The Latest from TechCrunch

The Rubicon Project, a Los Angeles based display ad optimization platform, confirmed today that it has completed its acquisition of parts of the Fox Audience Network from News Corp. I outlined the main details of the deal last week. Rubicon is purchasing mostly the technology (ad server, MyAds self-service ad buying platform, targeting technology, realtime bidding algorithms) and taking on about 100 of FAN’s technology employees (after the other half of FAN’s employees, the sales team, lost their jobs last week). FAN’s third-party ad network is not part of the deal.

At the same time, the Rubicon project raised another $18 million from investors including News Corporation, Clearstone Venture Partners, IDG Ventures Asia, Mayfield Fund, and NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund. So News Corp now owns a minority stake in the Rubicon Project as a result of this transfer of assets plus some cash.

The company expects revenues to hit $100 million in 2010, and says it hit profitability for the first time in the month of October. [Release]

Is 3D already in trouble? Quite possibly, and there’s a few data points to back up that claim. As you know, Christopher Nolan has announced a few things pertaining to the next Batman movie, namely its name (the Dark Knight Rises), that The Riddler won’t be in it (much to fans’ chagrin), and that it won’t be filmed in 3D. I’m pretty sure the previous Batman movie, the Dark Knight, was a gigantic success, so to not film it in 3D is quite the snub. Sorry, 3D, but the prettiest girl at the dance wants nothing to do with you. (Stupid metaphors are stupid.)

In a report that is raising eyebrows this morning, UK-based market research firm Canalys estimates that total shipments of Android phones in the U.S. during the third quarter were nearly twice as large as iPhone shipments. Out of 20.9 million smartphones shipped in the U.S., about 44 percent, or 9.1 million, are running the Android OS. Apple, shipped an estimated 5.5 million phones, or 26 percent of the total.

Apple ships only one phone, the iPhone. And it became the single largest smartphone in the U.S., surpassing all Blackberry phones combined (with RIM shipping an estimated 5.1 million phones, or 24 percent). Apple’s market share in the U.S. jumped 4.5 percent from the second quarter, but the collective share of all the Android handsets now on the market jumped by nearly 10 percent (from 34 percent).

On a worldwide basis, Canalys puts Android’s share at about 25 percent, also larger than the iPhone’s global share of 17 percent (and RIM’s 15 percent). These numbers are surprising given the fact that Apple claims to be activating 275,000 iOS devices a day, with Google a bit lower. Activations and shipments are different, but they should be more or less in line with one another. The numbers that have come out from both Apple and Google suggest that Android and iOS devices are neck-and-neck, not that Android is a length ahead. But Apple’s activation numbers include more than just iPhones (iPads are in there too).

Other market research firms such as Nielsen and Gartner have yet to release their third quarter estimates. Will their numbers tell the same story as the Canalys numbers?

Update: NPD Group came out with its numbers, which are pretty close. It also shows Android in the U.S. on 44 Percent of smartphones compared to 23 percent for Apple’s iOS, and RIM in third with 22 percent.

When the press gathered to shoot pictures and videos of the likes of Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Niklas Zennstrom (Skype), Chad Hurley (YouTube) and Michael Birch (Bebo) last Thursday when I arrived at my hotel in Dublin, where the F.ounders event was being held, I was surprised to see a fifth man get prompted to be included by the event organizers. Particularly because I didn’t recognize who this guy was, and not even his name rang a bell.

Over the course of the next few days, I’ve gotten to know him, and he has a fantastically inspiring story to tell alright: meet Divyank Turakhia, one of India’s youngest and most successful pirates – sorry, technology entrepreneurs.

Turakhia started his first business when he was 14 years old, and co-founded what is now the Directi Group when he was 18. He famously made his first million when he was 18, and now ten years later it sounds like things are just getting started for him.

Directi is a holding company with a current market value of over $300 million (not bad for a venture that was bootstrapped on a $600 budget – loaned to Divyank and his brother from their parents – back in 1998). Its portfolio of products and businesses are all over the place, ranging from collaboration, social networking, instant messaging and content publishing software offerings to major domain parking company Skenzo.

As for Divyank Turakhia, he’s set a large chunk of resources aside for his next bet: Media.net, which will formally make its debut at ad:tech New York later this week. It’s a contextual advertising play, and Turakhia aims for it to rival none other than Google AdSense.

After what I’ve learned about him the past few days, I wouldn’t bet against him at the very least taking a really good shot at it.

On a sidenote: he knows how to rival Lady Gaga, for one. From The Telegraph:

“Turakhia arrived in Dublin with an improbably young wannabe actress/singer/model girlfriend he met at Disneyland in tow, having – so the rumour goes – booked out the Presidential Suite of the Westbury Hotel to upstage Lady Gaga, who is in Dublin this weekend. That story, whispered, variously, through snarls of envy and smirks of delight, speaks volumes about this controlled explosion of machismo.”

Here’s my (admittedly far too brief) interview with Divyank:

Browser market share numbers are out for October from Net Applications. Chrome made the biggest gains with a 0.49 percent jump from September to 8.47 percent.

Chrome is the third most popular browser after Internet Explorer (59.26 percent) and Firefox (22.82 percent). Both FireFox and IE saw their overall market share positions erode slightly by 0.39 percent and 0.14 percent, respectively. Safari was up a smidge (0.06 percent) to 5.33 percent, and Opera declined 0.11 percent to 2.28 percent.

When you drill down into specific browser versions, IE 8 is the single largest browser with 29 percent share. IE 9, which just launched in beta in mid-September, is just now beginning to raise its head in the browser share tables at 0.32 percent share. On Windows 7, IE 9 is up to 1.29 percent share and growing fast.

The Dell Streak is clever device, but with its 5-inch screen, a touch on the large size for a phone and a touch on the small size for tablet. Still, a good amount swear by it saying it’s the best of both — like this commercial. It cleverly shows all the usefulness that comes with the larger screen like games, navigation, Facebook, video capture — really everything — but in true marketing fashion, does so without showing the downside transporting the large device.

Not that you can blame them, though. It’s the job of marketing to point out all the pros while minimizing the cons. Still, a 5-inch slate might seem like a great product until you try to put it in your pant’s pocket. Or in the cup holder of your car. Or in a shirt pocket. Or on your hip in a holster. Yeah, the Streak is a clever device, but it’s also a big device. Your call whether it’s a pro or a con. The commercial after the break will try to sway you to the former though.

Domestic venture capital funding of cleantech businesses fell 55% to $575.6 million in the third quarter of 2010 compared to the same period last year according to a new report from Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureSource. The energy efficiency segment, however, beat the downward trend.

The largest deal of the entire quarter was a $65 million third-round later stage deal closed by Solaria Corp., a Fremont, CA developer of silicon photovoltaics and high-efficiency solar panels.

Including “energy efficiency products, power and efficiency management services or industrial products,” the energy efficiency segment saw 17 deals raising a total of $161.7 million in venture capital funds, representing an increase of 6% by dollars, and 21% by number of deals, year-over-year in Q3.

Smooth-Stone— an Austin, Texas startup that sells ultra-lower power chip technology to data centers— closed the largest energy efficiency deal for the quarter. Graduating from the Austin Technology Incubator, the company raised $48 million from a syndicate of investors including: Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) and Texas Instruments.

Corporate investments and plans to invest in energy efficiency influenced the trend, the Ernst & Young / Dow Jones report suggests. For example, General Electric (GE) said it would invest $432 million over the next four years into research, design, and manufacture of energy-efficient refrigerators in the US.

Overall, corporate investor participation increased from 15% of deals in Q3 last year to about 23% for the same quarter this year. Cleantech deals in Q3 2010 included participation by corporate investors: BASF Venture Capital GmbH, Intel Capital and GM Ventures, which all did two deals apiece.

Beyond energy efficiency, other segments faced a challenging quarter. Venture capital funds going to industrial products and services— which include agriculture, construction, transportation, materials, and general consumer products— fell 72% to $116.9 million, representing a 50% drop in financing rounds to 12. The alternative fuels segment raised $50.5 million in three deals.

Regionally, the report found California’s venture investments in cleantech falling 44% to 21 deal, and by dollar value, falling 71% to $295 million. In comparison, California had five deals over $50 million one year ago, including the $286 million financing of Solyndra.

Massachusetts followed California as largest regional overall investors, with eight deals worth $87.6 million, representing a 50% increase in deals and a 65% increase in capital invested compared to the same time last year.

Vindicia, a company that provides an on-demand billing platform, has raised $20 million in series E funding led by FTV Capital with existing investors Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, DCM and ONSET Ventures participating in the round. This investment brings the company’s total funding to $41 million.

Vindicia supports online merchants with a number of solutions to enhance the scalability, flexibility and compliance of their online billing services. The company markets subscription billing and fraud management solutions under the Software-as-a-Service model, delivering its software products to companies in the online gaming, social networking, virtual world and Internet dating space

Vindicia says that it will use the new funding to expand its sales, services and marketing teams. Clients include Boxee, Symantec, Intuit, Activision/Blizzard Entertainment, Atari/Cryptic, Fuel Industries, TransUnion Interactive and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Ah, mother sun: you give us maize, you give us warmth, and in the summer you give us just a little color, not too much, just maybe a little around the shoulders so we look like we went outside. Now you can charge our keyboards!

The $80 Logitech K750 is the first solar keyboard built of fully recyclable plastic. The device has a set of solar panels along the top edge and even includes a luxmeter to tell how well things are charging. It charges in sunlight and even under a standard bulb.

If you’re familiar with Logitech keyboards they usually last for months – if not years – on the same battery. This, however, will ensure that you don’t go dark in the midst of a marathon blogging session.

Press release after the jump.

Social business services company Dachis Group has acquired Stuzo, provider of social marketing applications and programs, and notably one of the first and largest Facebook Preferred Developers. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Stuzo offers a suite of services and technologies serving social marketers, launching nearly 200 custom social marketing campaigns for over 100 global brands and agencies in under three years. The company was launched in May 2007 and quickly became one of the first ten Preferred Developers worldwide selected by Facebook.

Dachis Group says the acquisition of Stuzo fits into its strategy of becoming the “world leader in Social Business Design”, adding capabilities to allow large global brands the development and customization of platforms and features for the management of Facebook Pages, the development of Facebook apps, or development and management of Facebook Connect integrations for clients and their brands.

The company says it will integrate Stuzo into the company’s offering effective immediately.

Dachis Group was founded in 2008, by CEO and chairman Jeffrey Dachis (cofounder and former CEO of Razorfish). The company offers services around the globe with offices in eight cities in five countries, employing over 120 people.

Its growth strategy, which consists of rolling up smaller companies in the social business services space as well as growing organically, is backed by a financial commitment of up to $50 million from Austin Ventures (Dachis Group is headquartered in Austin, Texas).

Acquia, a Boston-based commercial open source software company that provides a set of tools and network services for the Drupal social publishing system, has raised $8.5 million in third-round funding. The financing comes from existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners together with Acquia CEO Tom Erickson.

The Series C round brings the company’s total of capital raised to $23.5 million and comes at a time when Acquia is experiencing massive growth in terms of customers and partners.

The additional capital will be used to expand operations in the US and Europe and the further development of SaaS and platform-as-a-service offerings for Drupal, the company says.

Acquia offerings for Drupal include website hosting, custom distributions, a search platform, training and professional services. Acquia also markets Drupal Gardens, an easy-to-use publishing and management platform for relatively basic Drupal sites, and Drupal Commons, social business software for community sites.

Acquia says it’s seeing massive adoption in the enterprise space, helping companies like Red Hat, The Economist, Intuit and Thomson Reuters build, deploy and operate their corporate websites, social communities and intranets.

The company claims to have tripled its customer base in 2010, attracted over 220 partners across the entire system and gone from 30 to 70 full-time employees.

Acquia is keen on pointing out that it gives back to the Drupal community in a big way – the creator of the social publishing system happens to be the company’s cofounder and CTO Dries Buytaert – and says 30% of its R&D team currently works directly on Drupal 7.

Acquia even publishes a site called Drupal Myths which it uses to “set the record straight on the countless benefits of Drupal, dispelling many of the fallacies that continue to be spread by less innovative proprietary vendors”.

Leading Dutch social network, Hyves, which for a long time held out against the encroachment of Facebook, is selling the entire company to Dutch media group TMG (Telegraaf Media Groep) for an undisclosed sum.

Hyves has a 68% penetration in the Netherlands, but lately we’ve been told that more and more people are talking about moving to Facebook.

Hyves was founded eight months after Facebook in 2004 by Raymond Spanjar, Koen Kam and Floris Rost van Tonningen. It has 10.6 million member accounts.

The move follows rumours of another European social network, Nasza Klasa in Poland, being put up for sale. Are Europe’s home-grown social startups finally cashing in their chips before the Facebook juggernaut rolls over their markets? Almost certainly. In the last few days we’ve also heard ‘European MySpace’ Netlog is aso having a tough time against Zuckerberg’s legions.

Founded by Steve Spurgat and Chuck Reina, the New York-based and newly launched VYou is a combination of Formspring, YouTube and Twitter (“Formspring + video + crack.” is a popular description amongst its beta users). The core function of VYou is to enable a video conversation, allowing you to send and receive messages with friends and experts at your own pace. You can also follow users and create, store and share pre-recorded video responses accordingly.

Similar to what Seesmic was originally attempting to do back in the day and like a peppy Howcast or eHow, VYou’s asynchronous chat format was designed for multiple use cases, “We could do a deal with a dating site (an obvious use case), but then we become ‘that dating application.’ We could focus on celebrities, but then we may lose experts and general users,” Spurgat explains.

Like Q&A giant Quora, Spurgat and Reina have been working on site development for a year and wisely targeted the beta towards influential users and brands including pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman,  investor and advisor Rex Sorgatz, BNTER founder Lauren Leto, writer Will Leitch, Gawker TV guy Richard Blakely and wine expert Gary Vaynerchuk.

Aside from attracting talent, it’s addictive as all hell; The moment I signed up, after I recorded a “Waiting” video and “No Response” video, Spurgat asked me the question of the hour “Does Yahoo Mail lower your credit card score?” (har har). Because sense of humor and other body language cues often do not come across in writing, video is an ideal platform for Q&A, especially when answers are time limited (there’s a helpful/condescending little bar across the bottom of the site that tells you when you’ve gone on for too long while recording a video).

After being fenced in by 140 characters or the often dry annals of Quora or Formspring, it was great to have the information surplus of sights and sounds at my disposal when interacting with a human online. And I actually feel closer to Spurgat after having video answered his Yahoo Mail question, even if he was pulling my leg.

Riding on the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the OldSpice campaign, it’s inevitable that brief, personalized video responses would immensely appeal to companies and brands seeking to interact with users — right out of the gate VYou’s first brand partnership is with lifestyle website Flavorpill, where Flavorpill editors will interview celebrities through the service and post their VYou-powered “Interactive Video Interview Program” on the Flavorwire blog.

VYou is currently angel funded and is looking to improve its search function as well as expand access to multiple platforms, including mobile and through an API. Says CEO Spurgat, “Our only guidance will be to show the market that this is a utility, with a wide range of applications.”

Applications which include preventing me from getting any more work done, for tonight at least.

About a month ago, we noted that LeWeb would be getting a bit more TechCrunch flavor this year. For the seventh iteration of the popular tech conference based in Paris, France, organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur decided to make their startup competition a bit more like a mini-TechCrunch Disrupt. That is, of the 16 startups launching, 3 will get time on the big stage to present in front of everyone and a winner will be chosen. And that won’t be the only TechCrunch influence felt.

As you can see on the just-released program for LeWeb ’10, TechCrunch names are all over the agenda. A group of us are slated to interview some of the big names in tech on stage during the two-day conference, which takes place on December 8 and 9 this year. And there seem to be a range of other interesting talks and panels as well.

A taste of the highlights:

• Leaders from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mozilla, Foursquare, WordPress, EA, MySpace, UStream, Evernote, Microsoft, PayPal, Nokia, RIM, and more on stage.
• You can learn about how to get your company acquired (with people from Microsoft and Twitter).
• You can learn about how to create a top mobile game (with the CEO behind the company responsible for Angry Birds).
• You can hear about innovation in other parts of the world, such as Japan (with the CEO of DeNA).
• You can hear about where the media is heading (with people from CNN and Techmeme).
• A partner at DST will talk about investing hundreds of millions in Zynga and Facebook.
• You can learn about the building of a solar pane plane.
• Howard Lindzon, Gary Vaynerchuk, Leo Laporte, Dave McClure, Yossi Vardi, Dave Morin, and more will all be on hand for talks.

And, of course, the Disrupt-like startup competition finals with be hosted by our own Michael Arrington and August Capital partner David Hornik.

For a longer intro, be sure to check out Loic and Geraldine’s full rundown in the video below. And if you’re interested in attending, use this link for a 200 euro discount for TechCrunch readers. Hopefully we’ll see some of you in Paris in a few weeks.

JAKARTA–It was only a few days ago I was sitting in a wheelchair getting a blood transfusion.

It was Friday night in Singapore, and I was at Clarke Quay– a pseudo-outdoor mall of clubs. It’s like a smaller scale version of the Las Vegas strip frequented by Singaporean college kids, goofy Western expats and hot Asian girls, mind-bogglingly shimmied into too-tight dresses.

Everything in Clarke Quay — and Singapore for that matter– is highly competitive, and the clubs rotate in and out of business. So to stay popular, it’s important to have a gimmick. There was Highlands, the scotch bar, where the waitresses wore short kilts and the chandeliers had antlers. There was Lunar, where the gimmick was simply being “cold”– indeed that can be a novelty in Singapore’s sweltering heat and humidity. Then there was the Pump Room where a large cross-dresser belted out tunes, in between the thumping techno music.

But I was at the most over-the-top, a bar called Clinic. You sit in a wheelchair, and you get your drink in the form of an IV– with a name like the blood transfusion–delivered by a young nurse. Want a shot? It comes in an oversized plastic syringe. It felt a little wrong. I mean, I’ve seen enough of Asia to know people could have used those medical supplies for more than partying. But there I was nonetheless, doing wheelies and sucking on an IV.

It was the essence of Singapore: An Asian themepark developed for Asians who want a Western lifestyle and Westerners who want an Asian lifestyle– but can’t quite commit to either. A true sign you’re in Singapore? I didn’t have to use a single squat toilet– even in the dodgier areas of the city. In Asia, the toilets don’t lie.

Singapore times how long it takes to get through its immigration line, obsessively trying to get it under 11 minutes. I breezed through on arrival and departure. “I’m here because of the airport,” said KF Lai, founder and CEO of BuzzCity, an ad network that monetizes the throng of mobile users in Singapore’s chaotic neighboring nations. Compare that to Jakarta. I arrived Saturday and despite being on one of the only arriving flights at that time, I stood in the immigration line for about 45 minutes.

It’s not that Jakarta doesn’t have its Western bubbles. But they’re smaller and colliding with the city’s larger reality much more frequently. The walk in between the comfortable apartment I’m borrowing in Jakarta and the cavernous, Western shopping mall, the Grand Indonesian, took me through a sprawling slum and along streets so jammed with traffic, I almost got clipped by a motorbike a few times. My first day in town, walking through the slum– getting deeper and deeper as I kept taking wrong turns– I stuck out like a sore thumb. A big, tall, pale-white American woman who only knows about three words in Bahasa. One of those was “pulsa,” which means “credit.” I was wandering this neighborhood seeking a top-up on my pre-paid SIM card– something that is ironically easier to do in the slum here than in that opulent mall.

This is the disconnect of Southeast Asia right now: There is enough of a middle class that Western companies want to be here, and Web companies in particular want to make sure they don’t miss out like they did in China. But a place like Jakarta is still a Wild West. A neighborhood like the one I wandered through is so far from the consumer reality in the US that it’s hard to imagine the opportunity is as big as it is for Western companies. Trying to do business in Indonesia, particularly in the Web space, is about vacillating between the fear that it will take another ten years to build a $1 billion Web business (ala India) and the fear that it’ll take off overnight without you (ala China.)

Progress on this kind of scale is just messy and putting a comfort bandaid on it only hides the issues and the opportunities. Almost every day in Jakarta there’s a protest in front of the city’s Soviet-esque Welcome statue, that people get plenty of time to look at because the roundabout is always clogged with traffic. It’s the realistic underbelly of a country surging headlong into democracy and capitalism: Democracy means people dissent and capitalism means everyone who can afford a car wants a car. In my opinion, parts of Jakarta can put on a better face than India– where there’s been so much rapid urbanization the big cities are an out-of-control infrastructure mess. But plenty of Jakarta is scary and unpredictable, plagued with poverty and corruption.

It’s this disconnect that Singapore is hoping to bridge, a sort of economic and cultural translator for the West. And on paper– and in a few industries that I’ll detail in my next post– that makes sense. Singapore is, after all, just a short flight from India, China, most of Southeast Asia. And because it is 40% made up of immigrants, you can find a lot of local market expertise on the tiny island. But is Singapore really that much closer to the market? Physically yes, but don’t kid yourself: If you’re this comfortable, you’re not experiencing an emerging market and you’re not going to understand your customers. You aren’t going to understand how the five-tower pricy apartment building I’m staying in sold out in a flash, how the Grand Indonesian was packed with affluence-seekers on a Sunday afternoon and yet how so many people on the walk in between still live like it’s 100 years ago. If that’s what you want to understand in Asia, Singapore might as well be on the moon.

Sure, Singapore is growing at an economically drool-worthy 18% a year but that’s not because of an exploding middle class climbing the prosperity ladder. Lai and others tell me between 50% and 70% of the economy is in providing comfort for the region’s wealthy, whether it’s five-star hotels, expensive expat penthouses, or the real cash king– financial services for offshore money. Singapore is like a summer camp for the region’s rich, and that’s mostly who you’ll find there.

There’s just no hack around the pain of building a consumer business in emerging markets. Living in Singapore won’t teach you the market, any more than living in an expat enclave in Jakarta will. Without experiencing the pain and frustration of everyday life, you can’t understand this new customer. Like the old West, it’s exactly that unstructured inefficiency that creates so many opportunities. By the time problems like local talent, infrastructure are all figured out, you’ve got China– a place where local companies have grabbed most of the opportunities.

"The playlist ran out on my computer, and I thought, 'You know, there's really no reason why my computer shouldn't just know what I want to learn next,” he explains. "So that's what we made."

– Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard Crimson interview, 2004

Above is the Team page for Synapse, the Pandora-like music recommendation plugin Mark Zuckerberg and former Facebook engineer and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo built in 2002, while they were in high school together. You can access the entire site through the Web Archive here. Aol, Microsoft and WinAmp all expressed interest in buying the WinAmp program and Zuckerberg and D’Angelo reportedly received up offers of up to 2 million dollars, which they famously turned down.

Items in the above image presented without commentary: The fact that high school student D’Angelo is described as being “hung like a horse.” The consistent references to “Programmer Gods” woven throughout the site. The fact that the Synapse slogan is “My brain is better than yours.” The Coolio reference. Whatever “If you hit it and that thing feels deeper, say his name” means (shudder).

Hey, we’ve all written strange things on the Internet, and most of us would have lived our lives differently had we known they would one day be searchable (or in this case, Wayback Machine-able). However, what is most interesting about this Team page is the fact that D’Angelo’s Quora and Zuckerberg’s Facebook are now in direct competition over their respective Q&A products.

And there seems to be some contention over just how friendly this competition is: Facebook’s Director of Product Blake Ross is the subject of an entire thread on Quora called “The Oct 2010 Blake Ross Quoragate Farrago” where there is much speculation over exactly why he was unable to login to Quora and why his account there was deleted in early October.

There’s also lot of talk on Quora AND Facebook Questions about a possible dispute between Facebook and Quora, with one thread accusing Facebook of blocking Quora users from gaining access to Questions over the summer.

Ross tells TechCrunch that this is not the case and that, “We don’t feel animosity toward Quora. It’s a terrific product. I worked closely with all of the founders in the past. I wish the media would stop trying to turn Silicon Valley into TMZ.”

Ross also tells TechCrunch that whatever happened with his Quora account has “been resolved.” Yet he still doesn’t know what exactly happened to his account. Busy Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently asked his first Facebook Question, hasn’t been active on Quora since January 2009.

No matter what Quora or Facebook Questions thread you subscribe to, the reality is that Facebook Questions, if rolled out to all users and executed correctly, could kill Quora. The Facebook Questions beta currently has one million users, while the Quora site has around 155K (very passionate) users.

Facebook wins the numbers game by default, but many hold that Quora retains a better user experience in terms of quality of answers and a strong community — So it remains to be seen which former Synapse co-founder will ultimately be “the king of the spreadsheets,” at least in the Q&A space.

Last Wednesday, I got my hands on a new Meisterstück Le Grand Traveller pen. I haven't touched my MacBook Pro since. It's twelve months old. RIP.

Stop. Take a deep breath. Before my opening paragraph gets you all worked up, consider what I'm saying here. I'm saying that my TechCrunch options just cashed out and I've just used some of the money to buy an awesome new pen. And it's beautiful. And I want to write a post all about how awesome and beautiful it is.

No – wait – I've just looked back at that lede, and you're right. I am saying more than that. I'm saying that my new pen is so perfect in every way that my purchasing it spells the inevitable end of my MacBook. What's more, I genuinely and unironically believe that the awesomeness of my pen is such that its halo effect will render your MacBook – and those of everyone you hold dear – useless as well.

But, still, hear me out.

In the next few hundred words I'll explain all of the myriad reasons why my new Meisterstück Le Grand Traveller – a snip at just shy of $800 (inc tax and ink) – is superior in every way to my $1200 Mac Book Pro. And when you've finished reading, I'm confident that you too will want to trade in your clunky old laptop for this masterpiece of German manufacturing. If you don’t, I'll eat my power cable. After all, I don't need it any more.

I mean, seriously, did I mention how amazing my freaking pen is?

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "but the Meisterstück has been around since 1924 and it hasn't killed the MacBook yet". That's true, but until this week I hadn't bought one. Now that I have, and now that I've written this post about it, surely we can all agree that it's only a matter of time before the streets are filled with the smell of burning aluminum and glass while former bloggers look on, describing the scenes in their diaries using shiny black fountain pens.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: let's make a side by side comparison…

My MacBook Pro is 14.35 wide and weighs 5.6lbs. The Meisterstück Le Grand? How about 4.2 inches long and less than a pound in weight. Unbelievable. Of course much of that size difference is down to the lack of a hard drive or battery or any electronic parts in the Meisterstück, but that just adds to its awesomeness. Also, when my MacBook gets warm it sounds like a jetplane taking off – my Meisterstück? It's literally silent, even when it's operating at full speed. No one believes me when I tell them that, but it's true.

And how about battery life? My MacBook manages a decent 3-4 hours on a full charge, but compare that to the Meisterstück: I've been carrying it around in my pocket for five days – using it constantly – and I haven't had to plug it in once. Montblanc are killing it with this pen!

But there's more! When you get your Meisterstück and remove the cap, you will find exactly zero keys inside. My MacBook has 78! In the Meisterstück all of those have been replaced with a single nib, capable of producing not just letters and numbers but also signs, shapes and runes. For a writer like me, that's gold! (Note: the nib is actually gold) To be honest, I feel a bit silly having carried around all those keys for so long – the truth is, there are at least 10% that I haven't ever used. I mean what's the "^" even for?

Ok, so that's hardware: how about applications? Of course, this is where the MacBook should have the edge: after all, with my MacBook I'm able to listen to music, write and send documents and use social media tools like Twitter. Surely my Meisterstück can't compete with all that?

You wanna bet?

Here I am, not just listening to music, but ACTUALLY PLAYING IT….

Twitter? No problem!

And how about writing and mailing documents, or publishing blog posts? Well, ok, I admit that's a little slower with the Meisterstück. I started writing this column shortly after MG published his anthology of love poems to his new MacBook Air, and it would definitely have been funnier if I'd been able to publish sooner – but first I had to write it longhand….

…..then mail it to AOL to be transcribed….

….the wait for it to be published. But, as any MacBook Air user will tell you, sometimes you have to take a few technological steps backward in order to make a giant leap forward.

And those leaps just go on and on: my Meisterstück has a pocket clip, a removable cap and a brass insert capable of holding two ink cartridges (along with the six spares kept in the leather carry pouch). I called Apple a few hours ago and asked if ANY ONE of these features was on their roadmap for the MacBook. They hung up on me, but I think we all know the answer! Yeah – Rest In Pieces, MacBook!

With my purchase of a Moleskine notebook three years ago, I put the wheels in motion to kill my MacBook. This week, by purchasing an awesome pen, I kicked off my final assault. There will be no survivors.

Now if you'll excuse us, my pen and I are heading to Hawaii for a few days of "couple time" away from all you lameos and your tired old "crap books". Try not to be too jealous when you see my pen gliding through the x-ray machine without me having to remove it from its case!

See you in the future, suckers!

It’s finally happened. MG’s love for all things Apple has manifested itself in physical form, and he now wears an iPhone to work every day. The doctors say we should try to make him feel like this is normal, so I’ve taken to donning a matching Android handset. Clashes are frequent — the hallway leading to TC HQ literally isn’t big enough for both of us, and the rest of the team is tasked with making sure we don’t push each other’s buttons.

Or maybe it’s just time for a special Halloween edition of OMG/JK.

This week’s topics include the forthcoming Verizon iPhone, which seems to finally be more than just an Apple fanboy’s pipe dream. And who could forget the infamous white iPhone — the chink in Apple’s armor that keeps reminding the public that Steve Jobs is not quite omnipotent. We also discuss the company formerly known as UberCab, which is facing a new foe: the City of San Francisco.

And don’t miss the thrilling struggle as I attempt to say the word “anthropomorphized” on air. Will I succeed? You’ll have to watch til the episode’s haunting conclusion to find out.

Here are some articles related to this week’s topics:

• An Anthropomorphized White iPhone 4 Is Confronted Regarding Its Inability to Be Shipped (Daring Fireball)
• For Apple, AT&T Is The Company You Sleep With, Verizon Is The Company You Marry
• Barnes & Noble Reveals The Nook Color, Please Act Surprised
• UberCab Cease & Desist Means One Thing: They're Onto Something

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

This guest post was submitted by SGN founder and Executive Chairman, Shervin Pishevar. The entrepreneur and angel investor was founding president of Webs.com, a co-founder of Hotprints and Hyperoffice and has made several investments, including Nowmov, Aardvark, Thread.com, Gowalla, and Qwiki.

So I just logged into my email tonight and I see this email titled: Super Talent. The writer is a casting director from Romania who now lives in London. She’s worked on a number of movies with great directors like Spike Jonze. The email reads:

I’ve found you through this TechCrunch article  “Democratizing Talent: Guy Oseary, Greyson Chance, NowMov, IndieGoGo and the Future of Talent.” Thank you very much, it was an inspiration for me . I wrote about it on my blog too.
Following your story, I’ve discovered this brilliant filmmaker and composer: Josh Beattie.

He has 17 years and I think he is GENIUS. If someone would invest a small amount of money in this kid he would be the  next big Hollywood film director. If you can recommend Josh to your super agent friends, it would be fantastic.

Thank you very much for reading this email.

Kind regards,
Andreea Tanasescu

I click on the short film, To Clair; From Sonny, half expecting not to be impressed. Instead, I am floored by this 17-year-old director, Josh Beattie. Working with a few friends, Josh uses regular equipment, like an SLR camera and even composes his own music.

Josh and his friends posted this video in September 2010 and now the world is starting to notice. They have done amazing work and are an inspiration to so many others.

In a New York Times profile on Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, the company revealed a few interesting stats showing the growth trajectory of the network. Twitter now has 175 million registered users, which is up from 145 million users in September. That means the startup added around 30 million users in just under two months. And Twitter has added 70 million users since April.

This is impressive growth considering that Twitter had a total of 58 million users in 2009 (and 503,000 users three years ago). That’s a 200 percent increase from 2009 to 2010 in terms of users. And the year isn’t over—it’s conceivable that at the rate Twitter is growing, the company could be ringing in the New Year with 200 million users. So what’s contributing to this massive growth?

The new Twitter.com experience, which the company announced in mid-September, probably accounted for a surge in users. And new initiatives like allowing users to watch and Tweet President Obama’s recent town hall meeting from Twitter.com have surely drawn more attention to the platform.

In September, Williams said that traffic to Twitter.com has grown about 100% this year and on average 370,000 new users sign-up for the network per day (that’s up from adding 300,000 users per day in April).