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From the very same Internet that brought you The Twitter Movie, The YouTube Movie, The Auction Site Movie and The Other Social Network Movie comes today’s Ping parody: Another Social Network Movie. Something tells me that people are just going to keep making these parodies of David Fincher’s The Social Network until they run out of websites. Can’t wait to see what people come up with for Orkut.

While this trailer primarily focuses on the travails of the Ping user interface,  you can’t help but sympathize as the beleaguered  user checks for iTunes updates, dramatically agrees to the 36 page terms of service, restarts their computer, gets their login denied, tries to upload a photo, ends up following Keith Urban, etc …

My favorite part: “Ping is as simple as the push of 47 buttons.”

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GetGlue, a social browsing assistant that shows ratings and recommendations of movies, books, restaurants, stocks, and more on the web, has been on a roll lately when it comes to the startup’s mobile strategy. In less than three months, GetGlue has launched a mobile website, an Android app and an iPhone app. Today, GetGlue is completing the package with an iPad app and a new deal with Fox.

Similar to GetGlue’s other mobile offers, the iPad app allows users can to check-in to their favorite shows, music, movies and books, and see what their friends are enjoying in real-time. With each check-in, users earn points and stickers from GetGlue and other major brands. The app also allows users to rate their favorite shows, movies, music and books and receive personalized suggestions.

You can also share check-ins with your Twitter and Facebook friends, rate lists of popular shows, movies, music and books, receive weekly new releases and customized recommendations, and access existing reviews, clips and ratings for 20 million movies, books and albums.

The iPad app could definitely be a winner for GetGlue considering the fact that consumers use the device to consume the same media (movies, shows, books) that they would be voting on and checking-in to within the app. And the app tries to take advantage of the native UI elements and larger screen by creating overlays for conversations, giving users the ability to vote directly from the stream and more.

GetGlue, which recently landed a deal with HBO, is partnering with FOX to offer stickers for for fans of Glee, Bones and two new shows premiering this fall, Raising Hope and Lone Staris. The startup will also be unveiling new stickers for shows and movies from HBO, Showtime, PBS, TwiT, and Universal Pictures.

GetGlue is seeing an average of 5 million check-ins and recommendations monthly and is growing fast. The company, which recently ramped up its personalization features, makes money through affiliate relationships when users click through from the site and app to buy books, movies, and more. GetGlue faces competition from Comcast’s Tunerfish and Miso.

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Clickjacking attack hides behind content warning and anti-spam mechanism before posting your prurient interests to all of your friends.

Football season is upon us and that means many of you are making your fantasy football picks. While ESPN, Yahoo and others provide data and statistics on players to help you make decisions, numberFire is hoping to be an additional useful resource for fantasy football picks.

Originally presented from the TechCrunch Disrupt DemoPit, numberFire is an application that applies quantitative analysis and statistical reasoning to the world of fantasy football. Not only does numberFire have recommendations of pics, but the site also provides contextual data supporting each decision.

For example, let’s take Tom Brady, who is playing against Cincinnati this week and is known has one of the best quarterbacks because of his accuracy and decision-making. In order to find comparable players to Tom, numberFire evaluates his statistics and compares that data to players in the past in order to find a past QB who plays in a similar style and has performed with similar statistics. For Tom Brady in 2010, his closest comparable is Brett Favre in 2007.

NumberFire founder Nik Bonaddio says that the player is only one part of the equation. His site also factors in the team (Patriots), the defense he’s going up against (Cincinnati) and the situation (the start of the season so players may be rusty, off the field distractions such as injuries). numberFire also evaluates games and situations to find comparable situations. In this case, says Bonaddio, the closest comparable is San Diego vs. Atlanta in 2004.

NumberFire will be free for the first month (as to prove to people that the site can beat the predictions that platforms like ESPN provide, says Bonaddio), and will then charge a monthly subscription ($7.99/mo) or a flat-fee for the rest of the year ($19.99).

One interesting tidbit about Bonaddio: Before he demoed numberFire at TechCrunch Disrupt, he was on a primetime episode of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” hosted by Regis Philbin and won $100,000. He subsequently quit his job to develop and launch this project.

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Sony's motion controller will need hard-core games and gamers in order to be a success, Heavy Rain creator David Cage said in a recent interview.

Ding, ding! It’s round four of our Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN. Both of our pugilist Davids live and work in Silicon Valley. Given that today’s topic is about whether or not the heft of East Coast Super Angels like Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson is pulling the center of early stage funding gravity away from famed Sand Hill Road, you’d think it’d be nothing but agreement. “Oh, no, Silicon Valley is still the center of the universe.”

But you’d be wrong. In the first moments of this clip, the Davids can’t even agree over whether “management fees are great” and whether establishment VCs are “fat and happy” or “fat and sad” given the disastrous IPO market.

David Hornik of August Capital makes the distinction between hot companies found in other locales like Groupon and who funded them. In a lot of cases, it wasn’t local VCs, it was VCs flying in from the Valley. Put another way: Great companies can start anywhere, but not everyone takes enough risk to fund them.

Ultimately this segment ends in agreement that Silicon Valley will maintain its “market share” of venture capital influence, but that a big shakeout on the firm and partner level is unavoidable. (One note: I don’t buy that market share in question is just 30% globally and less in the US, as McClure says. Both NVCA and Dow Jones numbers for show that Valley companies get between one-quarter and one-third of venture capital dollars invested in the United States, and a huge percentage of Sand Hill Road money flows outside of the Valley. So the percentage of money coming from here would have to be substantially higher. Historically it was 75%–those numbers could well be dated, but it doesn’t logically make sense that it’s less than 30%.)

Check out the earlier segments of our SMACKDOWN on “Why the Hate?” “Are Super Angels a Phase?” and “Are Super Angels only about the Flip?”

Survey of cell phone users by Piper Jaffray finds some said antenna issues affected their decision whether to buy an iPhone 4, but more complained about the phone not being available on Verizon.

For the first time ever, after 250,000 apps have been developed, Apple finally decided to release some guidelines for developers to help them understand the app review process. The document is not only informative, but also entertaining to read. In general, for an app to make it through the somewhat opaque-until-now App approval process it needs to be a serious app (“We don’t need any more Fart apps”), it can’t crash or have bugs, it can’t be a beta or “practice” app that “looks like it was cobbled together in a few days,” and can’t “cross the line” in terms of being offensive. Oh, and when Apple rejects your app, if “you run to the press and trash us,” that will count against you.

The whole document is about keeping developers in line, but at least it is done with humor. Apps that contain objectionable material or pornography will be rejected, as will any apps which try to go around the App Store for payments or purchases, or have “interfaces that mimic any iPod interface.” Also, don’t try to use any of the “location-based APIs for automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other devices.” All of this, of course, is subject to change.

Apple also acknowledges that it is being stricter with apps than with songs or books in iTunes, which some might say is hypocritical. But here is how Apple responds, along with some high-level principles (the full guidelines are embedded below).

We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion,
write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get
complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of cokeep some of our broader themes in mind:

• We have lots of kids downloading lots of apps, and parental controls don’t work unless the parents set them up (many don’t). So know that we’re keeping an eye out for the kids.
• We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.
• If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
• We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask?  Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
• If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.
• This is a living document, and new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time. Perhaps your app will trigger this.

Image credit: Flickr/Michael Stout

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Apple's decision to remove language from its iPhone Developer Agreement that could have caused problems for AdMob was welcomed at Google.

One thing is clear to me now: GM gets it. Government Motors now understands the importance of cutting edge technology. They understand rapid development processes. But most importantly, the once largest auto maker understands the future. If only they had “gotten it” back at the turn of the century, they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in now.

I recently spent some time at a couple GM facilities where in between various PowerPoint presentations mainly about OnStar and the Volt, I was shown several labs and testing areas. All this was neat and about what you would expect: motion simulators, virtual testing, all housed in cold cement buildings. But it was the overall message that instilled hope in me that the automaker born in my hometown of Flint is actually on the right path.

After the grand tour with several fellow journalists we were escorted to a pair of early production Chevy Volts. This is where it all came together. Love it or hate it, the Chevy Volt saved GM and you can’t even buy it yet. Let me explain.

At first glance, the stats from free text messaging startup GOGII and its textPlus application sound like they’re too big by an order of magnitude: 3.7 billion messages sent since June 2009. 8.5 million downloads. 23 million phone numbers in the network. But they’re real, and they’re a big business. Today the company is launching two new features that make the textPlus experience even richer, with support for sending images and a nifty new feature called ‘Face Text’.

The first feature is self-explanatory: you can attach images to your outbound text messages and send them for free. The second feature, called Face Text, is related, but it comes with a twist. Upon activating the feature, textPlus will take a photo using your phone’s front-facing camera whenever you hit the send button, allowing you to quickly attach facial expressions whenever you send a message (think of it as emoticons meeting the photo booth — see the screenshot above). You can turn it off and there’s a countdown timer so the feature should never surprise you, and I suspect that the teenage audience that absolutely loves these apps will eat this up.

GOGII is one of a new breed of startup building on the relatively ancient and ubiquitous technology of text messaging. They compete with Pinger’s TextFree, which we wrote about last week and has similarly massive stats, and both companies have grown by leaps and bounds in the last year (interestingly, both Pinger and GOGII are part of the Kleiner Perkins iFund).

GOGII’s textPlus shares at least one major feature in common with Pinger’s TextFree: it allows you to send unlimited free text messages to your friends. But textPlus has a few differences. For one, it doesn’t give you a new unique phone number like TextFree does — instead you’ll have to message your friend’s username to the GOGII shortcode (users will be able to get their own phone numbers in the near future).

Another key differences lies in the community nature of textPlus, which TextFree doesn’t offer yet. The service effectively brings chat rooms to the mobile phone — fire up the app and you can create or join a chat room about, say, skateboarding, which behaves a lot like the AOL chat rooms of yore (around 500,000 communities have been created so far). But you can also elect to receive push notifications whenever there’s a new message, which turns into a powerful tool when you combine the feature with a private community. GOGII says that many people create private communities for their families or sports teams, which can be powerful for staying in touch with a small group: when a member of these private communities sends a chat message, it gets immediately relayed to everyone else in the community.

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Chipmaker releases some details of its forthcoming 2.5GHz Cortex A15 processor, which it says will be up to five times faster than its current architecture.

An outright block on iOS apps derived from Flash software is lifted--but Adobe axed the developer tool project, and Apple still maintains control via the App Store.

Advertisers are not the only ones plowing money into the online video space with gusto, you can add large, international investors to that growing list.

This morning, Ooyala announced a $22 million Series D round, led by the CID Group (Shanghai-based venture capital firm) and ITOCHU Technology Ventures (venture unit of the Tokyo-based ITOCHU). The round, which includes previous investors like Sierra Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners, puts the video publishing platform at $42 million raised since its 2007 launch. And according to CEO Jay Fulcher, the company is not done. In order to accommodate robust demand (the latest round was over-subscribed), Ooyala will take on additional investors later this year in a second closing.

Impressive numbers but it’s not just about the money. For Ooyala, saddling up with CID and ITOCHU also represents a highly strategic move, as the company tries to expand its footprint in Asia. “It was a conscious point on our part to chose investors who had great ecosystems to leverage throughout Asia,” Fulcher told TechCrunch. “We are doubling down in Asia.”

Ooyala specializes in hosting videos for large corporate and media clients, such as the Telegraph Media Group, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Dell and General Mills ( full disclosure: Ooyala is also a partner of TechCrunch TV). Their primary product is Backlot, a video management system that allows clients to upload and manage content and get access to analytics. Growth has been strong, with the revenue run rate up 300% year-over-year.

Over the last several months, the startup has committed serious resources to its international plans, setting up shop in Japan via its partnership with NTT Smartconnect and, more recently, Australia. Last week, Ooyala appointed John Treloar (formerly of Adobe) as Managing Director for the Australia and New Zealand region. Although the European and North American market still make up 80% of Ooyala’s business, Fulcher says Asia’s potential for online video demand is tremendous. “We’re quite bullish on the entire theatre, we’ve been in Japan now for some time, the pipeline suggests that there is more and more demand for this kind of technology to power online video,” Fulcher says, “Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Australia — those are our top markets”

What is their strategy? Beyond regional investors, Ooyala is in the process of securing new channel partners in Asia and finalizing deals with several “big anchor customers,” Fulcher says. “The kind of clients that will give us deep access into the area.”

Of course, Ooyala is not the only one. A bevy of video players are also rushing into the far corners of Asia— with fistfuls of cash. Rival Brightcove has raised a whopping $103 million, and has had a strong presence in Japan for several years (the company currently has roughly 100 publisher deals in Japan). In August, Brightcove also announced the appointment of Dennis Rose (a veteran of Citrix) to VP of the Asia-Pacific region.

(Source image: Flickr/David Z.)

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This morning’s somewhat vague statement by Apple on updates to it’s developer agreement brought a flurry of questions. Did Apple just allow Flash-powered Apps into the App ecosystem? Will third-party anlaytics companies like Flurry still be blocked? And one important question—did Apple rescind its terms that effectively prevented ad networks that are owned by a device or OS manufacturer (ie Google’s AdMob) from serving ads on iOS devices? According to MediaMemo, it looks like Apple did, in fact change its terms to include non-independent ad networks, such as AdMob, in being able to serve ads on iPhones and iPads.

And Google has just released a statement on its Mobile Ads Blog confirming Apple’s now inclusion of AdMob: “Apple’s new terms will keep in-app advertising on the iPhone open to many different mobile ad competitors and enable advertising solutions that operate across a wide range of platforms.”

Apple’s developer licensing agreement in June allowed only “independent” ad-serving companies tol be able to serve ads. AdMob, because it’s “an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple” (i.e. Google), was restricted from serving ads on apps for the iPhone. AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui confirmed this inn an official response from AdMob. But as we learned in July, Apple didn’t enforce this policy, as AdMob was able to serve ads on iOS devices. This could have been because the FTC was rumored to be sniffing investigating Apple because of these anti-competitive practices.

But Google is now in the clear and can fully reap the benefits from its $750 million acquisition of AdMob and this $1 billion market without the fear of Apple’s wrath.

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If you know who this is and where she's located, you could win a prize in the CNET Road Trip Picture of the Week challenge.

Former President Bill Clinton will take your questions in an upcoming YouTube interview, Comcast has a free service that lets you text to get details about what's on TV, and Google's new search feature is actually good at filtering out the bad stuff.

In April, we announced that French startup fund, ISAI, officially launched with some 24 million euros. The "French entrepreneurs fund" brings together some of the 60 hottest names in French tech, including PriceMinister's founder Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and the former Editor of TechCrunch France, Ouriel Ohayon. The fund announced a first investment in June, putting 1.25 million euros into the France-based, European carpooling platform, Covoiturage.fr - and has just announced a second investment in InstantLuxe, a marketplace for certified authentic luxury goods. InstantLuxe was founded in 2009 and allows individuals and professionals to buy and sell high-end, second-hand goods from brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Bulgari, etc. All items sold on the site are delivered with a certificate of authenticity after being inspected by a network of experts. The site sells everything from jewelry to leather goods to accessories - plus, users searching for a particular item can request it for free.

Trend Micro says that its spotted a zero-day Reader and Acrobat exploit on the Web, identifying the malware by name.

Glam Media is flexing its M&A muscle overseas. Today, it is acquiring German men’s Web property Fantastic Zero from the digital division of German media giant Holtzbrinck and European marketing agency Publigroupe.

Fantastic Zero is a collection of 50 male oriented sites with a reach of 5.5 million unique visitor a month in Germany, and 10 million overall. The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but it is a decent sized acquisition for Glam, which started in the U.S. as a collection of female-oriented sites and a larger ad network. Glam is already the the sixth largest Web property in the U.S. with a reach of 98 million uniques in August, coming up fast on No. 5 AOL’s 107 million (comScore). Fantastic Zero won’t help in the U.S., but it will worldwide, where Glam has a reach of 170 million uniques.

The acquisition helps Glam not so much on the numbers, but in its attempt to broaden out to men. A year ago it launched Brash, and more recently, BrashSports.

Glam raised $50 million last February, and hired a big-gun CFO in former Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe last May. Glam’s M&A machine is just getting rolling. Expect it to pick up more properties to expand its reach both in the U.S. and abroad as it tries to unseat AOL.

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