Roger Avary is one of the writers of the movie Pulp Fiction. He wrote the movie along with Quentin Tarantino. This past August Avary pleaded guilty to manslaughter for causing a car accident that killed a passenger and injured his wife. He has to serve one year of jail time as the punishment.

However the punishment did not hinder Avary to carry on writing. He is sending some status updates in 140 characters through his Twitter account. The Twitter account has not yet been verified but a friend of Avary’s says that it really is him tweeting from behind bars.

How Avary would have access to a computer while in prison is a mystery. The tweets are coming from the “web” so it is assumed that they are coming from a public computer. His Twitter account has over 10,000 followers.

Chegg isn’t the only online textbook rental company that raised funding this week. BookRenter.com announced that they have raised $6 million in funding as part of the company’s first round. Investors included Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management.

BookRenter’s growth was “300 percent year-over-year,” stimulated by the the back to school season. BookRenter is led by CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia.

Currently BookRenter has 80,000 customers across 5,000 college campuses and is predicting that they will earn $10 million in revenue this year.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters last week that “Android and Chrome will likely converge over time”. Both open source operating systems use Linux and Webkit browser code. The operating systems are very similar in user interface as well.

I was looking through some of the referral traffic from Pulse2.com and I discovered one of the hits came from Bing.com/twitter. Microsoft is being quiet about the service as of right now which is why they are calling it Twitter Beta. The URL of the service is http://www.bing.com/twitter/. The original Microsoft and Twitter deal was announced on October 21.

At the top of Bing Twitter is a list of the hottest topics on Twitter. For example a lot of people are searching for MP34FREE, New Moon, Thanksgiving, AMAs, Black Friday, and Bengals right now on Twitter. Underneath the Hottest Topics are a list of blog posts being tweeted about that are related to each of those topics.

The two most recent tweets by Twitter users are displayed beneath those blog post links and Bing gives you the option to retweet it by clicking this icon:

When you conduct a Twitter search on Bing, there are results for blog post links and the 4 latest tweets related to the keyword(s) you entered. Once again the blog post links have the two latest related tweets underneath them. The 4 latest tweets related to the keyword(s) you entered is collected in real-time from Twitter.

I did a search on the keyword “Twitter” and the 4 latest tweets were changing about every minute. There is an option to “See more Tweets about” the keyword you enter in case you missed one of the results that you liked.

What are your thoughts about Bing Twitter search? Do you foresee yourself using this service often? What is your Twitter application preference? Let us know in the comments. I personally like TweetDeck the most.

Late last week court documents revealed that Rebecca Swift will be taking Facebook and Zynga to court over scam advertisements that were embedded within applications such as Mafia Wars and YoVille. Zynga designed the Facebook applications and the social network hosted them.

Rebecca Swift claimed that the ads were “highly misleading.” But there is a federal law that gives web sites immunity for material that they did not create. The controversy started after Michael Arrington started a rant against the social network gaming companies. Arrington even posted a video of the Zynga CEO admitting that he “did every horrible thing in the book” to grow in revenues. Swift claims she lost $200 as a result of the scam advertisements.

The law that might make the case easy on Facebook and Zynga is the Communications Decency Act. Google used this law to protect themselves recently against a lawsuit that involved fraudulent ringtone advertisements appearing on their search results.

eBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar is starting up a new venture in Honolulu, Hawaii. The venture will focus on issues taking place in Hawaii. Omidyar is partnering with eBay VP Randy Ching on the new project.

“We’re starting something up in our own backyard,” stated Omidyar on his blog. “We are creating a Honolulu-based local news service that will produce original, in-depth reporting and analysis of local issues in Hawaii… We have a lot of work to do before our public launch in early 2010.”

Omidyar is also close to finishing up his Ginx project with Ching. Ginx is expected to be a recommendation website that utilizes Twitter.

Through eBay and other ventures, Omidyar’s net worth is at $5.5 billion.

Above is a picture of Quebec resident Natalie Blanchard. She lost her insurance benefits because of the above photo and several other photos that were on Facebook. Blanchard was on a long-term disability for 18 months because of a depression diagnosis. Her insurance company ruled that she was no longer depressed because she did not appear to be that way on her Facebook status messages and photos.

One of her Facebook status messages said that she had climbed a mountain recently. She was collecting the benefits because a psychologist said that she should take time off from her job at IBM.

Some of the other pictures showed Blanchard at bars, beaches, and male strip shows. But Blanchard said that she was at those events after her insurance company stopped paying her. Manulife disagreed about that. Blanchard and her lawyer will be suing Manulife in the near future as the result of what she believes to be a violation of privacy.

Chegg is the biggest online textbook rental company and they are aggressively funding themselves in order to expand their business. The company raised $57 million in Series D equity funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Insight Venture Partners also provided Chegg with $25 million in credit facility. Before that Pinnacle Ventures and TriplePoint Capital provided Chegg with $30 million in debt facility. This gives Chegg a total of $112 million to work with.

Insight Venture Partners Managing Director Deven Parekh will be joining the Chegg Board of Directors as part of the funding round. By providing textbook rentals, Chegg has helped students across 6,400 colleges save about $65 million.

“We are thrilled with the continued excitement from leading investors who understand the tremendous value we provide to students around the country,” stated Chegg.com CEO and Co-Founder Osma in a press release. “This new funding is a significant step up from Series C and a testament to the growing market opportunity for Chegg.com’s textbook rental offering. With college tuitions continuing to climb and higher unemployment rates, parents and students are looking for any and all ways to cut costs.”

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has acquired Teracent. Teracent is a service that allows advertisers to build smarter display ads by capturing the images, colors, and text themes. Teracent can also capture the geographic location, language, and content of the website and customize banners.

Before the acquisition announcement, Teracent raised a total of $5.8 million in funding. Teracent’s technology will be rolled into a service offered by Google’s Content Network and DoubleClick. Yahoo! previously had a partnership with Teracent, but after the acquisition takes place it is assumed that the deal will be removed. Teracent is based in San Mateo, California.

“This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content,” Google VP of Product Management Neal Mohan and Google Engineering Director Joerg Heilig on the Google Blog.

AT&T is getting aggressive when it comes to marketing. AT&T’s temporary restraining order against Verizon for the “there’s a map for that” advertisements fell through so they had to respond. First AT&T hired Luke Wilson to be a spokesperson and now they have launched two new commercials that points out that their network can manage voice and data simultaneously. After the jump is the two videos.

Apple iPhone Ad – Did You See My Email? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

Apple iPhone Ad – What Time’s The Movie? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.