Since 2007, you’ve been able to sign in to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account to chat with your AIM contacts directly from Gmail. You simply login with your AIM account in Gmail and your contacts will populate your gChat list, allowing you to chat with them just like you would your Google Talk contatcs.

From this notice, it looks like changes may be afoot to this feature. From AIM’s notice, In the next few days, Google and AOL are working together to change the way you connect to AIM buddies within Gmail. After this change, Gmail and AIM users can talk directly to each other without having to log into both services (you will no longer be able to log into AIM within Gmail’s “Chat” section).

We’ve all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he¹ can’t seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by that bureaucratic parasite—swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people.

It’s a big problem, especially now. There’s a boom on. I get harassing emails from recruiters every day. Everyone’s desperate to hire developers…but developers are not fungible. A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity. Hiring a mediocre or bad developer is a terrible mistake for any organization; for a startup, it can be a catastrophic company-killer. So how can it happen so often?

Like many of the hangovers that haunt modern software engineering, this is ultimately mostly Microsoft’s fault.²

A few weeks ago we gave away a BlackBerry Playbook and, much to your disappointment, you didn’t win. In order to right that wrong, we present The Return Of The Attack Of The 16GB BlackBerry Playbook, Part II featuring a brand new BlackBerry Playbook with your name on it.

How do you win? I think you know

Meebo, which connects users with their friends across social platforms, emerged from the ashes of an idea Seth Sternberg and his team had for “file sharing between friends that had IM in it.” Those early days of development saw more misses than hits—“kind of depressing” says Sternberg in this episode of Founder Stories.

After more than a year of tinkering, Meebo finally found its magic formula and launched in 2005. Right from the get-go they heard from their users, but admittedly didn’t totally grasp the scope of what they created. As Sternberg admits, “a lot of commerce sites were calling, bloggers were calling and we did not get it.”

Search is about to change quite radically. For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much. Users have changed radically in that time frame. Even though the kind of content users consume is different, search engines are still focused mostly on web pages. Users have become less patient and have less time on hand, while search engines still require users to dig through and extract information from the web pages to find what they’re looking for. In addition, users are spending more and more time on their mobile phones and other connected devices, which require a completely different kind of user experience for search.

Hybrid cars have been around for a while, but one German grad student is taking the concept to the water. A new hybrid propulsion motorboat designed by Stefanie Behringer, would reduce drag thanks to its three-hull, or trimaran, form.

A jet ski attaches to either side of the main hull, helping stabilize the boat. While the jet skis are electric-powered, the 49-foot long watercraft is also powered by two diesel engines that use Audi’s turbo-charged injection technology. Audi’s Concept Design team in Munich worked with Behringer on the project.

Around eighty entrepreneur hopefuls gathered at NASA AMES last week to pitch their ideas for breakthrough technological products, with the hopes of gaining the funding to make their dreams a reality. But this wasn’t part of the application process for a new fangled startup accelerator program, and the teams weren’t comprised of Valley visionairies in their 20s and 30s but rather high school kids between the ages of 14-18.

To compete in the Conrad Foundation’s Spirit of Innovation Awards, each team of high schoolers had to create a business plan, technical report, graphical representation and elevator pitch for their product, presenting their invention to a panel of judges for 10 minutes. All in all 27 finalists competed in the Aerospace, Clean Energy and Cyber security categories to win $5,000 and the community support and mentorship to develop their product commercially.

This past November, the blogosphere was briefly set on fire when a comment Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak made in passing stated that Apple had acquired the voice recognition company Nuance. Wozniak quickly came out and corrected that comment, and most believed that he had simply confused Nuance with the company he mentioned right afterwards, Siri — a company that Apple actually did acquire in April 2010. But as it turns out, Wozniak’s comment, whether he knew it or not at the time, may not have been as off as it seemed.

Apple has been negotiating a deal with Nuance in recent months, we’ve heard from multiple sources. What does that mean? Well, it could mean an acquisition, but that is looking fairly unlikely at this point, we hear. More likely, it means a partnership that will be vital to both companies and could shape the future of iOS.

Notable mobile developer Joe Hewitt has left Facebook to pursue independent projects related to HTML 5 development.

From his blog:

“Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go out cursing the management and wishing I had left much sooner. In the case of Facebook, I sent heartfelt emails to all of my managers thanking them for the privilege of letting me work there, and I genuinely meant it. Facebook was the longest I ever worked at one company, and the best employer I’ve ever had.”

Whoa there tipsters, slow down. We’ve just been bombarded with tips coming our way that Google has rolled out a new-look search results page. Scanning Twitter, it looks like there are in fact a lot of people seeing this. And boy is it ugly.

I mean, it’s great that Google appears to be trying to clean up the look of the results page, which has gotten pretty cluttered over the years as they add more and more types of information and snippets. But the new design is too sparse. And the colors are too soft. It looks like Bing on a bad day.

Who needs another social network? Maybe you, friend. Admittedly, the social networking space is packed with so many players, it makes the mind reel. Across the Web, it seems like a new social network is born (and dies) every day. There are niche social networking sites for everything you can imagine. The knitting and crochet community has one, as do gamers, pet-lovers, and bowlers.

Some of these specialized networks have significant traffic, and while Facebook Groups continues to evolve, it seems that there may still be room for social networks that revolve around shared interests, and specific groups and activities. It’s also true that more and more companies are becoming interested in leveraging online activity and interaction to create meaningful connections, relationships, and services offline. The examples are endless.

It’s for these reasons that Zenergo, an activity-based social network that launches today, still believes there’s room to succeed.

LAGOS, NIGERIA– I’m in Lagos to speak at an event and decided to come a week early to check out the country’s tech and entrepreneurship scene.

Apparently Arrington thought I was kidding when I told him this. But he should know by now, I don’t need a lot of arm twisting to visit a country of 150 million people chaotically surging into modernity. Where there’s that much opportunity, there’s always entrepreneurship.

Nigeria has fascinated me for the last few years: It has the largest population of any country in Africa. It has abundant natural resources, most notably oil. And it has a ton of potential outside of oil. According to the World Bank the non-oil economy has grown at 8% per year for most of the last decade.

The problem is employment hasn’t budged, and the country has fifty million unemployed young people. Those are the official figures, but people in the country tell me it’s actually much higher than that. That helps explain why Nigeria is more known in the West for 419 email scams than its vast economic potential.

The idea behind Grubwithus is an awesome yet simple one. You browse for a restaurant you’d like to go to in a certain city and buy a ticket for your meal at a set price. But the key is that others do this as well, all with the intention of meeting new people over dinner. And when you’re buying your ticket, you can see who your dinner buddies will be. Yes, it’s sort of like Groupon meets Meetup. And yes, it’s brilliant.

So it should be no surprise that a long list of prominent early-stage investors have decided they’d love to back Grubwithus. The service, which launched out of Y Combinator last year, has just raised a $1.6 million round. Who’s at the funding table? Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, NEA, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Vivi Nevo, Maynard Webb, Matt Cutts, Elad Gil, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Start Fund, and Y Combinator.

Brands may be pouring money back into online display advertising, but that doesn’t mean that display advertising works or won’t be replaced by something else in the next few years. Will it be social, mobile, or something else? At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, we’ll get into this debate with three of the best operators in online advertising: Facebook’s new VP of Global Advertising Carolyn Everson, Medialets CEO Eric Litman, and Right Media founder Mike Walrath.

Media companies and brands still don’t understand the power of social advertising, and Everson is going to explain it to them.

Ze Frank wants to send us all back to kindergarten. Star.me, Ze’s soon-to-be fully public startup, which raised $500,000 from star-struck investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway, is an attempt to reinvent the kindergarten’s star system of rewards.

As Ze told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, “stars are good.” They make us human, they allow us to display our emotions and become children again. But the funny thing about Ze is that, in building his new online kindergarten, he’s had to become an adult – fancying an idea, raising capital, developing a business model, leading a team. And, as he confessed to me, becoming the CEO of a funded start-up hasn’t always been as easy as he first imagined when he founded Star.me.

comScore’s mobile subscriber stats are in for the month and Android continues to top U.S. smartphone share over Apple and RIM. Additionally, during the three month average period ending March 2011, Samsung was top handset manufacturer overall with 24.5 percent market share. Google Android led among smartphone platforms with 34.7 percent market share.

The report shows that during the period, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices (this number remained steady from the previous month). But, in terms of smartphones, 72.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in March 2011, up 15 percent from the preceding three-month period.

Popular commenting platform Disqus, which recently raised $10 million from North Bridge Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures, is adding support for a feature that’s both nifty and familiar: mentions within comments. It may not sound particularly sexy, but it could actually help foster better discussions in comment threads (more on that in a bit).

If you’ve ever mentioned someone on Twitter you’ll be right at home with Disqus’s implementation. Start typing a comment, then type the ‘@’ symbol whenever you’d like to tag someone — this could be a user who has left another message in the comment thread, or a user who hasn’t participated. The convention is very similar to the ‘@reply’ system popularized by Twitter, and a small overlay will pop up with autocompleted names drawn from both Twitter and Disqus. Tagged names appear with a gray box around them in the published comment, which looks nice.

The U.S. solar industry is banding together to fend off an onslaught of global competition, and to lower the cost of manufacturing solar technology domestically. To make it happen, the newly formed U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC) secured a $57.5 million federal grant from the Department of Energy Sunshot Initiative, along with financial commitments totaling $400 million from various state and corporate entities.

Today, the PVMC revealed (in an exclusive to TechCrunch) who its earliest members are, including cleantech businesses more often seen as competitors, not collaborators…

The story of tech is largely about adoption, and adoption often comes into focus in the wake of cultural events. Last Friday’s wedding of Prince William to Katharine Middleton was the epitome of an event, bringing together YouTube watchers, Facebookers, Flickrers, Twitterers and even Colorers in a mass collective online experience of the festivities.

Taking place at 11 am London time (4 am SF time) the wedding itself was live streamed 72 million times, to people watching in 188 countries. With the addition of rebroadcasts that day, the streams reached 101 million by the end of April 29th.

Following our visit to Berkeley Bionics to talk with the team about their inspiring artificially intelligent, bionic devices, we were lucky enough to visit The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (VMC) to speak with those involved in the clinical testing of this new technology as part of patient treatment.

Berkeley Bionics has been working in conjunction with VMC Chief of Spinal Cord & Orthopedic Rehabilitation Dr. Akshat Shah to bring eLEGS — the wearable, artificially intelligent exoskeleton that enables those suffering from paralysis to stand up and walk again — into patient care, treatment, and rehabilitation.