5 O’Clock Roundup: China may get more iPhones, TypePad goes real-time, stuff not about TechCrunch

Here’s the latest action:

China Mobile says it’s still in talks with Apple’s iPhone — China Mobile chairman Wang Jianzhou told attendees at the World Economic Forum that Apple’s iPhone deal with China Unicom, China’s No. 2 carrier that is a third of the size of China Mobile, is “absolutely not exclusive.” China Mobile is far and away the world’s biggest phone company, as well as the largest Chinese company listed overseas. The WSJ reminds us that China Mobile also recently cut a deal with HTC to sell Androd-based phones. What would Steve Jobs do?

TypePad, the huge paid blogging site, goes real-time — It seems late to the party, but TypePad is the largest platform for blog software for which customers pay, says Read/Write Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick. Businesswise, blogs have lost their next-new-thing sparkle to Facebook and Twitter. WordPress, which VentureBeat uses host Venturebeat.com, turned on similar real-time features a week ago. TypePad, of course, published the news in a blog post rather than sending out a press release. I hate to say it, but an emailed press release would’ve gotten TypePad’s news on VentureBeat a lot earlier, indeed, first thing this morning, while the crowd at TechCrunch50 were still waiting for the surprise demos to begin.

Overstock.com will launch a bulk-purchasing site for businesses — “It’s Overstock’s products but in bulk form and with bulk pricing,” CEO Patrick Byrne told the Wall Street Journal. Potential customers could include not only supplies buyers for office wares, but retailers looking to resell Overstock’s bulk items at boutique markup rates.

New York Times website hit by advertising hack — The Times reports on itself, but it works because Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty explains the hack for laypeople:

“The culprit masqueraded as a national advertiser and provided seemingly legitimate product advertising for a week. Over the weekend, the ad being served up was switched so that an intrusive message, claiming to be a virus warning from the reader’s computer, appeared.”

[Disclosure: Many VentureBeat stories are published on The New York Times’ Technology homepage through a syndication deal. I write features fairly regularly for the newspaper. This all sounds self-absorbed, I know, but it needs to go here.]

New book attempts to get “Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain” — Writer Richard Brandt had a problem: Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don’t do interviews anymore. Can he make a book about them work? Will anyone read yet another book about Google? The excerpt on Brandt’s site, “No Longer Status Quo,” is better reporting and writing than most of the turnkey business books that cross my desk.  Brandt offers a convincing take that the Google founders’ upbringings made them feel that giving stuff away free on the Internet was, is, and always will be a noble calling. The chapter may also explain why, having tasted it, Sergey and Larry now want nothing to do with pop culture celebrity.

VentureBeat posts NOT about TechCrunch50 today — There’s no easy way to filter the two-dozen-plus TC50 posts from our feed. Here’s a recap of the other news from today:

Top Stories

• Intel confirms management shake-up as EMC hires away executive
• Confirmed: Intuit acquiring Mint for $170M

Deals, etc

• oDesk Challenge gives startups a staffing kickstart
• Zoove dials up $5.2M for mobile marketing tricks
• Brazilian Busk sorts your daily news digest by keyword
• Itron teams with OpenPeak to bring smart meter data to touchscreens
• Three firms buy up 3i’s European portfolio
• Flickr Galleries let you curate public photos, videos
• Video-sharing site Veoh wins suit against Universal
• Battle of social networks: How long can Orkut keep Facebook at bay in Brazil?
• Storytelling startup Massiverse set to launch its first cross-media tale
• Avere Systems raises $15M to build cheaper, more powerful enterprise storage