A parade of consumer goods now bears the ‘multi-touch’ label: typewriters, lamps, musical instruments, bras, and of course, phones. The craze started with the eyePhone sold at Apple Whole Foods stores which was smooth and pleasant to touch. People could not get enough of stroking and caressing the new gadget, and other manufacturers sought to emulate its appeal.

New phones including the Hand Fore and Blueberry Precipitation Event are also multi-touch, mimicking the smooth surface of a pebble. But smoothness has gone beyond phones. Users are clamoring for smoother and more soothing experiences with everything they buy. Appliance makers have rushed to create multi-touch surfaces for all of their products and even granite counters are getting the multi-touch treatment. And in a multi-touch world, buyers are now upset when what they buy or use isn’t.

People are abandoning rough turtles and spiny fish for softer and more touchable domestic animals including dogs, cats, and sheep. Across the country, people have staged burnings of 2-ply toilet paper and Scott’s has introduced a 16-ply version in response.

“When you buy one of these newfangled Le Go-Go Nexus thingamajigs, you expect a certain level of touchability”, said John Sellers of Inglewood, while standing in a long line to multi-touch “The County’s Softest Multi-touch Horse and Lamb” at a local petting zoo. On Tuesday, the line was four hours long – another symptom of the multi-touch craze.

“I wish my wife were multi-touch..” mused Eric Weitzman of Santa Ana, standing in the same line. His wife, standing next to him, agreed.

Thanks to the brilliant investigative journalism of our close affiliates at Fox News and TMZ, we recently learned the Chinese man turned out to be one of Schmidt’s closest friends. Schmidt’s youngest son, 12-year old George, nicknamed Goog, was often seen by neighborhood parents playing with a Chinese boy. This Chinese boy most likely is the son of the Hu Bingtao, the Chinese man found fighting with Schmidt.

The according to SFPD, the argument started when Schmidt accused Hu of intentionally installing a key logger on Schmidt’s family computer. Being the head of Le Go-Go Group, Schmidt values his family’s privacy tremendously. He forbids his family from using web-based email or storing documents online. Every file is kept locally, encrypted on the hard drive.

Hu denies these accusations, calling Schmidt “a paranoid crazy man who has anger issues.” In Hu’s account of the incident, “Schmidt flipped out when he found BonziBuddy installed on his computer and immediately called in two teenagers from Geek Squad. After wasting three hours trying to figure out how to turn the damn thing on, the incompetent duo told Schmidt it was a key logger. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground with a black eye.”

As of this hour, Hu is not pressing charges. Unless Schmidt formally apologizes, Hu is planning on permanently breaking off all personal and business ties with Schmidt. More to come as this story develops.

Le Go-Go Group proudly announced the highly anticipated Nexus One device yesterday during a morning press conference. While Wall Street analysts forecasted another cellular gadget, Le Go-Go’s Nexus One turned out to be much more than just another phone. As shown in the promotional advertisement below, the device resembles a hybrid of a watch, a miniature cellphone, and an electronic ankle bracelet registered criminal offenders wear when serving probations.

Andy Lai, the head of Le Go-Go Group’s communications team lead the keynote. Andy proudly announced, “Le Go-Go and our Asian subsidiary hardware companies have launched six devices running our award winning Andy Operating System. Today we’re here to revolutionize the mobile space once more with the Nexus One!”

According to Andy, the Nexus One has two comparative advantages. First, the device will be marketed as a macho internet phone. Its slogan: “where phone meets the internet.” Like the other AndyOS devices, the Nexus One will be able to run any number of user-installable applications available from the Andy Marketplace. This places Le Go-Go in direct competition with Apple Whole Food Market’s extremely popular bPhone or commonly known as the Banana Phone. Second, to gain market share and truly dominate the mobile space, Le Go-Go is making an unprecedented move to offer the unlocked version of the device for free. If users decide to sign up for a 2-year contract with T-Mobile, Le Go-Go will even rebate $80.

“Imagine a world where anyone can get a phone for free! Le Go-Go is making that dream a reality.”

Pricing Details

Le Go-Go is offering the Nexus One to three different groups of end consumers. For regular folks, the unlocked version is free. Free shipping is also included. The package comes with all the essential accessories like the ankle bracelet and the USB cable. For convicted inmates serving a sentence longer than 30-days, Le Go-Go is offering the Nexus One package along with free mobile service for only two packs of cigarettes, cigarettes being the most prevalent form of currency in today’s jails. Finally, for those daring few who want to lock in with T-Mobile’s shoddy service for two years, Le Go-Go will pay you $80.

What’s the Catch?

By now you might wonder why Le Go-Go Group, the hallmark of capitalism, is practically giving away cash. MIT Sloan Professor Dmitri Tarasov explains, “Although Le Go-Go is one of the biggest conglomerates in American history, its executive team recently recognized the value of harvesting information for profit. Unlike other cellular devices, each Nexus One is connected with Le Go-Go’s data center. Every character you type, every call you make, every picture you take, every phrase you query will be logged by Le Go-Go and filed away for later use.”

Tarasov continues, “Think 1984. Now replace the totalitarian government with a totalitarian and basically omniscient company. People are trading their privacy for free gadgets. Whoever came up with the Nexus One’s product design actually did a great job. Consumers are essentially wearing these things like electronic ankle bracelets, things normally reserved for convicted felons on probation.”

When asked whether he will be taking advantage of the Nexus One deal, Tarasov replied, “I would rather shoot myself in the foot.”

We have front row seats to the 10:30AM Pacific or 1:30 PM Eastern launch event. Please join us.

The event will be covered live via carrier pigeon. Our updates will be transcribed by our intern below. There’s no need to refresh.

• 2:00 AM crunchteam - We are camped outside of 1600 Coliseum Boulevard in beautiful Mountain View, California. Going to heat up some tea.
• 2:20 AM crunchteam - We definitely showed up way to early for this thing. See lights and people in the distance. Going to introduce ourselves.
• 2:32 AM crunchteam -
  
• 2:37 AM crunchteam - Met a couple of Le Go-Go employees waiting for the midnight shuttle. They’re very excited about the new device. Alright, we’re going to call it a night and get some sleep in the car. We’ll see you tomorrow morning for the event. 10:30AM PST / 1:30PM EST.
• 12:22 PM crunchteam -
  
• 12:22 PM crunchteam - We’re awake! Percival took this snapshot of a stray dog a couple of minutes ago in front of a Le Go-Go sign.
• 12:32 PM crunchteam - Le Go-Go still has not informed anyone what “Nexus One” actually is. Even the industry analysts at America’s best banks remain clueless. Stick with us to find out! The event starts in one hour.
• 12:51 PM crunchteam - Rumors going around price the device between $50 and $1,500.
• 12:58 PM crunchteam -
  
• 1:01 PM crunchteam - And we’re in! The event will start in 30 minutes. As someone who spent the night in a car, I feel surprisingly upbeat. This device better be worth the wait.
• 1:04 PM crunchteam - Classic music is playing in the background. Caviar is being served by a bald man wearing a tux. The international conglomerate Le Go-Go Group is the epitome of capitalism and corporate power.
• 1:06 PM crunchteam - We see Andy Lai, a 2009 Harvard graduate, now king of the Le Go-Go communications team.
• 1:09 PM crunchteam -
  
• 1:11 PM crunchteam - 20 minutes to go! The lighting is rather gloomy for our tastes. It wasn’t for the project and the four wall spotlights the room would be pitch black.
• 1:12 PM crunchteam - What are your thoughts about this mystery device? Want participate in TechCrunch.NET’s first live blog? Voice your opinion @ bit.ly
• 1:15 PM crunchteam - Le Go-Go Group has been in intense competition with Apple. How hilarious would it be if the head of Apple Whole Food Market’s CEO came on the stage right now?
• 1:18 PM crunchteam -
  
• 1:20 PM crunchteam - Please excuse the quality of these pictures. Our Kodak instant camera’s native resolution is not that high. Factoring in all the scanning our intern is doing at the other end, we are doing the best we can.
• 1:26 PM crunchteam - Oh no.
• 1:28 PM crunchteam -
  
• 1:29 PM crunchteam - We have good news and bad news. First the bad news. It turns out the guy who sold us these press passes didn’t work for Le Go-Go Group. We were kicked out for having counterfeit passes.
• 1:31 PM crunchteam - The good news is, we left one of our moving picture cameras inside the press conference room. After the event’s over, we’re going to try to sneak inside to recover the footage. Stay tuned.
• 1:32 PM john - Way to go.
• 1:32 PM crunchteam - We apologize for the inconvenience John.
• 1:35 PM crunchteam -
  
• 1:36 PM crunchteam - Two security guards literally dragged us off the premises. We managed to snap this photo on our way out.
• 1:40 PM crunchteam - Ok folks. Tune in at a much later hour (probably during the wee hours of the morning) for our journey back into the Le Go-Go complex. My grandmother gave me that moving picture camera and I am not leaving Mountain View without it.

Developed by a team of Le Go-Go engineers over the past two years, the Wave is now being tested by a select group of engineers and those that they have taught it to. New users are allowed to teach it to a limited number of their own friends too. All in all, however, just a few thousand people know how to ‘wave’.

Penelope Johnston is one of the privileged few. “I got it a long time ago when it first came out – one of my friends works at Le Go-Go,” she bragged. When asked what use she found for it, however, she conceded that she had ‘absolutely no idea.’

“It’s just a cool thing to have,” Johnston said. “Not all of my friends have even been taught how to wave yet, so here I am just waving to random people on the street. Some of them don’t even know how to wave back, so yeah, sometimes I feel like an idiot.” Like others I spoke to, Johnston likes to tell people she knows how to wave, but rarely does so herself.

I managed to get a hold of an invitation to the Wave craze myself through a friend. Excited, I waved to as many people as I knew, but I ran into the same problems reported by so many others. Nobody I knew had it, and out of the people I knew who did, none of them knew how to use it. I really did feel stupid waving at people and like everyone else, I eventually gave up and waved good-bye.

The error went unnoticed for several weeks until parent Todd Nesbit of Flint, Michigan published a Letter to the Editor of the local Times protesting the ‘offensive’ image pairing. Since then, parents across America have reacted. On a recent family trip to Akron, Ohio, Sue-Ellen Merchant of Mobile, Alabama and her two children aged four and five read “Alphabet Zoo”.

“I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary when I read it,” said Merchant, “but it’s that damned liberal agenda again trying to poison our nation’s children.”

Her husband John, a self-identified lifelong Republican and devout conservative, sees it differently: “When I first saw that picture, I was just laughing hysterically – the best things are funny and true at the same time.”

Liberals are not laughing. The image has stirred up sharp political rhetoric, with some liberal organizations including MoveOver and WALNUT declaring the image ‘racist and misleading’. Animal rights advocate PETA has also chimed in, calling the image ‘deeply wrong’ and ‘an act of animal humiliation’.

The White House has issued a statement condemning the book and requesting that the image be altered in subsequent editions. A White House staffer commenting off-the-record, however, confided that the President had a hearty chuckle at his wife’s expense, saying that “they got the ears right.” This comment was reportedly followed by a fist-bump.

While it is making no moves to honor the White House’s request, the publisher did take out an ad in one of its own wholly-owned circulars apologizing for and explaining the situation. The statement from Le Go-Go reads: “Our indexing and filing policy is very strict and cannot be helped. This was the image returned to one of our design editors after consulting our image librarian. We apologize for the insult that we may have caused the First Lady, however we have no direct control over the system and people we have put in place.”