You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, we were on the verge of the second Twitpocalypse. Originally, Twitter’s development team intended to manually trigger the event on September 11, but at the last minute thought better of doing it at the end of the week (that was a Friday) and instead pushed out the event. It now looks like it will happen tomorrow at 11:30 AM PST, an update in the Twitter Development Talk Google Group states today.

I could go into what the Twitpocalypse is for the fifth time, but if you really want to know, just read our previous posts. Or read what developer Ryan Sarver has to say:

We’ve seen free iPhone apps, $1,000 iPhone apps, promotional apps, pointless apps, and offensive apps. Now we have the high-concept app. This is a little like conceptual art, except that it doesn’t quite rise to that level.

One example of a concept app that just hit the iTunes Store is 24 Hours: The Starck Mix (iTunes link). It is a 24-hour soundtrack streamed to your iPhone, meant to be an audio tribute to French designer Philippe Starck. In fact, it sounds like something you might hear in the lobby of one of the trendy boutique hotels he’s helped to design, like the Clift in San Francisco or the Hudson Hotel in New York City.

Seedcamp, the European-wide programme for tech startups, has opened its annual week of supercharged mentoring for its final list of 20 startups.

There are other startup programmes and competitions in Europe but Seedcamp seems to have cornered the market in that scare resource: smart European tech CEOs who can mentor new startups.

Put simply, if you’d thrown a grenade into the Costa Coffee at University College London today much of the tech startup scene in Europe would have been wiped out. Which would be a pity. But back to the startups: What are the trends this year?

If you liked the Animoto video at TechCrunch50, just wait until you see what French startup and winner of Seedcamp 2008 Stupeflix has just launched. Can’t keep up with the flood of tweets and pictures about you, your blog, your event or your company? Stupeflix.TV will mash them up on-the-fly into a live TV channel. The results are stunning, and they’re not limited to your own events or companies: you can enter any search terms you like to see what people are sharing at that moment.

Realizing that it’s better to swim with the stream than against it, MySpace has just turned on two-way sync with Twitter. MySpace status updates can now be sent to Twitter and shared with all of your followers there, and Twitter updates can appear in your MySpace activity stream as well (blog post).

Members of both services can connect their accounts using OAuth. Status updates from MySpace are then identified as being “from MySpace” in your Twitter stream, as if though it were another Twitter client, with a link back to MySPace. Members can choose either one-way (read-only) or two-way syncing.

It used to be that M.I.T was filled with code-breakers. Part of the movie A Beautiful Mind takes place there and in real life it’s always had close ties with the military and intelligence agencies. Tech companies also like to recruit there, and Google is no exception.

In search of some beautiful minds, Google has been putting up signs around the M.I.T campus with a code that say, “If you can figure this out, you may have a future at Google.” If they crack the code, which is a fairly simple substitution cipher (or not), it reveals a phone number where they can leave their contact information.

So far, no M.I.T. students have been able to crack the code, or at least they haven’t bothered to leave a voicemail. Maybe they need some help. The first person to crack the code gets a TechCrunch T-shirt, or maybe a job at Google if you call the number and leave your name.

Searching for growth and better margins, Dell is expanding its enterprise IT consulting business by acquiring Perot Systems for $3.9 billion in an all-cash deal. Perot Systems is the IT consulting and integration services company founded by Ross Perot in 1988 four years after selling Electronic Data Systems to General Motors. (EDS is now part of HP, which bought it last year for $13.9 billion).

The shift to consulting services will make Dell look more like IBM (and HP). Dell has an existing services division, which will be rolled into Perot Systems. Peter Altabef, the current CEO of Perot Systems, will run the combined IT Services business. Both Dell and Perot Systems are based in Texas, which should make the combination go smoother.

Australian-startup iMinds is hoping to re-create the experience of reading an encyclopedia, except on your iPod. The startup is launching audio-versions of encyclopedia entries, with topics such as “The Federal Reserve,” and “D-Day Invasion,” that can be downloaded fro, Audible.com or iTunes.

Currently, there are 72 different “MindTracks” available that give a well-rounded subject overview of a general knowledge topic in a variety of subject matters including politics, sports, pop culture, science and more. Each track is eight minutes and costs $0.99 cents on iTunes.

I was reading over a pitch tonight for a new streaming movie service called Epix HD, when I looked up from my computer to my TV stand. On it, I saw an Apple TV, an Xbox 360, and a cable box. Right there, that is 3 different ways to get streaming movies to my television. And that’s not even mentioning the Netflix service over Xbox Live, and the streaming service that can come right to my TV. That’s 5 ways to get movies within a foot of my TV. It’s madness.

Now, choice is of course a good thing, but the problem is that each of these services don’t really offer much choice. If you want a complete way to get movies over the web, you almost have to have all of these boxes. That’s because the movie studios form partnerships and alliances with various services and not with others. And they have silly rules about who can stream/download what, when, and how. It’s a mess. And Hollywood really needs to sort it out soon, or they are just asking for trouble as broadband continues to improve.

Companies and brands always want to have their Twitter profiles and background images fit their profile. Tweet Scenes is hoping to make the process of creating backgrounds for Twitter users much easier. You upload your logo, photos, text and links, and give some basic background information on your company and what you’re looking for. You then pay a flat fee ($129) up front, and get your design done in three business days.

Tweet Scenes is owned and operated by a web design and development company (Carnes Media) with over a decade of design and branding experience. Carnes Media has done sites like Tatango, who we recently covered, Derek Media, and many others.

Technology conferences are supposed to have Internet. Most don’t. In fact, audiences are trained to be grateful for even a trickle of bandwidth. Maybe enough to get off a Tweet or two. But uploading photos and videos is something that you do later, after the event is over. Because it can take days.

It’s been a real problem for us over the years. We’ve thrown money at the problem. We’ve tried new vendors and technologies. We’ve prayed. And cursed. I’ve offered vendors a big wet kiss of a post on TechCrunch if they could get it right. They never have.

Last year we had a full day Internet outage at TechCrunch50, and it wasn’t better on day 2. The only good thing about an Internet outage is that most attendees can’t blog or tweet about it, since they can’t get on the Internet.

Giving 2,000 hard core Internet users simultaneous access from a single location is very, very hard. I’ve seen grown men cry when they tried and failed.

Many of the widgets scattered across the Web are made in Flash, but Adobe doesn’t participate in the widget economy. Today, it is taking a first tentative step towards changing that with the release of a new Distribution Manager for widgets created on the Flash Platform. In addition to making it easier for people to share the widgets across 70 Web and mobile destinations, it will track their usage, and serve as a widget ad network as well.

Adobe is obviously interested in getting into the advertising end of the business, which is why it recently announced it is acquiring Omniture for $1.8 billion. Rather than just getting paid once for the tools to create Web apps and content, it wants to get a piece of those recurring advertising dollars too. The widget distribution play is along the same lines, except that for now Adobe is doing it through a partnership with Gigya, the widget distribution and advertising network. What that means is that any money Adobe makes will be split more ways, but in return it achieves faster entry into the market.

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working for the Man. Problem was, I seemed to suck at the whole startup thing. Multiple attempts followed by multiple failures. At some point I just said, “screw it, I’ll get a high paying job.” Problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking of the next great thing that got me ridiculously excited. Turns out, it wasn’t so much that I was the problem. Rather, I didn’t have anyone around me familiar enough with startups to tell me that I was doing it all wrong.

There’s no question about it: Google is great at search, and its huge lead over competitors is well deserved. But the site’s spartan design can sometimes leave something to be desired — sure, the company gradually makes tweaks to it, but we haven’t seen many radical changes in a very long time. Now WebMynd, a Y Combinator startup that launched back in early 2008, is looking to help spur the search giant to make itself a little better, or at least give it a few ideas to help. Tonight, WebMynd is launching a contest appropriately called RedesignGoogle.com that invites designers from around the world to give Google a makeover.

WebMynd has posted all the details details on its blog, but here’s the gist of it: designers are invited to revamp Google using any CSS modifications they’d like. The contest starts accepting submissions today, and will run through November 1. Then, a number of judges (which include Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, the WebMynd team and — full disclosure — myself) will pick the best designs. The winners will take home a brand new MacBook Air.

It’s time for a quick primer on the proper way to interact at conferences and other business events. Since I just came back from one of those types of events, this is on top of mind for me.

What’s surprising is how few people get it right and move a conversation towards their business goals. The rest let ego and sloppiness get in the way, usually leaving people on both sides of the conversation frustrated. I’m here to help.

I get approached a lot at technology events (usually entrepreneurs), and I also approach others (usually about a story I’m working on).

A typical frustrating interaction for me: I am being hit on all sides by people saying hello, or trying to pitch me, or whatever. A new person pops up in front of me. They look vaguely familiar. A hand is thrust towards me and they say “hey Mike!”

This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Back in 1986, when Bill Gates was still making sales calls, he pitched my group at First Boston on why we should bet the farm on Windows. Despite the risk involved, we gave his fledgling startup the deal. This wasn’t because of his financial backers (he didn’t even drop any names), but because we believed in his vision and nerdiness. In the same way, Google became a huge success long before the deep pocketed VC’s arrived to ride Larry and Sergey’s coattails. They simply had a great technology and winning strategy.

So I’m miffed by the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) claim that companies like Microsoft and Google “…would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists.”

The S&P 500 is up 58 percent from its lowest point last March, the worst of the economic recession seems to be behind us, and even perennial stock market bear Jim Grant is calling for a barn-burner of a recovery, yet predictions of the next stock-market crash are already here. And you can find them on Twitter. Individual traders love to talk stocks on Twitter so much that they have given rise to a whole offshoot service, StockTwits. In fact, some argue that Twitter is becoming a pump-and-dump playground. But it is really no different than the Internet stock boards of old, which mixed honest financial discussion with attempts to manipulate the market with misinformation.

Either way, traders are flocking to Twitter because if there is one area where real-time information is really valuable, it is in trading stocks. The question is, who do you trust and who should you listen to? There are countless stocktwits who are now being joined by more professional prognosticators. One is BAM Investor, which markets its financial model to hedge funds. BAM stands for Behavioral Analysis Of Markets. It uses fractal theory (and the Fibonacci sequence!) to predict emotional mood swings in the market.

About five days ago it predicted that the current stock market rally would crash by 50 percent. It also thinks that Crude Oil is heading down to $56/barrel. But it is bullish on natural gas, predicting a 400% “melt-up”.

One European company that picked the TechCrunch50 conference to launch a service was DemoPit participant deciZium, which launched its travel planning website YourTour in public beta and gave the audience a demo of its capabilities during the event’s breaks.

Granted, there are a lot of travel-related websites and applications out there which makes it quite difficult to come up with something unique in this space, but YourTour does have a number of interesting features that deserve a second look. In essence, the website offers personalized travel planning assistance based on one’s wishes, preferences and limitations.

Writing a book in 2009 is a tricky thing to pull off. Never mind the research, the interviews, or the writing, but then you have to face facts: who reads in 2009? Unless you’re Dan Brown or Stephen King or Glenn Beck, odds are your book, no matter how thorough or well-written, isn’t exactly going to fly off the shelves. What will fly off the virtual shelves, though, is an iPhone App. You see where I’m headed.

Adam Penenberg, who’s a contributing writer over at Fast Company magazine (and an old professor of mine from back in my NYU days), has developed an iPhone and Facebook App called “Viral Loop” to help raise awareness of his latest book, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. Let’s take a look.

So here we go then, the fourth and final part of my award-winning TechCrunch50 coverage; the all-important ’round-up’. This is where I ask appropriately round-uppy questions like “what did we learn this week?” “what were the highlights of the event?” and “is there any chance it will happen again next year, given that the whole spectacle climaxed with Arrington walking off stage as co-host Calacanis led the audience in some weird, embarrassing clapping game?”

I’ll get to that last question in due course but first, given that the “what did we learn?” question has already been answered by Lacy and Arrington, let’s consider the highlights.