Katalyst Films founders Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg were in Silicon Valley today. They stopped by TechCrunch HQ (aka my house) before heading off to more important meetings with Dan Rosensweig at Quadrangle Partners and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurely.

The reason for the visit? They are preparing to launch new interactive web content (with an emphasis on the interactive part) and are doing a bit of a road show to see what Silicon Valley thinks of their ideas. I had a chance to see some of the content and hear their monetization strategy. And while I can’t say much yet, this is clearly going to be really entertaining stuff. Advertisers in particular are likely to flock to the platform.

The two decided to focus on the web after a trial run with AOL that began in 2006. That partnership eventually fizzled - rumor is the content was a little too racy for AOL’s taste.

The new content isn’t just entertaining, it’s highly engaging with users and they definitely have a monetization strategy that goes beyond display and pre/post roll ads.

And Kutcher won’t be trying to lock people in to interacting with content under their rules. “If people steal our stuff, it’s fantastic” he said.

Suddently Katalyst Films is doing more than producing video, they’re now building software. That means they need to hire more developers. Their most important hire is a new CTO, Kutcher said. Prepare your resumes.

Sorry for the teaser on this. More to come.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

If you're anything like our boy Ryan, you've been wearing that Wii Fit out ever since you took delivery. Unfortunately, you've probably been doing a bit of unintentional jogging when logging miles back and forth to the local mini-mart for batteries. If you can't seem to keep your Wii Balance Board charged, Nyko has introduced a novel solution: the Energy Pack for Wii Fit. Our pals over at Nintendo Wii Fanboy were able to get ahold of this very unit and put it through its paces, and generally speaking, they were quite impressed with the $20 peripheral-for-a-peripheral. Head on over for the full writeup and a smattering of pics.

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Robert Scoble just finished a half hour interview with Twitter Founders Evan Willams and Biz Stone. The two are surprisingly candid about the scaling problems the service has had since, oh, it launched two years ago.

“The fact that people are frustrated is a sign that we built something people care about,” says Williams a few minutes in. I agree, but that’s no way to run a business. Stone also says that Twitter doubled in size in March/April this year.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

This is a little out of left field, but it could also be interesting. Time Warner Cable is planning on releasing a set-top box to its customers with a built-in cable modem to allow them to watch “Internt TV” on their televisions.

The thing is, there’s no additional information on what this might be. Time Warner already has set-top cable boxes with full digital and HD capabilities, so what this additional device will give customers in addition is a mystery. And why they don’t just build the capability into future standard cable boxes is as well.

We’re guessing it’ll be some sort of DRM-friendly BitTorrent streaming box, but until we get more information, we can only guess.

A few weeks back, we wrote about how Immersion was involved in a bizarre lawsuit involving a firm focused on the "teledildonics" market (look it up -- or, actually, you're probably better off not). Immersion, of course, is well known in the tech world for holding a bunch of patents on "haptic" technology, which many people are more familiar with as "force feedback" in devices like video game controllers. Immersion is not afraid to use its patents and has been involved in numerous lawsuits -- with the big one yielding $130 million from Sony for the force feedback controllers used in the PlayStation. The case mentioned a few weeks ago involved a shell firm that Immersion had done a deal with. Since Immersion didn't want to smear its own name by suing companies involved in force feedback sex devices, it basically licensed the legal rights out to this shell company. However, that shell company felt that Immersion owed it some of the $130 million Sony booty.

While the case with the shell company has now been dismissed, Jim Mullin notes an even more interesting case: Microsoft is also demanding a large cut of the Sony settlement money. Here's where things get tricky. Basically, Immersion had sued Microsoft as well for violating the patents. But, as we've seen other companies do, part of the settlement terms between Immersion and Microsoft are that Microsoft would join the patent battle against Sony and get a cut of any settlement money that came out of that lawsuit. In effect, rather than just paying up to license the patent, Microsoft switched sides in the lawsuit.

However, Immersion used some sneaky tricks to skirt around its agreement with Microsoft -- most specifically never referring to its deal with Sony as a "settlement." Thus, it claimed that it doesn't owe a dime to Microsoft (some thanks Microsoft got for paying up, huh?). So now Microsoft has sued, though muddling the whole case is the fact that in filing the lawsuit, Microsoft released some confidential info, which caused Immersion to sue Microsoft as well. And just think, folks, all this money being spent on lawyers could actually have gone into making better game controllers. But who wants to do that when there are more lawyers to pay?

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"Constraints drive innovation and force focus," according to 37Signals in their popular "Getting Real" book. If that's true, then Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest, announced a couple of weeks ago, should have had writers brimming with creativity. The task? Write a short story in 140 characters. Not less than 140 characters, exactly 140 characters. That's no easy task, but the contest still fielded over 300 entries. Today, Copyblogger revealed the winners.

"Being constrained to exactly 140 characters will spark your creative juices and force you to focus stringently on word choice, sentence structure, and even punctuation," said Copyblogger's Brian Clark in introducing the contest last week, echoing 37Signals as he did. Luckily, it seems to have worked -- the winning entries are tightly wound, beautifully constructed masterpieces that challenge readers to fill in the blanks.

The winning entry entry comes from Ron Gould:

"Time travel works!" the note read. "However you can only travel to the past and one-way." I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

The spirit of the Twitter Writing Contest is reminiscent of Hemingway's famous six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." It's said that Hemingway called those six words his greatest story ever, and two year's ago WIRED magazine brought together a group of best-selling authors to compose their own 6 word masterpieces.

Remember to check out Copyblogger for the other winning stories, and see Daniel Smith's blog for a slideshow of all 331 entries.

Matt Schlicht, a UStreamer and avid Twitter user, advanced a proposed solution to the PR issues the Twitter-folks are currently facing - do a live townhall. The live townhall concept is something that Digg started after they narrowly avoided a top user revolt following the deployment of some new features that weren’t recieved as well as they had hoped.

The obvious idea here is that Twitter and Digg are both services that are enormously popular amongst a particularly vocal subset of the tech user community.  Any time either of these companies falters, even a little bit, because of the nature of their business those foibles are amplified far afield of the appropriate proportions (even if they are technically in the right, the negative press will still often outweigh the positive).

That’s why the townhall is such a great method to utilize. It’s free but for a little bit of your company’s time, and it allows you to connect with your users in a meaningful way, utilizing all aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication. It puts your company out in front of the potential troublespots, acts as a megaphone for not just the rough patches but the bright spots that you’d actually want to highlight. Most of all, it offers a means for explaining in depth all the intricacies of what’s going on behind the scenes that make us scratch our heads and go “Why is Twitter doing that?”

Matt has offered UStream as the platform of choice to broadcast this townhall, and I’d like to join in on his petition and offer Mashable as the official (or even unofficial) home of the liveblog coverage, much like what we do for Digg’s townhalls. We understand that managing a chatroom with that many interested users can be unruly, but when the hordes of Digg fans came for their townhall, we were able to provide a stable and slightly moderated communications arena for them to exist in for the duration.

So Twitter - my suggestion is you accept Matt’s proposal. He’s told me that he’s standing by, and that UStream will put their full efforts into supporting this endeavor and making it an effortless and effective means of communicating with your users on a mass scale.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Digg Townhall Liveblogged Here
Twitter Mobile Interface
Quick Fix For Twitter Troubles
Second Digg Townhall Liveblog Coming to Mashable
Don’t Send Bac’n: Use TwitterSearch
Mosio Uses Twitter For Mobile Q&A
Twitter Adds GMail Contacts Import

Filed under: Laptops

It looks like your dreams of laptop salvation via the Van Der Led Jisus will have to wait a little, as the company has pushed back the release of its diminutive PC to the 28th of July (at least according to the product page). However, if you want to spend a tiny bit more money, they've got a new model that nets you a lot more bang for the buck. Enter the Jisus V2, or as we like to call it -- the second coming of Jisus. The new version features a pink leather (!?) casing, a 10.2-inch 1024 x 600 LED display, a VIA C7-M 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, a VIA Chrome9 graphics chipset, an 80GB hard drive, 802.11a/b/g, and Bluetooth 2.0 support. All this magic will supposedly be available come June 20th for an extremely affordable €349.99 (or about $546).

[Thanks, Takashi]

Read - Jisus V2
Read - Jisus

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It’s for sure a sign of the rise of digital music and casual gaming when it’s reported that one of the greatest bands of all time — Motley Crue — has sold more copies of its new single through the Rock Band downloadable store than it has through iTunes. In fact, Rock Band has almost five times more sales of the track than iTunes, an interesting feat.

Of course there’s a lot less competition in the Rock Band store than there is in iTunes. Rock Band members are hurting for new content, wanting the good stuff every week, whereas iTunes literally gets new stuff every day. Still, it proves that as a money-making idea, in-game distribution might actually be more profitable than traditional digital sales. Now if only I could get it from my Xbox to my iPod I’d be happy.