BoomTown is always up at 5:30 am PT, but now I will apparently be joined by twitch-fingered Apple fanboys, waiting for the iPad pre-order rush to begin this morning. Currently, the Apple Store online has this note of heady anticipation (A Post-It ? Katie, surely you could do better!) Getting the actual magic tablet in your grubby mitts will have to wait three more weeks to April 3, …

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Kwedit , the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data. The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It’s not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users …

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Snaptu , a startup bringing an iPhone-style application experience to thousands of mobile devices, just announced it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital . Previously known as Moblica, Snaptu says it works on any phone that can run a Java application, adding up to more than 2,000 devices. (The first question in the “help” section of Snaptu’s website is “Does Snaptu work on my phone?” which…

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The battle between HTML 5 and Flash wages on with the discovery of an interesting report comparing the CPU usage of HTML 5 and Flash on both Mac and Windows platform. In the midst of all the smack talk about Flash, Flash was presumed to be a CPU hog that chokes your system to the point of death. A series of measurements performed by video compression guru Jan…

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Android for Windows phones — simple concept, simple enough installation, but awesome results. The good people behind the XDAndroid project have been working hard to allow you to get your Google juices flowing nice and freely on your WinMo device and the latest build looks to have all but completed the task. Demonstrated on a Touch Pro 2 — a phone that recently got itself Ubuntu-ized — the Android installation experiences no difficulty in making…

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Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we’ve learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website…

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Lucid Imagination , the startup that commercially distributes the open source Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Shasta Ventures with Granite Ventures and Walden International participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $16 million. Lucid powers enterprise search technologies using the open source Lucene/Solr search. Customers include Zappos, Nike and Netflix. The new funding …

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Today, I appeared on WSJ.com’s daily online show, “Digits,” talking about the “next big thing” in tech, on the 10th anniversary of the tech stock bubble high. Those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d always end. In the video, I am wearing a pair of honking big headphones that work well on Skype, to give it that year 2000, …

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Jeff O’Connell is the lead producer of the new True Crime game, and he’s showing off the game’s hand-to-hand fighting. The part of the game we saw was low on gunplay, but it looked great, with some cinematic-looking moves and kills. The game takes place in Hong Kong, and we’re told the art team took 27,000 reference photos of the city. They wanted a…

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Towards the end of Google’s developer event launching its new Apps Marketplace , Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard offered some perspective on how the marketplace fits into Google’s broader strategy for business apps. For one thing, it means the company can build fewer apps. Girouard said his team is often asked when they’re going to roll out additional apps — something for customer relationship management…

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