TechCrunch Giveaway: An Apple iPad #TechCrunch

We’ve given one away before, and we are doing it again.

Earlier in the month we asked our Facebook fans a question we were curious about. We asked, “Choosing from all of the cool gadgets we write about, if you had the chance to win one, which one would you want?” We had hundreds of fans chime in and the number one thing people wanted was an Apple iPad. We thought since Apple had such a tremendous quarter, an iPad is the number one thing our fans want, and the iPad just won a 2010 Crunchies Award for Best Device, why not give one away?

We will be giving an iPad to one lucky reader at random. At a retail value of $499, this is one giveaway you surely don’t want to miss.

If you want a chance at getting your hands on an iPad, just follow these steps to enter.

Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below explaining why this iPad has to be yours

The contest starts right now and ends tomorrow, January 22nd at 7:30pm PST.

Like previous giveaways, please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will choose at random and contact the winner this weekend with more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages. We’ll also throw in some TechCrunch swag for fun.

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PostUp Acquires UberTwitter, Renames Itself (Again) To UberMedia

Bill Gross is up to something. The CEO of PostUp, who previously founded (and sold) Overture, answers.com, and a number of other companies, has just acquired his second Twitter client in as many weeks. On January 5 PostUp acquired EchoFon, and today the company has announced that it’s acquired UberTwiter, which makes Twitter clients for iPhone and BlackBerry.

In addition to the acquisition, PostUp has another piece of news: it’s changing its name to UberMedia. This is the third name for the company, which was originally called TweetUp, but changed its name last summer to PostUp as it added support for Facebook and LinkedIn.

So what is UberMedia’s strategy here? The company now has a new homepage, which includes the following description:

UberMedia is the leading independent developer of applications and web-based services that make it easier for users to find, follow and communicate with others on Twitter and other social media platforms. The company is focused on driving innovation in user experiences across a range of online and mobile platforms. UberMedia also provides advertisers and brands with new ways to engage and communicate with consumers via Twitter through its family of apps.

In other words, it wants to offer a variety of third party services that are complimentary — and in some cases, directly competitive — with what Twitter offers.

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Brickify: Turn Any Image Into A Lego Statue!

Everyone loves Legos. There is no debate. In fact, there may only be one thing better than Legos: customized Legos. And a new web service aims to provide those to all.

Brickify is a website that allows you to put in the URL to any image on the web and it will output a “brickified” image. Yes, it’s an image just like the one you just put in — but made of bricks. “Bricks” are the generic and non-trademarked term for Legos, but make no mistake, we’re talking Legos here.

Once you get the brickified image, you can alter it on the site by changing around colors. And once you have what you want, you can download inventory you need to build an actual version of the images with Legos. And they’ll even give you the schematics to build it. Yep, awesome.

“Turning a picture into a brick pattern isn’t the kind of problem we solve every day, but HTML5 technologies made it relatively easy. We use the canvas to load the user’s image and process the pixels in the image into bricks,” Carsonified founder Ryan Carson says. Carsonified’s Think Vitamin team built the site.

“We also use the canvas to tile brick images together to form an isometric view of the final production. JQuery helps out with basic manipulation in the UI, and we use Sammy.js and Underscore.js to glue everything together,” he continues.

That’s all well and good. But let’s be honest, the key is Legos.

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PeopleRank: Quora Is Developing An Algorithm To Determine And Rank User Quality

It’s no secret that Q&A site Quora is exploding in terms of usage and growth. Currently the site is getting around 164,000 unique visitors per month (December 2010 stats from comScore), and we’ve heard from a source that the service is doubling users every four months. The drawback to that kind of growth is that content could suffer in return (i.e. the Yahoo Answers issue). While Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever has alluded to some of the ways that the company is planning to mitigate this issue, he recently went into more detail about these initiatives in a new Quora post titled ‘Scaling Up.’

Cheever writes that the startup is working on several new projects to support to new users, moderate massive influxes of content and to help the site scale. One of the most interesting projects he mentioned was that the company is currently developing an algorithm to determine user quality, which will be a huge addition in terms of technology. Here’s what Cheever wrote:

We’re developing an algorithm to determine user quality. The algorithm is somewhat similar to PageRank but since people are different from pages on the web and the signals that are available on Quora are different from those on the web, it’s not exactly the same problem. We’ll use this to help decide what to show in feeds, when to send notifications, and how to rank answers.

While a huge endeavor in terms of development,it makes total sense for Quora develop a PageRank-like technology to rank people and content on the site. For those of you who don’t know this, PageRank is the link analysis algorithm was developed by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that is the technological foundation for Google Search.

Cheever says that the startup is also working to get more people to help evaluate the quality of new content on the site, effectively crowdsourcing moderation on Quora. He adds: Most of the people who use Quora have pretty good judgement, and we believe there is some wisdom in crowds. Preliminarily, this approach is very promising.

And education is another key part of helping Quora scale, says Cheever. He asserts if new users understand what Quora is when the join, that will help influence users to add appropriate content to the site. For example, Quora has added a brief tutorial quiz before new users add new questions and Cheever says that it has made a big difference in reducing the number of questions that don’t meet guidelines or policies.

He adds that Quora is working a number of other ways to improve the site and mitigate growth.

If Quora is able to develop a ‘PeopleRank’ algorithm that works and can scale, this could no doubt be a very important piece of technology generally. And a patented algorithm will certainly make the startup even more of a desirable acquisition target.

Hat tip to Shervin Pishevar for coining PeopleRank.

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Verizon Can’t Even Stand Net Neutrality Lite, Goes To Court To Challenge FCC’s Authority

Who saw this coming? (Oh, right: everyone.) Verizon has taken umbrage with certain aspects of Net Neutrality, and has taken the rather predictable tract of challenging the FCC’s authority in order to get out of complying with the rules. It’s nothing more than a simple case of if you can’t win an argument based on its own merit attack the credibility of your adversary. Verizon isn’t too keen on the provision that would force it to treat all data on its network equally, so it’s going to court to make sure it doesn’t have to.

Verizon, while claiming to be “committed to preserving an open Internet” (whatever that means), says that it’s “deeply concerned by the FCC’s assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself.” Note the presence of the word “sweeping,” which is designed to make it seem like the sky is falling. Sweeping new regulations? What kind of evil agenda is at work here?

You know, making it so that ISPs don’t treat you and your data like dirt. Such an evil agenda, I know.

Read the rest of this entry »

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