Making things go viral on the Internet is an elusive art, one that Jonah Peretti has studied and tried to perfect for more than a decade. He once got on the Today show for an email exchange he orchestrated with Nike asking them if they would customize a sneaker for him with the word “Sweatshop” on it. That email was forwarded millions of times. Later, he created the Rejection Line, a phone number women could give to guys at bars which went to an automated rejection recording (“Unfortunately, the person who gave you this number does not want to talk to you or see you again”).  He also co-founded the Huffington Post.

Today, as CEO of BuzzFeed, he is making a business out of making things go viral. At a meetup last night at BuzzFeed’s New York City offices, he gave his five rules for making things go viral (slides below), which I made him repeat in the video above (yes, that is 4Chan’s Moot in the background). The rules are:

1. Create media for the Bored At Work Network: There are hundreds of millions of people around the world bored at work sitting in front of their computers connected to high speed networks.  This network is bigger than any traditional media network like CNN or ABC. Create something they will want to pass around.
2. Practice The Mullet Strategy: Business up front, party on the back.  If you have a Website, keep the front page serious so as not to scare off the casuals.  Give all the crazy commenters and contributors space in the back, and only show them to the rest of the world when they create something that catches on.
3. Try Big Seed Marketing: If you are  brand trying to create  a viral campaign, it might be hard. True viral memes are hard to reproduce.  It is much easier to make something that still gets passed around, but you might have to spend some money to seed it around the Internet.  The more seed you spread, the more chance it will grow. “Buy the seed, get the viral for free,” he says (this is basically BuzzFeed’s business model).
4. Target The Maniacs: The Web is ruled by maniacs, people who get worked up about things and push their ideas out.  ”Content is more viral if it helps people express their personality disorders,” notes Peretti.
5. Be A Mormon, Not A Jew. This one is tongue in cheek.  But Mormonism is a growing religion, whereas Judaism is stagnating in terms of population.  Why?  Mormons are better evangelists.  ”The problem with Jews is that they suck at marketing,” says Peretti.  ”It’s almost like they don’t want anyone else to be a Jew.” His point is that it is not just the quality of an idea that counts, it is how much effort you put into spreading it.

Labor as a service startup CloudCrowd has just raised $5.1 million in funding, according to an recent SEC filing. We’ve confirmed the funding with the startup, which had previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding. This recent round of funding was led by DFJ with and the startup’s co-founder and CEO Alex Edelstein participating in the round.

Like CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CloudCrowd is trying to bring labor into the cloud, by creating a vast network of workers around the globe. The startup has roughly 25,000 workers, who have completed more than a million tasks since the site’s launch in October 2009. You can read our recent coverage and video interview with CloudCrowd here.

The bulk of CloudCrowd’s business are client-driven tasks: a company submits tasks to CloudCrowd and the service will farm that out to eligible workers. Workers can also access CloudCrowd through a Facebook app, where they can pick available tasks and arrange payment.The tasks can be as simple as checking the quality of an image or involve the translation of entire web pages. Because pricing is determined by the level of difficulty, the payouts range from one penny to several dollars. Once a task is completed, a different user will check the finished product for an additional fee, creating a level of quality control.

With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don't have a rating yet are assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal.

CloudCrown also has a consumer facing business. The company offers EditZen, a simple web site, where consumers can submit pages for editing at $4 a page. The also plans to launch TranslationZen, which will offer translation services with a similar labor model.

And the model is seeing success. The company is on track to complete 2 million tasks, and this round of funding should help scale the business further.

Students have another choice when it comes to electronic textbooks. CourseSmart has released an iPad App [iTunes link], and the company says that 90 percent of the "core textbooks" out there are available.

CourseSmart already sells e-textbooks for view on a laptop or the iPhone, but I think you'll agree that reading a textbook on an iPad is another experience entirely. The large, color screen could come in handy for, off the top of my head, biology books, or maybe if you're buying a photography book for an introductory class.

Only days after buying DataCap, Big Blue has made another purchase. IBM is acquiring marketing software giant Unica approximately $480 million, or approximately $21 per share. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2010. Unica, a publicly held company that traded on the Nasdaq exchange, develops an enterprise marketing management software that helps companies to manage web marketing efforts, including web and customer analytics, search marketing, email marketing, and website marketing/personalization.

Think what you want about 3D TV, but it’s here already, and we’ve just seen the beginning. But are people actually buying the devices, as a few dozen models are now available in the US, Japan and other places? The Nikkei, Japan’s biggest business daily, recently investigated the 3D TV market in Nippon. What they found out could be of interest for the US and European markets as well.

Two years later and Magpie, the first service to offer in-stream advertising on Twitter, is being put up for sale. It claims to be Europe's number one Twitter advertising network with a combined reach of almost 20 million followers and has around 5,000 registered advertisers. Major brands who have used Magpie include the likes of Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, Burger King, Honda, Heineken and many more. So why do its founders want out? It's tempting to think that the business model simply didn't work out. For many, in-stream ads is sailing pretty close to spam. But that isn't the case, says Magpie co-founder and CEO Jan Schulz-Hofen. "If it didn't work we'd just shut it down."

The past few days I’ve been bookmarking posts about Google, Verizon, and net neutrality to read later. For the past few hours I’ve been doing that — and I’ve barely made a dent. It seems that everyone who has ever written a word on the Internet is up in arms about the situation. And what’s amazing is that nearly all of them are in agreement. There’s no clear consensus as to why Google is selling us out, but the consensus is that they are.

And I have to agree. Further, Google’s response to the backlash today stating the “facts” about their proposal with Verizon sort of pisses me off.

Before I begin, let me just state that there are only a handful of companies I adore because I love their products. Google is one of them. Sure, I love the iPhone more than Android phones — but I love Android phones a million times more than the crap that was out before the smartphone revolution started a few years ago. Out of all the things I do during a day, I’m positive I use Google products the most. Gmail, Google Reader, Chrome, Google Search. It’s all solid gold. Google is a great company.

And that’s exactly why what they’re doing with regard to net neutrality is so disappointing.

In light of this week, much has been made about Google’s unofficial motto “don’t be evil”. Google must be evil now, right? No — that’s absurd. There seems to be this tendency to believe that when companies do something unfavorable, they must have malicious intent. I’ve stated it before, but I will again: this is not a James Bond movie where some villain wants to do bad things just because he’s evil.

Instead, Google’s intentions are much more transparent: greed. Greed also tends to have a negative connotation, but I’m of the Gordon Gekko mentality that “greed works.” It’s what drives this country. And as a public company, whether we want to admit it or not, it’s what drives Google.

The problem is that Google themselves are unwilling to admit that greed is what’s at play here. They’re still trying to put on this charade that this is all about what’s best for us. That’s insulting.

What’s best for us is net neutrality, pure and simple.

If someone at Google just stood up and gave a Gordon Gekko-esque speech about their passion for expansion and securing deals it would be easier to stomach. At least it wouldn’t be quite so disingenuous.

Part of the problem may be that those at the top of Google are in disagreement once again. We saw this with the China situation. Word is that Sergey Brin did not want to cave to any of the Chinese demands to operate inside of mainland China, but Eric Schmidt talked him into it. That ended up biting them in the ass. It was a situation of what’s best for the company versus what’s right. This is the same situation.

In private conversations with Googlers and ex-Googlers over the past couple of days, the vast majority of them seem to be disturbed by what Google is doing here as well. Some are buying the company line that Google is doing the only thing they can do in order to get something done. But most seem to agree that this is way too slippery of a slope to be playing on.

I’m assuming, of course, that you’re aware of some of the details about Google and Verizon’s joint proposal for net neutrality. In case you’re not, it basically boils down to the two sides reaching an agreement that wired connections for the most part will fall under full net neutrality. Meanwhile, they’re also agreeing that wireless networks for the most part should not — at least not yet.

With both, the key phrase is “for the most part.” With the wired aspect, there’s still a portion that would give providers the ability to circumvent this neutrality with their own services (under proposed government supervision). With wireless, it’s more of a Wild West situation. Things are still shaking out, and there’s plenty of competition, is the argument.

Both arguments are faulty because both are extremely gray. And both set a horrible precedent going forward (if adopted, of course).

For net neutrality to truly work, we need things to be black and white. Or really just white. The Internet needs to flow the same no matter what type of data, what company, or what service it involves. End of story.

That seemed to be Google’s previous stance. But now it’s not.

Obviously, the carriers and service providers don’t want this full net neutrality. They want to be able to charge different amounts of money depending on what is being served. They argue that they need to going forward (particularly with wireless) to ensure the stability of the networks. My guess (given everything I know about the carriers and cable providers) is that this is mainly bullshit — it’s all about trying to make more money.

And in the future, the money is all going to be in wireless, so it’s no surprise that they’re willing to accept a less favorable arrangement on the wired side of things.

In their response today, Google basically keeps restating that a compromise of some sort is needed. They even use the phrase “political realities” — ugh. “We're not saying this solution is perfect, but we believe that a proposal that locks in key enforceable protections for consumers is preferable to no protection at all,” Google’s Richard Whitt notes.

Again, this is a problem; the solution needs to be perfect or there might as well be no solution at all. Google is suggesting that without a compromised solution, the system could fully swing in favor of tiered packages from carriers and providers. First of all, this sounds like FUD. Secondly, this is a situation where that is a risk worth taking. Google needs to stand their ground here. It needs to be all or nothing.

But again, they don’t want to do that. This compromise ensures that money will keep flowing. Would they prefer not having to deal with Verizon or any other carrier? Of course. But that’s not the reality. The reality is that they need their pipes and their money.

And that’s why Google’s in a hard place. They likely want to do what’s right, but they can’t sacrifice the business to make that happen.

Again, my problem with all of this is the clear misdirection going on. Google’s argument that a compromised solution beats no solution, benefits them a hell of a lot more than it benefits us. And yet, that’s exactly how they’re trying to spin it. They’re doing this for us. Gee. Thanks.

If you really want to do something for us, stand your ground on net neutrality. Don’t let Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, or any of those other jokers bully you into any sort of compromise. Other companies will back you up. But you have to lead.

It may ultimately end in failure. But hey, you celebrate failure. As you should. Big risks, big rewards, and all that.

Or, better yet, extend your brilliant broadband initiative. The real problem behind all of this is that there isn’t nearly enough competition in both the wired and wireless connectivity ecosystems. A huge amount of this country has no choice when it comes to broadband providers. And with wireless carriers, the choice isn’t that much better (no matter what Google and Verizon say). We need more competition in both — with it, the net neutrality debate may give way to natural selection.

There aren’t enough companies out there with the resources to foster this type of competition. But Google is one of them. In fact, they may be the only hope there.

A firm stance on full net neutrality may seem too risky or worse, futile. But it’s the only appropriate stance for Google to take here. We’ve crowned them as the King of the Internet. And now it’s time for them to go to war for us.

Or, if they’re not going to do that, it’s time to at least admit that money is the real motivating factor here. They’re not doing us any favors by compromising on net neutrality. They’re doing themselves one.

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.“

[images: 20th Century Fox]

TechCrunch Europe is an interesting gig. There are 27 members of the "European Union", 48 geographical European countries and territories, and 51 participating countries in the Eurovision Song Contest (surely, the ultimate gold standard of a chaotic definition of Europe). But we love them all. You guys rock. We have hundreds of languages, no unified single market and centuries of war and conflict behind us. But luckily, tech is here to the rescue. Whether you are working on a Twitter client in Romania (hello Seesmic guys!) or a teenager in a bedroom in the tiny country of San Marino dreaming of building your own Foursquare, we are all united by our fascination with technology. Which is why we want to reflect you. So we'd like your guest posts for TechCrunch Europe, written by people on the tech scene in Europe.

As a Brit in Silicon Valley, I’m always encouraged when I hear about my fellow countrymen making headway amid their Yank counterparts. And it’s particularly heartening when those countrymen are building companies that promise to stamp out spamming, griefing, trolling and even more nefarious behaviour online.

One such man is Peter Maude, CTO of Crisp Thinking, a UK-based start-up that offers social networks as well as brands like Nickelodeon, Sony and Lego  a way to detect everything from irritating bullies to dangerous child predators amongst their users.

I spoke to Maude on Skype to ask him how Crisp Thinking’s technology works and what happens after it detects a bad guy lurking in the shadows.

Juxio is a service that allows you to create “Juxes,” which are Mondrian-like combinations of event-related text, title and image that you can combine like pieces of a puzzle to well, do all sorts of things, but namely create slideshows you can share with your friends through Facebook and Twitter.

The Juxio iPhone app interface is incredibly intuitive, and I like that you don’t have to log in to create a Juxe (see the one that I made above), only to share one. I also give them props for their ambition in “trying to create a new visual way to communicate” and while the noun “Juxe” (from “juxtaposition”) sounds a little silly, I’m sure that’s what many people thought about the noun “Tweet.”

Presenting photos and text combinations in attractive formats has gained some traction lately with Twitpic’s launch of Twitpic Gallery,  and the rise of social/visual story telling services like Pictory and Shutterfly. However, it’s hard for me to conceive of the average non-design freak Facebook and Twitter user getting addicted to channeling much of their visual communication via Juxes.

Juxio is a privately funded company whose founders Larry Gormley and Will Younker are on their third startup (their first company “Submit It!” was sold to Microsoft). Juxio for the iPhone is now available in the app store and the Juxio web platform is currently in private beta. Juxio is also giving out invites to the first 500 TechCrunch readers, so act fast design freaks.

Why go to a press conference, when the press conference can come to you?

This morning Google held a press event in San Francisco to unveil a few new Android features including Google Voice Actions. Currently comprised of 13 “actions,” the sleek app allows user to verbally command their phones to perform a wide array of tasks such as to call a friend, find directions, dictate and send e-mail/text messages, call any business on Google Search, find songs, etc. As my colleague MG Siegler writes, it’s “awesomely fast and accurate” and only available on the Android.

After the event, several key members of Google’s mobile team— including Hugo Barra (Director of Product Management), Mike LeBeau (Sr. Software Engineer), Fernando Delgado (Product Manager) and Dave Burke (Engineering Manager) — dropped by TechCrunch’s SF headquarters to give us a deeper dive into Android’s flashy new toys. Barra and LeBeau, who you will probably recognize as the star of the adorably dorky demo video, discussed the future of Google Voice Actions and its technology on TechCrunch TV. See video above.

There were a few interesting disclosures:

Google believes Voice Action will be big in SMS. Although voice command web queries have seen a surge in popularity on the Android platform, with 1 out of 4 queries via voice search, Barra believes Google can achieve similar numbers on the SMS front. “I would love for it go to 1 out of 4 for SMS, right, wouldn’t it be great if this technology was so good— and I think it is— that I’ll feel comfortable sending the majority of my text messages from it.”

There will be many more Google Voice Actions available in the future. Expect the next announcement to focus on openness and integration with third party developers. “We think it is the tip of the iceberg…We’ve only done an inkling of in this release is integration with third party apps…We are definitely thinking about ways to make this as open as possible,” LeBeau says. If you want another hint for what Google has in store for Voice Actions, channel Captain Kirk. LeBeau, the architect for Voice Actions, says he was heavily inspired by Star Trek (unclear, whether he was referring to the original series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or one of the feature films).

Google Voice Actions and Google Voice’s transcribing services share similar technology. Google Voice transcription (which turns voice mails into text) has been less accurate because the path from voice to app is less direct (i.e. talking directly into your phone enhances accuracy, while previously recorded content is not as clear). “They definitely share a lot of the same core technologies some of the big differences are that in the case of Google Voice mails or YouTube transcription, the circumstances that we’re trying to transcribe the audio are actually much more difficult. So a user picking up their phone, pressing a button, knowing that they’re speaking to the system, is a very different experience and much higher quality experience in terms of audio and speaker quality in terms of the way that they’re trying to annunciate and things than something you find in a voice mail or something you find on YouTube with lots of speakers…we’re sharing learnings from both of those to build core technologies that do both of those things really well,” LeBeau says.

According to Barra, Google has not started the process of making Google Voice Actions compatible on other operating systems (i.e. the iPhone), but it will happen. “We haven’t started working on bringing Voice Actions to other platforms quite yet but we are very interested in doing that. There will be constraints, there’s a lot of things we won’t be able to do on other platforms because they’re not as open or as easy to work with as Android is but as we do with pretty much every single one of our products we try to bring them to as many users as possible and of course that means going to all the platforms out there. That is work we hope to start in the near future,” Barra says.

WePay, a Y Combinator backed startup that aims to take the hassle out of group paying, has raised $7.5 million in Series B funding led by Highland Capital Partners with existing investor August Capital participating in the round. The startup previously raised funding last December from an all-star roster of angel investors including Max Levchin, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and Steve Chen.

As we wrote in our initial coverage of the payments platform, WePay is an easy way to collect, manage and spend money for groups. WePay’s platform based around a prepaid debit card system, which makes its accounts easy to set up as well as more flexible when it comes to setting up group paying.

WePay, which launched to the public earlier this year, of course faces competition from online payments giant PayPal. But there is a slight difference between the two platforms. With PayPal, your account is tied to your name, without any way to separate the payments associated with a group. On WePay, you can create a unique, FDIC insured account for each group. While the account is still associated with your name, but you can keep each group account totally separate from your personal transactions. Group money can essentially be kept separate from any individual accounts you may have. You can also designate specific individuals to have control over accounts.

From accounts on WePay, users can send emails with electronic bills (which can be paid with bank accounts or credit cards) and spend funds with a WePay VISA prepaid card, paper checks, or electronically. If group members don't pay soon, the site will automatically remind them a few days later. WePay makes money by charging a 3.5% transaction fee (there's also a different plan that charges 50 cents per transaction and limits you on the methods of payment you can accept).

And WePay is gaining traction in the group payments space. Payment volume grew 80 percent in the month of July, with WePay adding over 1000 groups in the month. Groups that have participated in WePay range from fantasy football leagues to group vacations to girl scout groups.

WePay’s co-founder Rich Aberman says that the new funding will be put towards marketing efforts and to hire additional staff. And Aberman says that the next step is to start encouraging other startups to incorporate WePay’s API into their services.

Damntheradio, an appropriately named social media CMS for bands and brands, launches today in private beta.

Part of the i/o ventures incubator, Damntheradio allows companies to strengthen relationships with their fans through Facebook and Twitter and facilitates the sharing of branded content through incentives, across multiple Facebook pages. Damntheradio shares the enterprise branding space with competitors Buddy Media and Wildfire.

Damntheradio already has helped artists such as Enrique Englesias, Metric, Avenged Sevenfold and companies like Warner Brothers, The Collective, and Tapulous manage lead gen and CRM using social media, including setting up a system of rewards for top influencers, as well as orchestrating campaigns exclusive to Facebook fans such as the Tap Tap Revenge Ten Song Countdown and even a whole album launch by artist Travis McCoy.

When asked about the company’s focus on Facebook, founder Johnny Hwin responded,“Our goal is to help our clients build a relationship with their fans, whether those fans are on Facebook, Twitter, or the client’s website.  We started building on the Facebook fan page because we saw 1) a demand for more powerful landing pages than what Facebook currently offers, and 2) higher engagement on Facebook than anywhere else.”

In a world where your Facebook fans have become in some sense your audience, Damntheradio’s tools to better target this audience engagement a huge boon for anyone trying to promote branded content.

From Matt Drouin, the manager of Metric, “When we launched our first promotion in March, we had 64,000 fans on Facebook. Around 4 months later, that base has increased by 350%.”

name=”My Damn Channel”]

As regular readers are undoubtedly aware, I have a sort of love/hate relationship with our commenters. Well, okay, it’s more hate/hate. I find it amusing, but I realize not everyone does. Some people say they avoid our stories just so they don’t feel the need to take a shower after reading our comment section. I have good news for those people: there’s an extension for that.

Remove TechCrunch Comments is a Google Chrome extension made by user hrparmar. He actually made it back in January, but we’re just seeing it now. And it’s awesome.

Here’s what it does: it takes any individual story on techcrunch.com and hides the comment section. Boom. Now you can read us ranting about things without having to dive into the… is cesspool too strong a word?

Seriously though, commenting (particularly anonymous commenting) is a growing problem on the Internet. A number of startups are working to solve it, but the fact still remains that if a site gets large enough, its comment section tends to go to shit.

For every very nice, insightful comment left on our posts, there are at least 100 that set humanity back ten years or more. So now we offer you an option to stop that.

Think of it as Daring Fireball with Comments – but the opposite. I turned it on last night. It’s so peaceful around here now.

Comments?

As the author of popular BuzzMachine blog and the 2009 hit What Would Google Do, CUNY Assistant Professor Jeff Jarvis has established himself as one of the liveliest and most incorrigibly optimistic new media pundits.

If anything, Jarvis' incorrigible optimism has grown since his book about Google.

Having lived through a prostate cancer scare, which he blogged about in intimate detail, he is now writing a new book a defense of publicness, entitled Public Parts which will be published next year. As Jarvis told me when we talked about the past, the present and the future of media last week, Public Parts will argue that our current obsession with defending privacy is counterproductive, both to us as individuals and as a society.

While I'm more than a little ambivalent about Jarvis' publicness fetish (full disclosure: I'm currently writing my own book in defense of privacy), I find his optimism about the future of media and journalism very refreshing. In contrast with groups like Free Press who have lost faith in the ability of the free market to reinvent media, Jarvis – who is also the Director of the Interactive Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism- believes that it would be most unwise to allow government to get into the "business" of subsidizing journalism. Here, I think, he is entirely correct. And as our conversation reveals, few people are doing more than Jeff Jarvis to both invent a viable future for journalism and to nurture a new generation of innovative media entrepreneurs.

Jarvis on Publicness: Why the public is as importance as the private and on why he's having a ball writing a book about his penis.




Jarvis on WikiLeaks: On openness and the new culture of transparency in politics and media.




Jarvis on the Future of Journalism: Why the government shouldn't subsidize journalism and how the future of journalism is entrepreneurial.




Jarvis on Google: Why even Google is struggling to be Google.




Jarvis on the end of text: Why were are living in a post-Guttenberg world and passing from a text based to an interactive civilization.

It started with an email from Esra'a Al Shafei, a 24-year-old female political activist living in Bahrain…

“Hi Paul, a few months ago you wrote an article about documenting violence through social media – whether it’s even appropriate to Twitpic/YouTube/Tweet etc live events as your primary reaction, instead of actually helping out.

In fact that article of yours inspired me to start a new project called CrowdVoice: Tracking voices of protest - I thought I’d tell you about it, to let you know what you’ve helped inspire.”

As attention-getting emails go, that one was a doozy. And in fact CrowdVoice is worthy of the attention: a site that aggregates images, videos and links from witnesses of oppression around the world: in the Middle East, but also as far afield as Uganda, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan and – uh – Oakland.

For obvious reasons Esra’a prefers not to show her face on camera, but has chosen to use her name – prompting interesting questions about anonymity on the web, as well as the reliability of anonymous political videos/content online, the role of technology in fighting oppression  and much more besides.

Sarah and I wanted to speak with Esra’a about those questions and more, so we connected with her via Skype for this week's episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch.

Today, as I walked into TechCrunch headquarters after this morning’s Google Android event, I was approached by a sweaty man who had clearly just ridden his bicycle across town. He’d come to deliver a large, white box that had only a single marking: a tiny Internet Explorer sticker. “This will probably be mediocre,” I said to myself.

“Goofy” would have been a more accurate prediction. Inside, I found a handful of confetti along with an array of crayons, colored pencils, and paints that would put some pre-schools to shame. There was also a single, not-so-mysterious note emblazoned with the text www.beautyoftheweb.com. Given my extensive sleuthing skills it did not take me long to attempt to plug the domain into my browser, only to repeatedly meet a “401 – Unauthorized” error that said I had invalid credentials. My attention waned and I went off to play with my new crayons.

It wasn’t until an hour later (an eternity in tech press time) that I saw an official blog post informing me that this misfire was part of the buildup to the launch of Microsoft’s IE9 Beta — slated to debut on September 15 at a special event called Beauty of the Web.

I’m still not sure what the crayons were for.

Back in April we heard word of an affordable hackintosh tablet called the Axon Haptic. We were skeptical, since all we had was an anonymous tip and a render — something any 3D concept artist could have cooked up in an hour or two. But now we know that the Axon Haptic is real, you’ll be able to pre-order it this week, and yes, it runs OS X.

Let’s just get right to the juicy part, shall we? The Haptic is designed from the ground up to be compatible with any Darwin OS. That includes several UNIX distributions such as PureDarwin, and of course Apple OS X. Of course, installing OS X on anything other than Apple hardware is a breach of the license agreement, so Axon Logic (the company that makes the Haptic) strongly urges you not to do it, though of course they are not responsible for how you use the open-source software they include. I, on the other hand, think it’s a great idea.

Continue reading…

According to a survey of UK iPad owners put forth by Cooper Murphy Webb, people who own iPads are now using them as their preferred device for reading newspapers, magazines and books. Of the 1,034 iPad owners polled via telephone between July 28th and August 10th, 43% use the iPad for more than 10 hours per week, with most of those usage hours taking place in home.

While the iPad dominates among users  for text based activities like perusing magazines and books, the laptop still holds strong  as a primary entertainment device — perhaps due to the iPad’s lack of Flash support. I know that I have been discouraged from readily picking up an iPad to watch online video from the Pavlovian effect of those disappointing little blue legos.

Giving ammunition to the “iPad Will Save Reading” camp, 31% of iPad users prefer their iPad to their laptop, mobile phone, e-reader and print media for reading newspapers and magazines, perhaps due to the innovative presentation of news put forward by aggregator iPad apps like Flipboard and Pulse.

And moreover 41% of iPad owners prefer the iPad for reading books, which bodes well for iPad apps like iBooks, Kindle for iPad, and  Barnes and Noble.

As a side note to and probably as a byproduct of text consumption, the iPad is also preferred for Internet browsing among UK owners at 38% and gaming at 37% respectively.

iPad owners may be a skewed sample in terms of consumption habits — six times more likely to be "wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated” according to one survey — and UK owners even more so. But at over 3.27 million iPads officially sold at the end of Quarter 3 (our educated guess is around 5 million so far), Job’s magical and revolutionary product is gaining inroads in the way people at least say they partake in the written word, if they happen to be in the ever increasing class of people that own one.

Photo: Cliph

First there was the Facebook movie trailer. Then, there was the YouTube movie trailer. Obviously, it was only a matter of time before we got the Twitter movie trailer. And now here it is.

And it’s good.

As you might expect, the Twitter movie trailer created by Next New Network’s Barely Digital group, explores the founding of everyones’ favorite 140-character social network. It opens with tweets such as “My hair is sad today”, “My computer is being a fart butt right now” and “Just left my wife and kids. W00T!” Then we get into the backstory. “I need to create a way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall.”

Other choice lines:

• “The Fail Whale is showing up! — No, what is the Fail Whale? Why do you always go limp when we have fights.”
• “If you put a ‘tw’ in front of any word it makes it infinitely cooler. Check this out: hey, can I get a twhiskey?”
• “If Twitter is as useless and as boring as they say it is, then somebody would have tweeted it.”

Watch it below:

Twitter is keeping the hits coming with their Earlybird specials. Hot on the heals of a deal with Buy.com for Madden 11, a new deal today offers the number one album in the U.S. at a nice discount: Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

But what’s sort of odd about the deal is that it’s for the CD version of the album — you know, the compact disc, remember those? And the deal actually makes said CD cheaper than the MP3 version of the album. If you visit this site, you can get the CD for $7.99, while the MP3 download version of the album is $8.99. And the CD version comes with free shipping in the U.S., so it is actually cheaper.

As we’re hopefully all well aware, the CD business is dead. Sure, mega retailers like Best Buy are keeping them around somewhat, but iTunes and its digital music has been the dominant music retailer for some time now. So what gives here? Why did Merge Record (the label in charge of Arcade Fire) decide to discount only the CD version of the album by 50% from $14.98 to $7.99?

Who knows, maybe they’re nostalgic.

The Earlybird Madden deal was actually so popular that Buy.com sold out of the game in about an hour. They managed to get some more copies and sold out of those in another hour. Hopefully Merge Records had the CD presses working overtime to make sure they have enough discs.

Arcade Fire, meanwhile, seems to be quite the digital darlings these days. YouTube did a live broadcast of their NYC show last week.

Like New Hope, Pennsylvania, Corsica is most definitely not the first place that comes to mind when we talk about tech and innovation. For the geographically challenged, I should clarify that we're talking about that island off the southern coast of France. You know, where Napoleon comes from - or more recently where Alicia Keyes got married (wow, never thought I'd put these two characters in the same sentence). It may be void of both Starbucks and McDonalds - but definitely not startups. So essentially I've been on a quest to expose the startup activity in Corsica for a while now and oddly enough, the opportunity came at a time that is usually less active for French companies. Then again, when you work in Corscia, I guess you don't really need to take a vacation.

HeyZap, a startup that offers game developers a distribution platform and a variety of social tools, is looking to stay ahead of the curve: the company, which has been focused exclusively on Flash games until now, is adding support for HTML5 games.

HTML5 is still something of a novelty when it comes to gaming — we’ve seen demos like Quake running in the browser, but the vast majority of popular social games are still Flash-based. But HeyZap cofounder Immad Akhund thinks that’s going to change in the future, as more games are ported to HTML5 for compatibility (iOS doesn’t support Flash) and as browsers support more HTML5 features.

Akhund also says that they’re seeing demand for the feature already: HeyZap has had ten established developers ask for HTML support, and there are plenty of more basic casual games that are HTML-based (think Vampire Wars, Mobsters, etc.)

HeyZap’s HTML5 feature suite includes support for authentication of users through Facebook and Twitter, the ability to share/tweet your in-game achievements to your social networks, and payments through PayPal and credit cards.

Am I QuakeCon this year? No, of course not because that would have actually been fun. But I do know this: John Carmack just announced that he's got the Rage engine running on an iPhone. At 60 frames per second, no less. Ridiculous, yes.

What happens when Twitter and online communities filter scientific discovery ahead of professionals?  As we saw this week, a lot of fuss over a result that will ultimately be discarded into the dustbin of flawed mathematical proofs.

Computer scientists have long believed that a large number of useful computational problems require an impossible amount of CPU time to solve.  Decades ago it was discovered that a large set of these problems, referred to as "NP", have so much in common that a fast solution to just one would imply a fast solution to all. But after years of no one discovering such a solution, the standard assumption for mathematicians is that no solution will be found.

But assumptions aren't good enough for mathematicians, who prefer proofs, and have long been looking for a proof that settles that NP problems will never yield to a fast solution.  In mathematical terminology, the proof they're seeking is "P ≠ NP" (that NP problems are not equivalent to "P" problems, the kind that can be solved relatively quickly).  They've been seeking this so long that the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a $1,000, 000 prize to anyone who provides a valid solution.

This past Sunday HP researcher Vinay Deolalikar became the second person at HP to fall victim to the Internet fameball machine, as he posted his attempt to prove P ≠ NP on his personal website, and sent out an announcement email, which got picked up by the original formulator of the problem, Stephen Cook. Cook forwarded Deolalikar’s email to select mathematician colleagues with the now infamous statement "This appears to be a relatively serious claim to have solved P vs NP."

Cooks' validation email got the paper picked up by research blogs, then HackerNews, then mainstream media. Both armchair and professional math pundits proceeded to tear it apart in comments sections and subsequent blog posts, finding major flaws. Before the age of Twitter, Facebook and social news aggregation , draft research papers on something as complex as P ≠ NP would have gone through a rigorous academic process, which would focus on whether the proof strategy is correct, and whether the apparent errors are easily corrected.

Deolalikar's proof draft was public for a day before being pounced on by the online chattering classes. When I emailed him for comment I received the following auto-response, “My email is currently backlogged; please bear with some delays in responding.” No kidding. Despite the “Please note that the final version of the paper is under preparation and will be submitted to journal review” disclaimer, heated discussion into the finer intricacies of the proof’s failures are ongoing.

Why we should care? The real world implications of P not equaling NP are that certain algorithms will take longer and certain functions in cryptography (which relies on problem solutions being difficult) will be more secure. If P were equal to NP, it would transform mathematics and the way we see the world, as many computational problems previously thought difficult could be solved, see:  Traveling Salesman, Graph Coloring, etc. Most large computer systems need to solve NP problems, and currently make due with less than ideal solutions.

Or maybe because we're all a bunch of closet wannabe math nerds?