In the run-up to the Oscars tomorrow, social media intelligence startup uberVU conducted a study of how and where people were talking about the Best Picture nominees.

The data was collected during the week between Feb. 19 and today. The company wasn’t just looking at the number of times a movie was mentioned — it also rated the sentiment of each comment, giving the movies an overall rating between 0 (negative) and 100 (positive). So even though The Artist is largely expected to win by movie industry watchers, it’s actually not the winner of what uberVU is calling the “Social Oscar.” Yes, it received the most social media mentions (68,993), but The Help, with 51,968 mentions, seemed to be better-liked, with “a good range of positive adjectives.”

The Help was the winner with general audiences too — it has the highest domestic gross of any of the nominees, by a considerable margin. No one, however, seems to be predicting that The Help will beat out The Artist for the big award tomorrow night.

I was also curious about how the discussion broke down across different social networking sites. Not surprisingly, the largest number of comments were on Twitter, followed in descending order by public Facebook comments, blogs, and YouTube. Even though The Artist saw the most mentions of all the nominees on Twitter, The Help actually beat it for mentions on Facebook and blogs.

You can see the uberVU-created word cloud for The Help above. And since every startup seems to be contractually obligated to release data in the form of an infographic, here’s a big infographic, too. (In fact, it’s a little big for the TechCrunch layout, so if you want to read all the text, download it or open it in a new window/tab.)

Coverage of the NBA’s All-Star game in Orlando began tonight at 5pm ET, starting with the Sprite Slam Dunk contest, featuring the Indiana Pacers’ Paul George, Minnesota Timberwolves’ Derrick Williams, the Knicks’ Iman Shumpert, and Rockets’ Chase Budinger. The NBA is stepping up its social media coverage of the All-Star game this year, and is making some crowdsourcing-type changes to the Slam Dunk Contest, which we thought were worth quickly sharing.

This year, the dunk contest will only consist of one round, and each competitor will get three dunks, fan voting will open after all four players have performed their acrobatics. But, more importantly, for the first time ever, fans get to vote directly for the winner of the dunk contest through SMS, NBA.com, or the Twitters. To vote on Twitter, fans simply tweet their favorite player’s last name along with the hashtag “SpriteSlam.” The player with the most votes, via this new “dunksourcing” will take home the victory.

Tonight’s All-Star game also includes another “first” for the NBA and social media, thanks to TechCrunch Disrupt winner Shaker, which is, essentially, a virtual nightclub that lives inside Facebook. During this year’s All-Star game, the NBA and Shaker have teamed up to host fans from across the globe in the NBA’s first online arena. The Shaker-NBA partnership will give fans a chance to interact, chat, watch exclusive interviews and highlights, and test eachother’s NBA knowledge.

The league is also offering a bunch of updates and new channels to its GameTime mobile app to bring fans 90-plus hours of streaming video, including everything from highlights to off-the-court interviews, and shenanigans from this year’s ballers.

The NBA believes that this will be the most digital and social All-Star game to date, that is, of course until next year, says the NBA’s Vice President of Marketing, Melissa Brenner. The NBA definitely deserves credit for embracing social media, as Brenner tells us that the NBA now has over 240 million fans of the league across Twitter, Facebook, and Chinese social networks.

The league also plans to post pictures from tonight’s dunk contest on Twitter and Facebook from a special “Dunk Cam” above the backboard. What’s more, they’re also bringing back the popular “All-Star Pulse” feature, which will be keeping tabs on all the trending topics from the weekend and from tonight’s game across Twitter and Facebook.

On top of All-Star Pulse, the new “Social Spotlight” function will be displaying the top tweets, images, and videos shared by fans, presented on NBA.com. Combined, Brenner says that these features will add a whole new visualization layer to all of the social activity and buzz that happens throughout the game.

Unfortunately, the NBA will not be streaming the All-Star game live, for free, but fans will be able to watch a slew of highlights via GameTime, and, as we understand it, international fans should be able to watch the game streaming on NBA.tv.

For more, check out NBA.com here.

Digg’s January saw an increase in page views by 35 percent and was its highest traffic month since October 2010. When it dug into why, it found we’re proud to look smart, hip, or funny by sharing tech news and offbeat content, but we keep our guilty pleasure entertainment and divisive political reading to ourselves.

Specifically, Digg analyzed what people read vs what they shared to their Facebook Timeline in part through the new Digg Social Reader Open Graph which has helped boost Facebook referral traffic by 67 percent. It discovered telling psychological trends in how people want to portray idealized versions of themselves.

According to Digg’s data, ”Entertainment stories were 14 percent of all stories read but less than 4 percent of those added to the Timeline. Likewise, political stories comprise less than 2 percent of those added to a user’s Timeline but close to 10 percent of what people read”. Gaming was another content type rarely shared.

It seems that while many of us are addicted to celebrity gossip and war games, we don’t want everyone to know. We might geek out privately with fellow enthusiasts about Kim Kardashian’s latest romance or a new Call Of Duty map pack, but there’s a stigma about allowing those interests to define our identities. Meanwhile, our social graphs often span across party lines, so we’d rather not share polarizing political content. Better to stay silent than offend someone, it seems. Out of top 100 stories most often published to Timeline, only 244 shares were political and 72 were gaming stories.

[Postscript: Yes, maybe people don't share niche content because they think it will bore most of their friends. But what really bores me is the softball, middle of the road content I can find anywhere. Expose me to your niche, show me why you love it, and I might just geek out with you.]

Instead we try to put our best foot forward, showing off our sense of humor and how in the know we are about developments in tech. Of the stories most shared to Timeline, tech stories got 5,086 shares, 2,060 for offbeat, 951 for world news, and 785 were of business related stories. The first data points are certainly biased by the irreverent tech-loving demographic Digg appeals to. However, the significant presence of world news and business show our desire to appear cultured and motivated. Diggers are gamers and many lean left, but you couldn’t tell from their Timelines.

Screw that. We shouldn’t be embarrassed. Sharing what we’re truly interested in attracts people who love us for who we really are. Why surround yourself with people who don’t get what excites you? No, you don’t need to be overtly confrontational by sharing every hate piece about the demopublican party, but be willing to say something controversial if you believe in it. You’ll spark discussion, and hear conflicting perspectives that help refine your views.

At their worst, social networks like Facebook let us compartmentalize our identity and show different sides to different people. At their best, they connect the different sides and encourage us to be mindful not of what we share, but of how we actually spend our time. That’s what really defines us. So BRB, I’m going to share my love of Marvel comic books, because that’s me.

Popset, a new mobile app from the current Winter 2012 batch of Y Combinator startups, is a way for groups of friends to privately share photos. Oh what, you’ve heard that one before? Yes, it’s true – mobile photo-sharing is a crowded space. However, there hasn’t been a de facto leader established in the particular category Popset is after: sharing photos in private groups, easy photo album creation, and support for exporting entire albums to Facebook.

Each of Popset’s features may remind you somewhat of other apps, including group texting apps like Beluga and GroupMe, the earlier incarnation of Path, Batch, LiveShare, and others, but none of Popset’s competitors share the exact same feature set implemented in the exact same way.

Path, for example, has moved on from only photo-sharing to become a “share everything” app. GroupMe et al. are meant more for group texting, not photo album creation and sharing. Batch lets you upload to Facebook, but it posts links to your Wall – it doesn’t export entire albums. Plus, (and personal preference alert here!), Popset has a look-and-feel that puts it ahead of much of its photo-sharing competition right out of the gate. And for what it’s worth, it has created a good mix of both utility and pleasure.

The app is simple to set up, allowing you to sign in via Facebook, optionally invite friends, then jump right into creating your first album. Thanks to the app’s Facebook integration, you’ll also be able to see the photo albums shared by other Facebook friends who are Popset users, assuming those albums haven’t been set as private.

After starting your album, you give it a title, click next, then, on a very easy to understand screen, you answer three key questions related to privacy: Where? (check or uncheck to have the photos geotagged), Who can add photos? (You, those in your current location, or you plus specific friends), and Who can see this album? (Public or Private).

Albums, whether public, semi-public or private, work well in several scenarios, including private photo-sharing with just a few friends or family members, photo-sharing at events like weddings or parties or for sharing photos around a given topic or interest with other like-minded friends. And if you later decide to share the album on a larger social network like Facebook, exporting the entire album is an option.

However, even though Popset could be used for many purposes, it’s that Facebook export option that could end up being its best feature in the long run. Uploading a lot of photos to Facebook quickly and easily is still a challenge. There are a ton of utility-type applications out there for the purpose (I often use iLoader, for example), and while they get the job done, they don’t do so with any style. And they definitely don’t have Popset’s expanded feature set that could draw you in for other tasks, too, like tweeting out links to photo albums, emailing them, or sharing them over SMS text messaging, for example.

Popset still has to make some improvements though. The Facebook export option won’t support unlimited uploads until a later release (expected soon) – it only supports up to 10 photos at a time right now. The team already plans to add many other interesting features, too, like photo filters, selective photo exports, the ability to choose the album’s privacy settings on Facebook before export, syncing albums’ likes and comments to Facebook, and more.

Popset was founded this spring by a team of four, Phillip Wein, Jan Senderk, Nicolas Boes, and Daniel Wagner and has YC’s $20K in funding, plus the $150,000 from StartFund which all YC companies now receive.

You can grab the app here for free in iTunes.

TradingView, a social finance site that launched last September, has just been upgraded with some new features, including data on European stocks and U.S. stock futures.

The site was created by trading software company MultiCharts. Charts, after all, are often at the heart of stock discussions, so TradingView is a place where those charts are front-and-center. Users can create and share charts with up-to-date data, follow and comment on other charts, and also post their charts to Twitter and embed them on other websites.

Among TradingView’s new features are a watch list for tracking your most important stock prices on one screen, study templates to make it easy to add financial indicators to your chart, and color themes for adjusting the color of a chart with just one click. Asked which new features will make the biggest difference, COO Stan Bokov points to the new data and the watch list.

“New data coverage makes the site useful to a lot more people from all over the world, including Canada and Europe,” he says. “Users can now see data for markets that are relevant to them. Eventually we are hoping to extend coverage to data from all over the world.”

TradingView sees about 2,000 visitors per day, a number that has been growing steadily, Bokov says. And those visitors spend an average of 30 minutes on the site.

Gaming is changing fast these days, especially in the browser. Sure, social games are great and everything, but there’s always been a sense that, as browser-based technologies mature, the opportunities that present themselves will make casual social, Facebook-only gaming look crayon scrawl. Inherently, one of the best parts of gaming is that it’s inherently social, and gamers want deeper, more interactive experiences — from console to free-to-play online games.

Of course, enabling deep, multiplayer experiences puts a lot of stress on the technology and the game’s engineers (coding, synchronizations, de-buggings, oh my!) — even with how far HTML5 has come, it’s still a pain in the butt and can be expensive. That’s where Game Closure entered the picture. We were the first to cover Game Closure back when they launched at the “demo day” of SSE Labs, Stanford University’s student-run startup accelerator. (Now known as StartX.)

At the time, Game Closure described itself as a gaming version of Heroku and Appcelerator, but, for the uninitiated, that means that the team has built a game development environment and SDK, which makes it easy for developers to create, host, and deploy HTML5-based, cross-platform, multiplayer games – on iOS, Android, and Facebook. But what’s really cool about this, especially given where the space was as recently as a year ago, is that the development environment itself doesn’t require additional software, plugins, etc., all you need is your browser.

Mobile and social gaming are already growing like weeds, so there’s an untapped market and lots revenue potential from all the new users on-boarding as those platforms scale, but there’s also a lot of fragmentation, resulting in an increasing demand (among both experienced and novice gamers) for cross-platform availability. To be successful, developers have to be there. That’s why we’ve been seeing the big players like Zynga and EA, who were once content with being one-platform wonders, not only scramble to launch on multiple platforms, but offer direct-to-consumer services, and increase their frequency at which they turn out viable, robust games.

Game Closure has, in part, made that latter obstacle their top priority, and last summer they’d gotten to a point where they believed they could realize cross-platform push with all the bells and whistles in as little as four to six weeks. (For context, this is a task which typically takes developers six months to a year to do.)

So, at Google I/O last summer the team launched its first game, called Popstar Defense, in about five weeks, as proof that its game development tools could be used to create a workable gaming experience, purely written in HTML5. The team has since released a few more games, with some going live, and while some of them have missed, they each represent a step closer to a more powerful gaming technology.

This caught the attention of investors, and less than six months after incorporating officially as a company, Game Closure closed a seed round from an impressive list of investors, including SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Joi Ito, Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, and General Catalyst Partners. In addition to investing in Game Closure’s seed round, Joi Ito, who has served on the board of DeNA, advises Zynga and Twitter, and runs the MIT Media Lab, also joined the startup as an advisor.

But, we’ve heard that it’s not only investors who were interested in the startup. Quite a few of the big players are lacking in their HTML5 strategies, and Game Closure as a young company, looked like a good steal. In fact, the Game Closure CEO confirmed that the company has had “significant inbound acquisition interest” from Facebook, Zynga, GREE, Motorola, and several others. What’s more, our reliable sources close to the deal indicated that Zynga put out the highest bid, its acquisition interest pushing into the $100 million range.

The team turned down these offers, choosing to go it alone. And now a year from launch, the startup has grown to a team of 26 and is adding more coin to its coffers to support its independent exploits, announcing today that it has closed a $12 million series A round, led by new investor Highland Capital Partners, with contributions from existing investors, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and CRV, bringing the startup’s total to just under $13 million.

Carter tells us that they were particularly excited by the fact that Highland Capital’s participation was led by Partner Andy Miller, who has quite a bit of mobile experience to his name, having sold Quattro Wireless to Apple for $275 million, whereupon he joined the company as VP of its iADs platform, and recently left Apple to join Highland.

As to what’s next, the team has recently added analytics and multi-language translation into its game development experience, and, going forward, is looking to add monetization structures to the mix. Right now it’s working with game studios to optimize their HTML5 and mobile gaming experiences, and in the future we might see them tack to a broader focus.

For more, check out Game Closure at home here.

If you like the idea of charting your life in a diary, and possibly sharing that detail with others, but lack the motivation to do all that logging yourself, then this might just be the social network for you.

Evertale, a service that automatically logs your activities through your mobile device, has picked up seed funding from Mangrove Capital – early backers of Skype, shopping sites Brands4Friends and KupiVIP, and a number of other European startups – and is now preparing to launch its app, which is still in beta.

We are still trying to get the exact amount of the investment.

The news of the funding was first noted on the Quintura blog in Russia.

As we first noted when Denmark’s Evertale appeared at TC Disrupt back in September, the service works through an app on your phone – at this point, that phone has to be an Android device, although there are plans to launch on other platforms “soon”, says the company’s co-founder and CEO Francesco Patarnello – and that app essentially collects the pictures you take, the locations you visit, the calls you make and any other details you happen to enter on your device, and collates them together into a mapped view of your “path” through life.

You can then edit out what you want included, and what you’d like to share with others.

Evertale, with a name that sounds not a little like Evernote, may inevitably get compared to the bigger app (and its offshoots, Food and Hello). And in a way, the two are cut from the same cloth: both are created in a similar vein to be used to chart what it is that you do and think about, using your mobile to help with that.

But just as equally, Evertale is also part of growing trends of automation and simplification in apps — trends that almost seem inevitable, given the demands on users’ time and, frankly, the fact that it’s not that enjoyable entering loads of data on a small touch screen.

Another recent force in that trend has been the app Clear – the to-do app that does away with any buttons and text and instead relies on simple swipes to function. Launched only last week, Clear is already claiming 350,000 downloads. For a to-do app.

Just in time for the Presidential and general elections coming up later this year, Votizen, the social media site that helps like-minded voters get together and influence how those elections go, has raised $750,000. And while that may sound like a modest number, in true influencer fashion, it’s the backers that are going to count here.

They include Sean Parker, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, A-Grade Investments (Ron Burkle), and Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter — a group whose value in raising a voting startup’s profile in an important election year could carry more currency than even actual money.

This puts Votizen’s total funding at $2.25 million, including the $1.5 million Votizen raised in 2010.

That will all be going to help expand Votizen’s footprint and usefulness — and its staff, particularly in the area of engineering talent. (Read more on that in the update below.)

So far, Votizen says that over 480,000 voters have been connected together by its services, a base built up through the ranks of Votizen’s active members, which number around 20,000. The services can be used via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. The company has also started to amass a big trove of voting data from the U.S. and is ramping up activities in line with the presidential election in 2012.

We’re just about to talk with the CEO of Votizen, David Binetti, and will update this post with more detail after that.

Update: Binetti says a good portion of this recent, convertible strategic round will be used to support hiring efforts, especially in the area of engineers, to expand Votizen’s 11-person team. He says that his company is in the lucky position of solving a “real problem” at the center of its business, which is attracting strong candidates who want to do something to make a difference:

“There’s no question startups have been quite challenged to find good talent, and that’s because they’re not working on real problems,” he said. “This is not just a social game.  We’re helping to connect individuals to solve big problems. That’s going to attract a certain kind of person and puts us in a strong position.”

Some of the investor interest, he said, came from the fact that voting and elections are two areas that have yet to be truly disrupted by the Internet and social media – although there have certainly been a lot of grassroots efforts, such as the protests around SOPA/PIPA, that have demonstrated the potential.

The plan, said Binetti, is not just to focus on the presidential election but to also get people engaged in the “long tail” of politics: Senate and Congressional races, and “all the way down to school boards,” as it looks to make more direct connections between people and move them away from the influence of 30-second attack ads. If all works out to plan, Votizen wants to “reduce the influence of money in politics,” he said.

There is also a lot of scope for growth outside of the U.S. and when Votizen makes that move it will likely first be to other English-speaking countries such as the U.K., Canada, Australia and India, “the world’s largest democracy,” said Binetti.

Facebook is complicated, but most users don’t have the patience to dig through the Help Center to find answers. But thanks to a brilliant new update Facebook is testing, they won’t have to.

I just discovered that for some users, clicking “Help” in the Account drop-down atop any Facebook page now shows Help topics relevant to the page you’re viewing. Instead of directing you to the Help Center, answers open right in the drop-down. If rolled out, Facebook could expect fewer users bouncing out of frustration, and you could expect fewer customer service calls from your parents.

If you’re in the test base and click Help in the top right drop-down while on the home page, you’ll see articles about the news feed, notifications, and sharing, which in turn reveal sub-questions. From the profile you’re shown Timeline and privacy answers, while the photos page suggests how to upload, tag, and edit photos. Facebook even proceeds suggestions with benevolent HAL9000-style “Hi Josh, what do you need help with?”

Not all sections of the site have tailored suggestions yet, but I expect them to be added for Messages, apps, and the most baffling page of all — privacy settings. If you don’t see the right article suggested, there’s always a button to go to the full, searchable Help Center. This is the first major change to Help Center since a set of gamification leaderboards were launched in September 2010 and later scrapped. I expect it will perform well and be rolled out globally.

When Facebook started, it was for Ivy League college students, and was basically a network of profiles. Few options, smart users. Now the average Facebook page lets users take 20-30 different actions and its user base includes a wide range of education backgrounds, ages, and levels of Internet understanding.

The most common complaints I hear about Facebook are it’s too confusing, or stem from a misunderstanding leading people to assume Facebook is being evil or deliberately hard to use. People fear what they don’t understand, and fear leads to hate. When you can’t figure out how a feature works, you’re likely to either leave the site or abandon that feature. Confusion could be costing Facebook tons of engagement and ad views.

That’s why in-line Help suggestions is a great pre-IPO move. It could assist monetization by directly improving the user experience. With time, Facebook could optimize suggestions to surface commonly checked articles and what you actually clicked on last.

To avoid disruption, Facebook needs to combine functionality not necessarily with simplicity, but with usability. In-line Help suggestions could permit Facebook some more leeway to add options, and improve adoption of those already available. Making people more connected will be a lot easier when they don’t feel lost amongst a thousand features.

Today Facebook rolled out a limited redesign of Groups, featuring a big new Timeline-style cover image, and a prompt for users to prominently label “What should people post in this group?” See, if you’re not careful, your intimate Facebook Groups can balloon in population and stray off topic generating annoying notifications for everyone.

This redesign makes Groups feel more close knit, and will encourage them not to devolve into a chaotic array of kitten photos, political diatribes, and self-serving announcements. After all, that’s what the news feed is for.

Groups previously displayed a small “group image” that admins could upload. I bet people often chose some generic clip art or a photo that appeared too tiny to be meaningful. Now the top of Groups looks more like Timeline, with a sweeping banner image that defaults to a collage of members but can be replaced with any image. Cleverly, the default collage shows the most recent members to post to the Group.

The redesign also makes links to members, photos, events, and docs more obvious. This is the second time Facebook has increased the prominence of these links to draw usage and compete with Google Docs as a collaboration tool.

Since Groups launched in October 2010 users have been able to add a description. However, they were provided no prompt as to what to enter, and likely just noted a theme rather than a purpose. Now a prompt and input field for group guidelines are immediately visible in the right sidebar.

This little prompt to display “What should people post” might not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve ever been in a big noisy Facebook Group, you probably wanted to tell everyone to shut up until you muted its notifications. Then you ceased to be alerted to the few useful posts and forgot all about the Group.

When I started a Group called SF Socialites soon after the product launched, I knew I had to keep noise to a minimum if people were actually going to use it to hear about cool local events. So I added the description “We keep posting volume low so you can leave notifications on. Check the Docs for guidelines”, then laid out ground rules in a doc that prohibited self-promotion, asked people to comment and post only when necessary, and detailed how I’d kick you out of my sweet Group if you annoyed people.

Eighteen months later and the group now has 280 members, no spam, and has led to some epic last minute meet-ups at concerts because people don’t mute it. Hopefully Facebook users heed the new description prompt, create focused discussion and collaboration spaces, and get as much out of Groups as I do.

There have been a few walkie-talkie mobile apps that have come out on iOS and Android over the last year or two, but it wasn’t until last fall that one of them had a breakout moment. Voxer suddenly hit it big with the young black community in Cleveland and a few other big cities last November. Since then, it has spread to the rest of the world, topping the app store and gaining a wide range of users – including venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road here in Silicon Valley.

By which I mean, lots of VCs are both using it, and looking at investing in it. Voxer has spent the last couple months working on closing an angel round that it had left open, according to industry sources, while also working on its first venture funding. It’s raising $15-20 million at a pre-money valuation of $150 million, says one person. Another counters, saying that the valuation is going to be at least double that.

Among the attractions, beyond the usage numbers, are the company’s patents and tech about its live-streaming voice service. Many of its competitors are essentially using existing voice mail technology, which results in delays between the person recording and the person getting the message. Voxer is able to make everything live, to the point that you can talk to each other at the same time. It is the most similar to the Nextel walkie talkie phones that have been out for years, except it lets you listen to messages whenever you want and talk one-to-one with other users.

Beyond the product and tech, one of the other main attractions is that the company is looking at doing what Nextel did, and distribute across larger organizations. Indeed, founder Tom Katis told me in November that the idea for the company resulted from his time as a soldier in Afghanistan, trying to coordinate reinforcements and medical teams during a firefight. He’s also the founder of one of the top security contractors in the world, Triple Canopy, so you can imagine him using his connections to that industry to help drive enterprise sales.

The big question now is how high investors are going to be willing to go. An additional source says that some top firms have been very interested, but are unsure of the company’s long-term trajectory. It has 2.5 million daily active users, one person says, but most of this growth has been in the last two to three months. The uncertainty here is what the future holds for Voxer’s style of communication – short-form voice message recordings, that users can listen to sequentially in a text-message style flow. The fact that VCs are finding the format valuable is no doubt helping the company raise.

I haven’t pinned down which venture investors are going to lead or participate, but names mentioned have included a good portion of the most prominent firms in the Valley.

So there you are, an independent filmmaker at a top film festival. Your movie is received well, gets some good buzz, but it’s six months before you secure distribution. You’re ready to release, but remember all those people eager to watch the movie six months ago? They’ve gone on to something else. The point is that independent filmmakers have a tough time with marketing and promotion; they don’t have the resources or tools to expand their outreach. Only the big Hollywood studios have the resources to drive enough cross-platform advertising to stir up buzz over their upcoming blockbusters, six months in advance. And, it goes without saying that this isn’t just limited to independent filmmakers, it’s true for musicians, artists, and many more.

That’s why early ThePoint/Groupon employee Shawn Bercuson, Zoosk Co-founder John Smart, Dan Rummel, Lee Wilson, and Tyler Seymour launched Prescreen last September – to bring movie lovers an easy way to discover independent films they wouldn’t otherwise and, in turn, give filmmakers, producers, and more a shot at drumming up interest in (and bringing eyeballs to) their work.

Prescreen aims to provide independent filmmakers with an alternative to traditional advertising and marketing channels with an on-demand platform that borrows a page from Groupon, serving users with daily emails that feature a particular film that it thinks will strike their fancy. Users can watch trailers of a wide range of movies for free, discovering new, curated content, and then purchase the content they want to watch, streaming it on-demand for up to 60 days.

Today, Prescreen is getting a makeover in an attempt to boost its social credentials, relaunching with a new social movie discovery experience that features Facebook Open Graph integration. While Prescreen initially targeted independent films, Bercuson tells us that the team doesn’t want to limit Prescreen content just to movies; instead, they’re going after all long-form content, and will begin to add indie-ish stand-up comedy specials, concerts, larger budget movies, and more. Prescreen aims to continue supporting indie movies, focusing on premium content – a more targeted, socially crowdsourced version of Netflix.

In the new Prescreen, users sign up for free through Facebook Connect to watch free trailers and can bookmark new content with its “add to queue” button (something with which both Netflix and users of the awesome Watch It service will be familiar with) before going on to rent on-demand.

And what good would having an early Groupon employee be without offering users the chance to earn rewards and discounts by sharing movies with their friends? Prescreen continues to offer social sharing discounts, as well as daily deal-type offerings when new titles are introduced on the site. With the new Facebook integration, users can now have viewed trailers or queued movies pop up in their Facebook timeline or news feed, and, if their Facebook friends have signed up, users can also view what their friends are watching.

Again, it probably now goes without saying, but everyone’s on Facebook – even your cat – and social proof, or influence, has proven to be an effective way to discover new content, travel destinations, music, clothes, etc. that is relevant to you personally. The idea being, who knows you better than your friends? And whose recommendations do you trust more than a close friend, or loved one? A stranger?! Don’t be ridiculous! Not in the Facebook Era.

Thus, allowing users to see what their friends are watching helps them discover titles that are relevant to them, but it’s also a great, organic way for content producers to turn up the buzz on their work. Good old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, viral-social-graph-style.

As to monetization, beyond taking a cut of on-demand sales (the rest goes directly to the content owner), Prescreen also provides content producers with analytics and demographic info related to their content, allowing them to better target their marketing efforts. Those who offer their content exclusively to Prescreen get that stuff for free, and those who are already sharing their content on other sites pay a fee.

Prescreen’s model definitely capitalizes on a growing trend among artists, which is to bypass traditional deals with big media, (like going to HBO for a comedian), and offer their content on their own site for a price they choose. This obviously also means they don’t have to deal with profit-sharing. Prescreen could become a go-to resource for artists that want to avoid contracts, losing control of their content and so on.

The CEO also tells us that not only are they planning to build a dashboard for content producers (to view analytics, etc.), but they want to expand the role of content curation on the site by bringing in, say, a famous director, who gets to feature his or her favorite indie horror films for a week. This seems like a no-brainer, as it could be a big draw for viewers, and fun for the notables.

Obviously, the startup wants to take advantage of the multi-billion dollar industry that is entertainment marketing. Bercuson believes that by offering Facebook integration for viral sharing and by working with content producers to place ads on the site and giving them access to views, demographics, it will be able to boost conversion and get a leg-up on Hollywood, which is still stuck in those CPM models. At least that’s the hope.

By tracking views on trailers, and then comparing that to what viewers actually watch, the company will start to get a better sense of how the two correlate – how much/often intent (watching trailers) leads to making a purchase. That’s the key. They can then tweak discounts, flash deals, etc. accordingly, and marketers start to know how best to target, and when.

The startup has raised $1 million in seed financing to date, from the likes of Former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, Ed Cluss, Auren Hoffman of Rapleaf, Saad Khan of CMEA Capital, and Bercuson himself. They’re also in the process of attempting to build out their advisory board with industry veterans, and already have Blockbuster exec Tim Wesley and IM Global Founder Stewart Ford.

For more on Prescreen, check them out at home here. And let us know what you think in the comments.

If you’re an iPhone user, you may not be as familiar with Astrid, which has turned into one of the most popular “to-do,” list-making apps for Android. We first wrote about Astrid when it joined thirteen other startups that composed AngelPad’s second batch. Astrid’s value proposition was simple: Offer users a clean, easy-to-use interface to enable sharing and collaboration around tasks. Other services have now come along to make this a familiar service, but the goal was for groups (businesses) to be able to assign tasks to each other, and broadcast to the group when those tasks are completed.

In the big picture, Astrid was conceived to be a social way to encourage friends and colleagues to help tackle your to-do list, from sending memos to buying your mom a Mother’s Day present. A year removed from AngelPad, Astrid has moved across platforms, as the startup now offers a mobile site, Android, and iOS apps, with a Windows Phone app on the way. But, what some may not know is that Astrid was started as a side-project by co-founder Tim Su, then a software engineer at Palantir Technologies. Su was joined by co-founder Jon Paris, and the two launched Astrid on the Android Market when it was still young, back in the fall of 2008.

Collectively, the team were early adopters and proponents of Android, says Paris, but like so many others, they moved on to focus on building for iOS and other platforms. But, today, Astrid is officially returning to the platform on which it got its start, launching a new version of its service for Android tablets, accompanying a complete redesign for Android phones that features streamlined design and a new set of integrations aimed at helping users be more productive.

More specifically, Astrid’s new app for Android tablets can be used independently, or synced with Android phones, iOS, and Astrid.com. The app is available now for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom, and will be made available in the next week for Kindle Fire through the Amazon App Store. The goal here, Paris says, is to make the UX easy for new users to adopt and learn without disrupting the experience of those using older versions.

And, to that point, the CEO tells us that Astrid has helped people complete over 30 million tasks and has racked up 3 million downloads across platforms. Yet, while Astrid is one of the most downloaded paid to-do apps in the Android Marketplace, the startup is today launching a new revenue stream via integration with TaskRabbit. Astrid has long offered users the ability to share tasks with family and friends, but, as part of its new look, users can now outsource individual to-dos to TaskRabbit, the fast-growing personal assistant that lets users list errands or tasks that needed to be completed in its marketplace. For those unfamiliar, it’s basically an on-demand delivery network for outsourced tasks.

Astrid is also now offering users the ability to view suggestions/ideas through integrated search with Amazon and Google, for the simple reason that many of us start their tasks with a Google search before popping over to Amazon to make a purchase. Again, in case it’s unclear, what Astrid is trying to do here is match to-dos and tasks with products and services that help get them done, a la TaskRabbit and Amazon. Paris says that he thinks this can be a win-win for both eCommerce retailers (and startups like TaskRabbit), as Astrid’s users are inherently people with full plates, looking to manage their tasks and lighten the loads. And eCommerce sites now get the benefit of getting traffic from people that are more likely to buy.

In the case of TaskRabbit, for every user that ends up purchasing help on the site, for every transaction, Astrid takes a cut. Paris — and he’s not alone — believes that the to-do list space is understandably a potential goldmine for purchase intent, something that has been supported by the interest around Pinterest and its related monetization path.

Clearly Gmail set the stage for crawling what is considered personal and sensitive information (your inbox) and matching it to related ads. Astrid is basically doing the same, serving up related ads when you search within the app for products/services that help you check off your tasks, but the CEO says that he understands the personal nature of to-dos, so users can turn off this new feature. Although not totally analogous, given what happened to Path, transparency in these situations is definitely advisable.

As to what’s next, Paris mentioned that they are working with TaskRabbit to provide additional features around outsourcing your task list. A lot of people don’t know which of their tasks to outsource to other people, so the team is expecting to offer the ability for its users to post their task lists on TaskRabbit and let other users flag all the items that they can help with. Beyond that, the startup is also considering adding a premium version of the service, and is embarking on its mission to raise its Series A. (It raised a seed round back in July of last year from Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and a few angel investors.)

As the collaborative economy heats up, and startups like TaskRabbit gain traction, it behooves services like Astrid to take group collaboration and task assigning outside its own walls, to the marketplaces that specialize in that kind of commerce. That can potentially be a lucrative relationship for both parties, though that remains to be seen. Along with a refreshed look for Android, adding subtasks to its service is another bonus. And, hey, now the 10 people that have Android tabs get to use Astrid 4.0, too. (Just kidding.)

For more on Astrid, check it out at home here.

Twitter says that 70 percent of its users come from outside the U.S. at the moment, and so it makes sense that this is where it is also investing more to grow the rest of its business. Today the company announced that it has appointed another sales executive to beef up its efforts outside its home market.

Stephen McIntyre, most recently of Google, will be overseeing Twitter’s international self-serve business, based out of Twitter’s European HQ in Dublin, which Twitter opened in September 2011.

McIntyre’s appointment comes about a week after reports emerged that Shailesh Rao, currently based in New Delhi, India, would be leaving Google to join Twitter. Rao is now Twitter’s new VP of International Revenue.

The news also comes as one third-party Twitter analytics company, Twopcharts, claimed that Twitter this week would pass the 500 million user mark. Twitter’s most recent official figure for active users comes from September 2011, when it said it had 100 million active users.

Both announcements were “officially” confirmed on Twitter today by Adam Bain, the company’s overall president of global revenue.

Update: We now have slightly more detail from Bain himself. “2012 will be a pivotal year for Twitter and our advertising business,” he said. “These hires are key to bringing our Promoted Products to more markets around the world and helping businesses everywhere get value from advertising on Twitter. I couldn’t be more excited.”

Both McIntyre and Rao had been with Google for years and played a significant part in Google’s international growth.

McIntyre (pictured left) is the latest hire for Twitter’s office in Dublin, opened in September last year. According to his LinkedIn profile – not updated to include the Twitter news at the time of writing– he was senior director, new media products and platform at Google, where he was also overseeing self-service platforms for international advertisers. That job was also based in Dublin. McIntyre had been with Google since 2005, working in a variety of jobs in sales for the search giant.

Twitter rolled out its self-serve platform only last week; this indicates that Twitter very much wants an aggressive roll-out of that platform.

Rao, meanwhile, who had been with Google since 2007, had been MD of Google India and also oversaw display sales for Asia. His appointment signals a key move for Twitter to start monetizing its service in international markets where it had not done so before.

While McIntyre is looking after a specific platform, it looks like Rao, as a revenue VP, might have a wider remit. Twitter tells us that he will be tasked with setting up direct sales operations in new markets. It is not clear if it might also include licensing deals along the lines of the one announced earlier this week between Yandex and Twitter to provide real-time search results. Although there were no financial terms revealed with that announcement, a similar one between Twitter and Microsoft to provide similar data for Bing was reported to be worth $30 million.

The hires come at the same time that Twitter is looking to expand its employees outside the U.S. That hiring drive has also seen the company looking for additional staff to manage PR and others to focus on content development from specific verticals, such as sports.

Every time a dating site succeeds in making a match, it loses two users. To offset churn, Zoosk tells me that tomorrow it’s announcing a new business model that complements subscriptions with date discounts, expert relationship advice, gift ideas, holiday reminders and online scrapbooks. The products could convince users to pay even after they’ve found their sweethearts. If users fall in love with the new revenue streams, the whole dating industry could start courting happy couples.

Zoosk now has 15 million monthly active users across its site, mobile, and Facebook app. It also has a $90 million annual sales run rate, up from $20 million in 2009. Still, it’s had to raise $40.5 million to buy ads and failed dating sites so it could replace the users who canceled their subscriptions once they’ve found a mate. Most users don’t want to look like losers by sharing their Zoosk activity on Facebook or Twitter, so the service misses out on the organic virality enjoyed in other verticals.

But Zoosk may have found a way out of this downward spiral. While a $12-$30 monthly subscription may seem expensive, singles, and men in particular, are used to forking over cash to impress dates with dinners, drinks, and nightlife. Zoosk could grow profits if it captured some of this spend by offering discount package dates similar to romantic experience subscription service BeCouply.

Once a couple emerges from the high-priced date honeymoon period, Zoosk could sell them on reminders and gift ideas. It could take cut of spend on birthdays, Valentine’s Day, and the winter holidays, as well as digital scrapbooks.

Finally, Zoosk could identify couples on the verge of breakup through on-site behavior analysis that surfaces users returning to their profiles for the first time in months. Then it’s as simple as targeting them with in-house ads about how true love never dies and they’ll never find someone better.

[Image Credit: iStockPhoto]

Referral traffic is pouring out of Pinterest and Facebook’s Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab’s licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their social curation fix. It also instantly roots your site into Facebook’s confusing APIs so purchases, comments, reviews, and pins are automatically blasted at friends of your visitors.

Pinterest’s simple, stable sharing canvas has struck a chord with ecommerce shoppers and middle America’s women in particular. You could add Pin It buttons to your site and hope they get clicked, but great websites steal, they don’t borrow. Sociable Labs licenses a website personalization SaaS to sites that want to instantly get social. EverShare Gallery mimics Pinterest’s home page activity board, but only displays trending products and those shared by a user’s friends.

I’ve spoken to several developers and they want to add Frictionless Sharing, but they’ve found the Facebook developer docs confusing. Considering how most sites and apps that integrates it see traffic go through the roof, there’s surely plenty of sites looking for a turnkey hose into the Facebook Ticker, Timeline, and news feed. EverShare Connector makes it as easy as writing a check.

Once integrated, users don’t even have to go back to Facebook to see what friends are sharing. The sidebar activity feed also includes the option to turn off sharing, for those who don’t want friends to know how many shoes they buy.

Virality best practices are developing faster than most companies can employ them. Meanwhile, good developers and designers are in short supply. For content sites, buying referral traffic might not produce big ROI. But for ecommerce sites, a monthly SaaS subscription could pay for itself quickly since Sociable Labs says socially sourced traffic converts 250-300% higher.

Research firm eMarketer has put together a few interesting data points that show Google doing better in display ads than you might have realized. That is, by growing this business across properties and networks that it at some point acquired — YouTube, DoubleClick, and mobile (AdMob) — it’s set to pass Facebook’s own display business.

The social network had the highest online ad sales of any company in the U.S. last year, at $1.73 billion. But that was a mere $200 million or so above Google. This year, eMarketer expects a similar story, with Facebook bringing in $2.58 billion versus Google’s $2.54 billion. Things change in 2013 and 2014, further off from what the data can tell us accurately.

The firm thinks Facebook’s growth rate is going to plummet after this year, down to 13 percent in 2014, while Google’s is going to continue at nearly 50 percent through 2013 and still at nearly 30 percent in 2014.

I’m not ready to bet on that.

The estimates are based on publicly available documents from both companies, and other sources. On Google’s side, its earnings from last quarter indicated that its non-search ads were on track to reach $5 billion a year, or 12 percent of its total business. This is double what it brought in over the previous five quarters. YouTube is getting better and better at monetizing videos, DoubleClick is a market leader in online display ads, and AdMob has a strong position across mobile platforms. I agree it makes sense to be bullish about this part of Google’s business.

On Facebook’s side, eMarketer’s original estimate for its revenue had been $2.01 billion in the US, but Facebook’s S-1 filing proved this to be around 15 percent over what it actually was. The projections here read as if eMarketer feels burned by being so positive about last year. But the report manages to qualify itself in the event that Facebook revenue does in fact start to grow more quickly, by noting the potential benefits of newer advertising features like Sponsored Stories.

That’s the thing. Facebook’s ad business is still young, the company is fine-tuning all sorts of interesting features, and there are other ways that the business could see new growth, for example if Facebook launches a web-wide ad network that competes with DoubleClick and the rest of the online ad industry. 2013 and 2014 are a long ways off, and other numbers like traffic are looking fine.

Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.

The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product.

Explains Retickr co-founder Brian Trautschold, “information overload is an epidemic – content is being created faster than ever before, and people can’t keep up.” But he clarifies that his startup is not a simply a news reader – it’s a big data company. “We are focusing on an algorithmic approach that we believe should be individual-centric…our API learns what people read, like or dislike, and share. As we roll personalization out, users will begin to see content catered to them, and discover news they would have missed before,” he says.

The idea for a personalized, ever-learning news reader is not a new one, but these days, it’s more common to see such things launching as iPad apps, not as desktop software. (See, for example, Evri for iPad or News360). Retickr plans to address other platforms too, including web and mobile, but started with the Mac app instead.

With the updated version of the Retickr app (ver. 2.0), which rolls out today at noon (ET) on the Mac App Store, you can now sync your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds and then incorporate those streams into “playlists” along with the news feeds from over 85,000 sites that the service crawls. This addresses one of users’ bigger complaints about the earlier version of Retickr’s product: an inability to import OPML files or sync with Google Reader. Done!

The app will appeal to the social dashboard user base (TweetDeck users, e.g.), but aims to help cut down on the noise of the real-time streams with customized controls that let you configure how fast news scrolls by. But the name “Retickr” comes from the app’s key feature: its news ticker. The ticker is reminiscent of an older product called Snackr, which I happily used until I couldn’t stand its Adobe AIR-ness any more.

A word of warning for serious RSS connoisseurs, however: Retickr took forever to import my 1,000+ Google Reader feeds. It’s unclear if this was an issue with the alpha version of the product I was using, or a serious bug that still needs to be addressed. But with a million and half now in the bank, I expect the issue to be resolved soon.

If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?)

At conception, Newsle mostly focused its efforts on becoming an archive for interesting (older) news about friends and people you care about. (You can read Erick’s early coverage here.) But, in testing the idea with its some 10K beta users, the founders discovered that it turns out most people have friends who are in the news every single week. And this doesn’t just apply to those in the tech industry, nearly everyone has an acquaintance or five that appear in local papers, blogs, and beyond.

The startup’s beta users wanted a better way to keep track of their friends, loved ones, and contacts popping up in the news in realtime. So, Newsle has been heads-down in stealth mode for the past nine months building technology to enable this kind of news-based friend-tracking, and the new version officially launches today.

In its new garb, Newsle has basically built a massive RSS feed crawler that processes more than 100K news sources every day, culling together over 1 million articles from major media outlets, blogs, as well as local publications. The startup allows you to then pull your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts into its engine so that it can serve you a stream of news content that focuses on the people you want to stay in touch with. Users can then Facebook message or tweet the people they’re following directly from Newsle’s web interface. Or they can drill down, set more specific alerts that get sent to their inbox daily, weekly, and so on.

Users can not only follow their Facebook and LinkedIn friends, but also choose from a list of celebrities, comedians, actors, and business people, staying on top all news related to Lady Gaga. It sounds a little stalker-ish, but it’s a great tool for, say, startups looking to keep tabs on VCs, or for my many fans to keep track of my posts. (You’re welcome!) The founders tell us that they really wanted to pick up where Google Alerts leave off, focusing on friends and people we care about.

As Erick pointed out, if Newsle sounds familiar, it’s because the idea has been tried before in various incarnations, most notably Rohit Khare and Samil Ismail’s now-defunct Angstro, which eventually morphed into Knx.to to be later acq-hired by Google. Previous attempts haven’t been successful, but Newsle has a great UI to recommend it, works well, and looks snappy.

Obviously, tackling the enormous amount of news content out there on the Interwebs is no easy feat. The service will really live or die based on how relevant the content is that it serves to its users. Right now, since quite a few other TechCrunch writers are my friends on Facebook, Newsle is serving me their posts on TechCrunch, but if you’re looking for news about those people, and not written by those people, that could be a strike against. It’s no easy thing to separate the equivocating metadata or profile information that comes with bloggers’ news posts.

The founders have been hard at work creating and fine-tuning these disambiguation algorithms that allows Newsle to, among other things, distinguish between commonly occurring names in the news and those who are actually your friends. With so much content coming into its silo, that can be tricky.

But that’s where funding can come in handy. Newsle is officially announcing today that it raised $600K in seed financing from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. The startup is using its new capital to hire engineers to help in tweaking its algorithms, and to launch mobile apps (which should be going live in the near future).

Newsle is still early in the process and hasn’t yet solidified its monetization strategy, but one can imagine that a service like this would be appealing to businesses, especially to marketers and sales people. The founders also said that they will add further local news sources as more users come on board, and they get a better sense of which particular outlets are most in demand.

While the goal has really been just to build an open-ended resource that allows people to track news about their friends, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see the startup eventually offer more targeted, subject-specific content and tracking.

For more, check out the new, new Newsle at home here, and let us know what you think.

140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.

Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads (and yes, they should work on mobile). Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag.

Co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III told me via email that 140 Proof’s biggest advertisers have been asking for video ads “for a long time.” He pointed to several things that make this a good move for the company. For one, it allows brands to deliver video ads targeted at people with a specific interest, and to deliver those ads in a social stream. For another, it places the videos in the perfect context for further sharing. Manoogian even pitches this as a way to help your standard TV commercial stay relevant.

“The new video ad unit lets brands get more value out of that expensive 30-second TV commercial that lots of viewers aren’t seeing, since they’re now watching shows on Tivo or Hulu or (ahem) BitTorrent,” Manoogian says. “The social video ad unit lets brands reach those users in a context where they are already looking for ‘the next big thing’.”

The company is also sharing some numbers about its recent progress. In 2011, 140 Proof says that it increased revenue by 700 percent, that the average media buy across all customers doubled, and that it tripled its headcount. During that time, the company also raised a $2.5 million Series B from BlueRun Ventures and others. Advertisers include UPS, Nike, Victoria’s Secret, and many others.