On deviantART , the site for anyone who thinks they are an artist, member submissions are known as “deviations.” The site’s been around since 2000, attracts 33 million monthly visitors (comScore), and just recently passed its 100 millionth deviation. It is, appropriately enough, a short story about gay sex . I could quote from it, but it is more of a deviation from good writing than anything else. I might as well just show the “Blizzard” drawing above featuring some sort of black unicorn frolicking in the snow with an arctic fox. How should I put this? There are some creations which are better left in a drawer and maybe shouldn’t be shared with the world. Seriously, would you pay $150 for a print of this drawing? I’m sure there’s some great art on deviantART among the 100 million submissions of drawings, photos, videos, and stories, but they are hard to find among the 99.9 million pieces of mediocrity which seem to fill up the site. It’s as though every kid from your high school art class who dropped out to draw dragons is on the site, telling the other drop-outs how amazing their art is. Some of it is so bad that it’s given rise to parody blog divineART , whose slogan is, “When art becomes visual pollution!” But, hell, what do I know? Those 33 million visitors a month are enough to classify the site as mainstream (shhh, don’t tell). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Last week we wrote about a friendly challenge between super-angel Ron Conway and entrepreneur/VC Sean Parker over who could raise more money for their favorite causes. The results are in. Conway has raised $40,600 for the UCSF Foundation . He’s beaten Parker, who raised $32,130 for Malaria No More . TechCrunch readers donated to both causes generously, including by simply going to see Avatar with us last week. Of course the real winners are the children, some 5,000 a year, who get treatment at the UCSF Children’s hospital. And 3,200 children will receive mosquito nets that will greatly reduce their chances of getting Malaria. You can still donate to either cause of course. Just follow the links in the second paragraph above. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Last night a bunch of us from TechCrunch went to see the midnight first showing of Avatar. Sure, we’re hosting a screening in San Francisco today at 4, but we just wanted to see it right then. Verdict: Flawless. Epic. Awesome. I can’t wait to see it again in three hours. We’re pleased to announce that all attendees will get a medium popcorn and medium soda free of charge, thanks to our four sponsors: Building43 – A great resource for learning about how to leverage the web’s newest tools. Mashery – A powerful API management service. Kontera – Provider of in-text advertising generated based on the content around it. SingleFeed – Helps retailers manage product listings on multiple shopping sites through one feed. The tickets for the screening tonight are long gone , and we have a short waitlist (most of the waitlist should get in). But just for fun we’re giving away five last tickets. Want one? Just tell us a joke (we need a good laugh right now). Just type it in, link to a video, or whatever. Whoever is funniest gets the tickets. We’ll pick the winners at 2. Here’s one of my favorite all time: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
When Brightcove released a major upgrade to its online video platform last month, one of the new set of features was better analytics. It turns out that Brightcove’s new video analytics suite is powered TubeMogul . Professional video publishers who use Brightcove can now measure things like the geographic distribution of their viewers, how many seconds they watch each video, their drop-off rate, number of unique viewers, number of new viewers, as well as total video plays. The two companies have also signed a joint R&D pact to develop new video analytics products exclusively for Brightcove. TubeMogul will also become a marketing partner for Brightcove’s paid video hosting, streaming, and advertising services. About 125,000 people use TubeMogul’s free video analytics. Many of them are online video professionals Brightcove is hoping to turn into paying subscribers for its new “low-end” $99/month plan. Analytics are an important part of the video equation, especially for advertisers and marketers who need to demonstrate the ROI of spending money on online video. TubeMogul already has an advanced analytics package Brightcove can plug into its latest release. TubeMogul adds Brightcove as a customer and will receive both R&D payments and marketing fees for each new Brightcove client it helps to sign up. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Usually when Twitter goes down it happens in the middle of some sort of event that causes a rush of tweets. Today is just a regular old lazy Sunday, and yet here we are, with it being down. It’s so lazy, in fact, that no one is even bitching about Twitter being down on FriendFeed, even though it has been for a good 30 minutes now. There is also no update on the status blog. It’s weird. It’s eerie. Twitter is quietly down. It is really news anymore when Twitter goes down? Not really. But they’ve been doing such a good job at staying up for a while now that hiccups like this and the one last week are at least worth noting. Especially when new COO Dick Costolo emphasizes how Twitter will have absolutely no problem scaling going forward. As always, you should study up on our list of 15 alternate things to do when Twitter is down. Update : And she’s back. A little over a half hour of downtime it looks like. Update 2 : Deja vu? Looks like Twitter has a canned message for the Status page to note downtime, so I’m not sure why it takes them so long to get it up. It’s smart to default to “about” 10 minutes ago though when it’s really “about” triple that. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
