Bump Technologies, the startup behind the very popular iPhone application Bump, has closed a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. We had heard whispers of the news weeks ago, but the company declined to comment on it. Today though, during Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo’s presentation at Y Combinator Startup School, we got all the confirmation we need: Bump was listed on one of his Powerpoint slides as a company Sequoia has funded this year.

Bump once again declined to comment on the funding and the amount, but the cat is out of the bag. We’ve heard the amount raised was over $1 million, and are looking into getting more details.

FriendFeed Co-Founder, Paul Buchheit has taken the stage at Startup School at UC Berkeley. Buchheit is talking about what he’s learned so far as an entrepreneur, from creating Gmail to founding FriendFeed. Buchheit made some interesting points from his career at Intel, Google, FriendFeed and now Facebook. He’s also winging his presentation to see how it goes (and he’s doing a good job at it).

Buchheit talked about his past at Google, where he is of course known as being the creator of Gmail, as well as Intel. At Intel, Buchheit learned that he didn’t enjoy working at large companies. People often ask what’s the formula to startup success. Buchheit answered with that Google had a formula for making successful products that everyone had to follow.

Q: What was the original motivation behind Twitter?
Biz: We should start with Odeo. We were working at Odeo, we weren’t as passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We weren’t using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines.

While most users may have not realized it, Twitter has had a rather annoying problem for some time now: If you deleted a tweet, it would still reside in Twitter Search’s index. This meant that if you said something you didn’t mean to, or made a mistake that you hoped to correct by deleting the tweet, it was still easily accessible by anyone who simply typed your username into Twitter search. Finally, that’s no longer the case.

Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter’s search index as well. We’ve tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We’ve tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.

Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything.

Era of the Silicon Valley success story – two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it – is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.

He says ‘free users’ aren’t free loaders, and that it’s okay to let the minority (paid users) subsidize the majority. Because the free users will recommend to friends, it’s a great form of marketing. And for those paid users, many of them are very strong customers — they may be price insensitive, with very little churn.

Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

I’m here at UC Berkeley for Y Combinator’s Startup School 2009, where the startup incubator has invited hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the country to listen to some of Silicon Valley’s most accomplished founders and investors share their advice on building a new company. Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo just took the stage to talk about the current economic conditions, and how startups can actually thrive during them. Below are my paraphrased notes on what he said.

During the last 12 months since the fall of Lehman, we have been more busy making investments. Made ~20 investments (Series A/Seed) in the last twelve months. Don’t let the negative headlines get to you. If you look back at the headlines of the 70’s (1975-78), there’s quite a bit of bad news, but some of the biggest names (Apple, Atari) were founded then.

A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a “secret” technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea.

The secret project is a new content-management system (CMS) which will make it easier to produce and publish Web content across AOL’s sites and perhaps beyond. It will also help AOL scale up the number of contributors who write articles and produce videos for its numerous media sites well beyond the thousands who are working for it today.

Halloween is coming up and if there’s one thing I know it’s that geeks love Halloween. The opportunity to hide behind a mask, to subvert the status quo, and to dress up like sexy nurse/sexy witch/sexy balloon boy is a cause for celebration. That said, we’re offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest.

Here’s how to enter.

An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won’t increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

So you couldn’t get into Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard, huh? Don’t sweat it. You can still make it big. Some people might believe that an Ivy League education provides a huge advantage in entrepreneurship. But after researching this over and over again, I’ve found no such correlation. To the contrary, it seems that those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed. And those who aren’t members of elite alum societies develop the skills needed to hustle in the rough and tough business world. The Ivy-Leaguers may be able to get their buddies from Sequoia and Kleiner to return emails, but they aren’t going to be any more successful at building companies.

Earlier this week, I was in Kunshan, China, to attend the 3G Industry Summit [CN], a four-day event that has attracted a few dozen speakers and an audience of over 200 people, making it one of the biggest of its kind in this country. The annual event is organized by the Kunshan government and Mobile 2.0 Forum, a communication platform with more than 1,500 members, almost single-handedly run by industry veteran Leo Wang.

The summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it’s bound to become huge in the very near future.

Information and stats on China’s mobile web sector and profiles of 16 Chinese mobile startups after the jump.

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Founder’s Fund managing partner Sean Parker gave a provocative presentation entitled “The New Era Of The Network Service.” In it, he argues that so-called “network services” like Facebook (which he helped start) and Twitter will soon dominate the web, rather than “information services” like Google and Yahoo.

It’s a very interesting idea, to say the least, and obviously you’re interested in it, as about 200 of you commented on it yesterday. So we’ve obtained Parker’s full slide deck from his presentation. Find the full presentation embedded below, definitely worth the read.

Last week Apple surprised the iPhone’s developer community with the annoucement that it was finally allowing free apps to offer in-app purchases. The move will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way developers conduct businesss on the App Store (we’ve already begun to see some changes). I sat down with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar to talk about the annoucement’s effect on SGN’s upcoming games, as well as its impact on the market in general.

Pishevar says that he was estactic when he heard the news — he almost immediately recorded a video sharing his elation that he sent to all of SGN’s 100+ employees worldwide. He explains that this is really the announcement that he’s been waiting for, but that he had no expectation that Apple might do it so soon. Now the company is working at a brisk pace to take advantage of the change: it will soon be releasing a new free version of its smash hit game F.A.S.T., which has done over $1.8 million in sales before Apple’s cut.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo’s board of directors. According to MarketWatch, he said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” at Yahoo anymore and that he’d rather focus on other companies. The subtext there being that either A) he feels that his work is done and he can move on now that the search deal with Microsoft is moving towards government approval, or B) he can make more money by trying to control some other company.

It’s inevitable: With Facebook change, comes Facebook backlash.

Today’s introduction of the new-style News Feed on Facebook has been garnering quite a bit of positive buzz. But this is Facebook we’re talking about. Anytime they change anything, the backlash starts quickly. Sometime’s it’s justified, but quite often it’s users overreacting from the natural human feeling to dislike change.

Not surprisingly, there are already plenty of Facebook groups against new changes. But hands down the best is “I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE,” which of course, pokes fun at what I’m talking about. But the best part? Facebook employees like Ivan Kirigin and Ari Steinberg have already joined it. More notable, so has Mark Zuckerberg.

Remember, earlier this month when we wrote about the upskirt app that Apple deemed kosher, while at the same time banning a satirical Someecards app from the App Store? Yeah, we may have found an even better example of Apple’s hilarious hypocrisy.

Truth is, it wasn’t hard to find. The app called “Asian Boobs” is a top seller right now in the App Store. So what is it? Well, the title says it all: It’s an app that features the breasts of Asian women. Lots of them. Over 2,500 of them. And actually you can double that, for each breast in each picture. That’s a lot of boobs.

Much like everyone thinks they’re the best driver in the world, everyone thinks they’re great in the sack. Maybe you’ve got the Kama Sutra down like the back of your partner’s… hand; maybe you’ve used that internet connection to amass a few external drives full of “training material”. Whatever arts you’re trained in, the question has almost undoubtedly popped into your head during the heat of the moment: “Am I good at this the best lover in the world?”

Well, friends, to fall back on an almost-stale cliche that I promise we’ll use only a few dozen more times: there’s an app for that.

Since its inception, Google Maps has always rolling out little tweaks and new features that are useful. But today comes the first large-scale overhaul of the look and feel of the service in quite a while. But you may not even notice it.

The reason is that almost all of the changes are very subtle. And unless you spend hours looking at Google Maps everyday, you probably aren’t going to realize when a road outline has been toned down, for example. But looking at the side-by-side images, it’s clear to see that the new look is much nice. Gone is much of the clutter cause by darkened street outlines.

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including two jobs here at TechCrunch. Here’s a quick sample:

• Director of Local Business Marketing
  Yelp – San Francisco, CA

• Lead Ad Optimization Engineer
  Scribd – San Francisco, CA

• Account Supervisor – Deputy Director of Technology
  Edelman – Washington D.C

• Lead & Senior LAMP Web Developers / Software Engineers
  isocket – San Mateo, CA

• Web Developer
  Tesla Motors – San Carlos, CA