Is 'Pulp Fiction' screenwriter Roger Avary tweeting from jail? [Updated]

Roger Avary pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter in September and may be tweeting from jail. Credit: Los Angeles Times

As is often the case with Twitter, screenwriter Roger Avary recently tweeted about what he had for lunch. It was soy, which, an acquaintance told him, contains a dangerous substance intended to shrink their genitals and reduce their sex drives.

Just another day in Ventura County Jail.

Avary, who won an Oscar for writing the "Pulp Fiction" screenplay, appears to be sending updates to Twitter from the big house. He received a jail sentence in September after pleading guilty to vehicular manslaughter following a fatal crash last year.

We can't confirm that the Twitter account, @avary, actually belongs to Avary. But a second account, @rogeravary, points to the companion profile and contains photos of sci-fi author Neil Gaiman and the Dresden Dolls' Amanda Palmer.

[Updated, Nov. 27, 2:40 p.m.: L.A. Now reports that Avary was tweeting while serving time in a Ventura County work furlough program. He is now in full-time custody.]

For that pampered pooch: a RFID-enabled automatic doggie door

This Pomeranian lives the posh life but the doggie door is so yesterday. Utilizing a smart chip on the dog's collar, the Plexidor Electronic Door would automatically open the door for the pooch. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times.

Dogs that open doggie doors with their noses are such ruffians. Those ill-mannered animals will probably never get a date or a bone.

Sophisticated pets, with deep-pocketed owners, can now use garage-like doggie doors that open and close electronically when a pet wearing a collar with a radio-frequency-identification chip approaches. The doors only open for the pet with the RFID chip, keeping out unwanted visitors.

The chips are widely used at automated toll booths and for tracking airline baggage.

Plexidor Electronic Pet Doors cost $129 to $800 depending on the size and model.  To see a picture, check out our L.A. Unleashed blog.

"It allows the pets to go outside when they have to, not when you're able to let them out," said Plexidor President Joe Ambrose. He added: "For the pet owner, it is very helpful in preventing pet messes in the house from the pet having to hold it too long."

-- Melissa Rohlin

GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today

We always imagined how this might end: GeoCities would finally take down all of the animated "under construction" signs, and we'd hear one last Midi file to the tune of horns playing taps.

Instead, GeoCities will probably go down with a whimper today.

Time is up for Yahoo Inc.'s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline.

GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom Web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents. It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet.

At the turn of the century, GeoCities was nearly ubiquitous. Fathers created websites about their families; kids created sites about Pokemon; teenage girls created sites about the Backstreet Boys. Practically every facet of culture was documented and thanks to search engines, easily accessible.

All of those documents are about to disappear.

GeoCities stopped accepting new registrations earlier this year. Existing users could continue to update their pages and save sites to a personal hard drive in advance of the impending closure. Yahoo is encouraging the relatively few remaining users to transition their accounts to the company's $5-per-month Web hosting service.

The decision to shut down GeoCities rather than keep it around for historical reference and, say, slap ads all over it is curious. Especially when you consider that the network is still among the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the Internet, according to metrics tracker Alexa.

"Yahoo continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences," according to a company spokeswoman. GeoCities' closing is "part of our ongoing effort to prioritize our portfolio of products and services in order to deliver the best products to consumers."

The company downsized in a different way on Friday when billionaire financer Carl Icahn announced he was resigning as a director.

Yahoo boasts that it has closed nearly 20 services in less than a year, which includes a sort of competitor to GeoCities called Yahoo 360 as well as My Web, which was similar to Delicious, another Yahoo property.

ReachLocal, with 146,050% growth in five years, tops Deloitte's Fast 500 list

Zorik Gordon, chief executive and founder of Woodland Hills-based ReachLocal, which topped the list for the fastest-growing technology companies, in a photo from October 2007. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times.

Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 rankings were released today, showing the fastest-growing technology, media telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in the United States.

The top 10 companies on the list posted an average revenue growth rate of 53,798% over a five-year period beginning in 2004, and primarily fell in the biotechnology/pharmaceutical and communications/networking categories.

Topping the list was Woodland Hills-based ReachLocal, whose revenue jumped from $100,000 in 2004 to $146.7 million by end of fiscal 2008, or a 146,050% growth rate. It is the only Internet company to take the top spot since Google received the honor in 2004. (The majority of the companies on the list belong to the software sector.)

ReachLocal "brings order to the fragmented Internet by connecting advertisers, publishers, and creative solutions providers together on one platform," according to the company's website.

Zorik Gordon, 37, founded the company in 2004 after dropping out of dental school and working for two Internet start-up companies. His goal was to "democratize Internet advertising" by disseminating elite technology, marketing and advertising tools to small businesses.

ReachLocal has more than 500 Internet marketing consultants who can track clicks, impressions and phone calls and advise businesses on making marketing improvements. The company then helps place small business on various Web platforms and increase their searchability on major search engines.

"We bring tier one advertising technology that's had been only available to top companies down to a historic group of people that could never access these tools and technologies," Gordon said.

-- Melissa Rohlin

Wal-Mart to offer no-contract cellphone service

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is launching a no-contract wireless service called Straight Talk. The service offers a $30 or a $45 prepaid monthly plan and will be exclusively available at more than 3,200 Wal-Mart stores nationwide starting Sunday.

The $30 monthly plan includes 1,000 minutes, 1,000 texts, 30MB of mobile Web access, nationwide coverage and 411 calls at no extra charge. The average U.S. adult spends $78 a month for 1,000 minutes, according to Wal-Mart, and this plan would save him or her more than $500 a year.

The $45 monthly plan includes unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited mobile Web access, nationwide coverage and unlimited 411 calls.

Straight Talk was developed with TracFone Wireless, and a pilot program was launched last summer in 234 Wal-Mart stores. "In light of the savings customers continue to need, we have worked very quickly to extend this offering to all of our Wal-Mart customers nationwide, and just before the holidays," said Greg Hall, Wal-Mart vice president of Media Services.

Consumers can buy plans and refill their monthly balances at Wal-Mart or online at www.walmart.com or www.StraightTalk.com.

-- Melissa Rohlin

U.S. getting out of the Internet management business -- sort of

It sounds almost silly to say it, but the Internet is going global.

Of course, it's already global. But the underlying technology that makes the Internet run was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense 40 years ago, and the federal government continued to have a dominant voice in how the Internet was run.

Eleven years ago, as the Internet took off as a consumer medium and global force, the U.S. turned over some of its governance to a nonprofit group, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is based in Marina del Rey, where 70 of its 100 employees work, and it oversees what its vice president, Paul Levins, called the "unique and highly technical addressing system" that enables people to surf among 183 million domain names.

The U.S. has kept some authority over ICANN, including regular reviews, but the agreement between the government and ICANN was due to expire today.

The two entities have signed a new agreement that eliminates the U.S. reviews. ICANN now will be reviewed by a broader-based group of stakeholders from around the world.

"One thing this is not is Independence Day," Levins said. "We were independent the day we were established. This is not somehow slipping nooses of accountability or cutting ourselves loose from the U.S."

Instead, he said, the agreement marks a further weaning from U.S. control. The Internet is a public resource that is increasingly managed by its users. "We’ve become an organization accountable solely to the Internet community," he said. "We will have review teams made up of people from all over the globe, not just a government sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue, although they will continue to play a crucial part."

One sign of increasingly international influence to watch for: Domain names such as .com, .org and .gov currently are rendered only in the alphabetic characters we're used to seeing on Western keyboards. ICANN is working on setting up domain names in non-Western characters, such as Chinese or Arabic. And when that happens, Levins said, watch for Internet growth to really take off.

-- Dan Fost

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom discusses the new agreement. Credit: ICANN.org.

Design Your Dorm lets students virtually decorate their rooms

By now, most college freshmen are getting to know their new roommates; their moms' tears have dried; and the best years of their lives have just begun.

Great! Now what can be done about this dorm room, which looks the inside of a cinder-block factory?

Design Your Dorm aims to alleviate those "fresh out of Mom-and-Dad's house" woes with software that helps first-time interior decorators figure out a good look for their maiden interiors. Every college kid knows it's not easy to figure out whether a futon will fit in that tiny room or how much wall space will be left for that last Band of Horses poster.

Students can fire up the Design Your Dorm website, enter in a school name, dormitory building and room number, and the software will pull up a virtual room if it's in the system. (If you attend an unsupported school, you can enter the room's dimensions.) Then, drop in a couch, some storage containers and pick out a few posters, and you've got a pretty snazzy virtual room.

Jenny Jonsson, 18, from Bellevue, Wash., who just started at USC, was impressed with ...

Ugly Dolls creator David Horvath: Math was my favorite art class

We're going to let you in on a little secret: David Horvath, co-creator of the hyper-popular Ugly Dolls, almost flunked his drawing class. Here's how Horvath described squeaking through the Parsons School of Design in New York -- by doodling.

Like most art schools, Parsons had figure drawing classes where students would draw from nude models in various artistic poses. Horvath dutifully replicated the poses, but as cute monsters. His girlfriend, now wife, sat behind him and giggled, but his instructors were not humored.

"They'd tell me to get serious," said Horvath, whose company Pretty Ugly, is profiled in a Times article. "So I drew the monsters again, only with more shading. I really just got by in art class."

In fact, Horvath does not have a diploma from Parsons. He lacks the required credit for a single class -- math, a subject he dreads. Instead, he would doodle in those classes. "Math was my favorite art class in high school," the 38-year-old joked in a recent interview at the July Comic-Con convention in San Diego.

He's a Parson's star now that his work with his wife Sun-Min Kim has turned into a multi-million-dollar business with fans ranging from Snoop Dogg to Sasha Obama.

His advice to would-be artists and illustrators: "Don't listen to anybody. Just draw. And throw away the erasers. There are no such things as mistakes."

Some would say that offbeat approach is the secret to the Ugly Doll's charm.

"Sun-Min and I had this concept that ugly is beautiful because it meant you were unique and different," he said. "We should celebrate what makes us different, not surgically alter it to look the same as everyone else. You can try to fake beautiful. But you can't fake ugly. That's what these dolls are to us. They're all a little bit different."

To see what Horvath means, click on the video above.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

ESPYS gag uses Twitter to poke fun at star athletes

ESPYS host Samuel L. Jackson introduces a fake tweet for tennis star Serena Williams. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

A running gag during tonight's sports-centric ESPY Awards revolves around everyone's favorite social network, Twitter.

And by "everyone," we mean athletes, celebrities and news media -- not necessarily young people, as evidenced by a vocal Morgan Stanley intern.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson was the host of ESPN's awards show, which took place at the Nokia Theatre on Wednesday and airs tonight at 6 p.m. Jackson landed well-timed jokes about Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps "smoking" the competition and about "how to treat a lady," referring to Dodgers power-hitter Manny Ramirez's consumption of fertility drugs.

But an ongoing joke that seemed to fall flat among audience members showed bogus Twitter messages from star athletes in the audience (although Times writer Diane Pucin called it "the night's best running gag").

Jackson himself supposedly Twittered throughout the show on his Blackberry, saying how bored he was. In reality, Jackson has many impersonators on the social network -- none of the accounts appear to be his own.

It has been well documented that athletes have taken to Twitter like a dime cover defense on a slow football receiver (meaning, quite substantially). ESPN pushes its own Twitter account regularly during news broadcasts.

So, it was a natural target for topical humor that allowed Jackson to poke fun at athletes, like controversial Buffalo Bills NFL receiver Terrell Owens, without ...

Venture capital funding still slow in Southern California

For many SoCal start-ups, the bank vault is still closed. Credit Anonymous Account via Flickr.

The numbers for start-up investments are out, and in Southern California, they're not so good.

It's a familiar refrain: venture capital funding is tight;start-ups need to sit and wait until venture capitalists have some more funding money. The bad news is that those in Southern California might have to wait a little bit longer.

Nationally, investors put $5.27 billion into start-ups during the second quarter of this year, up 32% from the first quarter. But Southern California attracted only $433 million in venture investment in the second quarter, down 12% from the first quarter. That's according to a Dow Jones VentureSource report scheduled to be released Saturday.

In Los Angeles, venture capitalists invested $111 million, down 34% from the first quarter. That’s down 74% from the same period last year.

“Los Angeles had another challenging quarter,” said Mike Schoenfeld, venture capital advisory group leader at Ernst & Young.

Nationally, investment in information technology crept up 8.5% from the first quarter. But the amount invested during the second quarter, $1.9 billion, is a 41% decline from last year's $3.2 billion. And for the first time since Dow Jones started keeping track in 1992, investment in the healthcare sector outpaced investment in information technology. Venture capitalists put $2.23 billion into healthcare deals in the second quarter.

Things aren't likely to turn around until venture capitalists see more IPOs and mergers and are able to exit their companies, said Samit Varma, a partner with Santa Monica's Anthem Venture Partners.

"They’re waiting until 2010 until the storm is over and the cycle becomes realistic again," he said.

Some of the local start-ups able to raise money this quarter include Generate, a Santa Monica media company that got $2 million, CoreObjects Software of Los Angeles, which raised $2 million, and HauteLook, a Los Angeles Web company that received $10 million.

-- Alana Semuels