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Oil prices rebounded from a 21-month low Thursday as traders awaited the government’s weekly inventory data and considered reports that OPEC may hold an emergency meeting to discuss further production cuts.

TechCrunch will host a party closing LeWeb conference next December 10th in Paris. About 600 hundred personns will enjoy an open bar and live music in a relaxed atmosphere after two days of intense conference (All details are here). This party will be accessible to non participants to LeWeb and we’ll be selling 300 tickets (if you have a LeWeb pass you don’t need to buy a ticket. Just bring your pass with an ID).

The first 50 tickets are now available at 30 euros (pricing will go up over time). If you want to keep track of upcoming ticket sales the best way is to follow my twitter account (@ourielohayon).

We’d like to thanks our sponsors for supporting this event: Facebook, SFR, HotelAParis.com et KonoLive, FaisonsAffaire.com, 3999.com, MyPronostic and AF83.

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Wall Street rallied Thursday morning as investors picked up stocks battered down in a three-session selloff on fears about the depth of the recession.

The U.S. trade deficit eased in September as lower gasoline prices drove down imports of crude oil.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment insurance last week surged to the highest levels since the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the number continuing to collect benefits rose to a 25-year high, the government said Thursday.

On a freezing day in January almost five years ago, I got a call from a neighbor who had seen smoke coming out of my roof. The barn that housed my 2,000-square-foot metal workshop was on fire.

Talk about being where the action is: Ground zero for today’s financial crisis is the business of home mortgages, and Bank of America’s Barbara Desoer oversees the biggest collection held by any financial institution in the U.S.

Zynga, a social gaming network whose backers include Kleiner Perkins, has released a new multiplayer Poker game on the iPhone that will likely leave its competitors in the dust. The application, called Live Poker, taps into Zynga’s network of online poker games, allowing you to play seamlessly against users on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5. You can grab the free version of the app here, or the $10 version (which gives you more chips to start off with) here.

There are at least 25 poker apps on the App Store (including one developed by Apple in-house), but none of them feature multiplayer networks that come close to rivaling the Zynga network’s 4.8 million daily active users (up to 80,000 of whom are active at any given moment). This large userbase and network infrastructure allow Zynga to expand beyond standard sit-down gameplay by holding regular tournaments, which will also be available through the app.

The game itself is well executed, and will be familiar to anyone who has used poker sites like Party Poker, PokerStars, or Zynga’s social network poker apps (it may not have the flair of Apple’s poker app, but it gets the job done). To ensure speedy gameplay the game typically places iPhone players at smaller tables, though you’re free to join larger ones if you’d like. All games use virtual (i.e. fake) money, but your total earnings are persistent so if you burn through your chips you’ll wind up playing at the small stakes tables, where gamers are generally less experienced.

All users are granted a daily allowance of 1,000 free chips every day, so you’ll never go bankrupt for long, and if you’re really eager to start playing high stakes you can purchase the ‘40k’ version of the application for $10, which sets your initial chip count to 40,000. Unfortunately purchasing chips beyond this is tricky (if not impossible), as Apple does not yet allow for microtransactions within applications.

The app also incorporates some social aspects into the game. Users can pull in their Facebook photos and basic information using Facebook Connect (which Zynga says is a first for iPhone games). At the table, users can interact through chat and can also offer virtual gifts and drinks (which do nothing to the gameplay but can still be amusing). Users can also add other players as buddies so they can find each other later.

Zynga’s Live Poker app will likely do very well - its massive network is exponentially larger than any of its competitors on the platform, and the company has plenty of resources to build on the game, having raised nearly $40 million over the last year. And frankly I spent far more time testing it than I needed to, which is always a good sign.

Live Poker by Zynga

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As a Gmail power user, you don’t need to convince me about the advantages of handling your email avalanche through a fast, web-based management system instead of a bloated piece of desktop software. I’ve long kissed Microsoft Outlook goodbye, although there’s no denying that it is still extremely popular in business environments, to the extent that it may possibly remain the dominating professional email management software for years to come.

Now TechCrunch 50 DemoPit alumnus Taglocity is releasing version 2.0 of what they say marries the best of both worlds. It’s essentially an add-on that is supposed to enhance Outlook 2003/2007 with a number of key productivity and knowledge sharing features.

Hate that folder system? Taglocity 2.0 will turn messages, contacts, calendar entries, etc. into taggable items or virtual folders much like Gmail does with labels.

Don’t like the default search functionality? Taglocity 2.0 will provide additional context to keyword searches so you don’t spend so much time looking for that one message or contact.

A fan of threaded conversations? Taglocity 2.0 can bring all emails related to a certain conversation in a single viewer in blog-like chronological order, and enables you to group them together.

Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook also offers integration with another product, Taglocity Groups, which they refer to as an “Enterprise Web 2.0 inspired email collaboration service for groups” enabling users to share information, reduce email overload, and improve productivity.

You can find out for yourself what that means: get Taglocity 2.0 here, free of charge (there’s also a premium version with advanced features at $99 per user).

A big challenge the startup is going to face is that people are required to tag all their existing items in Outlook manually, which is bound to take a lot of time for those who use Outlook a lot (i.e. Taglocity’s core audience). Maybe something like TagCow could come in handy here, too.

Other companies trying to make Outlook better include Xobni and Add-in Express.

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