Remember this report about Google Chrome passing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in browser market share? Well, at today’s D10 conference , Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai basically confirmed this is true, saying that Chrome is “#1 in most countries” and even noting that Chrome’s market share is over 50% in some regions.

Microsoft just announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company’s final pre-release version of Windows 8, is now available for download . With this release, Microsoft is also making new versions of its Windows 8 apps for Hotmail, SkyDrive an Messenger available, as well as hundreds of new and updated apps from third-party developers in the Windows Store. Other new apps in this release include a Bing Travel app, as well as Gaming and Music Xbox apps that integrate with Microsoft’s Zune music service

Businesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That’s why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization.

OnSwipe’s been around for a little over a year , and since raised a total of $6 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form content on their even-smaller iPhone. That said, publishers who don’t want to build out an app will now have a new tool to display iPhone-optimized content to folks on-the-go

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch  columnist  Semil Shah  is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter  @semil “In the Studio” begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next big idea. Courtney Powell is the CEO and co-founder of PublikDemand , a social crowd-based platform where individuals can initiate and/or join campaigns (or “demands”) against Fortune 1000 companies

Quite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple’s Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not.

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications . ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube

Until now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS , however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services. The Flikdate team gave me a demo of the service earlier this week and it turns out the app is about as easy to use as it gets.

Those who don’t live or haven’t recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be “inconsistent and unreliable” in mainland China — to use Google’s words.

What once you had to use or pay for outside software to do, Facebook now offers for free. Facebook today rolled out  Page administrator permission s and post scheduling . The two critical marketing features were previously only available in third-party Page management products like Buddy Media and Vitrue, which are fetching big acquisition prices in part because of these kinds of options