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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The 100 Millionth Deviation on DeviantART Is A Gay Sex Story, But…

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Ron Conway & Sean Parker Raise More Than $70,000 For UCSF And…

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Avatar Screening In Three Hours. Here’s Five Last Tickets

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Brightcove Teams Up With TubeMogul To Power Its Analytics

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Lazy Sunday: Twitter Takes The Day Off

Just a quick reminder that today is the last day to submit your nominations for our third annual Crunchies Awards. We’ve received over 100,000 nominations so far, but just in case you’ve forgotten, go here right now and add some more. You have until midnight PT tonight.

Once all the nominations are in, the Crunchies Committee will choose five finalists per award category. From there, the popular voting will begin on December 21 and run through January 6, leading up to the live ceremony Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PT the Herbst Theater in San Francisco which we’re pleased to be co-hosting with GigaOm and VentureBeat. The full rules are here.

Again, nominations end tonight at midnight, so get them in.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Get Those Crunchies Nominations In Today Or Lose Them Forever

Twitter’s Retweet functionality, which has caused so much consternation appears to have disappeared not long after it was introduced last month.

The Retweets area in the right side bar has gone and the RT function button on people’s profiles has gone as well.

The design of the Retweet feature created huge confusion over how RTs were attributed, plus different client applications treated RTs differently. Retweets of these retweets were even worse.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Has Twitter Dumped That Hated Retweet Function?

First of all, yes, everyone on Twitter now should have access to the new Retweet functionality. Currently, only Twitter.com and a handful of clients support the new mechanism. But did you know that you can also trigger the new Retweets via SMS?

As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.

If you love the new Retweets, that’s a great feature. If you hate them, well, then, you’ll hate this too. For more on that, see here.

Regardless, Twitter’s quick moves to expand and extend mobile support is pretty impressive.

A couple other things worth noting about Retweet now that it’s live for everyone:

1) You can stop seeing the new Retweets from any user simply by clicking on their profile and making sure the rotating arrow badge under their name is not green.

2) New style Retweets do not show up in your @replies section. To see them, you have to go into the new Retweets section and click on the “Your tweets, retweeted” area.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Twitter’s New Retweets Work Via SMS Too

No Righteous Cause is complete without a colored wristband. That’s why I’m so excited that the no-hand shake movement (yes, movement) now has an official blue wristband for people who want to show that they support the effort. Get a ten pack of them here for $20.

Here’s who has (sort of, not really) pledged their support for the No Handshake cause to date:

• OpenCandy, Bessemer Venture Partners
• Some German city
  
• CNN, Dalai Lama And The Obamas
• One in three Canadians
• Brad Feld and Boston Globe
• NEW – The New Yorker, via this cartoon

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Skip The Hand Shake Now Has A Wristband

There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMeme, Yahoo Buzz and Fark.

Splurb tallies the number of votes from the various sites and number of sources that list links. The more sources that cite a link, the larger the story appears on splurb. To get listed, a link must be popular on at least two social websites.

The site’s founder, Bill Chasen, said he created splurb because the most popular content on the web has a tendency to repeatedly show up on the seven hubs which are indexed. From there, he says, content then moves to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media. I’m not so sure about that statement, but I do think that sites like TweetMeme and Topsy help us understand what links and news are trending on the web. To a certain degree, these sites are able to help us understand the importance of certain links vs. others.

Of course, Chasen says that splurb is not a replacement to its competitors, but rather serves as another layer for people to discover the best content without having to dig deep into each site.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Splurb Surfaces The Most Popular Links Across Social Media Sites

Following its meeting with developers yesterday, Facebook announced some changes to people’s homepages today.

As expected, one of the biggest changes is an attempt to fight application spam. Notifications from apps that you sign up for are being curtailed so that you can opt to only see those notifications that your friends explicitly send to you. That should get rid of all those random updates about Joey sending some virtual bananas as a gift to someone else you don’t care about. Facebook will also allow users to specify which applications may contact them via email and for what purposes, much like when you register for any Website and they ask you if they can send you marketing newsletters.

Applications, however, will be easier to access. An “Applications” link will appear in the left-hand navigation column. Clicking on that will show you all of your Facebook apps. And in a sign that shows the growing importance of social games in Facebook, “Games” will get their own link in the left-hand dashboard, even though they are a kind of app. Games are special that way.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook Fights App Spam, Gives Games Its Own Dashboard Link

Just hours ago, Apple made an announcement that has developers everywhere dancing down their collective, metaphorical street: In-App Purchase is now good to go in free applications. This, of course, comes just months after Apple essentially told a room full of journalists that such ideas were nonsense – that free apps should always remain absolutely free.

Still – hindsight is always 50/50, or whatever that saying is. There were really just too many advantages to allowing it to let it pass by any longer. Freemium applications! Upselling! It made In-App Purchases seem less tacky to the user! Hurray. But there’s one major factor that isn’t quite so obvious; one issue that this, to some limited extent, solves: piracy.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

In-App Purchase In Free Apps: A Shot Across The Bow of iPhone Piracy?

ToyBots CEO Shervin Pishevar, fresh off his TechCrunch50 debut, apparently wasn’t too pleased with my post yesterday calling him and his company out for not dreaming big enough. My chief complaint – that ToyBots should be building the next multi-billion dollar superhit toy, not messing around with an unproven platform solution that no one may ultimately use, but that many may ultimately copy.

So he stopped by today to tell me that ToyBots will indeed build their own toy or toys, and to show me his super double secret stealth prototype – a very lifelike dog-type thing, only smaller. And it’s certainly cuter than this scary thing. Pishevar says of the device: “We’ll be bigger than Facebook.”

The video is below:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

ToyBots: The Stealth Prototype

It’s a day late, but social game site (and Zynga-antagonizer) Playdom has finally responded to our request for comment on the lawsuit and temporary restraining order they got hit with earlier this week (all the legal documents are here).

The statement, emailed to us earlier today, is short and sweet and contains very little information at all:

This lawsuit comes as no surprise given Zynga’s penchant for litigation. We do not believe in using unnecessary litigation as a business strategy, and we are troubled to see an industry as bright and promising as ours weighed down by such tactics.

We have no interest in Zynga’s “Playbook” or “secret sauce.” Our strength comes from our 111 talented people, and we will defend ourselves vigorously against this distraction.

The lawsuit stems from seven former-Zynga, now-Playdom employees who may or may not have taken a few proprietary documents with them to their new jobs. Among the documents Playdom is accused of stealing is the fast-becoming-legendary/mythical “Zynga Playbook”: “The Zynga Playbook is literally the recipe book that contains Zynga’s “secret sauce,” and its contents would be invaluable to a competitor like Playdom,” says Zynga in the lawsuit.

Did Playdom steal it? All they say is they have “no interest” in the document. It seems to me that the only way they could know that for sure is if they’ve read it. I mean, if the New York Times had a playbook, I sure would be interested in it. Unless I’d read it and found it uninteresting, that is. So I’ll ask again, Playdom. Did you steal the Zynga Playbook?

And if you did, can I have a copy?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Yeah, But Did You Steal The Zynga Playbook, Playdom?

Facebook has submitted v. 3.0 of their iPhone application to Apple, Joe Hewitt says via Twitter: “Just uploaded Facebook for iPhone 3.0 to the App Store for review. ”

Hewitt also says he’ll post screen shots and more detais on this Facebook page for the iPhone app next week, and that he’s looking forward to getting started on v. 3.1 tomorrow.

We’ve been tracking 3.0 since details first became available in July. A list of some of the much needed improvements is here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Facebook 3.0 For iPhone Submitted. Now Let’s Count The Days Until…

iGoogle, a personalized homepage that competes with My Yahoo, My MSN, My AOL, Netvibes and others, will release 19 new in-house and third party iGoogle widgets today that add new social and sharing features to users of the service. An overview of the service is above.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

iGoogle Releases Social Gadgets

Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape. Buildabrand could possibly do just that. The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for startups for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process with ‘brand expert’ agencies.

Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customizing it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even - eventually - merchandise like pens and, er, beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Buildabrand Offers Full Blown Branding For Price Of A Domain

The massive Google billboard campaign underway now to promote Google Apps is the best spoof opportunity since the comic book announcing Google Chrome last year (here was our effort). And the first ones are starting to roll in. Here’s the spoof, followed by the official version. Can you do better? We want to see it.

Spoof:

Official:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Let The Google Billboard Spoof Videos Begin

AT&T has made even more people than usual angry when it started blocking/filtering parts of 4chan late last night. The popular message board, famous for being able to brew online (and offline) shitstorms like no other web property could, saw portions of its publication - including /r9k/ and the infamous /b/ - blocked for AT&T customers across the United States. Quickly enough, there was a lot of rallying going on, with 4chan members and fans virtually gathering to plot digital riots and all-round mayhem.

An update on the situation as of 8 AM Eastern Time: access to 4chan has apparently been restored, with AT&T reportedly confirming the hours-long block of portions of the site, “following the practices of their policy department.”

AT&T went on to say that they contacted (or at least attempted to contact) the owners of 4chan, which Moot vehemently denies. AT&T told CentralGadget that they have specific reasons why they blocked these parts of the site, but they would not disclose them, further stating that they have requested specific things and changes from 4chan’s owners to which they have failed to comply.

Meanwhile, 4chan is apparently under DDoS attack, supposedly because of the attention the site has been getting for the past 12 hours. The site is sometimes down, sometimes up but very slow, according to various reports. Note that this is not AT&T’s responsibility and quite possibly even the reason for the company to have made the dangerous decision of restricting access to the message board in the first place.

Updates coming, including some of the actions taken by 4chan members and friends to retaliate.

Update 1: this thread on Digg (760 votes and counting) pointed to a now-removed fake article at CNN’s iReport about the death of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

Update 2: there’s pledge up at ThePoint to boycott AT&T and cancel the Internet service with them.

Update 3: YouTube alert

Update 4: an announcement on the Project AT&T forum reads: “All rioting/’war’/protests have been suspended for the time being.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Shitstorm Averted? AT&T Restores Access To 4chan (Which Is Now Under…

If you notice this morning that your follower count on Twitter dropped dramatically, don’t be alarmed. It is just Twitter cracking down on spam accounts and bots that automatically follow people. So chances are those weren’t real people anyway.

The drop is a big topic on Twiitter (search for “spam”). This isn’t the first time Twitter has purged spam accounts. What is alarming, however, is that some people affected are complaining that not only did their follower count drop, but that all of their followers and people they followed were wiped out. Oops. That is the same effectively as starting from scratch.

Spam accounts on Twitter are becoming a big problem, inflating follower counts and setting the stage for unwanted commercial come-ons and scams. (And you thought spam on Gmail was bad). As Twitter inches towards becoming a place to do business, it needs to sweep the spammers out of its system. Inevitably, some innocent bystanders will suffer collateral damage.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers