Starting this week I’ll be picking a video from our TechCrunch Elevator Pitches web site to feature here, every week. Your startup can be form anywhere in Europe. The best way to get featured is to create a video no longer than 60 seconds in length, as per these instructions. A technology startup’s CEO or founder should use that time to explain the company’s products and how they are intended to make money. Imagine you’re in an elevator and have only one chance to convince a VC or executive that you deserve a follow-up meeting. Be sure to focus on your company’s big picture while avoiding too much detail about particular products. Please upload your video to YouTube, tag it with “tcpitch”. In addition to following the specifications above, please do not include any editing or graphic overlays – just a straight pitch from beginning to end. Finally email me that you’ve done it and with a link to the video. And make sure your company is on CrunchBase. Voila. Here’s an example on the US site.

Well, we now know that the main news to come out of MacWorld was a new 17 inch MacBook Pro and a freshly DRM-free iTunes Music Store (and some software upgrades). What didn’t come out of MacWorld was an iPhone Nano.

Interestingly enough this was predicted to arrive before Christmas by none other than The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that newpapers are now starting to tweek their headlines to appeal to search engine bots and tech news aggregators like TechMeme.

So I guess we can put the fact that the Mail made TechMeme with an unsourced, seven sentence story about how Apple would launch the iPhone ‘nano’ in time for Christmas, priced at £150 on a pay-as-you-go plan, down to wishful thinking.

Then again perhaps they read Charlie Brookers column titled “Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it” and ran with it?

With the launch of Skype integration, Truphone’s mobile VoIP service is fast becoming a unified client for other VOIP and messaging services. As well as the ability to make low-cost calls over Wi-Fi or GSM networks and send cheap SMS, it is now supporting Skype and other messaging services via its application for the iPhone or iTouch. The software comes out on Jan. 12, at which point you’ll be able to make and receive Skype calls and IM to other Skype users. Truphone has also added full two-way instant messaging over MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk on the iPod touch as of now and on Jan. 12 for the iPhone. Admittedly you can already use Fring or Nimbuzz iPhone apps to access Skype, but neither of these also integrate VOIP or GSM voice calls as seamlessly. Truphone has already added Twitter integration.

Clearly the idea of all these new services is to keep users inside the Truphone app for longer and thus garner more revenues from users making calls over their Truphone account [For current Truphone call rates, see here]. However, the introduction of Skype calling will likely be a double-edged sword for Truphone. People may stay in the app for longer, but Truphone won’t make any revenues out of its users using Skype. In addition it remains the case that Truphone won’t run inthe background, so you really do have to keep the app open all the time if you are waiting for a Skype call. Still, it’s a welcome new feature and strong incentive for people to download the app in the first place.

In December, Truphone re-vamped its iPhone app with two crucial new features. The first, dubbed Truphone Anywhere enables iPhone users to make low-priced international calls via the GSM network even when they are not connected to Wi-Fi. Prior to this you needed WiFi. The second is that inbound Truphone calling on the iPhone was added. In addition Truphone are able to indicate ‘presence’, as in ‘available’ or not.

The new year sees Truphone hunkering down for the economic downturn. Last year CEO James Tagg moved downwards to Chief Architect. New CEO Geraldine Wilson was brought in from Yahoo’s mobile division to shake up the company and set it on a more commercial path. They also moved from plush offices overlooking London’s Tower Bridge, to more spartan offices nearby. Truphone has £31.5m funding.

Handing your Twitter account to minions to post for you is common in the celebrity game, though some, like UK TV presenter Jonathon Ross, like to do it themselves. That latter strategy may well have been proved to be the wiser one. The perils of handing the Twitter keys to others has just been proved by singer Britney Spears.

Most people know that it is her staff, not her, that updates her Twitter account, but today that may have proved to have been be a bad decision. Very bad. Her latest update, said: “HI Yall! Brit Brit here, just wanted to update you all on the size of my vagina. Its about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth.” [Screen grab below]. The update has now been removed.

Britney has 14,095 followers on Twitter. If this is an employee and not a hacker, something tells me she’ll be running the account differently in future.

Update: It looks like it was in fact a hacker. Obama and US TV presenter Bill O’Reilly’s twitter accounts have been got at as well. TechCrunch.com has more.

Privately backed LiveAps Liveaps is a drag’n'drop page webpage builder not unlike a kind of Dreamweaver for those who want to build a site visually. There are a number of competitors out in Europe these days, not least of which is Webnode which showcased at Le Web in December.

However, LiveAps founder Paul Christian tells me the site has been re-jigging its model since last year and will now be based on subsciption revenues (£30 a year for a fully hosted, unlimited pages drag’n’drop website), not advertising, and is contemplating sharing software revenues with franchises/partners on a by-country basis.

They are giving away 500 1,000 free accounts for 2009 (priced at £30 for the year each) available exclusively to TechCrunch UK readers – use ‘TC’ as the promo code when registering at liveaps.com. Might be worth grabbing one for yourself or someone you know.

Here’s a video of how it works:

A gremlin inside Facebook – or more likely a disgruntled employee – briefly hacked Facebook in the last few hours. They went in to the Facebook advertising page and changed the title description from “Advertising” to “Lying”. How do I know? An observant informant emailed me the screen grab before the page was changed. Nice start to 2009 for Facebook! [Update: Socialmediocrity also captured the page before it was changed.]

However, this small incident serves to highly a couple of more serious points.

First, it proves the Facebook machine isn’t prone to a few gremlins now and again. If an employee can run riot like this, who know what havoc they might wreak on the rest of the system.

Second, it merely continues to highly the fact that Facebook’s advertising targeting is legendary for being bad. As Guardian journalist Jemima Kiss recently Tweeted: “Consecutive ads on Facebook: ‘Essay writing – we’ll get you a 2:1″ and Bad credit? Get a credit card with 39.9% APR!’. Classy.”

The thing is, social media has rarely found its feet in online advertising. The extra data that exposing the social graph was supposed to provide has yet to translate into far more targeted advertising.

If Facebook knows I write for TechCrunch (it’s in my profile) and often post things on Facebook related to technology and business, then why do I get shown ads for Credit Rating Reports, as I did today?

On thing’s for sure – the economic downturn means sites like Facebook can ill afford to laugh off this sort of incident forever.

“My name’s Scott. I’m 13 and have launched a web startup.” So began an email exchange over last weekend which culminated with me chatting to Scott’s mum today to verify, that, indeed, he was actually 13 and really had launched a blogging site for people in Scotland.

ScotBlog.net is essentially a social network for people in Scotland and anyone of Scottish heritage. Based on a group WordPress blog, users can create a profile, join user created groups, send private messages, add friends and blog. Scott says: “We have some users in Glasgow, while we have some from South Carolina and even California”.

The point about this story is that not only has this teenager gone and created ScottBlog, but he had the get-up-and-go to find out who writes about startups, write a press release and email them. He’s even put himself on CrunchBase. A lot of older people than haven’t done that much.

Scott lives with his mum, Susan Campbell, who confirmed to me today that he is who he says he is, but he couldn’t come to phone today as he’s at school.

I used the opportunity to ask Susan about how she feels about the recent debate about government plans to give cinema-ratings to web sites in an attempt to protect kids when they are online. She said she doesn’t worry about him as he’s “very sensible”, but she thinks there is a role for schools in educating children about safe web use, rather than a top-down approach from government. Indeed, it’s not Scott’s mum who is doing the educating about the Web, it’s Scott. In 2006, he was a runner up in the BT Internet Rangers competition, where he won a laptop for helping his family with the Internet.

Ok, now I’ll admit, if a 13 year-old can launch a startup then the barrier to entry may be a lot lower than we thought! And I daresay ScotBlog has a ways to go in finding a business model beyond advertising, and admittedly he has no startup costs – these are paid by his mum! However, It’s great to see Scott show this kind of initiative and I think it’s worth-while encouraging teenagers in the UK to be more entrepreneurial.

Just in time for those new year resolutions, PushupFu is a new paid-for iPhone/iPod Touch application designed to get you fit, via press-ups. There are now a lot of fitness apps available for the iPhone. Current leader WeightBot lets you weigh yourself daily. Other like iPump let you email your progress to virtual Gym buddies. However, there are none I know of which have turned exercises into a Wii Fit-style game where you can pit yourself against others on the same service – exactly what PushupFu does. The app was conceived, designed and coded by UK-based geekpreneurs Jof Arnold and Benjie Gillam under a new boostrapped venture, FuApps, which will produce exercise apps and mini-games based on fitness.

Using PushupFu is pretty fun. Once the iphone or iPhone Touch is strapped to your arm, PushupFu uses the device’s accelerometer to count your pushups. It will even shout instructions like “Slower!” and bitch at you if you don’t get it right, just like a personal trainer. Once you’ve completed a set of pushups your progress is recorded for you to monitor. The difference is that you can actually uses these stats to challenge a friend to a pushup battle from within the application. With the iPhone acting as a third party verification that you did actually do the pressups, you effectively get an instant gaming network. You score points for doing pushups and more for winning battles. A bit like the “100 pushups” meme meeting the Wii Fit. That’s assuming they get enough people to fork out the £1.79 / $2.60 first.

Right now Uk iPhone owners have to browse to the app from the App Store > Categories > Health and Fitness > Release Date (tab at top) – PushupFu is currently the 3rd entry. US visitors can get it direct from this link to the App store.