Yeah, don’t pretend like you didn’t see this one coming. Completely unsubstantiated “market sources” rumors are making the rounds that Apple is already prepping a lower cost iPhone variant. Warning: completely mundane “analysis” follows. According to American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, “Apple needs to round out its iPhone product line at lower price points (similar to iPod) if it expects to replicate the success of its iPod with sales of 100 million units.” Shaw Wu has been right on a couple Apple predictions in the past, but it doesn’t take much to guess that Apple is currently at work on, or at least thinking about, a second generation of iPhone. Price drops also seem inevitable, and Shaw’s predictions hold few surprises. He claims to have heard of “lower cost iPhone prototypes for release at unspecified future dates” from his sources, and maybe he has, but we’re not going to start proclaiming Apple’s dominion over all form factors and price points (as entertainingly conceptualized above) just yet.

Google — known for its good intentions almost as much as its search engine — has entered its nonprofit wing into the red-hot science of hybrid vehicles and energy conservation. The company’s peace-sign-flashing, tie-dyed-baja-wearing dreamers are working on a number of new technologies including modded solar charged PHEVs with additional battery capacity, which are also wired for swapping energy back to the grid (possibly even earning the vehicle’s owner some hard cash in the process). Apparently Google’s experimental hybrid can be wirelessly monitored to determine its charge state, and power can be added or drained according to the needs of the power company (and, presumably, the vehicle’s owner). No word on whether it has Gmail integration or the ability to let Sergey Brin take control drive it into the ocean, should he wish to do so.

Aww, isn’t that cute? We get warm fuzzies just looking at this mouse ears MP3 player that iriver is building for Disney, creatively dubbed the Mplayer. Sure, ergonomics are pretty much a no-go, same for pockeability, but at least the controls shouldn’t be too hard to figure out, and we don’t figure iriver is going to be charging too terribly much for the privilege of ownership. No word on internals, or much more launch info than “this month,” but somewhere in the 512MB to 2GB-ish range seems a shoe-in for flash memory capacity. Even better news is that iriver is unveiling this one in a sort of series, which started with the NV at “-2,” was followed by the D5 at “-1″ and has this Disney player repping the “+1″ slot. Two more days of fresh iriver goodies? Sign us up.

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According to what appears to be a leaked product roadmap, it’s beginning to look like a hot summer if you’re a laptop gamer, on-the-go video editor, or need to crunch some seriously large numbers while traveling. From the looks of the roadmap it appears Intel is planning updates and price cuts for laptop CPUs through September 2nd, including the introduction of a couple Core 2 Extreme chips (2.8GHz X7900 and 2.6GHz X7800, featuring 800MHz FSB/4MB L2 cache) as previously reported. All told, the processor overlords will apparently debut nine new chips and cut the price on four, with slight changes in pretty much every category. Of note is the addition of the budget Celeron M540 and M550, which according to “sources” are designed for the much-loved Santa Rosa chipset. Stay tuned, as we’ll be bringing you more laptop-obsoleting news on this next round of chips as soon as we get it.

We’re not sure why anyone would want to have 1TB of storage in a set-top box and not, say, attached to a dedicated media PC, but those looking to max out their home theater rigs should check out CodexNovus’ new HDcodex. The 1080p-capable unit sports compatibility with most popular formats, including the all-important DivX and XviD (but not H.264) and supports 7.1 channel Dolby Digital and DTS sound output — but lacks HDMI. We’re also not certain why CodexNovus is calling the HDCodex a “server,” since we don’t see any provision for remote viewing, but marketing probably takes over when you’re schlepping a $5,000 box that is barely competitive with the Xbox 360 and the Apple TV. Expect to see the DML-1000 in Q3, while the $3,499 400GB DML-400 will drop in Q3.

See that up there? That’s a JPEG of a purported PPT slide supposedly sent to sporting goods distributors. Pretty much the easiest rumor premise imaginable to fake. Still, at the heart of any good rumor is an aura of plausibility right? Timex makes iPod docks and sporty i-Control watches while Apple is no stranger to the athletics world with their successful Nike+ collaboration. At the intersection of the two strategies then is this, the rumored Timex i-Control series of watches for wireless iPod control. Reasonable, sure. Coming in October? Who knows, we’re still waiting around for those Nike Speed+ watches to hit.

The internet can be a crazy place for adults and even a dangerous place for kids. As more and more children are growing up with the internet as a part of their lives, parents are forced to deal with how let their children get online while still saying safe. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have implemented family friendly search features. Startups like IMSafer have taken on protecting kids on IM. Glaxstar’s new startup, Glubble, is making the internet kid friendly by child proofing the browser.Glubble is a Firefox plugin (3.8 MB) that allows parents to control a white list of which domains their kids can visit. The service is seeded with a list of 350 approved properties for domains like Disney.com or Nickelodeon, but parents can add new domains or individual links and even combine their lists with those of other parents. The service isn’t meant for older kids who can just load up Internet Explorer or know how to edit Firefoxe’s plugin folder. It’s meant for children under 12 who are still at the “holding hands” phase.

When a parent installs the plugin, they create logins and passwords for each of their family members as either adults, young children, or pre-reading children. Collectively, these accounts and the white lists associated with them define the “Glubble”. Whenever Firefox is loaded you have to sign in as one of the users to start surfing. Parents get access to the standard Firefox features. Children, on the other hand, get a family friendly portal page of links with all the plugins deactivated. Pre-reading children will be greeted with a thumbnail slide show of sites they can visit.

Where Glubble really stands out from other safety surf technologies is in its flexibility. When a child navigates to a page not on the white list, it doesn’t just tell the child they’re not allowed to go to the link, but allows them to ask their parent’s permission to access the site. when a child makes a request, it’s sent to parent for approval. The parent can approve only that link or the whole domain. At any time a parent can examine and edit the white lists in their Glubble. Glubble also has a rudimentary chat built in that operates on the same approval system. There’s no central list of children’s IM names, but if kids learn each other’s handles at school and each parent approves the other’s connection, the children can chat from within the browser.

As the service grows, Glubble will let parents give trusted friends the ability to approve sites in their Glubble or create community generated lists by combining with other Glubble’s white lists. Although Glaxstar will always offer a free service to parents actively adding to the service, one monetization plan is to charge for subscriptions to a moderated white list based on the communities list and the company’s approval.

Glubble is yet another great addition to Firefox and support for the distributed development open source allows.

Optimizing your website can be tough business since you can’t “see” your customers online. Analytics packages like Google analytics do a good job letting you see how many visitors are coming and going on your site by tracking every page request. However, another breed of analytics focuses on optimizing how they’re using it, by tracking where visitors click. Crazy Egg, one of these optimization services, now has a new feature “Confetti” that lets you easily see where every visitor clicked on your site and what brought them there.

Confetti overlays your site, showing each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you sort the clicks by: operating system, browser, window size, time before clicking, and what search term brought them to the page. It even shows you clicks that weren’t on links, so you know if your users are expecting a link where there isn’t one. You can see the results in aggregate as a bar chart or click on individual dots to find out more information about a particular user. For instance, you can use Confetti to see how users from different referrals behave, and settle the debate over exactly how many of those Digg users click on your ads.

Crazy Egg has been implemented on over 250,000 sites and is free if you just want to track up to 5,000 clicks on 4 pages at a time each month. But if you upgrade to a paid account, you can track more clicks over more pages with real time data. The limited number of clicks tracked may seem restrictive, but analytics from Crazy Egg are meant to run for a short period of time on a specific url to grab a sample of how your users react to design changes.

There are a couple other optimization services out there: Map Surface, ClickTale, and Click Density. Click Density was one of the first services to show each unique click on your site, but Crazy Egg has added a simpler point-and-click interface for drilling into your data.

Crazy Egg is based in Orange County California and has reportedly been in acquisition talks.

An upgrade overnight has seen the introduction of “real” threaded comments on Digg.The new comment system includes proper tiering, response per comment and improved visual navigation.

The upgrade did not roll out without a hitch, Digg CEO Kevin Rose posted that the new upgrade caused an outage and that at least temporarily, Digg was rolled back to its pre-upgraded form.

Potium reports that after initially offering hidden thread replies, the feature has apparently now been dropped with all comments being immediately viewable.

Threaded comments done properly, work well. Anyone who has tried to read the thread at Slashdot knows how difficult reading threaded comments can be. The Digg take on real threaded comments appears to deliver results that are accessible, easy to read and follow.

YouTube will launch nine country specific versions of YouTube today.YouTube local versions will be available for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the U.K, complete with relative country specific domains such as youtube.fr and youtube.jp.

The new sites include fully translated site content and will eventually deliver country specific popular content.

The new sites will be provided as an option to all YouTube users, although YouTube will be encouraging local users to switch by offering them direct links to local versions.

YouTube’s broadcast partners in the rollout countries include the BBC, France 24, the Spanish Antena 3 and Cuatro TV, the Portuguese RTP, the Dutch VPRO and NPO, along with a number of Football (Soccer Clubs) and not-for-profit organizations.

The only thing remarkable about the move to provide localized versions of YouTube is the fact that it hadn’t been done before. YouTube has been phenomenally successful to date; opening up the site to a non-English speaking audience will drive a new wave of growth that will further cement YouTube’s place as the leading online destination for on-demand internet video.