If you weren’t paying attention to anything but important news today you might not have noticed that Ashton Kutcher had turned over his tweeting privileges to the social media division of his company Katalyst Media. “But why?,” you ask, because it’s late and you’re wasting time on the Internet even though you’re super busy or should be sleeping.
Well because Kutcher, who has about eight million more followers than you or I ever will, tweeted out something without thinking last night and, because they’re a bunch of maladjusted ugly troll people, the media pounced on him — because he’s pretty. And more importantly because what he said was really really stupid; he wondered why Penn State coach Joe Paterno was fired, when the reason he was fired was like, everywhere on Twitter. Dude, where’s my excuse? → Read More
Tech investor Ashton Kutcher took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today to talk with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to talk about his investments and participation in the technology community. Interestingly enough, Kutcher’s art is actually imitating his life, he will be playing tech investor Walden Schmidt in CBS’ “Two and a Half Men” — Schmidt, like Kutcher, is also a tech investor, a dot com entrepreneur who sold his company to Microsoft and now invests in tech startups. → Read More
Whose tweets lead to more actual sales, Ashton Kutcher’s or Kevin Rose’s? The answer is not immediately obvious. Kutcher boasts 7.3 million Twitter followers to Rose’s 1.3 million, but a recent promotion run by design shopping site Fab.com suggests that raw numbers don’t always translate to more sales.
Both Kutcher and Rose recently tweeted out a link that gave their followers $10 off any purchase at Fab.com. Fab wrote a blog post about the marketing test. Kutcher’s link resulted in 5,888 signups, more than Rose’s 4,356 (but not much more). But Rose’s links resulted in more orders and higher revenues. → Read More
According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.
That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he’s an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date.
No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan. → Read More
Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in Airbnb (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.
Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.” → Read More
DNA, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s foundation for sex trafficking awareness, has launched its social media campaign this week, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls.” If you get past the absurdity of their ads (and they are absurd on so many levels) and visit the DNA Facebook page you’ll encounter some shocking statistics about the prostitution industry. For example, over 12 million people are at risk for sex slavery around the world and the average age of entry into sex slavery is 13 years old.
Moore and Kutcher’s solution? Raise awareness and take action, like reporting any suspicious ads you see on Craigslist or Backpage. → Read More
This list is in. Time has released its annual Time 100 list, honoring the most influential people in the world. There are a lot of interesting names including Sarah Palin and President Obama, but let’s focus on the names from the tech sphere.
Moot (the creator of 4chan), Jeff Bezos, The Twitter Guys, Sam & Dan Houser, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Nathaniel Silver, Nandan Nilekani, and Shai Agassi have all be included. And some of their write-ups are really interesting because of their authors. For example, Moot is written up by the man perhaps now best known for being the “Rick” in the “Rick Roll”, Rick Astley. The “Twitter Guys” (founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey) are written up by Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter users with a million followers. And Jeff Bezos is written up by Bill Gates. → Read More
The race between actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN to a million Twitter followers at first seemed to be little more than an exercise in online vanity. But then it transformed into a race to help out a cause, Malaria No More, in a meaningful way. But really, why does anyone need a race to do that?
With that in mind, tomorrow, Kutcher, with his nearly 1.4 million followers, and Digg’s Kevin Rose, with his over 500,000 followers, along with other notable users plan to use to Twitter as a platform to further the cause. The message they will send out is simple: “Every 30 seconds a child dies from Malaria. Nets save lives. Support World Malaria Day = http://bit.ly/30Io8” → Read More
We here at CrunchGear are no strangers to frivolous lawsuits (Peter Ha, for example, married then divorced two sisters in one family and that still hasn’t gotten sorted out. Crazy bigamy/incest laws!), but this one takes the cake. A gentleman named Richard Figueroa is apparently representing an image of Ashton Kutcher that used to show up on Google when you searched for the Punk’d star. It seems that selfsame image got lots of Google juice from TechCrunch and when you click on it it pops up under the TechCrunch banner. As we all know, Michael owns Google and has complete control over what goes on there so Richard assumed, not incorrectly, that Michael was a soft touch and would pay him $150,000,00 — that’s two zeroes at the end for savings — due to lost revenue. He even made a few phone calls and started commenting in the TC thread. Figueroa intends to rock some “legal activation” on the TC network, so look for us all on CourtTV in a few weeks. Being Stupid And Litigious Is No Way To Go Through Life [TechCrunch] → Read More
While we’re spending our time pushing our Destroy Your Landline Contest, wherein you the readers are implored to destroy your traditional landline phones, something comes up that makes us want to perhaps hold on to ours. Ooma is a new Vonage-like VoIP service that tweaks the formula just enough to perhaps survive where companies like SunRocket have failed. The VoIP ideal has been around, and VoIP to VoIP calls are almost always free. Calling to a traditional landline, though, has some costs associated with it (per-call or monthly). It’s these costs that have added up and made problems for other VoIP providers. Ooma has come up with a fairly innovative way to literally skirt these costs, and it could make all the difference. → Read More
