(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.

Mr. Kobo (Photo: Admin5)

Launched just two weeks ago, the Los Angeles-based social networking startup Pheed has already seen a fair amount of ink spilled over it, perhaps most notably in a Forbes piece which wondered if the hyped platform was "the new Twitter." With an iPhone app released today, that buzz is bound to build. But O.D. Kobo, a longtime internet entrepreneur and Pheed's cofounder, argues that these comparisons are moot, and that Pheed is in fact blazing a brave new trail in the social networking world.

"I read one journalist compare us to App.net," he told Betabeat, sounding slightly mystified. "We’re original. I think that’s obvious."

Pheed is a new social network that allows users to upload multimedia content to their profiles, including audio, video, photos and text updates. What differentiates it from other players in the space--aside from the fact that it seemingly streamlines the functionalities of companies like Kik and YouTube into a single service--is that it allows users to directly monetize their content. Users can opt to erect a paywall, charging anywhere from $1.99 to $34.99 monthly, or $1.99 to $34.99 per view of a specific piece of content.

But it's not all about the monetization. "We’re by no means a premium website," Mr. Kobo stressed. "We’re a website that simply offers the ability to monetize some things. If you want to share photos or do a live broadcast, monetization is simply a feature. We think it’s fair. We think it’s about time that content providers should own and monetize their content and not the platforms."

The nine-person Pheed team operates from a mansion on LA's famous Mulholland Drive. The company is staffed entirely by engineers, who have worked tirelessly to build out an infrastructure that's as fast as it is lightweight. Mr. Kobo, an American born in Hong Kong who worked in the internet biz in China for the past 10 years, possesses a sort of humbleness that occasionally veers into bewilderment. He simply can't believe, it seems, just how far Pheed has come since it beta launched in August.

"We’re all tech people," Mr. Kobo told Betabeat by phone. "We’re developers, programmers and we’re also users of social media. We come from the space and because we’re also programmers, we like to take things apart and understand how they work. The team has been working together for almost 10 years and most of the career we spent out of China building social networks and software. We used to have 90 million uniques a month from Asia. We learned from the ground up what users like, and that gave us a roadmap to get to Pheed."

Despite its star-studded user base--Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale and Chris Brown all have Pheed accounts--Mr. Kobo is quick to dismiss the idea that Pheed is just for celebrities looking to make money off of their social media content. "We have thousands more normal, not-famous people on Pheed than celebrities. We’re for everyone," he said.

So how did an internet entrepreneur who spent the majority of his career in China convince big names like Ms. Cyrus to create Pheeds? "I think the reason we have a lot of tastemakers and influencers on the platform is that while we were in our beta stage, I went around and showed Pheed to a lot of tastemakers and influencers around L.A. I had been in China for a decade so it’s not like I have buddies at Universal, so it was really kind of me just going around and meeting people and those people were some of the first people who opened Pheed channels up."

Despite its buzzy launch, Pheed has seen a few hiccoughs along the way. A few weeks ago, Twitter revoked its API access without warning or notification, leaving users who hoped to sign up for Pheed to use Facebook Connect instead. Twitter restored its connection within 48 hours.

"We contacted the support and we never really understood why, nor did we ever get any reason why it was taken down or even placed back up," Mr. Kobo said.

Do you think that perhaps, given Twitter's recent crackdown on third-party API clients, Twitter considers Pheed a competitor, we asked?

"I’m this little mosquito coming into this arena that Twitter helped create," he replied. "I don't really think we're a competitor. I don’t think a motorcycle is a form of car--just because we both live on the internet doesn’t make us competitors."

With today's launch of an iPhone app--and an Android app hitting the Google Play store hopefully by end of year--Pheed is hoping to capitalize on users' gradual transition to mobile. The app provides all of the functionality that the website does, including uploading and sharing of photos, videos and audio, as well as the ability to set up paywalls on that content. It's also fast. The Pheed team rigged the video feature, for example, to encode video while the user records, so that it uploads almost immediately afterwards.

Even if Mr. Kobo doesn't consider himself a competitor to the social networking giants out there, he does seem to have some prominent app makers unnerved. "Yesterday we had a CEO of a very popular app company open a Pheed channel," Mr. Kobo said. "The guy was playing around with Pheed and accidentally clicked on the 'Broadcast' button and forgot to switch it off. So we were sitting there watching him talking live to their staff for like 45-50 minutes, saying 'Can we copy this? How did they build this in a year? They must have bought another company.'"

Mr. Kobo laughed. "We’re just nine guys that have been in this game for a long time."

The new Winklevoss pad. (Photo: TMZ)

As residents of Silicon Alley (a clever knockoff of California's original Silicon Valley), we don't have much room to mock other cities around the country for attempting to claim a piece of the tech pie all for themselves. But we couldn't help but notice in a Wall Street Journal real estate feature that Los Angeles--despite the fact that it's already well-known for being the entertainment capital of the world--is still trying to make "Silicon Beach" a thing. SMH.

The Journal reports that tech bigwigs like Peter Thiel, Mars enthusiast Elon Musk, Romney critic and investor Ray Lane, Matt Jacobson, Facebook's stylish head of market development, the Winklevii and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have all recently plunked down millions of dollars for vast palatial compounds in the land of smog and nose jobs. The newly blurry line between tech, media and entertainment is enticing young techies with money to burn to ditch the fog for beachfront stunners.

Ever since Google opened its Venice Beach headquarters, home prices in the area have skyrocketed--despite the fact that tech stocks, on the whole, are kind of tanking. And apparently tech titans are much more annoying to work with than even your typical home buyer. "They will challenge your knowledge of the market. And only if you pass will they trust you," one broker said, exercising great restraint by not using the term "know-it-all."

Of course, there's another reason besides the good weather that has "Silicon Beach" filling up.

"A lot of these guys are young, they have cashed out, they are bachelors, they like to party," one real estate broker told the Journal. "And let's be honest, the partying in Hollywood is way better than in Silicon Valley."

Ah, it really is 1999 all over again, isn't it?

That's quite a view. (Photo: TMZ

Say it ain't so! It appears that New York will be losing one of its two Winklevii. TMZ reports (via TechCrunch) that Tyler Winklevoss will be picking up stakes for Silicon Beach, to launch the West Coast outpost of the twins' aptly named VC firm, Winklevoss Capital. (Cameron will be holding down the fort here in Manhattan.)

And since he can't live in some hovel, the twins have purchased an ultra-modern home high in the Hollywood Hills, for a mere $18 million. Careful, gentlemen--that $65 million settlement won't last forever, especially since part of it was paid in Facebook stock.

Says TMZ:

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss -- who snagged $65 million by settling their beef with Zuckerberg, are getting one of the best homes in the Hollywood Hills.  The house that had been on the lot was bulldozed, and a new, 8,000 square foot crib was just completed with a jetliner view of L.A.

The sleek pad looks like somewhere you'd film a vodka commercial.

Apparently (or at least according to TMZ, and their tech coverage isn't quite as solid as their celebrity death news), the pair "have their eye on SoCal as the new Silicon Valley... thanks to L.A.'s booming tech scene."

From what we hear, the weather's pretty hard to beat, too. But the twins do realize it's too far up the California coast to row to San Francisco for meetings, right?

Me. and Mr. Jones (minus me)

In the past couple weeks, two startups from Science (the Betaworks of Los Angeles!) have tried to break into the New York City market, so it seemed like high time we gave Mike Jones, the CEO of Science and former CEO of MySpace, a call.

The Betaworks comparison refers to the fact that Science, which raised $10 million last November, uses its capital to "take deeper equity relationships" in startups than a typical VC firm, Mr. Jones said over the phone, noting similarities to Obvious Corp. and Idealab as well.

Science both launches its own companies and is intimately involved with the operations of the businesses it invests in. Like Betaworks, Science also eschews the i-word—i.e. "incubator"—opting for the more Hollywood-appropriate "studio."

The incubator studio has added a number of companies to its portfolio already, including monthly subscription services Dollar Shave Club (razors), Whittlebee (kid's clothes), and MeUndies (self-explanatory), as well as peer-to-peer marketplaces Dog Vacay (an Airbnb for dogs) and Eventup (an Airbnb for spaces) and Uncovet, which TechCrunch likened to a fancier Fab.

Indeed, it's hard not to look at the Science club and see its startup influences. "There's certainly new business models being created and in certain cases we like to apply those business models to segments of the market that they haven’t necessarily been applied to," said Mr. Jones. "We don't shy away from that by any means. We obviously really like subscription commerce, but we were not the first people to do subscription commerce."

However, he noted, in many cases the subscription service pioneers that come to mind--like Shoedazzle and Birchbox—weren't first-to-market either. "We all fail to talk about Columbia House and people that really understood this model—even Guthy-Renker for instance, the master of this stuff."

Mr. Jones said Science gravitates towards, "businesses that have really high user-value, which typically means they’re in a role of facilitating transactions between users. Generally, we’re not focused on content-only business, like it’s just not part of our DNA."

What about Los Angeles overall? If New York startups are characterized as being too lightweight on the tech side, what do people say about L.A. companies? "One of the general stereotypes for L.A. that you might hear is that L.A. startups are typically very revenue-focused," said Mr. Jones. "I think that’s fairly true and I think one of the reasons for that is that in L.A. not a lot of large technology companies have big technology teams. [So] there’s not a lot of acqui-hire ability. Because of that, a lot of the companies that get built in LA. are focused on revenue and building sustainable businesses."

Mr. Jones's answer sounded a little like responding "I work too hard," when an interviewer asks about your weakness. After all, isn't the inability to monetize the worry about of companies coming out of the current boom? He insisted that's not the case. "You could easily take the opposite view and say Instagram was not focused on revenue, it was focused on audience. Facebook built a fantastic business with a lot of revenue, but one could argue that if Facebook had focused on revenue in the early days, it would have diminished their ability to become the big audience business they are today."

How does a tech scene function in a town fixated on the entertainment industry above all? According to Mr. Jones, it's a unique opportunity. "I think when you look at companies like BeachMint and Shoedazzle and Honest Company where you have celebrity talent that’s really spending time and leveraging their audiences into launching new companies that’s certainly interesting and can be a strategic advantage for L.A.-based businesses, so I love that."

In this case, the "talent," Mr. Jones is referring to is Kim Kardashian for Shoedazzle, Jessica Alba for Honest Company, and everyone from the Olsen twins to Jessica Simpson for BeachMint.

But Mr. Jones swears it's not just about the fame game. "We’re also seeing a lot of ecommerce companies coming out of L.A. and I wouldn’t have said previously," he said. "Being in L.A. for a long time and doing a lot of investing in L.A., I’m seeing higher-quality businesses and concepts coming out of L.A. than I’ve seen in the past."

So is everyone there sick of reading Alley vs. Valley headlines? "No, not at all. At the end of the day, I think each market has things that make it competitive. I love the financial services companies coming out of New York. Silicon Valley is a monster. We don’t compete against Silicon Valley. There’s no one that’s the next Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is the next Silicon Valley. It’s fantastic and we should all love it."

According to BoingBoing, DHS paperwork shows that one Leigh Van Bryan was matched to the agency's "One Day Lookout" program--a computer-generated list, typically used to monitor individuals on the official terror watch list--based on a couple tweets about his impending trip to L.A.. Upon arrival, Mr. Bryan was placed under oath, denied entry, and deported back to the U.K.

The reason? Joke tweets about digging up Marilyn Monroe's grave and 1,000 percent sincere plans to destroy America.

"[He wrote] on his tweeter[sic] website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe," DHS officials wrote on his charge sheet. "Also on his tweeter[sic] account Mr. Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America."

Mr. Bryan, of course, had a different explanation for his terrorizing tweeter.

"Interviewed by highly-respected British newspapers such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, Leigh Van Bryan says that the tweet — "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America" — referred merely to partying. Added a friend: "He would not hurt anyone. He is gay."

I mean we're already being idiotic, might as well add gross generalizations to the mix.