want their business model to remain vaguely viable for at least the next few years so they want to ensure that you and yours are enjoying fine Blu-ray entertainment as streaming moves in to eat their lunch. To that end, we must insist that you read on to find out how to win.

When domain name investor and blogger Patrick Ruddell (aka Chef Patrick) came across the name ScienceFiction.com, he couldn’t resist: he dropped $175,000 to buy it.

The domain name had been held back by a finance company called Domain Capital due to a defaulted loan, and Ruddell contacted two sci-fi geek friends to turn it into a business.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that Microsoft, not just Google, made a serious attempt to acquire business directory and reviews site Yelp. According to “two people involved in the negotiations”, the Redmond software giant even bid as high as $700 million for the company. Yelp instead opted to remain independent, for better or worse.

Google is attacking it with Places and Hotpot.

And now some information has surfaced that indicates Microsoft could be planning a Yelp rival as well.

In recent months there’s been growing buzz here in Israel around a small startup called The Gifts Project. Today, the startup is announcing a $1 million financing round led by Gemini Israel Funds. This follows a seed investment back in 2009 by Dr. Yossi Vardi.

With The Gifts Project, online retailers will be able to offer groups of people the ability to chip-in and buy a gift together for a mutual friend, colleague, or family member. A pretty simple idea with a promising potential considering social commerce is going gangbusters.

We’re always pretty excited when people contact us for some new technology they’re developing, a startup they’re building, or a refreshing innovation they’ve come across. (We also like it when we get a heads up when companies or technologies screw up, but I digress).

It is thus with great joy that I found an email in our anonymous tips inbox this morning with the tasty subject line: “The Fastest, Easiest, Cheapest, Most Omnipresent, and Universal Means of Communication”.

Anxious to try this speedy, inexpensive and simple product or service out, I opened up the email.

This afternoon, we wrote a post about the popular RSS feed reader, Reeder, calling out rival MobileRSS for design theft. As we noted, the community was starting to rally around Reeder, as both Read It Later and Instapaper, two of the most popular bookmarking services which work with both apps, blocked MobileRSS from using their APIs as a show of support for Reeder. But MobileRSS had yet to respond. Now they have. And they’re going to do the right thing.

They’ve just sent the following statement to us:

Igor Barinov, the developer behind the WikiLeaks app that got removed from the App store, has revealed the total breakdown of his app’s reach before it got taken down by Apple. Total damage? 4443 downloads and $5,840.14 in profit. The Moscow-based Barinov says that he’ll be donating $1.00 from each sale, a total of $4443 dollars, to WikiLeaks.

Perhaps this semi-charity feature is what lead Apple to take down the app in the first place? Barinov holds that the company said over the phonethat the app violated the following points of the iPhone Developer TOS.

Since their launch, Path has maintained that they aim to be a very personal moment sharing service. The idea there is that it wouldn’t just be limited to photo sharing. And as of tonight, they’re not. Path has just added video support to their iPhone app. And in what is sure to be another controversial idea, the clips are limited to only 10 seconds.

The latest version of Path, 1.2, which should be live in the App Store shortly, allows users to upload these short video clips alongside the standard pictures. And just as with pictures, these video clips can be tagged with the people, places, and things in them.

Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphones, has just raised $19.5 million in Series C funding led by Index Ventures with existing investor Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures participating in the round. This brings Lookout’s total funding to $36 million.

Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones help users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a tracking application and a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer. The company also announced today that it now has four million users, after crossing the two million mark in September.

Anchor Intelligence, a service that detects click fraud, is heading to the deadpool, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. We first wrote about the company in December 2007.

The company has raised $6 million in venture capital – all of it prior to 2008 – plus another million dollars or so in debt from Western Technology Investment.

The company has been trying to raise a new round of venture capital and almost succeeded in early 2010, sources say, but for a variety of reasons the deal never closed. Facebook was also close to acquiring the company in the Summer, say multiple sources. The deal, like many other Facebook acquisitions, would have given investors some of their capital back, with lucrative stock-based compensation going to founders and employees.

When it comes to RSS readers, there’s no question that my preference is to use Reeder. Whether on iPhone, iPad, or the Mac, their apps brings a usability and elegance to an otherwise ugly medium. And obviously, design is a huge part of that. So when Reeder developer Silvio Rizzi saw that exact design being used by a competitor, MobileRSS, he was obviously pissed off. And from the looks of it, rightfully so.

What Rizzi did next was both ballsy and brilliant. He created a page on his site to show side-by-side examples of just how bad the rip-off is. And support quickly flowed in. Stories about the rip-off began surfacing. As did hundreds (if not thousands) of retweets. And now the community that is partially responsible for the success that MobileRSS has seen up until now has started responding as well.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the folks over at SkyFire. They launched their Flash Video-friendly browser for the iPhone back in early November, only to pull it down almost immediately to ease the onslaught of users hammering their video transcoding server. Even with that temporary App Store absence, however, SkyFire for iPhone managed to pull in just shy of a million bucks in its first weekend alone.

There wasn’t much time to celebrate, though, as SkyFire had another device in its sights: the iPad. With their first stab at iOS proving to be a pretty friggin’ hot success, it wasn’t a question of if — it was a question of when, and how much. We’ve just been clued in on the answers to both.

Over the last couple years, there’s been a rise in hosted application platforms that let developers take their mind off of server administration and instead focus entirely on writing and deploying code. The best known of these is probably Heroku, a platform for Rails applications that was just acquired by Salesforce for $212 million. Google’s App Engine is another popular option for Python and Java developers, and there are loads of competitors popping up.

DotCloud is a new Y Combinator-funded company launching today that’s similar to these, but with a key difference: instead of focusing on one or two popular development stacks, it wants to give developers more flexibility by letting them mix and match from over a dozen preconfigured components.

Twitter is down. Skype is down. Tumblr is down. Facebook is down. Twitter is down again.You can base an entire tech reporting career around writing these types of posts. Because if you’re like me and millions of other users right now, you can’t access your Skype account because of a network connection failure.

And like electricity or Internet, I need Skype to do my job well.

A couple weeks ago, SimpleGeo launched a couple of their APIs, Context and Places, into public beta and they were told that was probably a good cut off point for new products before the holidays. But they didn’t listen. Today they’re launching a bunch of things right before holiday break starts for many people.

So what did they want to get out the door before the new year? The biggest thing is what’s known as JSONP / JavaScript SDK, which is a new feature of their APIs that allows anyone to enable location on any website they control. This is done with two things: GeoIP and the W3C’s Geolocation API. The former is a technology used while they wait for more browsers to adopt the latter. Essentially, it looks up your IP address on the fly and geocodes it.

Know about Uber yet? It’s one of those startups that I’ve been fascinated with since I first heard about it last summer. It lets you call for black car service via a mobile application, watch it come to you via GPS, and all charges are automatically billed to your credit card.

In the future I think the service could expand to let anyone become a “driver,” much like AirBnB lets anyone rent out their home like a hotel. For now though the service is limited to black car services and is available only in San Francisco (and one fun night in Paris).