It’s February, which means Toy Fair in New York City. Every year, Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith comes to town to peddle his little monsters. Those would be Moshi Monsters, one of the largest social game sites for kids 6 to 11, with 10 million monthly visitors. It’s huge in the UK, and this year Smith is going to make a major push into the U.S.

And it’s not just online. Moshi Monsters are finding their way into all sorts of kids merchandise, including collectible toy figurines (more than 20 million sold in the UK alone last year), plush dolls, games, the No. 1 kids magazine in the UK, mobile apps, and even temporary tattoos. While we were talking about his plans in the video above, Smith put one of the tattoos of the Snookums “moshling” character on my arm. My kids were pretty impressed when I showed it to them.

Last year, Smith’s goal was to sell $100 million worth of Moshi Monster merchandise, and he exceeded that goal, selling $105 million worth directly and through licensees. Mind Candy’s revenues was a portion of that, but it is profitable with 100 employees and Smith says revenues “tripled” last year.

He is constantly pushing the brand into new areas, including Moshi TV, which is like a YouTube for Kids with a mix of original and curated programming. If you haven’t heard of Moshi Monsters yet, you will. The toys will be in Walmart, JC Penny and pretty much everywhere else this year.

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took a leisurely stroll on a late winter Friday afternoon. The subjects: Path and the Address Book, SuperBowl dynamics, and 21st Century Fox, aka the new television/social media hybrid model.

It may seem like all stories are self-referential in this time of trending to zero barrier to entry, but as with many realtime transitions, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees until you get enough altitude. With 98 million simulsharing social media out of 119 million in realtime, the uber address book that’s being built will absorb all the big players including Facebook and Twitter.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Before we chat out the Droid 4 there’s a bit of other news we need to address right quick. As you’ll surely notice, we’re doing smartphone reviews a little differently now. That said, this video and my basic hands-on impressions are just the first in a three-part series reviewing the phone. Stay tuned for what comes next!

Alright then, back to business…

The Motorola Droid 4 has spent exactly 24 hours on shelves, and from the time I’ve spent with the phone I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it’s doing quite well there.

If you keep up with phones you know that the Droid 4 is a big deal, the fourth in Motorola’s Droid brand (which happens to be one of the most successful Android brands we’ve seen to date), and a QWERTY-packing beast if I may say so. The thing about it, however, is that the keyboard (any physical keyboard) is becoming less and less necessary.

To be clear, I think that the Droid 4 keyboard is possibly one of the best I’ve ever used. It gives a solid tactile feedback and is fairly easy to navigate. The fact that it’s backlit only adds to my infatuation. But… a combination of great auto-correct and Swype nearly makes that keyboard useless.

I understand that back in the day typing on a touchscreen was super annoying, since the auto-correct wasn’t quite up to snuff. That’s not really the case anymore, and I almost feel like anyone who insists on a physical QWERTY is doing so simply because they’re so used to it.

Truth be told the transition can be tough from QWERTY to soft keys, but Swype can make that transition a lot easier and you’ll ultimately be much faster in the typing department.

Still, for those of you who demand QWERTY-style satisfaction, I can’t recommend a better handset than the Droid 4. The 4-inch screen compliments the size and weight of the phone perfectly, and it honestly doesn’t feel that much smaller than the 4.3-inch Razr display.

Watching movies and playing games is still just as great, in terms of size, but it only made me feel “eh” in terms of quality. Sure, it’s plenty bright and pixel-dense, but it doesn’t have the wow factor of these 720p displays we’re seeing lately.

I didn’t experience any serious issues with the phone in terms of performance, and it would seem that 1GB of RAM combined with that 1.2GHz dual-core processor can handle basic tasks and multitasking just fine. At the same time, I’ve only spent about 24 hours with it, so things may change with heavier testing.

As you can see in the video, the Droid 4 looks much more like the Razr or Razr Maxx than it does its other Droid family members. I almost wish that Kevlar fiber casing was along for the ride, too, but that might ruin one of the best things about the Droid 4: its $199.99 price tag from Verizon.

We’ll be hitting you with more on the Droid 4 as the week progresses, so stay tuned for the rest of our review.

Note: I mistakenly stated in the video that the Droid 4 runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, when it in fact runs Android 2.3.6. My apologies.

When Google Music launched a couple months ago, there was some criticism regarding how the service was promoted. What many saw as just another music locker and streaming service (albeit a perfectly good and free one) others saw as a great new vector for music sales and distribution. But the music locker portion seemed to hog the spotlight, and the cool Band Camp-esque new artist hubs lurked in the gloom.

Busta Rhymes seems to be a fan of the latter, and not just because he’s in an official partnership. In an interview on MTV, he was positively effusive about Google’s new platform. Check out the short clip, from MTV’s Sucka Free:

I think he’s being truthful when he says that “with that power that they have, that it was almost blasphemous for them to not have their hands in music as well.” Google, via YouTube, is the world’s foremost player in video distribution on the web (though as far as purchased content goes, Netflix is king). One almost wonders why music didn’t come first.

In case you were wondering that, the reason is that the user-focused structure of YouTube makes it a platform for viral videos and self-expression, not studio-produced content. They’ve been trying to change that, but it hasn’t been very effective (people don’t think of YouTube that way, for good reaosn). Google Music lets them start fresh and try to build something that works both from the top down and the bottom up. So whether they “sign” guys like Busta or a dude recording on an 8-track in his living room, they can provide an end-to-end buying, listening, and sharing solution.

“Google ain’t really trying to just sell music” is about as capsule-sized a summary as you can get, and it’s true. Google hates selling things, in fact. And in the music world, it might be that in a few years, selling things like music tracks just won’t be something you do, and Google will have positioned itself well to be a non-purchase solution.

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmor, John Borthwick, and Kevin Marks. Recording has concluded.

The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their “logical next play” – a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters.

But, as Glam’s co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn’t just another of Glam’s vertical plays. It represents what he calls a “step further” in Glam’s attempt to dominate what Arora calls the “lifestyle” sector. Foodie, Arora indicated, will be more social and more mobile than his company’s other verticals and, I’m guessing, will be a prelude to other Glam offerings in travel and wine.

And that much rumored Glam IPO, I asked Arora. Could be the next next logical play in Glam’s relentless march to verticalize the Internet?

Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV this week welcomes a former California resident and current investor back to the west coast, where he and his partners have embarked on a new journey to build out a physical presence in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for one of the most dynamic business groups in the world.

Ajay Agarwal, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), is leading the charge of building his firm’s west coast offices and unveiling a brand new $600m fund, announced a few weeks ago in The New York Times. That’s a whole lot of money to invest in new consumer, enterprise, and mobile opportunities. This is sort of a personal homecoming for Agarwal, who went to Stanford years ago as a undergraduate computer science student and founded a company while he was in school. Now, after nearly ten years with Bain Capital in Boston, he’s leading his team here in California, comprised of Sahil Gupta, Indy Guha, and Adam Marchick, as it it were a startup, too.

In this short conversation, Agarwal discusses how BCV fits in within all of Bain’s diversified business units, and most importantly explains how founders can expect to leverage that very unique platform. He also discusses what the firm’s investment strategy will be, in terms of preferences for early vs. late stage opportunities, as well as why the firm chose the Valley over San Francisco, and downtown Palo Alto over Sand Hill Road.

Like other top-tier firms, BCV has also invested financial and human resources in order to help portfolio companies recruit technical talent nationwide, specifically by creating Startup Academy (led by Shannon Harrington) and going so far as to incubate companies. Even though Bain Capital Ventures has been around since 1984, both in Boston and New York, they have been investing in California and nationwide for years, so this move cements that long-term commitment to the west coast. With a group like Bain and their expansive, diverse portfolio, you’d have to expect when they make a concerted move out west, they mean business, and that will be a very good exciting development for a startup ecosystem that is constantly evolving.

Gumroad, the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19-year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia, officially launches today with over $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer.

To use the Gumroad, sign in with Facebook or Twitter Auth and submit any link in the entry form, whether it be to a blogpost, Spotify playlist, Instagram, invite for an iPhone app, research paper or whatever you can come up with you crazy character!

The service asks you to set a price and gives you the option of whether or not you want to require an email for purchase and/or upload a photo.

Like a Bit.ly with payments built in, Gumroad makes it very very easy to share your payment engine/link on Facebook and Twitter, as well as track views and purchases with its Bit.ly-like analytics and a simple interface.

Lavingia thinks that Facebook and Twitter can become the new marketplace/store-front and thus, in his view, Gumroad has the potential to be a huge sustainable (even billion dollar) company. Gumroad obviously disrupts the traditional and current online distribution systems, allowing artists with massive Twitter followings like Kanye and Gaga to sell directly to their followers, for example.

“The store model is kind of broken,” he told me in an interview for TCTV, “Every one talks to their fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook. But there’s a disconnect in the way people talk to their fans and the way people sell to their fans.”

In the same space as Kout, the startup protects its transactions through strict PCI compliance, to the point where Lavingia has physical auditors come in to make sure security is up to snuff. Of course, as a payments company, preventing fraud is his biggest challenge.

Gumroad monetizes by taking a 5% cut and 30 cents out of every transaction and Lavingia’s eventual goal is to have it “become a thing” i.e. when people see a Gumroad link on a social network, to know what it is and click on it.

“I don’t think five years ago this could have existed,” he says, “Just like Twitter has granted anyone the ability to talk to people, Gumroad could potentially grant everyone the ability to sell stuff, online or offline.”

Sometimes it’s the quiet ones who end up doing the most damage. I always thought of Larry Downes, the co-author of the mega-selling Unleashing the Killer App, as an unusually gentle and wise soul. But this was before Downes unleashed his all-too-critical powers on Best Buy, transforming himself from a cerebral author into a bomb throwing critic of America’s leading consumer electronics retailer. In Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually, a brilliant article he published at Forbes last month, Downes finally told the truth about the terrible customer service at Best Buy. And the article went viral, of course, amassing close to 3 million page views and even forcing Best Buy CEO, Brian Dunn, to issue a response.

Best Buy is committing a “huge strategic blunder” in thinking their service is any good, Downes told me when he came into our San Francisco studio last week. The retailer, he explained, offers neither the lowest price nor provides decent customer service. It’s thus stuck in retail no man’s land – caught  in that dead zone between big box retailers like Walmart and high-end operations like the Apple stores. Worse still, Downes explained, Best Buy’s service stinks so badly because it trains its staff in how to sell rather than in making customers happy; thus, these staff are trained in up selling and cross selling which explains, he says, why most of their carefully scripted encounters with customers are so unpleasant.

So what is to be done? Downes laid out three solutions to reinvent Best Buy: 1) Integrating their on and offline operations; 2) Making the stores fun; 3) Radically changing the in store product mix. But can Best Buy really be saved? I wonder whether its business model might be so antiquated and the experience of shopping in its stores so miserable that its demise might be even more imminent that even Larry Downes predicts.

TechCrunch Gadgets editor John Biggs wrote about whether Best Buy is really finished last month.

My own views about SOPA and the need to protect online intellectual property are well-known. But even I acknowledge that SOPA was a flawed bill that didn’t represent a viable solution to policing the Internet against intellectual property theft. So is there life after SOPA? How can the technology and content communities carve out a compromise which will simultaneously protect digital innovation and the rights of the creative community?

In the spirit of compromise, I invited Larry Downes, one of SOPA’s most articulate critics, into our San Francisco studio to talk about what comes next. Downes acknowledged that direct democracy on the Internet can sometimes degenerate into mob rule. He also agreed that there is a need for a new kind of dialogue, not only between the technology and entertainment industries, but also involving Internet users – members of communities like Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr – who, he said, needed to be much intimately involved in the political conversation.  This third force, Downes told me, fundamentally alters the power equation and may well also, in the long term, change the entire legislative process in Washington DC.

But Downes’ main point is a little depressing. Politics changes very slowly and technology changes really quickly, he reminded me. So in 18 months time, he predicted, nothing much will have changed in Washington DC. There still won’t be any legislative solution to the problem of online piracy and that promised dialogue between the two (or three) communities will not have materialized.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented.

@kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I’m pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants!

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

There are few more articulate supporters of high speed broadband access than Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper. Not only does he think Americans should have the right to high quality broadband, but he also thinks that it is the key to innovation in the broader economy. Home video is, of course, increasingly dependent on broadband and so, Japser told me when he came into our San Francisco studio earlier this week, is innovation in our  healthcare and education sectors.

Jasper doesn’t see the actual cost of broadband as the problem. Internet access isn’t finite, like coal or water, he insists – and the cost of bandwidth is actually plummeting to zero. Indeed, a stunning 98% of his costs, he confessed to me, go on things outside the product. It’s staffing, he acknowledged, which suck up most of his costs – with investment in customer service being 20 times higher than his investment in product.

For Jasper, innovation can solve all our problems. Even the seemingly endless issue of piracy, he told me, can be solved by rights-holders becoming more innovative in making their product readily available on the Internet. It’s that kind of innovation, Jaspers insists, rather than legislation such as SOPA, that will save the entertainment industry.

This is the second of two interviews with the straight-talking Jasper. Yesterday, he told me why fiber is the future of wired connectivity.

We covered the launch of Summly an application that summarises text last year, but I recently caught up with Nick D’Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview.

Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV continues today with a guest who was once a Senior Scientist at Apple and CEO of Mozilla Corporation before eventually making the trek up Sand Hill Road, where today he’s a partner at a leading venture capital firm.

John Lilly, an investor with Greylock Partners, has kept himself busy. Having invested already in properties like Tumblr, Dropbox, and a series of others through his firm’s early-stage “Discovery Fund,” one of the new areas Lilly is investigating today is world of personal health data and systems. The sheer number of new companies and devices on the market offering consumer-level health solutions is simply staggering. We have an explosion in “computing devices” (phones and sensors), new hardware (like Fitbit), new software services (like Cake Health), and social systems and platforms that attempt to weave these all together to form some type of personalized representation of our current state of health and where we’d aspire to be. (Note: There are simply way to many companies in the health space to mention them all here. You can find more comprehensive lists on Quora and by poking around the website of Rock Health, an incubator designed to help launch health-focused startups.)

In this short discussion, Lilly brings some of his latest blog entries on personal health data and social health systems to life. Because he has a background in hardware, sensors, software, and now consumer products, Lilly has a unique perspective on where the real opportunities may lie relative to all the approaches currently on the market. In this talk, he’s able to paint a picture of how hardware, software, and social systems could marry to form a truly personalized health experience for the consumer, especially set against the backdrop of aggregate population data. For those entrepreneurs working away on the health devices, the health software approaches, and the ways in which we’ll share our data in social systems, this talk with Lilly is a great chance to learn from someone who has been thinking deeply about the opportunity a few years down the road, with an eye focused on the convergence of the hardware, software, and social.

It’s always nice to see a small, plucky start-up take on the big guys and not only survive but also prosper. My excellent Santa Rosa based ISP Sonic.net is doing just that – laying its own fiber-to-the-premises network in Sebastopol for only $70 a month and signing up 30% of the local market. While the numbers are still small (the fiber network still only reaches 700 Sebastopol homes), the Sonic.net story is encouraging because it shows that innovation is still possible in the ISP space, a market that has been dramatically “consolidated” since 1995, shrinking from thousands of thousands of local providers in the nineties to just a handful of national carriers today.

So it was a real thrill to have Sonic.net co-founder and CEO come down to our San Francisco studio from his Santa Rosa office to talk about his amazing little company. Sonic.net, Jasper told me, having grown 50% in the last year, is back in “start-up mode” and it’s long term plan is to bring fiber to the district. Fiber, Jasper believes, is the future of home connectivity, especially given the merging of television and the Internet, and our insatiable appetite for video.

Yes, yes, Dane. That’s all very well – but when am I going to get fiber-to-my-kitchen-table in Santa Rosa?

Nothing is made in this country anymore. In terms of actual manufacturing, America is increasingly at a disadvantage. The logic of the global economy moves jobs overseas. Get used to it, we are told. Well, Bayard Winthrop thinks the conventional wisdom is wrong. He wants to bring manufacturing back to America, in the apparel industry, no less! His clothing startup, American Giant (gotta love the name), launches today.

American Giant is starting small, with a line of basic sweatshirts made in Brisbane, CA. American Giant doesn’t have any stores. It sells its sweatshirts only on the web, and soon will expand to other men’s basics such as T-shirts, polos, and button-downs. While the cost of materials and labor would be cheaper in Asia, a much bigger portion of the cost of a shirt is distribution.

By eliminating stores and going direct to consumer, American Giant can cut out a lot of the costs in the apparel industry and pass the savings onto consumers while still making better quality clothing. By controlling manufacturing, Winthrop also expects to be able to reduce his production cycles to 3 months or less instead of the 18 to 24-month cycles typical in the industry. By reducing cycle times, American Giant will be able to experiment more with styles and products and then increase production for the products which generate the most demand.

American Giant is a startup with 10 people and less than $5 million in funding, but the little giant is going after the Gap, J.Crew, and Old Navy. There is “no brand affinity” to those stores among men, argues Winthrop. “They don’t have a reason to live.”

How does he hope to compete? Simple: with better quality. “I feel like in the apparel sector the whole idea of quality has gone way,” says Winthrop, who has spent the past two decades in the apparel industry, most recently as CEO of Chrome, a chain of urban men’s clothing stores.

Winthrop wanted to make an “old-school navy sweatshirt” like the one his father used to wear that lasted 40 years, not the kind you buy at Old Navy. His first line of sweatshirts will be priced at a reasonable $59, but they are made with heavyweight cotton, double- and triple-needle stitching, thick ribbing at the waist, additional panels along the side for a better fit, and other construction details such as metal snaps designed in-house.

But can a Web-only clothing brand work? “Consumers are moving more online and spending more money online,” notes Winthrop. “Consumers’ expectations of value and quality are changing. The days of us walking into Macy’s and paying full retail for a shirt are basically going away.”

Watch the video above, in which Winthrop shows off his new sweatshirts and talks about his approach to American manufacturing.

Dropbox took home two of the big awards at this year’s Crunchies: Best Cloud Service and Best Overall Startup. Both times, CEO Drew Houston came backstage to talk about the company’s growth and its future.

When asked about what he’s planning for 2012, Houston offered some very broad thoughts, saying that “one of the most exciting things that’s happened” recently is the explosion of devices that people can use to access Dropbox from. When he looks to the future, he says one of his big goals is to move further in that direction, unifying the experience across those devices.

“Really, today people might think of us as something they put on their computer or their phone but really what we’re trying to do is build is this fabric that ties together everything that you use and simplifies your life,” Houston said.

You can watch video of Houston’s interview after his big victory below.

LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner won this year’s Best CEO award at the Crunchies, and backstage he talked about LinkedIn’s big milestone from the past year — its IPO.

“The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone,” Weiner said. It’s a common theme from Weiner’s interviews before the IPO, when he would dodge questions about the timing and emphasize that it was just another step in the company’s growth. This time, Weiner added that he’s proudest of the fact that “for us, it didn’t really change anything.”

Weiner was also asked about Facebook’s impending IPO and whether he had any advice for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His answer: “Go in when you’re ready. I’m sure they’ve given it a lot of thought.”

You can watch a video of the full interview below.

Online pinboard Pinterest, the hot new startup that’s growing at a phenomenal rate, won the Crunchie for the Best New Startup of 2011 at this year’s Crunchies. (This, despite the fact that it actually launched in 2010). The reason? Crazy, crazy traffic and growth. In November, the site had reportedly seen a 2,000% increase in pageviews, according to comScore. That wasn’t year-over-year growth, mind you, but the increase Pinterest had seen since June. At 421 million pageviews, the site had already surpassed more established players, like Etsy, for example.

But co-founder Ben Silbermann stayed tight-lipped on the hard metrics behind Pinterest. In an interview backstage after the win, he declined to provide the number of users or even the number of pins. (There were “a lot,” he demurred.)

However, Silbermann did attribute Pinterest’s success, in part, to its design and ability to connect people with each other.

“Pinterest is a visual site, and a lot of people are visual by nature,” he explains. “But at its core, Pinterest is a site that connects people who are passionate about the same things. In the same way that people who use Facebook are excited to connect with people they care about, people on Pinterest are excited to be inspired by people with similar tastes.”

(For what it’s worth, I still think Pinterest could have easily won Best Timesink, too, had it made the cut!)

After Twitter creator, executive chairman, and product lead Jack Dorsey accepted the company’s award for Biggest Social Impact at the Crunchies, TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis asked him about a recent, controversial decision to block individual tweets on a country-by-country basis. Will that hurt Twitter’s ability to make a positive impact on the future?

“Absolutely not,” Dorsey said. “It actually censors less.”

That’s because the only alternative would be “global” censorship of the entire site in certain countries, he said. He also said it allows Twitter to be transparent when an individual tweet has been hidden.

Dorsey also talked more generally about Twitter’s impact, agreeing with Alexia that its real power comes in its ability to handle a range of communication, whether it’s daily life, personal struggles, or broad political issues.

“That range is really, really hard to do for most technologies,” he said.

Dorsey had to do a second interview when he won for best founder, covering his roles at both Twitter and Square (where he’s founder and CEO). Asked to choose between the two companies Dorsey said it will be like choosing between two members of the family. And when Alexia jokingly repeated the common belief that to accomplish what he does, Dorsey must not sleep, he laughed, “I sleep, I sleep.” How much? Four or five hours a night.

You can watch the full video of Dorsey’s “social impact” interview below.