Hates Twitter.

Ashton Kutcher is totally over Twitter because we all fucking ruined it. The apparent barometer of what's "cool" told the CTIA Conference on Thursday that his experience on the site changed for the worst since joining and that we have no one but ourselves to blame for it.

Mr. Kutcher said that the media's oversharers wrecked the once-personal experience of publicly broadcasting your every thought to everyone with an internet connection. He added that when he first joined Twitter, it was hip and represented the democratization of media, but now that it’s gone lamestream, he’s OVER IT.

CNBC writes:

"I think media companies came in and just pounced on it and I think that the signal-to- noise ratio kind of stinks—people selling [expletive] that I don't want," he said. "Companies and people just pitching crap."

Mr. Kutcher said the new features Twitter added, like the retweet button, “created a ton of noise in the system” that mitigated the platform's usefulness. He still likes using it as an RSS feed, though, moreso than Flipboard, in which he is of course an investor in.

Can someone get this man an invite to Medium and leave him there?

(Photo: Venture Village)

Who says majoring in English is worthless? A leaked job listing from a Columbia English major listserv obtained by Salon proves that even professional wordsmiths can delve into the star-studded startup world. You could toil away at a publishing company for $25,000 a year, or you could work at the hot new startup from self-described brainiac and actor/investor Ashton Kutcher.

"Ashton Kutcher is looking for a writer to join a small team of designers and engineers who are cofounding a consumer-oriented technology company," reads the job listing. "Your writing will be a centerpiece of the company?s [sic] product and will reach millions of people." Please tell us this isn't another daily deals company seeking to corner the market with quirky copy.

Of course, in order to take the job you have to uproot yourself and move to L.A. The ever-knowledgable Mr. Kutcher isn't suggesting Columbia English majors leave the Ivy League to join his new venture, is he?

You can read the full ad over at Salon.

(Photo: ScreenRant)

Prolific startup investor and jOBS star Ashton Kutcher has news for everyone: he's a total brainiac, not unlike Steve Jobs! The whole time he was playing dumb bro characters in sitcoms like That 70's Show and Two and a Half Men and tweeting clueless riffs on sensitive news stories, he was actually acting.

In real life Mr. Kutcher enjoys conversations about stuff like "circular polarization versus vertical polarization," and he's an early investor in several successful startups, including Skype and Airbnb. "When it comes to the Internet, there's no beating Ashton," his investment partner (and Madonna's manager) Guy Oseary told Elle.

Mr. Kutcher also recently upped his geek cred: Elle reports that he became the 500th person to put a $20,000 deposit down for a space voyage on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo. We hope he takes the opportunity to film a Dude Where’s My Spaceship sequel and laugh (ironically) all the way to the bank.

Mr. Scoble and his advisees (Photo: Twitter/jonmarkgo)

"Now, it sounds like kind of a joke," Jonathan Gottfried warned us before launching into an explanation of Drunkspotting, an app that lets users upload photos of drunk people and then draw on them. (Think Instagram meets DrawSomething meets jello shots.)

Mr. Gottfried, a developer evangelist at Twilio, also served as a conductor for this year's annual StartupBus competition. While roadtripping to SXSW, 37 teams hacked together startups and prototypes on the fly, with judges declaring a winner in the middle of the interactive festival.

Drunkspotting was actually formed on a shuttle bus after the prizes were awarded. "There was another team from the Mexican bus called Cloudspotting that had developed an app where you take photos of clouds and draw on them," Mr. Gottfried explained. "It was kind of cutesy and fun. Drunkspotting started out as a parody of that, but it quickly became very very serious."

Or at least as serious as a startup with 46 CEOs can be.

The real winner of the Startupbus competition was a much more high-minded venture: CareerMob, a job search site for veterans that helps match military skills to civilian openings. "Essentially every military member has a code that they are assigned, which corresponds to their position and from that you can actually determine what training they’ve had and what kind of skills they’ve developed," Mr. Gottfried explained. The site, which was created by a New York City-based team that included one active duty Air Force member, already has interest from investors and companies who want to be part of the job database.

Dude, where's my privacy?

But Drunkspotting isn't the first startup idea that relies on overindulgence for content--and it may have some (wobbly) legs.

Both Mr. Gottfried and Robert Scoble advised Drunkspotting, which launched an HTML5 app and plans on releasing an API and native apps for mobile. (The cofounders' attempts to raise funds to combat liver disease, however, clocked in at just $200.)

On the phone with Betabeat, Mr. Scoble called it a fun app. "We all have smartphones now and there’s these new breathalyzers that just shipped at SXSW called Breathometers," he said. If Drunkspotting found a way to hook it up to the Breathometer, "I could forsee a whole new way of playing drinking games, I guess," he added with a laugh.

Early traction came from the beer-soaked hordes in Austin, with users uploading images of attendees like Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, Coolio, and Dennis Crowley. If you ask us, blowing up your drunk friend's spot is kind of a party foul. That might be why Mr. Scoble recommended some sort of "privacy model," so that pictures could only be shared with friends.

"The problem, if there is a problem, is that drinking games encourage bad behavior," Mr. Scoble added. "On the other hand, it has a social aspect of catching you in your bad behavior and then making fun of it. So it’s a social retardant on drinking too much."

Jacek Michal Grebski, one of Drunkspotting's many cofounders, had a more blase attitude about it over email. "Celebrity drunkspotting is still pretty funny, I mean this is Perez Hilton's dream come true. Right? Or did we just make him irrelevant? ;)" he told Betabeat.

#Wastetherainbow (Photo: Flickr)

We first met Mr. Grebski at a the third annual Awesomest Journalist Party where he was sporting wristbands that lit up when you knocked them together and a Drunkspotting branded "Waste the Rainbow" t-shirt.

"We're kinda hoping for our second cease and desist from Wrigleys," he confessed by email this week. In the meantime, Mr. Grebski and the rest of the team are working on moving the app to more scaleable server architecture before they push it out to college campuses and add anonymous commenting and social sharing.

Regarding monetization, he said, "We have a few meetings set up, but in all honesty, we'll just figure it out later, or maybe sell for 101 million, because it'd be funny to go bigger than Mailbox. ;)"

Sure, why not.

"The cool part about all this," Mr. Grebski added, "is that we're pretty much breaking all the 'laws' of how you 'should' do things in the startup world, it's a little bit joke, a little bit serious, and a little bit trolling the startup ecosystem."

Who isn't a troll these days?

(Photo: 9 to 5 Mac)

Just this weekend we were sitting around wondering when exactly someone would create another Steve Jobs biopic. We already have the indie one starring Ashton Kutcher and the fast-talking, sure-to-be-sexist incarnation dreamt up by Aaron Sorkin. What we really need is a third one that can make fun of the other two.

Luckily Funny or Die has come to our rescue, announcing that they'll be putting a full-length comedic biopic about Mr. Jobs online on April 15th.

The "60 to 75 minute" film is called iSteve and will star Justin Long, he of Mac commercial fame, as Mr. Jobs, and Hurley from Lost as Woz. Sadly, John Hodgman (a.k.a. PC) won't be playing Steve "Sweaty" Ballmer, which we think is a real oversight.

"In true Internet fashion, it’s not based on very thorough research — essentially a cursory look at the Steve Jobs Wikipedia page,” Ryan Perez, the film's director, told The New York Times.

There, there, Ashton.

(Photo: Irish Examiner)

Move over, Josh Brolin: there's a new uber-dedicated method actor in town, and his name is Aplusk.

If you thought the recently released clip of the Steve Jobs biopic Jobs looked a lot like Ashton Kutcher walking and talking just like Ashton Kutcher but in a black turtleneck, you obviously underestimate his dedication to his craft. USA Today reports that just prior to shooting Jobs, Mr. Kutcher was briefly hospitalized for submerging himself a little too deeply into the character. In an attempt to get closer to his hippie entrepreneur character, Mr. Kutcher adopted Mr. Jobs's all-fruit-and-nut diet.

The diet didn't sit well with Mr. Kutcher's delicate body chemistry. "I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie," Mr. Kutcher told USA Today. "I was like doubled over in pain."

"My pancreas levels were completely out of whack," he added. "It was really terrifying ... considering everything."

Mr. Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, and we suppose Mr. Kutcher is intimating that all the fruit had something to do with his poor health?

Luckily, Mr. Kutcher survived his harrowing fruit scare and received a standing ovation for Jobs at Sundance. Take that, Demi.

(The Hollywood Reporter)

Feeling blue about missing Sundance? Cheer up. Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs biopic is slated to arrive April 19 at a theater near you. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Apple set a company record for iPhone sales last quarter, but it wasn't enough to placate investors, who sent shares falling in late trading after Apple announced its quarterly results. [AllThingsD]

It wasn't all bad for tech stocks. Netflix soared after the company announced better-than-expected profit on the strength of new subscribers. [Bloomberg]

Careful. The NYPD has a new device that detects the energy emitted by the rocket in your pocket. [NYDN]

"While I haven’t seen hard data on how this plays out across the industry, my personal experience has been that women in tech are primarily found in these emotional labor-heavy departments, even in the tiniest companies." [Quartz]

Raaaaaaandi! [Fast Company]

Mr. Vinh. (Photo: Tumblr.com)

Shopping Site Goes Shopping Back in 2011, Khoi Vinh, the former design director for The New York Times’s website, attempted to launch an iPad collage maker called Mixel that even Taylor Swift would love. The interface was kind of clunky, and the company soon pivoted to a smoother iPhone product, which became fairly successful. And now Mixel has been acquired by the custom product giant Etsy.

No, you won't be creating any collages of your twee collectables any time soon. According to AllThingsD, The Mixel team is being acquired for its stellar mobile talents. Mr. Vinh and his cofounder Scott Ostler, along with employees Akiva Leffert and Roy Stanfield, will all make the move to Etsy's Brooklyn offices. Mixel will be shutting down the social side of its app, but will leave up its collage-making tool. In an email to Betabeat, Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea explains, “We expect our mobile traffic to surpass desktop traffic by the end of 2014." 

Not Even Punking You Kanye West's favorite Pinterest-like site, The Fancy, just expanded its subscription box service, originally a monthly plan that gives you $60 of curated goods for $30. Now everyone, not just the minds at Fancy, can choose a bunch of items to send out to their adoring fans. Fancy gets to split the profits with you, of course. The first partner is Ashton Kutcher with his A+ Box, which includes brain-shaped ice cubes and mustache-shaped Band-Aids.

Iowa Now Trendiest State Dwolla, the fast-growing money transfer app, reached a pretty big milestone this week. The company announced its partnership with the Iowa state government to help modernize the state's tax system. Starting soon, businesses will be able to use Dwolla to pay the cigarette stamp tax, which accounts for about $100 million of Iowa's revenue each year. In a blog post, the company seems to be looking to the future already: "And while you may not be able to pay your taxes using Dwolla today, you are going to start seeing our logo pop up here and there as the state looks to modernize the payment experiences and do better business for the 21st century taxpayer and economy (e.g. mobile payments, low-cost transfers, and real-time notifications, etc.)."

Norman Mailer Badge Foursquare recently partnered up with Voice Media Group, the company that was spun off from Village Voice Media, now without the icky Backpage.com. The Voice's Places event data will now be syndicated on Foursquare and the company's highly popular "Best Of" will be integrated into the service as well.

Let's All Go to the Lobby: Dogfish Accelerator, the first accelerator program for film producers, launched this week. Started by a former TechStars associate, James Belfer, the accelerator puts film teams in a three-month intensive training and networking program and gives them $18,000 in seed funding, along with free office space. But why wouldn't you just try a Kickstarter and go to Sundance?

Award Tour See.Me, the social network for artists, is currently running a bunch of contests for its 600,000 users. There's $125,000 in grants and awards up for grabs. The site has just announced that founding Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip is going to serve as a judge for its music competition. In a press release sent to Betabeat, William Etundi, founder and CEO of See.Me, said, "Our simple goal is support creative people with recognition, shows and grants and we are super excited to bring Q-Tip into that process.”

Fund My Relationship Coming Soon If you've ever wanted your neighbors to pick your next significant other, then you should try ChainDate. The site is billing itself as the world's first site that uses crowdsourcing to find you a match. Every user gets "Wingpeople," users who like the same type of person that you do. The site matches you up with people that these similar-minded users thought were cute too. Sounds a bit competitive.

Nothing Really Matters The mobile analytics firm Adeven claims that over 435,000 new apps will be added to the iOS app store in 2013. That's too many apps to fit on your tiny phone, but don't worry, you won't even notice most of them. The firm also reports that 60 perecent of apps are "zombie apps," or apps that go completely undiscovered by iPhone users. A Zombie App Survival Guide is surely forthcoming.

Stuff Michelle Obama Likes  Whole Kids Foundation, PACT and Indiegogo are teaming up to help build urban sustainable gardens across the country. Leaders raise $2,500 on Indiegogo pages and Whole Kids Foundation will provide additional help like gardening materials. Crowdfunding kind of saves the day again.

Help Out, Y'all LuckyAnt, the crowfunding platform for small businesses, is hosting a very large crowdfunding campaign for 9 South Street Seaport businesses to help them out in the enduring disaster of hurricane Sandy. There's 19 days left in the project to rebuild historic Front Street and over $10,000 has already been raised.

Wake Up, Loser If waking up to the blaring sound of beeping or shocking radio static isn't for you, then you should download Mood O'Clock. It's the first emotional alarm app for Android, which lets you choose what kind of mood you want to wake up to. Depending on what you choose, the app will play you a corresponding morning soundtrack. We need a setting to help us wake up feeling like a brogrammer for those special Saturdays.

New York City-based startup The Fancy* is trying a different approach. In September, the commerce-minded photo-sharing network--which lets users post pics of products and in theory purchase the items directly from the site--went the Birchbox route with a monthly subscription service. The idea being luring in users with small-scale affordable versions of the pricey, aspirational goods The Fancy tends to attract.

But recently, the Pinterest competitor announced that any user can now curate their own monthly subscription box. The company will handle the transaction and take care of packing and shipping and you get to keep half the profits from sales. It's kicking off this off with an A+ box of "the dopest stuff on the Fancy" from its investor, Ashton Kutcher. For $45 a month, buyers will get $90 worth of Beardo hats, headphones, and stickers, by the looks of it.

Wired explains how to follow in Mr. Kutcher's monetizing footsteps:

"You can sign up by e-mailing myfancybox@thefancy.com and once they set you up, you get to pick from a list of popular products on The Fancy, or add anything else you like from the internet, so long as isn’t deemed inappropriate by the startup’s staff (think offensive t-shirts, weapons, or drugs). The Fancy says it is looking for all kinds of people to make boxes, says a company spokesperson. That might seem like a risky business decision, but the company won’t procure any of the products for a box until one sells."

Attaching bold-face names to subscription services is de rigueur. Just ask Kim Kardashian's ShoeDazzle/every other startup in L.A. But the idea of empowering users to make (some) money and share links to the Fancy is the kind of hustle one expects when Kanye West is advising you on "social, mobile, swag." Funny, though, this sounds like exactly the kind of business model that would do really well on Pinterest.

*Disclosure

This guy. (Photo: Screenrant)

Not only is Starbucks accepting payments via Square, the coffee conglomerate is now also selling the Square credit card reader for $10 at its retail locations. [New York Times]

Spotify has suspended its music download service in the U.K. Users can still stream music, but are sent to an unhelpful FAQ page when they attempt to purchase it. [Pocket-Lint]

Kim Dotcom says the U.S. "planted" evidence, encouraging him to keep copyrighted files on the Megaupload servers but then punishing him when he did so. [Ars Technica]

That indie Steve Jobs film, that will star Ashton Kutcher and be an inevitable flop that we will still watch anyway, is slated for release in April. Who wants to go with us? [Wall Street Journal]

The New York state comptroller is suing microchip company Qualcomm for data about its political expenditures with the hopes it can bring more transparency to corporate political spending. [New York Times]