It appears that Foursquare has just crossed the 2 million users mark this morning. The location based social network has been growing fast, adding 100,000 users per week. Only three months ago, Foursquare passed one million users after taking a year to accumulate one million members.

Over the past several months, Foursquare has had a number of impressive stats for a startup. Some of them involved SXSW, some involved overall check-ins numbers. And it seems to be growing faster than its main competitor, Gowalla.

Of course, to expand upon this growth Foursquare has just raised $20 million in funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation, led Andreessen Horowitz with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. The new funding is going to be used to hire additional staff, for product development and a new office space. And we know that Foursquare has some interesting ideas to incorporate gaming with check-ins.

It’s important to note that other competitors have already crossed this mark. MyTown, another location-based network hit that number in May, Brightkite hit 2 million users in February. And, Loopt just passed 4 million users.

Congrats to Travis E for being Foursquare’s 2 millionth member.

Hat Tip to Finbarr.

I doubt that Steve Jobs has ever asked Apple customers what type of products they want, or that he cares about what they need. Jobs believed that if he developed a mobile phone that plays music and surfs the web, he could create both the want and need. He was right: his iPhone changed the industry and started a mini technology revolution.

Most of the entrepreneurs I know fancy themselves to be like Jobs.  They think they know—better than their customers—what the customers want, and what they need. Or they believe, as in the movie Field of Dreams, that if you "build it, they will come". But it just doesn't work this way in real life. The vast majority of technology startups fail because no one buys or uses their products.

Strategy consultant Sramana Mitra calls this failure "Infant Entrepreneur Mortality". She says that in the hundreds of companies she has mentored, lack of customer validation is by far the biggest cause of failure. Startup guru Eric Ries says that "validated learning" about customers is even more important than revenue for a nascent startup. Revenue, by itself, doesn't build traction for a business; it is only when you have products that are tested and proven, that customers are ready to buy, and that you can sell and deliver profitably that you have the right ingredients for a successful business.

How do you determine what customers will buy (or, if you're building a free web technology, what it is that they will invest the time and effort to use)?  Unfortunately, this isn't a simple matter of asking. Your customers know what their problems are; they know what they like; and they know what they don't need. They don't know what you can uniquely develop for them that they will really want. This is what you need to figure out. Start by understanding what the customer's problems are; use your experience and vision to conceive solutions; share this with potential customers in ways that they can understand; and learn. It is an iterative process.

The best example I've seen of a startup looking before it leaps is Campfire Labs. The startup has spent 14 months prototyping products. It hasn't even started developing its products yet. It could be that Campfire never gets off the ground, but if and when it does, it has a better than average chance of becoming a Zynga or Facebook. In the meantime, it has already lived at least three lives (but, fortunately, hasn’t had to die three painful deaths). Campfire was founded by former Yahoo! search technologist Naveen Koorakula and, former Youtube head of international strategy and product, Sakina Arsiwala. Their goal is to change the way people collaborate on line—to make it more meaningful and to better manage the many contexts in which they interact (work, home, school, etc.).

Naveen and Sakina started by building a prototype of a personalized news/media site and sharing it with friends. But, while their techie friends would really get excited about algorithms, the others would scratch their heads trying to figure what the purpose of the product was. Next, they experimented with content sharing, interest graphs, and other technical concepts. They came with product ideas and asked their friends who were specialists in various disciplines to brainstorm with them. Once they thought they were on to something, they talked to random people on the street and workers in the mall next door. They went to university campuses and bought smoothies and sodas in order to get students to spend a few minutes with them. They carefully observed user reactions, read between the lines, and dug deeper to understand what the users were really saying.  They incorporated what they learned into the next iteration.

Last time I met the Naveen and Sakina, they were still trying out new ideas. But they seemed to be getting closer and closer to having a product that users were eager to use.

Getting back to Steve Jobs. Does he really have some secret powers or a divine vision that lets him build one earth-shattering technology after another? I don't think so. My guess is that in his secret lab, Jobs has teams developing and testing hundreds of ideas. He just implements the best of them. Jobs is not afraid of abandoning failures, and when something does click, he rules like a tyrant and makes it happen. Eric Ries agrees with me and prescribes a five-step process that can help people become more like Jobs:

1. Hold your team to high standards; don’t settle for products that don’t meet the vision; iterate, iterate, iterate.
2. Be disciplined about which vision to pursue; choose products that have large markets.
3. Discover what’s in customers’ heads, and tackle problems where design is a differentiator.
4. Work on as few products as possible; keep resources in reserve for experimentation.
5. Start over (change direction) if you find yourself with a product that’s not working.

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

In a slightly odd blog post published Friday night, Condé Nast-owned news recommendation service reddit calls for help.

The company would love to hire engineers to complement the current technical team, which has been struggling with site sluggishness and outages lately and would also like to add some new features to reddit at some point.

However, they write, although the company is owned by a mega media corp with billions of dollars in revenue, there’s isn’t any budget to hire people and add more resources.

Its own revenues are too weak, they add, in a – refreshingly – brutally honest way.

But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit’s revenue isn’t great.

According to the company, reddit traffic has now grown to roughly 280 million pageviews per month, and a team of merely four engineers to sustain the site and add new features is simply not cutting it any longer.

So the team turns to what is arguably its most powerful asset: its very own user base.

Reddit is hoping that its users and fans will donate the money needed to hire more people and buy more servers, so they don’t have to revert to other tactics like intrusive and obnoxious advertising. But rather than call it what it is – donations – the company is asking people to subscribe to reddit gold and pay as much as they want for it.

What does one get for subscribing to reddit? Nothing yet, apart from the team’s “undying gratitude and an optional trophy on your userpage”, but should the program become successful enough, reddit hopes to give subscribers better incentives in the coming months.

Evidently, there’s a lot of debate on reddit about the program, the blog post, and a ton of other topics. To join the conversation or learn how the community is responding to the pledge drive, go here and check out the comments (2837 at the time of publication).

Or tell us what you think of all this hereunder, of course.

In a move that suggests a tad of insecurity on Apple’s behalf, the iPad maker is apparently buying Google AdWords ads targeting potential buyers of the Dell Streak, the Android-powered micro-tablet or netpad or whatever it is people cooler than me call the device.

The screenshot above was taken after I did a search for ‘Dell Streak’ on Google.co.uk (thanks for the tip, Tom from Rudefox). As you can see, Cupertino is trying to capture the attention of Dell Streak searchers by buying text ads on Google, in an attempt to get them to click through to the iPad product page instead of moving on with said search.

Update: same deal for ‘HP Slate’

We can debate the quality of the text ad copy that’s supposed to lure people away – “A revolutionary Multi-Touch device with nearly 200,000 apps.” – as it, for reasons unknown, lacks the bulletproof marketing term ‘magical’.

But, rather, let’s debate whether companies buying ads against keywords that contain the names of their competitors or their products is an effective, elegant and/or ethical means of promoting one’s wares on the Web.

I’ll kick things off: I think it makes perfect sense, although Apple is about the last company I’d expect to see revert to these tactics.

Your take?

I’ve had a very full schedule recently. Last Sunday I was in Amsterdam. On Monday I was “on a boat” off the coast of Texas and then zipped over to Dubai to check out the Ritz-Carlton hotel. By Wednesday I was in New York visiting the Foursquare offices. I spent the rest of the week in Waikiki, at NASA, in Monaco and, finally, at Pixar’s studios in California. I really did visit all of these places – I can prove it because I checked in via Foursquare.

Ok, I didn’t really visit any of those places last week. I faked it. If someone you’ve friended on Foursquare checks in somewhere in the world, you can just click the location and check in there yourself.

For some reason I really like fake checkins. In the past I’ve checked into Victoria’s Secret in Palo Alto (usually when I was actually at PF Chang’s. That definitely got some interesting comments. One of my favorite things is to check into a company headquarters when they’re having a board meeting. Or at a VC right before they invest in Foursquare. That always freaks them out.

I’m never much of a fan of self analysis, but I have pondered why I like fake checkins so much. I like doing it for a few reasons. Part of it is the funny comments I get back from people who see the checkins on Twitter or Facebook, like a “WTF?” to a checkin at a plastic surgery center in Menlo park a couple of weeks ago. But mostly it’s just about having fun. I’m living a parallel fantasy Foursquare Life.

Slow day at the office, with the heat and lack of air conditioning getting me down? No problem! Zap, I’m in Waikiki with a rum drink in my hand, hanging out with my friend Christine Lu. One of my friends (Kevin Marks) is at NASA? Jealous! I’m there too! See!

Yes it’s lame. I understand this. But it makes some people smile. And in a way it’s kind of like taking a very short break from real life and having a mini vacation. Remember Total Recall where you could go on a cheap vacation and instead of going they’d just embed memories of it into your mind? It’s exactly like that. Just like my robot experience earlier this week is exactly like the movie Avatar. Yes, not really.

I hope Foursquare never fully turns off the cheat feature in their service. I’m usually not that interested in checking in where I actually am. But I’ll probably be a lifelong user if I can keep up the #fantasyfoursquarelife. I just need even more interesting friends who are willing to do all the legwork and actually visit these places physically.

Enthusiastically written from the Soho House in Berlin.

An interesting post just went up on the Twitter Engineering blog. Usually, that blog contains posts that are more interesting to developers working on Twitter’s platform. And this post is that as well, but it also states two much larger things. First, Twitter won’t be using the Cassandra database system to store tweets. Second, Cassandra will be used for Twitter’s realtime analytics product. The one they haven’t officially announced yet.

It’s been believed for some time that analytics would eventually be a part of Twitter’s monetization strategy, but they’ve never said much about it beyond vague statements about it being one potential idea. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick dug up some evidence that it would be launching soon (which we also believe to be the case) two days ago. And in this post tonight, Twitter’s Ryan King writes the following, “Our analytics, operations and infrastructure teams are working on a system that uses cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally.”

Yep, large-scale realtime analytics — externally.

But the bigger news may be the shift Twitter is making in the way it had stated it would be storing tweets. Previously, Twitter was intending to use this Cassandra system for tweet storage (dumping MySQL in favor of it), but that’s not going to be the case anymore — at least for now. “This is a change in strategy,” King notes. He goes on, “Instead we’re going to continue to maintain our existing Mysql-based storage. We believe that this isn’t the time to make large scale migration to a new technology.“

I’m assuming the time isn’t right for the migration because Twitter has been dealing with uptime issues as they face levels of traffic that they’ve never seen before (thanks in part to the World Cup — which ends on Sunday). We have a query into Twitter about that.

Cassandra is an open source Apache project to create a “highly scalable second generation distributed database.” It was originally open-sourced by Facebook back in 2008. King notes that the system will continued to be a key part of many of Twitter’s newer large scale projects, such as their geolocation places database, data mining for data used in top tweets and trends, and the aforementioned analytics. “We’re investing in Cassandra every day. It’ll be with us for a long time and our usage of it will only grow,” he concludes.

Guest post by Cyan Banister…

I’ve met a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs from Detroit and there’s an underlying vibe that resonates from all of them: a specific attitude or work ethic – possibly left over from the automotive industry – that either causes them to try to work harder than their fathers or go against the grain trying to figure out how they can live life to its fullest.

As Jay Adelson takes his first break from work in 20 years, we get to time travel with him go back to the land of Henry Ford (the ultimate Detroit entrepreneur) to see where people like Jay come from.

Interviewing Jay (founder of Equinix, Revision3 and CEO of Digg for five years) with his brother Scott was a real treat, because we don’t often get to see the family that surrounds the entrepreneur. With the exception of Ron Conway, who works with his sons, family is often under represented in the entrepreneurial story.

One point Jay makes in the extended version of the interview (which we’ll publish later) is that there are amazing entrepreneurs coming from the midwest that lack the same support structure you see in cities like San Francisco, New York, etc. Although, there’s no solution offered quite yet, he proposes that instead of people yearning to get away, some of these companies may start sprouting up. As Jay says, there is a bouquet of Kevin Roses in the Midwest waiting to get funded.

(Watch Episode One of Speaking Of… With Cyan Banister – featuring RockJazz pianist Eric Lewis – here.)

Sick of circling the city streets in your car, looking for a spot — any spot — that you can squeeze into? Google may have the answer, or at least the very beginnings of one, though it’s going to heavily rely on the good deeds of your peers to be a success. Meet Google Open Spot, the latest addition to Google Labs, which has just released a new application for Android phones.

The service is really straightforward: fire up the Android application (it doesn’t look like there’s a web-based version yet), and you’ll see a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots. These spots were placed by other users, who are supposed to hit the app’s ‘Mark a Spot’ button when they leave a crowded parking lot or happen to see an open spot as they walk by.

The color of each available spot is tied to how long ago it was marked by another user — a spot that’s 10-20 minutes old will look yellow, while a spot marked within the last five minutes will be bright red. After 20 minutes spots are removed from the map. You’re able to see parking spots within a .9 mile radius of your current location.

That’s all well and good, but there isn’t a major incentive to actually mark spots yet. Google is employing a basic karma system to reward users when they share an available spot, but karma doesn’t actually award any bonuses in terms of making it easier to find parking — it’s just there to make you feel good. That said, if Google gets creative with the system (perhaps by adding a leader board), then that might provide sufficient incentive to get people using this. I’m not particularly optimistic, but here’s to hoping it works. Of course, even if a ton of people really do start marking their spots, it won’t necessarily be much help — in crowded cities, many spots are only available for a few seconds.

In case you were thinking of making parking even more of a hassle than it already is by adding fake spots, don’t bother (please). While parking submissions are anonymous, the Open Spot FAQ says that Google has ways to monitor for so-called ‘griefers’ and can make sure they aren’t leaving multiple fake parking spots.

This morning, we covered the debut of 1000Memories, a Y Combinator backed startup that helps family and friends memorialize loved ones online. The company was started by three friends, Brett Huneycutt and Jonathan Good, formerly of Mckinsey, and Rudy Adler, a former employee of ad agency Wieden + Kennedy.

Adler and Huneycutt dropped by our studios for our latest episode of TechCrunch NOW, to discuss the challenges of their business model and the theory behind the site’s design. See video above.

The founders cobbled together the first draft of the site in roughly one month, with a few goals in mind: create a sleek design that does not distract from the person’s story and offer the product for free. The founders say 1000Memories will always be free and sans advertising, but they plan to roll out optional products for purchase soon, like framed photographs and memory books.

Huneycutt also responded to commenters from Arrington’s post, who wondered what would happen to the content if the business went belly-up: “I think if someone takes the time to create a memorial site for their loved one, they want to make sure that their photos and their memories are there forever, so along those lines we are making a personal pledge never to erase anyone’s data or content… if things do go wrong, we will never erase it and we’ll make sure to get people their data back.”

Beyond the Rack, a members-only sample sale site, has raised another round of funding today. The startup has just announced a $12 million round of funding from Highland Capital Partners and BDC Venture Capital. This brings the Beyond The Rack’s total funding to $16.5 million.

Similar to Gilt Groupe, HauteLook and Ideeli, Beyond the Rack is a members-only shopping site that offers steeply discounted (from 50 to 70 percent) on designer brand clothes, accessories and other goods. The site says that its revenue growing over 30 percent per month and currently has 1.5 million members, doubling its userbase from six months ago.

Beyond The Rack launches up to eight new sales events every day, with each event only lasting a few days. The model has done fairly well in the space, with similar sites seeing rapid growth. There’s the rumored acquisition of European sample sale site Vente-Privee by Amazon for an estimated $3.01 billion. And sample sale sites Gilt and Ideeli have recently raised large amounts of funding. While the flash sales space is full of worthy competitors, clearly there is room for a number of sites to operate.

“Foursquare gets all the hype.” It’s something I hear just about every day from just about every other location-based startup. And it’s true, though I would argue that it’s warranted — and investors seem to agree. But it’s also important to keep some perspective. While Foursquare is just shy of 2 million users, other services like MyTown have quickly surpassed that number. Same with Google Latitude, which is at 3 million. And you can put Loopt on that list as well, as today they’ve hit 4 million total users.

Loopt was one of the first location-based services to get a lot of hype — even getting on stage at the Apple event first talking about the App Store way back when. But as we’ve noted numerous times, they started out at a disadvantage because the iPhone didn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background. And that was Loopt’s model, continuous location updates. But with iOS 4, the iPhone does finally allow for that functionality — and specially for background location. And Loopt is benefiting from it.

Daily sessions are up 60% from just prior to iOS 4 being release, founder Sam Altman tells us. Both background location and the proximity alerts are pushing this growth — as well as the latest version of the app, 3.0, in general. Altman says that daily active users is in the hundreds of thousands.

Altman also credits Loopt’s usage surge to being featured in markets where Android phones are quickly gaining popularity. And the biggest surge is thanks to the fact that Loopt is now preloaded on almost all MetroPCS phones. “We’re finally seeing real Android growth,” Altman says.

Loopt pivoted last year to allow for check-ins when it was clear that the model was taking off. But the latest version marries the two ideas. The latest iPhone version allows you to check-in at a venue and keep your live location active for up to 24 hours so that friends can see as you move on the Loopt map. For some people that’s extremely creepy. For others, it’s the future of location.

You can find Loopt 3.0 in the App Store here as a free download. You can also search the Android Market for it.

It’s not news that cargo planes aren’t the greenest way to transport heavy loads, but some companies are working on other ways to send goods through the air. Could blimps make a comeback as a greener cargo carrier? Speaking to an audience at the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, England, scientist David King recently predicted that helium-powered ships could be carrying freight within a decade.

It is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been developing blimps for some time, both for cargo transport and for military operations.

Boeing is working with Canada’s SkyHook International on the JHL-40 or “Jess Heavy Lifter”, a helium-filled airship with helicopter rotor systems that will help lift up attached cargo. The blimp will be designed to carry 40 tons as far as 200 miles before needing to refuel, or 800 miles without cargo and could be in the air by 2014 (assuming it doesn’t get mothballed or canceled before then, as several similar projects have in the past).

Blimps are unlikely to replace most airships, since they travel rather slowly. They could be used, however, to help transport goods to and from remote regions. Some models could have lifts for attaching and removing cargo without touching down, which could enable them to bring goods or humanitarian aid to areas without accessible roads or airports.

Other uses for the Heavy Lifter could be slightly ironic. Boeing and SkyHook plan to target the logging, mining and energy industries, offering a way to be greener by reducing their need to build roads in isolated areas.

It will be interesting to see how these blimps perform. If they succeed, some parts of the world could start looking like a more peaceful version of one of those old airship films.

When Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert heard that we were working on a redesign of TechCrunch, he decided to give it a go with his own sense of style. After inviting several other world-class designers to our headquarters in SF we decided to go with his vision. Voila! Say hello to the new-look TechCrunch.

Truth be told, we felt a bit bad for Gilbert. He’s had a rough 24 hours. Yesterday, at a nationally televised press conference, he found out his star player, LeBron James, was booking it to Miami to play with D-Wade and Chris Bosh — a move that left Gilbert clearly pissed off. But we’re here to offer him a consolation prize. We now have a version of TechCrunch in his favorite font, Comic Sans!

Yes, okay, Techmeme did it first, but we wanted to show our support as well.

It seems that the web can’t get enough of Comic Sans. Or at least, get enough of taking shots at the hideous font. Over 12 hours after we first wrote about it, the font is still a top trending topic on Twitter. And yes, still ahead of even “LeBron James.” Meanwhile, our post has gotten some massive mainstream media love with CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and others all weighing in on the hot topic. In fact, the CNN story on the faux pas was even the most popular story on the entire site earlier today. Joked Twitter user Audrey Watter earlier, “perhaps if BP had issued press statements in Comic Sans, we’d still be talking about the oil spill, eh?“

So this is our thank you to you, Dan Gilbert. Thank you for writing your rant in a font that cannot be ignored. And we’re sorry about the LeBron thing.

P.S. Every page on TechCrunch will now work in Comic Sans if you simply append “?lebronified” to the end of the URL. Or, if you’re feeling really adventurous, try “?LEBRONIFIED”.

What makes Apple tick? How is it that it came back from the dead to surpass both Google and Microsoft in market cap? French consulting firm faberNovel takes a stab at explaining Apple’s success and its strategy against its two main rivals in the SlideShare above. (In the past, faberNovel has created similar slideshows about Google).

The 48-slide presentation, titles “Apple: 8 Easy Steps To Beat Microsoft (And Google),” boils Apple’s strategy down to eight steps including “the arrogance of simplicity” (Step 1) to customer lock-in (Step 3), selling at a premium (Step 4), cross-selling products (Step 5), and, of course, think different (Step 7). Much of this is not new information, but seeing it all in a detailed slide presentation helps put Apple’s various moves in context.

Apple starts by stripping away complexity from computing products, paring down features in favor of making their products more effortless to master. Apple locks in customers by controlling every aspect of a product through vertical integration. For instance, it doesn’t make much money from iTunes, but that is how it keeps customers coming back. It makes its money from hardware, which it sells at a premium. It has been able to increase its gross margins from 23 percent in 2001 to 40 percent last year.

Over that time period, it went from a niche, high-end computer maker to a consumer electronics company. But its iPods, iPhones, and iPads bring new consumers into the Mac fold and drive sales of Mac computers, which of course work better with all of its other devices. The iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad are what drive mainstream adoption for Apple and have propelled it to become the powerhouse it is today.

The part of the presentation which is the most insightful is when it illustrates the thinking behind Apple’s emerging cloud strategy. While iTunes in the cloud is a foregone conclusion, that might just be the first wisp of an entirely new product strategy.

When Apple started to make other devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV, they were designed to connect to the Mac as the digital hub syncing and managing all of these devices and others like digital cameras. These began as media creation and consumption devices, but then evolved into communications devices in their own right. Applications were the glue that connected these devices to the computer hub.

But now we are entering the post-PC era with the iPhone and the iPad, depending on the Mac as a central, orchestrating digital hub no longer makes any sense. iPhones and iPads are powerful computers in their own right. The new hub is the cloud, which can manage many more devices and offer much more powerful computing experiences (“speech recognition, unlimited storage”) than any personal computer.

Google is already all about the cloud. Microsoft is moving in that direction, and so will Apple. The new glue tying its devices to the cloud will be iTunes and MobileMe, which faberNovel predicts Apple will make free because of its strategic potential to lock customers into the Apple universe. Instead of syncing your devices to your computer, MobileMe syncs them to the cloud. And why store all of your songs and movies on your computer, when you can stream them from iTunes in the cloud? (That is why Apple bought Lala). There is unlimited storage, it is all in one place accessible from any device, and Apple can start charging subscription fees for streaming music and movies. Throw your photos up there too as an extra backup while you are at it.

It’s been a big week for YouTube news. On Wednesday, the company launched a new HTML5-based mobile site, as well as the slick-looking YouTube Leanback. Today, during a keynote at VidCon, the site made a few more announcements: YouTube is adding support for video shot in the 4K video format — a very high resolution that clocks in at 4096 x 3072). And it’s also creating a new $5 million Partner Grants program that’s meant to help spur the creation of original content on YouTube by funding promising video ventures.

In a blog post, YouTube writes that the goal of the Grants program “is to act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation” and says that these funds will be serving as “an advance against the partner’s future revenue share”.

Here how the program works:

• YouTube is identifying eligible partners based on factors such as video views, subscribers, growth rate, audience engagement and production expertise
• Selected partners are contacted by YouTube and invited to submit a Grant proposal
• Proposals are evaluated by YouTube based on signals which include projected performance, distribution plan, marketing plan, cost requirements and appeal to advertisers
• If approved, funds are transferred to the partner so they can get started on their project

As for the 4K video resolution support, it’s really big: YouTube says that the ideal screen size for 4K video is 25 feet. Not to mention that the cameras needed to record in 4K resolution are quite expensive. So yes, this might be a little overkill for your average consumer recording, but it’s clear that it could definitely have professional applications.  YouTube also notes that if you want to watch a video shot at 4K you’ll need a very fast broadband connection.

All of this is clearly meant to help YouTube boost the amount of original, high-quality content on the site (in other words, it is growing beyond the 10 minute clips of cats on Roombas that are its bread-and-butter).  According to a report in AdAge, YouTube “envisions someone directing the money toward a short film or to increase their current level of production on YouTube”.  It sounds like the only restriction is that the primary mode of distribution for these videos has to be YouTube.

Well, well, well. Blizzard has announced that real names WILL NOT be required to post on the official forums after all. Your level one alt is safe!

To show just how much Blizzard cares, the news was penned by Mike Morhaime, the company’s co-founder and current CEO.

The money:

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

Read more…

Next time you’re running low on toothpaste, switch to solar power. The Soladey-3 ionic toothbrush from Japan apparently busts plaque with electrons that work with saliva to remove it from your teeth. A solar panel attached to the handle absorbs electrons from light and transmits them to your teeth through ionized water and a titanium oxide semiconductor in the upper shaft of the toothbrush.

According to the Website, “This reaction is not felt by you, but it makes the plaque unstable and easy to remove.” That is reassuring.

It’s different from most electric toothbrushes, which vibrate and sometimes shoot water at your teeth, but still rely on toothpaste to help remove plaque. You could still use toothpaste, but Soladey claims it loosens plaque effectively using only electrons. And don’t worry, night owls – it works with artificial light, too.

Note: Some people think that the health benefits of ionized water is nothing more than “Snake oil on tap.” Anyone have experience with one of these?

In it's seemingly never ending quest to slash public spending and bring down the deficit the UK government is resorting to increasingly bizarre stunts to whip the public up into a frenzy of "slash and burn". One of the most recent was the YourFreedom campaign which is trying to get the public to suggest which "red tape" inducing laws they want slashed (we'd like the repeal of the badly drafted and rushed-through Digital Economy Act, thanks very much). The latest is a clearly staged video chat between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Prime Minister David Cameron, now released below, about what to do about deficit. Huh, Mark? Huh? Come on then, let's hear your ideas... Quite why Mark chose to "meet" the PM in what looks like his spare bedroom in a T-shirt is something there will perhaps be PHDs written about. Or perhaps not.

Micropayments startup PlaySpan has primarily focused on powering transactions for virtual goods, but today the startup is moving onto videos. PlaySpan is launching its PriceYourVideo Platform which essentially allows video producers to sell views via a micropayments model.

Any video content producer can sell their videos on PlaySpan’s marketplace and can price their uploads accordingly. Producers can also donate proceeds to charity for videos that are available free elsewhere. It’s fairly simple and similar in theory to news organizations that are charging micropayments for viewing articles.

Playspan has already signed up a popular premium content publisher, Revision 3. Web shows like Diggnation, Chad Vader, and Turbo Dates are all being sold on PlaySpan’s platform. For example, you can preview an episode of Diggnation for 3 minutes but after that time period you need to pay 10 UPoints (the marketplace’s virtual currency) to view the remainder of the video. To give you a sense of the pricing, 1,000 UPoints costs $10 on PlaySpan.

Playspan also plans to allow publishers to integrate the video monetization into their own sites. The idea of micropayments for videos isn’t new; YouTube has been experimenting with this And PlaySpan will face the challenge of bringing traffic to its marketplace to actually generate views and payments for producer videos.

While PlaySpan has been steadily growing the reach of it marketplace through licensing deals with social networks, game developers, media companies and gaming platforms, it’s nice to see the startup innovating and adding new features to its platform.