The Crunchies are tonight. Alice 97.3 mentioned it on air today during their morning show, which is no. 1 rated in this market. The event is this evening, see you all there!

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was too far behind in the polls to get invited to today’s ABC/Facebook presidential debate – he was cut along with Duncan Hunter and Mike Gravel. Instead, we scheduled time to talk with him about his positions on technical policies, something we’ve already done with Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney and Mike Gravel.

Unfortunately we didn’t get past the niceties before Kucinich abruptly pulled the plug on the interview, said goodbye and hung up. There’s not much content here, but he does briefly address his position on the atomic bomb, the internal combustion engine and NASA, and notes that he’s had a lot of support from the Internet. At the end of the interview he promises to reschedule. Something tells me he won’t be able to do that before he pulls out of the race. After coming in dead last in Iowa and polling “NA” in other states, I have a feeling he may not be around for long.

More at TechCrunch, including a transcript of the conversation.

time: 11:03
size: 2.5 mb

Next up in our series of talks with 2008 presidential candidates is Senator Mike Gravel, a Democrat. In addition to Senator Gravel, you can find podcasts and written Q&As that we have recorded with Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, Governor Romney and Senator McCain here and on TechCrunch.

This discussion was much longer than previous talks. We recorded over 40 minutes of back and forth on issues ranging from net neutrality, spectrum issues and the digital divide to more light hearted stuff like the Senator’s preference of Macs over PCs (he’s the first candidate to say so).

See TechCrunch for more detail and a full transcript of the podcast.

Time: 43:30
Size: 9.95 MB

Next in our series of talks with 2008 presidential candidates on their positions on key technology issues is Senator John McCain. McCain made no stipulations on what we talked about before the podcast, and our conversation sort of roamed over a number of important current events and issues. We’ll have the full transcript up on TechCrunch later this morning. We made deep dives on the recent Yahoo/China issue and H-1B visas, in particular.

Hear the Mitt Romney Podcast here. Next to be published is a written Q&A with John Edwards.

Last week I mentioned that we had scheduled a podcast interview with Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate for President in 2008.

In our original post we asked the readers to come up with questions that they would like us to ask Governor Romney. The feedback was great, and we put together a list of what people think are the most important technology related questions that they wanted to hear about.

But there was no way we would get through all of those questions in the time we had with Governor Romney. So we divided the list up and asked about half of them. The campaign says the will try to make time to do a follow up podcast soon. Meanwhile, we are talking to other presidential candidates as well and we’ll use the same basic questions. When we’ve done a few of these, we’ll be able to compare the candidates on the issues.

More details and a transcript are available at TechCrunch. I want to thank Governor Romney and his campaign for making time for this, and also for being the first candidate to step up and talk to us.

Nik Cubrilovic and I managed to get the very busy Joe Hewitt on the phone for an interview about the new Facebook iPhone application that he built.

Hewitt joined Facebook when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired in July.

Hewitt has become a major contributor to the iPhone development community. He participates regularly on the Google iPhone discussion group and released his own sample framework and code that is now being used in dozens of iPhone web applications.

Hewitt talks about his fascination with the iPhone and the development process for the Facebook application. More at TechCrunch.

Time: 26:32 min
Size: 6.07 MB

The long awaited “Vonage Killer” Ooma has launched into private beta. The product allows consumers to get “free phone service for life” after purchasing special hardware that you plug normal phones into. We have a much longer article up on TechCrunch describing the service in detail.
The Ooma management team, which is very deep, includes actor Ashton Kutcher as the Creative Director. I interviewed Ashton and CEO Andrew Frame yesterday to hear more about the service. Hear the twenty minute podcast below.
Update: we’re having some technical issues with the podcast..will be fixed shortly. Use this link until then.

I finally had a chance to record a call with James Hong, the co-founder of HotOrNot, to discuss their new Hotlist product (see TechCrunch coverage on this today for a full overview).

In the first part of the interview, Hong talks about the history of the six year old company, which has never taken venture capital and has been profitable from its first months of operation. See our post on TechCrunch from earlier this year where we also cover some of the history of the company.

The new Hotlist product allows HotOrNot users to add brands, bands, people, or anything else to their profile to help others quickly figure out what kinds of things they like to spend their money and time on. It not only helps HotOrNot users quickly find other people with similar interests, but it also gives the company an unprecedented amount of information about their user base. That information can be used for super targeted advertising, and spotting of up and coming trends.

Time: 39:35 Minutes

Size: 9.06 MB

Microsoft made a number of major announcements today around their new Silverlight platform at their annual Mix conference in Las Vegas. Silverlight is a new cross-platform, cross-browser platform for creating rich Internet applications, and competes directly with Adobe Flash (and their related Flex and Apollo platforms).

Nik Cubrilovic and I had the opportunity to interview Brian Goldfarb, the product manager for Silverlight this afternoon. Please see our comprehensive overview of Silverlight at TechCrunch. There are more details of the product there.

Time: 22:33 Minutes
Size: 5.16 MB

Zimbra announces Zimbra Desktop, a way to access the Zimbra website and all of your user data when offline. I spoke to Zimbra CEO and Co-founder Satish Dharmaraj this morning about the product, and we also talk extensively about the background of Zimbra in general. The company has 6 million paid users, and is moving towards profitability.

We also discuss GrandCentral and Spinvox near the end.

Zimbra website

Time: 33:51Minutes
Size: 7.75 MB