Battle of the A-listers: Ashton and Arrington, let the games begin

Hollywood A-lister Ashton Kutcher is going to be hanging with Silicon Valley A-lister Mike Arrington, just one of the highlights of the upcoming TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

The name refers to the number of companies presenting products at the conference. (It's actually 52, but who's counting? Dude, Arrington is an Internet kingpin, not a bean counter.)

Arrington, who founded TechCrunch, and his conference cohort Jason Calacanis, usually keep confidential the list of presenting companies until the event ("to ensure maximum audience attention"). But they made an exception for Kutcher and Jason Goldberg's Katalyst Media, which will launch an interactive online video product called Blah Girls at TechCrunch50.

The conference runs Sept. 8-10. To generate buzz, Arrington asked the box-office star, who is also an Internet entrepreneur and a Hollywood producer, to promo TechCrunch50 in a video.

In a blog post introducing the video, Arrington writes: "You have to read between the lines, but I think he’s pretty jazzed about all of the strict confidentiality requirements and the need to meet with us twice before the event to rehearse his presentation."

Not.

"I understand your blog is really important for the interweb," Kutcher says in the video. "But this is really ridiculous."

"Movie studios don't even have this many requirements."

That's about all we can share in a family publication (Warning: The video contains some salty language, and it was even saltier before Arrington toned it down.)

Yes, Arrington toned it down. Is it possible that Kutcher can out-Arrington Arrington? Now that's a show we'd pay to see. Anyway, TechCrunch50, at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse, promises to be quite a show. The 52 start-ups were culled from a pool of ...

Spore fans spawn more than 3 million creatures

Face it. We love to play god. And Electronic Arts began tantalizing our inner megalomaniac in June by releasing a game called the Spore Creature Creator, made by the studio that also produces The Sims. The game can be downloaded for free here, although there is a more deluxe boxed version for $10.

Within minutes of firing up this title, players with no gaming experience can spawn a unique bouncing, gurgling creature of their own design. They can then upload their creature to an online database being kept by EA, called the Sporepedia.

This week, the number of creatures uploaded surpassed 3 million, according to Lucy Bradshaw, the game's executive director. Why does EA want all of these beasties?

The answer is simple: to colonize the universe.

On Sept. 7, EA will release one of its most important games of the year, Spore. The game, which can be played on a computer, iPhone and Nintendo Dual Screen console, will give players a virtual sandbox where these creatures can frolic, reproduce, form tribes, build cities and, eventually, take over the world. The iPhone version, called Spore Origins, takes place in a primordial soup and lets players fiddle with microbial evolution.

In the meantime, Spore fans must content themselves by crafting all manner of weirdly shaped critters.

"I’m fascinated by how players pushed the boundaries," Bradshaw said. "The magic of Spore is that you can run into anything."

How about a creature that looks like sushi? Or an airplane? Even though the software goes out of its way to prevent users from making things that resemble humans or real world animals, players find ways around that, making elephants, robots, gnomes and moose, to name a few examples.

It seems spontaneous generation, at least in games, isn't just a hobby for God anymore.

-- Alex Pham

Image courtesy of Electronic Arts

Parents go online to see where the lunch money goes

Lunch money, like your keys and your grandmother’s bifocals, is one of those things that suddenly disappears, leaving you with no idea where it went.

As many kids head back to school next week, parents will again ask the question they have pondered for ages: What happens to said lunch money? Bullies? Pockets full of holes? Children who want too many Twinkies? Tighter household budgets are making it even more pressing to find the answer.

But at last, modern technology has solved the quandary. A program called MealpayPlus, from Horizon Software International of Duluth, Ga., lets parents track what their kids are buying with their lunch money and see exactly what they're eating. Parents can also control lunch purchases, nixing the junk food or the bug juice. More than 250 school districts in the nation use the system, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, which recently selected Horizon to provide its food service technology.

"If parents don’t understand how their student goes through $30 in 3 days, they can view their students’ current account balance," said Ashley Steele, senior product coordinator for MealpayPlus.

Kids pay for their lunches with MealpayPlus in different ways, depending on the school district. Some will get a scan card. Others get a PIN. Some school districts will take images of students' fingerprints ...

Facebook the movie based on Facebook the book?

Speculation about the new Facebook movie penned by Hollywood scribe Aaron Sorkin has reached epic levels. Now a report says the film will be based on an upcoming book by "Bringing Down the House" author Ben Mezrich about the controversial and complex dorm-room origins of Facebook.

The website of the magazine 02138 -- which is aimed at Harvard alumni --  reported Friday that Sony Pictures Entertainment and producer Scott Rudin, who are behind Sorkin's screenplay, have also optioned Mezrich's book, which purportedly has a working title of "Face Off" and examines Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's falling out with early Facebook executive Eduardo Saverin. A Sony spokesman declined to comment on whether Sony has optioned the book. Sorkin's publicist could not be immediately reached for comment.

The guessing game about Sorkin's film began when he started a Facebook group to learn more about the popular social networking site. In a later redacted description of his effort, he said he planned to write about how Zuckerberg and others started Facebook to meet women, an allegation made in a leaked book proposal.

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo:  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

Around the Web 8.29.08: Comcast cap, Dell drop, innovation issues

-- Comcast Cap: The company will cap monthly broadband use but maybe it doesn't matter if streaming has replaced downloading. TechCrunch

-- Insurgent hacks: Iraqi computers are attacked. USA Today

-- Dell down: Price cuts to boost market share hurt profit. BBC

-- EBay unbound: Constance White, style director of EBay, wants more people to think of the auction site as a place to shop for the latest styles, not just the vintage. SiliconValley

-- Smashed and mashed: Yahoo closes Yahoo Mash, its 1-year-old social network. CNet

-- Military might: The key to Silicon Valley innovation has been military spending. Techdirt

-- Blame game: But Silicon Valley faces an innovation crisis, thanks to fear of risk-taking, says one of its storied innovators, Judy Estrin. NYT

-- Ideas thrive: Innovation is not dead; it's just changing. Techdirt

-- Giant gobbles: Microsoft buys online market research and surveys company Greenfield Online for $486 million in order to get Ciao GmbH, a hot European comparison shopping subsidiary. PaidContent

-- The old new: Romensko, the Poynter Institute site that has been the water cooler for the media since the '90s, is an Internet dinosaur. Web Scout

-- Nothing new: No Kindle this year, maybe next, Amazon says about its electronic gadget that lets users read digital books. PaidContent

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo: "Battle Duck," an art car, makes its appearance at Burning Man, the three-day art and music festival this weekend in Black Rock City, Nev. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

Watching sports on two screens via Jacked.com

It happens to the most dedicated of sports fans. You're sitting there, drinking your beer, scratching your, um, leg, and watching the game, and suddenly, it dawns on you. You need more statistics than TV can provide. Who cares what a player's batting average is or how many home runs he's hit? You need to know what school he went to and how much he weighs and if he could beat you in a fight.

Enter Jacked.com. The Santa Monica company provides what it calls "interactive broadcasts" for sports games on TV. The idea is to watch a match with your laptop open, and the site feeds you stats, online videos, news stories, analysis and other information customized to your preferences. Jacked's software pulls up relevant information as the game goes on, so if Manny Ramirez is batting, he'll pop up on-screen and you can get more information about him.

Jacked recently signed a deal with KTLA (the TV station that's owned by Tribune Co., which also owns the Los Angeles Times) to provide these interactive sportscasts for Raiders and Clippers broadcasts (including for the preseason Raiders game Friday). The content will be available through a KTLA website. In these broadcasts, Jacked users can send questions and commentary to the sportscasters, and the company says the sportscasters will respond to the questions.

Jacked CEO Bryan Biniak created the company two years ago when he noticed lots of consumers going online during games to check up on stats and find information, essentially watching the game on two screens at once. He figured the practice would only get more prevalent as more and more consumers got laptops and faster Internet connections.

Jacked just makes it easier, he says, because all the data sports fans could ever want is available on one page. (All that data takes up a lot of space, so people with slow Internet connections should prepare to get as frustrated as they do when their football team fumbles the ball.) Still, it's a lot of information: Biniak promises "more stats than you're going to get on one page anywhere else in the marketplace."

-- Alana Semuels

Photo by Dan Taylor via Flickr

Google's Android getting ready to ring up customers

Get ready to download.

After hiccups and delays, Android, the Google-supported mobile phone initiative, is finally starting to gain steam. The company today announced Android Market, which it hopes will be to mobile phones what Apple's App Store is to the iPhone and iPod.

According to news reports, T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a phone with Google's Android software sometime before Christmas. Android Market will make it easy for users to find, buy, download and install various third-party applications (dubbed "content" to encompass other software such as ringtones or music), according to the blog post from the Android team.

There are some differences with Apple, the post noted. Android is using the term "market" instead of "store." And, with Google opting for an open service it says will spur innovation, there will be no approval process for applications, in contrast to Apple's policy of putting software developers through the geek equivalent of "Survivor." (Apple also has booted programs from the App Store with no explanation). In fact, it will take just three steps for a developer to register as a merchant, upload and describe the software and then publish it. Google didn't disclose pricing for the applications or how much of a commission it plans to take.

The service will feature a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube so that developers can get a sense of how their applications are doing.

-- Jessica Guynn

Around the Web 8.28.08: Rough times at Apple, Facebook movie suggestions, Yahoo's Nebraska ambitions

-- Bloomberg greatly exaggerates rumors of Steve Jobs' death. Gawker

-- Fearing a decline in music sales, more record companies are steering clear of iTunes. WSJ

-- Rough times all around in Cupertino, Calif., better known as home to Apple. ZDNet

-- Forget all those other ads. YouTube hands over its home page to advertisers. Silicon Alley Insider

-- Yahoo is eying a Nebraska town for expansion. AP

-- What will software makers do now? Consumers are paying geeks to remove preloaded programs from their computers. NYT

-- Open source advocates sue Quebec for buying Microsoft software. CBC News

-- Technology helps baby boomers stay home and independent. NYT

-- Sony says that when it comes to services on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, the ideal price for consumers is free. gamesindustry.biz 

-- And now Sony has introduced the thinnest Walkman ever (it's Steve Jobs iPhone thin!). Gizmodo

-- A U.K. band says it relies on piracy. Techdirt

-- Casting ideas for Facebook the movie are starting to roll in. bringing nothing to the party

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

Veoh wins one ... for YouTube?

A federal judge ruled in favor of online video service Veoh Wednesday in a copyright infringement case similar to Viacom's billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube. U.S. Magistrate Judge Howard R. Lloyd of San Jose granted Veoh's request for summary judgment, rejecting the infringement claims brought by gay porn distributor IO Group. (Download a PDF of the decision here.) In what appears to be the first ruling on the legal status of user-generated video sites, Lloyd found that Veoh qualified for one of the safe harbors Congress created for online services in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The ruling isn't binding on the federal court in New York that's hearing Viacom's lawsuit, but Lloyd's reasoning could influence his counterpart in that case, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton.

The heart of the battle between Veoh and IO Group, as in Viacom's claims against YouTube, is whether the video site qualifies for the safe harbor the DMCA provides for services that host content at their users' direction.  Veoh and YouTube allow users to upload video files, which the sites then reformat, organize and index to make them easier to find and view. Mirroring one of Viacom's arguments against YouTube, IO Group contended that Veoh became a direct infringer when it copied users' unauthorized files into a new format and stored them on its site. As a consequence, IO Group argued, Veoh didn't qualify for the safe harbor. In his 33-page ruling, however, Lloyd held that automatically transcoding and organizing the files does not make Veoh directly responsible for any infringement or disqualify it from the safe harbor. Nor was Veoh aware of the infringing material on its service, which also would have disqualified it. According to Lloyd, IO Group didn't notify Veoh of the infringing files before filing suit, and there was nothing about the files themselves that should have tipped off Veoh to the fact that they weren't authorized.

The knowledge question may produce a different answer in the YouTube case, because Viacom sent copious take-down notices to YouTube before suing. According to Viacom, YouTube may have removed some of the infringing copies of each file from its system, but not all of them. Lloyd offered some thoughts on this issue, though, that may prove helpful to YouTube. Citing the 9th Circuit's ruling in the first Napster appeal, Lloyd held that a user-generated content company's duty to police its network is limited by the capabilities of its software. It can't turn a blind eye to "detectable acts of infringement," he wrote, but it can't be forced to change the way its system is designed just to enable better tracking and detection. Again, the 9th Circuit's holdings don't bind Judge Stanton in New York, but they could influence him.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Good cellphones make good delegates

It must be tough to be a delegate at the Democratic National Convention –- you have to know when to scream for Hillary, when to scream for Obama and when not to scream at all. And then you have to learn the art of shaking hands and networking while listening for really important announcements such as someone somewhere is offering free pizza.

Life may be easier if you have a swanky cellphone. At least, that’s what a bunch of companies are trying to convince you as they push their mobile-related products in Denver. There's the service that allows you to text questions and get answers from real live people. The one that allows you to watch MSNBC and other political TV shows on your phone. The service that lets you listen to L.A. radio show host Stephanie Miller and other pundits on your phone.

But wait a minute. Political conventions are where people go wave signs and yell themselves silly. Are they really a place to try to push new technology on people who are probably, let’s face it, not early adopters? Well, yes.

"Political conventions are the hotbed of people with passionate opinions," said Erik Schwartz, chief executive of Foneshow, a year-old service that lets people listen to radio shows on their cellphones. People with passionate opinions like to be well-connected to other people with passionate opinions, he said. That's why his service launched a PR blitz for the convention, pushing the fact that Miller's show is available on Foneshow. Just sign up for the texts and listen to the radio on your phone -- while still listening for announcements about free pizza.

Delegates can watch TV if they’re bored during the convention too. MediaFLO, the wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm that provides mobile TV to AT&T and Verizon Wireless subscribers, just added ...