Our sold-out LAUNCH 'PAD Tablet event at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Conference Center today will showcase 25 awesome companies -- four will launch new apps and six will unveil new features. Learn more about these companies in the speaker list.

Check out who's launching at the event today here.

The live blog will begin at 9 am PDT/12 pm EDT.

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Live video for mobile from Ustream

[ Photo courtesy of Dave Keeshan via Creative Commons License ]

Google Software Engineer Steve Yegge issued an apology of sorts on Google+ for his now infamous Google+ platform rant, which he unintentionally made public. In his apology, he shares his commitment to his statement in his rant that "Google does everything right" and despite Google's potential flaws in understanding platforms the company has already begun to address some of the issues he brought up. He also goes as far as to share his own personal account of pitching to Jeff Bezos while at Amazon.

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By Steve Yegge

Last week I accidentally posted an internal rant about service platforms to my public Google+ account (i.e. this one). It somehow went viral, which is nothing short of stupefying given that it was a massive Wall of Text. The whole thing still feels surreal.

Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google. Everyone just laughed at me a lot, all the way up to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history...

For the average consumer, a trip on a commercial space flight is going to be out of reach, but Kickstarter project KickSat is offering you the ability to transmit a message from your very own satellite in orbit.

Cornell University graduate student Zac Manchester wants to offer funders the opportunity to send their very own transmitter called a "Sprite" to space for the cost of a $300 pledge.

Zac is building a CubeSat, a standardized miniature satellite used for space flight, to carry hundreds or even thousands of Sprites up to low Earth orbit...

Watch this amazing video of the Google Street Team members collecting this special view of the Swiss Alps from the front of a Rhaetian Railway train on the Albula-Bernina line in Switzerland [H/t Vanessa Schneider, Google community manager for the post on Google+ ].

"Be part of the Google Street View Special Collect program as the first railway worldwide is a big honor and a great opportunity for our company," Reto Schmid, head of e-business and distribution systems for Rhaetian Railway says in the video. "We're sure that the virtual visit will inspire people in Switzerland and worldwide to visit us and and take a scenic ride between snow covered mountain tops...

Tired of difficult CAPTCHA logins, a new company, Picatcha, replaces sometimes difficult text-based authentications with image-identification security so instead of trying to type out some archaic combination of words, users will just have to select all of the images with a book.

The Picatcha test makes users select from a set of eight photographs to answer image-based challenges like, select all of the images containing a basket or select all of the images containing a dog. In the end it's a lot more fun to click on the photographs than it is to try and guess the characters in a CAPTCHA. 

UPDATE: "Image identification is very easy for humans but hard for bots," Satish Polisetti, co-founder of Picatcha tells LAUNCH via email. "This makes our product very secure. Compare it with text solutions - 70 lines of code or any OCR software can break them easily...

PayPal unfroze open-source social network Diaspora*'s account after locking the open-source social network away from more than $45K worth of donations for nearly a week.

"Free at Last: Thanks to your tweets & emails, PayPal has freed the Diaspora* community's donations!" Diaspora* tweeted.

PayPal confirmed that it had released the frozen account via tweet...