Uncrunched

Funny post up at TNW showing Oprah plugging the Microsoft Surface with a Tweet sent from an iPad.

Last month I wrote about how all the cool actors and actresses in those Surface commercials probably wouldn’t be caught dead in real life with anything but an Apple device.

The iPad has some real competition now. But it ain’t this thing.

It’s not just that Microsoft’s money isn’t green enough to get Oprah to give up her iPad. MG gave the device a thorough review (before throwing it in his trash can). The Surface, at least for now, is a dud.

The question isn’t really whether you’ll watch the amazing Gangnam Style video with MC Hammer from the American Music Awards last night. It’s how many times you’ll hit “replay.” I’ve now watched it half a dozen times.

How does something like this get organized? We’d imagine months of negotiations between lawyers and various rights holders ending in some sort of complicated contract. In reality, it all came together one evening at a late night revelry at Google Zeitgeist last month.

Scooter Braun, who’s PSY’s agent (as well as Justin Beibers’s), was apparently hanging out with super angel Ron Conway, MC Hammer and others at the Google event. Braun mentioned to Hammer that PSY was a huge fan of Hammer’s and had expressed an interest in bringing Hammer on stage at the AMA to perform with him.

Hammer agreed. Scooter then handed Hammer his cell phone, which was ringing to an outbound phone. PSY picked up and the details were arranged.

One month later, we get to see PSY in parachute pants dancing with Hammer on stage, including cuts to the audience where celebrities are doing the ridiculous Gangnam Style dance.

No one can ever take that away from us.

This was originally published on TechCrunch.

This post was originally published at TechCrunch.

Livestar first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt a few months ago. It’s a mobile app that lets you see (and write) reviews for the things you generally want reviews for – restaurants, movies, music and other apps. The company was founded by former Microsoft M&A exec Fritz Lanman.

The reason you want Livestar on your phone and use it every day – It combines normal user reviews (like we’ve grown accustomed to on Yelp) with professional critics.

You don’t have to scour the internet for those professional restaurant reviews. Use Livestar to pull up local restaurants and present those reviews for you. Same with music and movies. You can do it all with one app.

Livestar was pretty useful when it launched, but a lot of key features were left out. Those features are in there now.

There are now 200,000 professional critic reviews. 875,000 total reviews. And when you find what you want, Livestar helps you get it. Click to reserve a table at the restaurant with OpenTable. Or add songs to your Spotify and rdio playlists. Get theater movie tickets from Fandango.

And best of all, add older movies directly to your netflix queue.

All of these service integrations are new with the new version. And soon third party developers will be able to access Livestar data for their own apps.

If you’re constantly opening Yelp, IMDB and other apps on your phone like I am, try this out. You may like it.

About That $30 Amazon Gift Card

You can also easily get a $30 Amazon Gift Card for trying out Livestar. If at you can get at least 15 friends to accept invites and try the app, you’ll get the card.

Directly paying users to invite their friends is a time honored way to (a) spend a lot of money fast, and (b) if the service is good, get very fast and sticky distribution. Paypal famously did this over a decade ago, paying users $10 for every new user they referred. Suddenly, ever single person I knew in Silicon Valley was beaming money back and forth on their Palm Vs. Since PayPal was actually really useful, the crazy scheme worked.

Livestar is doing something similar, although a little less crazy. Instead of a flat cash payment they’re giving away Amazon gift cards. And instead of $10 per new user, it’s $2 per new user, with a $30 cap.

Why are they doing this?

“Buying downloads and getting to the iOS leaderboards costs around $10,000 a day on Tapjoy and other services,” Lanman told me. “It’s expensive, the users bail immediately and it’s slimy. What we’re doing is actually much cheaper and gets us better users.”

“How do your investors feel about this?” I asked.

“They say if it works they’re going to get their other portfolio companies to try it out, too.”

Disclosure: I have no direct or indirect financial interest in Livestar. See here for my full disclosure policy.

Amazing.