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The debates are rolling out and rumbles of the 2012 Presidential Election are growing into much bigger conversations. But where are those conversations occurring?

“JFK is considered the first television President. Next year’s victor may well be determined by the impact of Facebook and Twitter,” said Jordan Bitterman, a Digitas senior vice president, in a statement.

According to a study by Digitas, 63 percent of social media users expect candidates to have a social media presence. On top of that, 88 percent of social media users who are also registered voters have mobile phones. Both of these content avenues will play a roll in getting a Presidential candidate’s message across and the candidates know it. Indeed, all of the major declared Republican candidates have a presence on Facebook.

But digital content is not just ingested by the young voters. At least 40 percent of social media users aged 55 and older said they will search social media for information on candidates. In order to get the message across and persuade people to follow their vision of the American future, candidates will need to pay attention to the details below.

Check out the infographic:

What’s most amazing about TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing is that our Startup Battlefield format has proved applicable internationally; There’s something universal about giving your all in a pitch to people with money I guess. After watching the seventeen companies take the stage yesterday (and blogging all day), TechCrunch’s John Biggs, Greg Kumparak and I went backstage, exhausted and inspired, to discuss our favorites and who we thought had the best chance of winning.

Because startups are serious business, the three of us tried our best to be professional. Unfortunately (or fortunately) a maintenance woman accidentally walking through our set about one minute in put the kibosh on that plan. The resulting hilarity was so good we couldn’t help but post it exactly how it happened.

This is how the sausage is made folks.

After many sleepless months, our first ever international Disrupt conference will be starting at 9 am Beijing time/6 pm PST. Even if you didn’t make the trip over, you can still catch all the excitement on our livestream thanks to Tudou and Ustream.

In case you can’t watch the whole event, check out Alexia and my top picks for today in the video above.

We are kicking off the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 at 6pm PST. We’ve embedded the livestream of the event below.

You can also keep up with the action by searching for the #disruptbj hashtag on Twitter.

Stay tuned and be sure to tune in! The full agenda for today is below.

Monday, October 31st

9:00am -9:10am
Opening Remarks by TechCrunch

9:10am – 9:40am
Fireside chat with Pony Ma (Tencent), with Sarah Lacy

9:40am – 10:10am
Fireside chat with Peter Vesterbacka (Rovio), with John Biggs

10:10am – 10:40am
Why Silicon Valley Needs China To Survive: Hosain Rahman (Jawbone), with Sarah Lacy

10:40am – 11:00am
BREAK

11:00am – 11:40am
Fireside chat with Kai-Fu Lee (Innovation Works), with Sarah Lacy

11:40am – 12:10pm
Android Fever: Why China Is Betting So Heavily on Android: Wang Hua (Innovation Works), John Lagerling (Google), David Chao (DCM), with Greg Kumparak

12:10pm – 12:40pm
Founder Stories with Steve Chen (YouTube), with Sarah Lacy

12:40pm – 1:50pm
LUNCH

1:50pm – 2:20pm
Fireside chat with Niklas Zennström (Atomico, Co-founder of Skype), with Sarah Lacy

Startup Battlefield with Richard Robinson

2:20pm – 3:20pm
Session One

Judges:
John Lagerling (Google)
Rocky Lee (Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP)
Wallace Pai (Motorola Mobility)
Hans Tung (Qiming Ventures)

3:20pm – 3:30pm
BREAK

3:30pm – 4:30pm
Session Two with Duncan Clark (DBA)

Judges:
Robin Chan (GX Groupe)
Elton Jiang (NLVC)
Derek Ling (Tianji.com)
Benjamin Joffe (+8*)

4:30pm – 4:45pm
BREAK

4:45pm – 5:45pm
Session Three with Duncan Clark (DBA)

Judges:
Chris Evdemon (Innovations Works)
Sebastian Kübler (Taishan Angel Fund)
Matthew Prince (CloudFlare)
Si Shen (Papaya Mobile)

If you search for “Yelp” on Google from your mobile phone the top paid result, even above the organic result to Yelp.com, takes you to Zagat.  I am only seeing this on mobile searches. While it is a common practice for companies to advertise against their competitors’ names in search advertising, in this case it is Google itself which is bidding for that search term and taking the top spot.  A classy move.

Google bought Zagat last September to shore up its local reviews for Google Places, which is its answer to Yelp.  Google Places and Yelp have a contentious history, with Google borrowing liberally from yelp to help build up its local directory.  Now with Zagat, Google finally has a large corpus if its own review, in addition to the ones people are slowly adding to Google Places.  By redirecting some of the people who are looking for Yelp to Zagat, Google is keeping up its pattern of punching Yelp in the face every chance it gets.

Remember, at one point Google almost bought Yelp back in 2009.  But that didn’t work out, and the gloves have been off ever since.  (Sound familiar, Groupon?)

Google is really hitting Yelp where it hurts.  During an antitrust hearing last September, Yelp revealed that 75 percent of its traffic comes from Google in one way or another. A big chunk of that is from organic search.  If Yelp is not the top spot when someone searches for “Yelp” that could have some impact on Yelp’s traffic.  Yelp might have to respond by bidding on its own name on AdWords.  One way or another, Google’s aggressiveness in pushing Zagat is going to cost Yelp.

Grubwithus, the Y Combinator startup that lets you book group meals with strangers, has opened registration for its second round of get-to-know-you meals featuring successful alumni of the startup accelerator. The meals, which will take place in November, are happening in seven cities across the U.S., and spots are selling out fast.

“Last time we did it, they sold out so quickly, we didn’t have enough,” Sen Sugano, director of business development at Grubwithus, told VentureBeat.  He says that his team is actively working to add more seats to keep up with demand. The dinners will take place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle and Washington D.C.

The roster of recent Y Combinator graduates includes top companies like Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb and dozens more, making it one of the most dynamic networks of entrepreneurs anywhere on the planet.

The Y Combinator alumni meals are an ideal venue for up-and-coming entrepreneurs to meet with the founders of today’s hottest startups, and to get advice on how they too can get their company into the next batch at the Mountain View, CA accelerator program. This is the second time GrubWithUs has hosted an event for potential Y Combinator applicants.

The get-to-know you meals could serve more than one purpose for a wry entrepreneur. While the application tips and mentorship opportunities could prove invaluable for getting your company accepted into the next class at Y Combinator, if you’re crafty enough, you may land a new customer for your product or service, or score a future employer.

Grubwithus has played a variety of matchmaker roles the past. The company hosted an HR and recruiting meal in San Francisco for Zynga, and Sugano told VentureBeat that one of their top grubbers in Chicago took a job with someone whom she met at a meal.

Alumni from Picplum, Earbits, Paperlinks, Tutorspree, CrowdBooster, Aisle50, and GraffitiGeo are just some of the many participants in this year’s meals.

The term “hot startup” gets bandied about pretty frequently. But there are few companies it applies to more than Codecademy, a startup which, of all things, teaches you how to program. Today, the company is announcing that it’s raised $2.5 million from an all-star roster to continue that mission.

The $2.5 million funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from O’Reilly AlphaTech, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Social + Capital Partnership (Chamath Palihapitiya), Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), CrunchFund, Collaborative Fund (Craig Shapiro), Joshua Schacter, Vivi Nevo, Dave Morin, Sam Altman, Ruchi Sanghvi & Aditya Agarwal, and Naval Ravikant.

Since it launched last August, the site has become what’s (probably) a global hit. It has users in more than 200 countries, only 30% of which are in the United States. The company has declined to share its current user count, but it had 200,000 within 72 hours, and I’ve heard whispers that they’re still doing very, very well.

Codecademy originally started off with a batch of lessons created in-house, but it’s just started to roll out user-submitted lessons as well. Their first one? a course on Javascript functions by USV partner Albert Wenger, which will be available here shortly.

A class action lawsuit was filed today against Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry, after a massive, three-day service outage affected millions of its subscribers worldwide in October.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Quebec Superior Court by a Montreal law firm, “on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and who pay for a monthly data plan but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011,” the court filing says.

“When RIM’s system went down — and the backup system failed to kick in — it caused a chain reaction that caused messages that saw a backlog of messages build up in other network centres around the world, which started a chain reaction, causing message delays around the world,” according today’s report in the The Financial Post.

The company has apologized repeatedly, and CEO Mike Lazaridis issued a mea culpa in a video (see below.) RIM also tried to make amends for the outage by offering $100 worth of  free premium apps to affected users. Apparently, user are having none of it.

While iOS and Android devices are eating the Blackberry’s lunch in business communications, RIM is still one of the top handset makers for enterprise communications, due to its emphasis on security. However, handsets from Apple and those running Android are starting to erode any market position that RIM may have.

via: BGR

Patrick Bisch, founder of Pinglio.com, was on his Twitter earlier today when he noticed something different. For reasons unbeknownst to him, his timeline, or stream of tweets, suddenly had new features including a button to expand tweets.

Thus far, Twitter’s timeline has been fairly cut and dry. There are the tweets themselves, a time stamp and from where the tweet was sent. A slider opens on the right side of the Twitter page to show media and a section of replies or photos and videos. Nothing much more fancy is needed for a 140 character conversation. But it seems Twitter may be streamlining the look of its stream.

Bisch, who wrote about the changes on Pinglio, found that his retweet, reply and favorite buttons had been moved to the top of his tweet, as opposed to living on the bottom as per usual. When he hovered over the buttons, the time stamp, which usually appears at the top right of the tweet, read “open.”

When clicked, the open button does just that, it isolates the tweet in the timeline and also shows any replies to the conversation associated with that tweet. Similarly, you can open multimedia tweets to view photos — photo uploader agnostic — and potentially videos. If a tweet in this new timeline has been retweeted, the open function will show a horizontal list of all those who retweeted.

To view a specific Twitter handle, the profile appears floating over the rest of the Twitter stream, as opposed to on the right hand side of the webpage. It still only shows the last three tweets made by that handle.

Why these showed up in Bisch’s stream is unknown. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment and will update upon hearing back.

Check out the video from Bisch below:

[Photo courtesy of Pinglio]

Netflix ended the third quarter of 2011 with just 23.8 million total subscribers — 810,000 fewer subscribers that the previous quarter, the company revealed today in its latest earnings report (PDF).

So, where did those lost subscribers go? Most of the losses are attributedto the company raising subscription rates by 60 percent on its DVD-by-mail service. The low numbers are also reflective of Netflix’s unpopular decision to split its DVD-by-mail business into a separate company called Qwikster — a move that Netflix later canceled after receiving backlash from its customer base.

In a guidance update issued in September, Netflix did predict it would lose subscribers in the third quarter. However, those predictions were lower than the company’s original estimate of decreasing from 25 million subscribers to 24 million.

It’s also worth noting that subscribers for both its streaming and DVD business were down (– a prediction that was supposed to hold true for only the DVD side of the business). Netflix ended the quarter with 21.5 million streaming customers, compared to the estimated 21.8 million. As for DVD subscribers, the company had 13.9 million, compared to its estimated 14.2 million prediction.

In a letter to shareholders, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells said they expect both revenue and profits in the fourth quarter to decline lower than expected. However, the company should still remain profitable overall due to Netflix’s entrance into new international markets, like the UK and Ireland .

Despite additional revenue from international launches in Latin America and Europe, Netflix’s stock price has been taking a beating. The company’s stock was hitting $300 a share earlier this summer but is now hovering just below $100.

It’s hard to believe that 10 years ago today Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod at a low-key event, which is far different than the auditorium-sized keynotes that have become standard for Apple announcements.

Ten years ago, Apple was entering into a portable digital music player market that had no clear market leader — although companies like Creative, Sonic Blue and Sony had certainly been trying. Jobs talked about how music had been around a long time, and wasn’t going away anytime soon.

The original iPod featured a 5 GB hard drive that could hold about a thousand songs. It had a two-inch white backlit LCD display and an estimated 10-hour battery life. The device officially debuted during the holiday season of 2001, but I didn’t actually get my hands on one until almost a year later. (I still remember my neighbor coming outside with his bulky graphite-colored MP3 player that held only 15-songs. He was shocked and sort of in disbelief when I told him how many mine held.)

For the sake of nostalgia, we’ve embedded a video of Jobs first iPod announcement below.

When did you acquire your first iPod? Let us know in the comments.