Avatar was more than I could have dreamed of. Native American history being one of my favorite reading subjects and my cousin working within this movie, Avatar rang deeply for me. But I will tell you how watching this movie with a TechCrunch audience differs from watching it on a weekend evening with a wider demographic.

The stereogram effects make us act geeky, or faux-geeky shall I say. With the opening credits shooting at us in 3D, the mostly male, young and modern ooh-and-awe to rippled laughter. Sigourney Weaver's Dr. Grace Augustine character wearing a Stanford T-shirt caused some home plate laughs. Colonel Quaritch's bellicose character was interpreted as obvious mockery of the Bush administration to parodic chants of "USA! USA!" I felt the audience's deeper appreciation of the motion capture technology used to create this movie, and many approached Michael Arrington of TechCrunch to thank him for helping to arrange this free screening.

Here's a picture of Mr. Arrington and I after watching the film. Given that I had initially approached him as the theater lights dimmed, he was a really nice guy and listened to my rapid-fire self-introduction. Proof that not everyone who attended this TechCrunch screening was a techie, the lady we'd asked to take our photo using my iPhone didn't know which button to press!

That's right, I did! TechCrunch held a few online submission contests via its website and Facebook to see the much-anticipated Avatar on opening day. After missing the first open sign-up by an hour (which is a week in Facebook and TechCrunch time), I got my comment in for the second contest where "10 Best Comments Win A Ticket"!

My cousin, Ilram Choi, was a stuntman for Avatar, and also for Star Trek for you fellow fans out there. So I'm doubly excited to see Avatar and recognize his signature jumps.

I'm really loving TechCrunch more than usual today! I will follow-up with pictures.

After my calculated and yet robust shopping week in San Francisco, some themes emerge: Conscientious spending, an emphasis on environmentally-friendly products, an increased awareness of shopping footprint, and the use of social media for smarter holiday shopping.

Thus I'm boggled & irritated when companies like Deloitte spend time & money for studies leading to article titles such as "Social Media Likely to Impact Holiday Shopping Decisions." Likely to impact? Isn't this a given if you've sat in front of a computer?

Whereas in years past our inboxes were bombarded with the annual flurry Friends & Family email blasts, this season we get our cues from Facebook, Twitter, and Digg notifications. Retailers using Facebook to promote shopping discounts attain "cool brand" status among a youthful & ad-resistant online demographic, and effect an insiders' club feeling with Facebook Fans' Only discounts. Last week, Toys"R"Us became the fastest growing brand on Facebook with a fans-only preview app and promo code. This speaks not only to the concern of brands to attract customers through social media, but also to the various demographics that signed up: Both genders, Moms who tend to household shopping, the increased number of Dads who now stay at home, and the online marketing generation now growing into adults with budding families of their own.

Not too many years ago when I was glued to my chair monitoring holiday e-commerce sales daily, editing copy, and checking inventory, the Ghost of Christmas Future could've brightened my winter mood to the year when two funny appellations would make holiday shopping so much more fun: iPhone and Twitter. The Gilt Groupe iPhone app sends sales alerts to your iPhone, and their Twitter page has holiday tips and deals. These far more entertaining shopping channels draw the shopper's eye away from paid search engine links and save retailers from wasted clicks.

Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey has got the web abuzz today with the official unveiling of his latest and possibly greatest invention. What, you ask, could possibly top Twitter in terms of sheer innovation? What could change the way people go about their business faster or more dramatically than Twitter has? The key word here is "business" and that's exactly what the new product, simply called Square, is gunning for.

Think of it like the next step in the evolution of an easy-payment technology like PayPal. The Square is a small plastic device, about the size of a piece of hard candy, that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone or iPod touch. Here's the thing: it's a credit card reader. That may sound like a bit of an anti-climax until you think for a minute about the ramifications of such a device. It will allow vendors -- anyone from the biggest corporation to the hot dog cart -- to accept credit cards quickly and easily. This is a near revolutionary idea to any business owner who has ever gone through the fees and hassle of becoming plastic-friendly. Details are still forthcoming about how much it will cost to use Square, but presumably it will be less than the credit card companies charge.

What we do know is how Square works, and it's pretty cool: just swipe the card through the Square reader, and the payer signs on the phone's touch screen -- similar to how you'd sign for a package from UPS or FedEx. It also means no more paper receipts. Instead, payment information is emailed or texted directly to the customer. To get a clearer idea, check out the video above (via TechCrunch) showing the Square in action, as well as a few words from Dorsey about the device. Square will reportedly be available to the general public sometime next year.

We'll start with a simple conceit that almost everyone can agree on: Auto-Tune is annoying, and as technological advances in the music industry go, it's probably responsible for more terrible music than the theremin and Peter Frampton's talk box combined. But in Auto-Tune's wake there have been a few glimmers of light, chief among them Auto-Tune The News, the hilariously low-fi and inventive series of videos from comedians/musicians The Gregory Brothers that dropped in April. (see the best one, called "pirates. drugs. gay marriage" below). The Gregory Brothers garnered such a huge and swift online following that Sony recently came calling and the brothers -- three brothers and one sister, to be precise -- signed a deal to help plug laptops and TVs. Which brings us to Sony's new Facebook app "Auto-Tune Your Status" -- hands down the best way to waste ten minutes online, at least for today. The results, as Mashable points out, are "predictably awful" but hell -- it's all awful with Auto-Tune, so why not? After installing, just write a status, choose one of four hopelessly robotic voices, select a beat, and let it rip.

There's no doubt that social media is changing a great many aspects of human communication -- LMFAO anyone? -- so when the leading edge of social media of-the-moment, Twitter, changed its prompt from the original "What are you doing?" to the broader "What's Happening?" the digital masses took note -- and unlike 99 percent of all tweets, this update was actually worth reading. While the two phrases are used synonymously in casual speech, the company's explanation for last week's switch makes clear that Twitter has chosen to consciously mature their brand away from its ponderous, twee origins and harness some of the more useful applications of the platform. From the Twitter blog:

"The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore -- starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?""

You read it here first: Twitter is officially serious. Now if only they'd swap that cutsie blue bird logo with an owl wearing a graduation cap or something.

... speaking of the intersection of social media and language: if there was any doubt left about just how far social media has seeped into our culture, behold the New Oxford American Dictionary word of the year, "unfriend," a verb, which is defined as "To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Other contenders included "hashtag," "sexting," "funemployed," "teabagger," and "tramp stamp."

I admit, I downloaded the new Priceline app just to watch William Shatner break through my screen. Playing off the iPhone Genius function of shaking the phone to update music and Urban Spoon's similar slot-machine shaking to display viable restaurants, the Hotel Negotiator gets physical too.

Travel apps are one of the main reasons I bought an iPhone. For business travelers and wanderlusters like me, travel apps locating Cheap Gas or informing me of my surroundings no matter Where I am redeem the poor connectivity of an iPhone. I've watched my international friends stay glued to their desktops or gingerly carry their laptops while Skype-chatting with their families. With the free Skype app, the service returns us to talking on the cellphone, bringing us back to their primary use.

If I can walk through the City of Lights by tapping on my iPhone screen before traversing Paris, or reinforce my learning following a Rick Steves serial, then it will not be true that technology reduces our brain exercise by fragmenting our user experience between reality and technology. Add onto these travel apps the latest Layar augmented reality app, and I may very well not need a tour guide on my next urban holiday.

Techcrunch reports that Twitter has struck deals with both Microsoft Bing and Google search to help integrate real time results into their engines. They've been partially indexing what they can already, but Twitter hasn't given them full access to the real-time stream. Until now.

Looks like they may have found a revenue stream. I always thought an ad model wouldn't work with Twitter, and that some type of licensing deal would be their best bet, whether it be via charging users, creating professional accounts, some type of rev-share with app developers, etc.

I wasn't exactly expecting them to sell the data to the major search engines - thought they might give it a go building their own engine actually, but I guess that's a less likely scenario now. Why not just take an $undisclosedsum and let the Google and Microsoft PhDs work it out instead?

Often times the most creative ideas are a little subversive. Trying to do what everyone else does - only better - sometimes boils down to a game of one-upmanship rather than true innovation. But when you start to delve into the dark side, well there's a lot of places where one can find things that others haven't thought of...or at least weren't willing to pursue.

Maloney & Porcelli's, a (very) high-end steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan, did just that (well, at least they OK'ed their agency's idea anyway).

Knowing that big-ticket dinners and lunches are often the domain of corporate outings, they realized that in this economy nobody would have the cajones to try and expense a $500 lunch, and in many cases they're expressly forbidden to do so.

So what is this magical app? Well, basically you go to http://expenseasteak.com/, enter your total, and out pops a bunch of seemingly innocent - and very realistic looking - receipts for things like cabs, "regular" lunches, etc.

Ethical? Probably not...for the user anyway :-) They're just providing a service, it's up to each user to use/abuse it. But the idea is great none the less.

//via AdAge

Jason Fried of 37Signals, a Chicago-based web app development company probably best known for inventing Ruby on Rails, just penned a satire on the Valley tech press and venture-funded company valuations. It's a hilarious read...this is good enough to be in The Onion!

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

Read the full article here on the 37Signals "Signal vs. Noise" blog.

Today Google officially announced that the meta keywords tag is 100% unused. Again. According to WikiPedia, Google Research Director Monika Henziger stated it was essentially unused way back in 2002 (though to be fair, other engines may have given it some value, so we all continued to use it, and many still do as an "it doesn't hurt" move).

While this isn't really news to anyone who has been working in search for any length of time, it does provide a further indication to the evolution of search. It's moved beyond on-page edits. Way beyond on-page edits. Yet to this day, when describing search to friends, clients, or colleagues, I'll occasionally hear things like, "Oh, you mean you tweak the tags and stuff?"

Granted, that's still a part of our search toolkit, but it's a very small part at this point. In fact, the whole concept of driving people to one specific website is slowly starting to lose importance depending on what your goals are. Sometimes the goal is to be findable, and the specific touchpoint through which a consumer interacts with you or your brand is of lesser concern...as long as it's a positive result of course.

//img via Noah Sussman