Enjoy:

BoomTown loves the spoof videos that late-night television talk show host Jimmy Kimmel does–Hello, Humpilates!–and this one featuring actor Christoph Waltz is another great one.

Waltz always plays scary dudes–usually, some version of a Nazi, if not one, in fact–in movies, and so making him a homicidal judge on the talent show “American Idol” is perfection.

Enjoy:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took time off from his myriad of witty talk show appearances to slap around a just-published Fortune cover story that was titled–get it?–“Trouble@ Twitter.”

Wrote Stone, in part, on his personal blog in a post titled “The Trouble Bubble”:

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

He correctly points out Fortune’s reliable proclivity–see Google, Facebook–to write a wildly positive piece about the latest tech phenom, followed by a smackdown, followed by a they’re-back! tome.

Now, it is the San Francisco microblogging company’s turn.

(In Fortune’s defense, you try selling a magazine these days without a hookish cover line! Hence, the hit-you-over-the-head wounded bird motif here.)

But vegan-y, nice dude that he is, Stone ends on a positive note:

“For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.”

While it must be pointed out that Rocky suffered from brain damage in the last installment of the famed movie franchise, BoomTown awards a Stone-cold win for Mr. Biz-boa!

Here’s the full post:

The Trouble Bubble

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

Fortune magazine finally stepped up to knock us down with a cover article, “Trouble@Twitter.” Here are some examples of how this works. After mostly positive coverage of Facebook, Fortune finally published an article in April of 2009 titled, “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow?” However, later that year they published, “What Backlash? Facebook Is Growing Like Mad.” Google received similar treatment. In July 2010 Fortune published, “Google, The Search Party Is Over.” Later that year, they published, “Google Continues To Gain Search Marketshare.”

We’ve had lots of positive press from Fortune in the past. In July of 2010 they published an article titled, “Twitter’s Business Model: A Visionary Experiment.” The article ended with, “Facebook might want to take notes.” It may seem odd, but from my perspective, this means we are being taken very seriously. Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists–this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

The Twitter team is an incredibly dedicated group of people who truly believe they are doing the most meaningful work of their lives. It’s also a very small group of people when compared to the other companies Fortune is investigating. We still have under 500 employees–many of them working weekends and nights to fulfill a potential that is palpable. For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.

Here’s Keri Hilson performing “Pretty Girl Rock” recently on “The Ellen DeGeneres” television talk show.

Her hit song has some saucy lyrics, including the refrain: “Pretty as a picture/Sweeter than a Swisher.”

Hilson is obvi not referring to BoomTown, but the tiny cigars, Swisher Sweets. But a girl can sugar-plum dream.

Enjoy:

Recently, BoomTown reported that Flixster–the popular social movie site whose brands include the Rotten Tomatoes premium reviews site–was in early acquisition discussions with several suitors.

Now, said sources, Warner Bros. appears to be the frontrunner in various talks to buy the entertainment site, while Internet giant Yahoo has dropped out due to price concerns.

The reason for interest from the Time Warner-owned studio, said sources, is due to a spate of recent digital efforts, including its expansion of a movie rental experiment on Facebook.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka wrote last night:

Facebook users watch “The Dark Knight” on the social network for $3. Now it has added five more movies, and is asking more money for three recent releases: It will cost you 40 Facebook Credits–the equivalent of $4–to rent “Inception,” “Life As We Know It” and “Yogi Bear” on the site. The first two “Harry Potter” movies, however, are at the original price.

Flixster has a strong presence on the Silicon Valley social networking giant, which could make it a good vehicle to attract people to the movie rental effort, as well as a popular mobile app.

Interestingly, Rotten Tomatoes was once owned outright by another traditional media giant: News Corp.

It is now only a minority shareholder, after trading Rotten Tomatoes for a 20 percent stake in the combined entity a little over a year ago.

News Corp., which owns 20th Century Fox Studios, is not bidding for Flixster, several sources said.

The price being discussed for the San Francisco-based start-up is between $60 million and $90 million.

Any acquisition negotiations could always fail, of course. In fact, Flixster held advanced discussions in late 2007 with IAC/InterActiveCorp.

Flixster trades all kinds of recommendations, ratings and news and even posts user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook, and on mobile devices.

Co-founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering angel investments, such as from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The combination with Rotten Tomatoes and its more robust Web presence made a lot of sense. It features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news.

The site is famous for its clever fresh and rotten tomato rating system for movies.

I have not received a response from emails sent to Flixster and Warner Bros. requesting comment.

Conan O’Brien has been all over the South by Southwest festival this week, hawking a new documentary about his time wandering in the late-night talk television wilderness after he left “The Tonight Show” last year.

That included a lively live interview with Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on Saturday, as well as a series of appearances related to “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.”

His hysterical journey, of course, was deftly played out by O’Brien all over the Internet, which was definitely on “Team Coco.”

The documentary, which will be distributed in the U.S. in a multi-platform deal with AT&T, follows O’Brien on his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour.

Here’s a clip from the film:

While BoomTown has had just about enough of the media frenzy around the wacky ruminations of actor Charlie Sheen, this spot-on impersonation of the high-on-life-and-other-stuff star by late-night television talk show host Jimmy Fallon is worth a watch.

It’s for a perfume called, of course, “Winning.”

(Also best Sheen-related tweet comes from comic Sarah Silverman: “If I hung out w 20 year old porn stars all the time time I’d think I was a genius too.”)

Enjoy:

This mock fitness video by late-night television talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is so funny that it made BoomTown do several spit-takes watching it.

It is for a product called “Hottie Body Humpilates,” and includes a bevy of glam Hollywood actresses–including Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel, Eva Longoria, Sofia Vergara, Jessica Alba and also a perfect turn from Lindsay Lohan–doing bad things to an exercise ball.

Enough said.

Enjoy:

BoomTown is still cracking up over this video, another in the faux television talk show series on Funny or Die called “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.”

His genius of an unlikely pairing this outing: Reality star Tila Tequila and Jennifer Aniston.

Aniston has become tiresome of late, due to the relentless press junketeering around her new movie with Adam Sandler called “Just Go With It.”

But somehow it works here for the consistently out-of-control Tequila to be on the same level as the perpetually pent-up and pinched Aniston, along with Galifianakis’s oddly put questions about the nuclear destruction of Rhode Island and a man dressed as a Speed Stick.

Enjoy:

Let’s cut to the chase: BoomTown adores “Modern Family” actress Sofia Vergara, for her ridonkulously charming comic persona.

It’s on full display here in the hidden-camera prank she did for Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime television talk show. Her galloping like a horse will leave you in stitches.

Enjoy:

However, even with the masses descending upon Las Vegas this week, Cricket has decided to delay the Muve music service and the launch of its first Muve-compatible phone.

Cricket had hoped to launch service in Las Vegas this week along with a number of other markets later this month.

Under its revised time frame, Cricket plans to launch the service in Las Vegas later this month, add nine more cities in February and roll it out to the rest of its markets this spring.

Although all the necessary licensing is in place, Cricket spokesman Greg Lund said that the company needed the extra time to ensure all of the software bugs were ironed out before it started asking customers to pay for the service.

“It’s got to be just perfect,” Lund told Mobilized in an interview at CES in Las Vegas.

On “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” earlier this week, the host and Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow revived their mock ’80s R&B duo Shazzazz, after a first music video in May on the late-night television talk show.

It’s all about doing it.

That rap, “Let’s Do It,” was followed by “We’re Gonna Do It,” and then “Remember When We Did It.” Finally, in Milli Vanilli style came “We Did It.”

Here are the videos:

In the middle of the report, I embedded a video from a recent speech Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made at a women-focused TED event, which I thought spoke eloquently to the topic.

In fact, the social networking giant–as well as social gaming site Zynga, social buying site Groupon, geolocation site Foursquare and microblogging site Twitter–was one of the companies without any women on its board.

Including Sandberg, although she attends its meetings (but not its executive sessions).

Here’s her TED talk, which is well worth watching:

The company, best known for its prepaid phones, is offering a new service called Muve Music, which includes the cost of unlimited music downloads as part of a $55 monthly cellphone plan that also includes unlimited talk, text and Web. Basically, Muve adds about $10 to the cost of the monthly cellphone tab (which, incidentally, is about what one can expect to pay for the typical subscription music service).

The music is downloaded directly to the cellphone and is accessible as long as you remain a subscriber. From a technology standpoint, the service works by transferring the music to a secure partition of a 4GB digital memory card in the phone; Cricket says that partition can hold about 3,000 songs.

Cricket is launching the service next month with a single compatible phone–a color touchscreen feature phone known as the Samsung Suede, which will sell for $199. The service will first be available Jan. 6 in Las Vegas, with about 10 of Cricket’s other markets due to come on board later in the month.

What makes the service interesting is the approach–there is no tie to a PC whatsoever. Music comes to the phone, lives on the phone and is managed on the phone. In an interview, Cricket Vice President Jeff Toig said the service is geared to Cricket’s base of customers, many of whom don’t have a PC and broadband connection. It also allows them to get their music the way they do their other cellphone services–by paying in cash at the company’s retail outlets, thereby eliminating the need for a credit card.

The downside, of course, is that the music can only be played on the phone, though the phone can connect to a car stereo or external speakers over bluetooth or via a 3.5mm cable.

On the plus side, Muve doesn’t add much to the cost of a cellphone plan and eliminates some of the complexity traditionally associated with digital music. In addition to the ability to download and play tracks from all four major music labels, Muve subscribers can set any track to be either a ringtone or ringback tone (the music heard by callers while they are waiting for someone to answer).

Nokia tried a somewhat similar approach with its “Comes With Music” phones, which debuted in 2008. In that program, the cost of the music subscription was included in the price of the phone rather than in the monthly cellphone bill. Others, such as SpiralFrog, have tried to create services relying on advertising to subsidize the cost of providing music free to the end user.

Toig said that his customer base is one that typically isn’t downloading music from iTunes at 99 cents a pop, but includes a fair number of people that illegally download music from file sharing services.

The new service, he said, allows them to have a better experience without having to spend much more than they already are, while giving the record industry a chance to reach digital music customers they are largely missing out on today.

Unlike other services, which Toig said bank on the fact that people have access to a computer, Muve tries to make it easy to discover and download music directly from the phone. Customers can subscribe to curated feeds of music that get automatically updated, as well as find and download albums by name. A built-in social network allows them to see what their friends are listening to (assuming they also have a Muve-compatible phone).

“Nobody has done mobile music right,” Toig said.

Cricket won’t say how much of the incremental $10 in monthly revenue it is getting goes to the labels, but Toig said part of the bet is that Cricket will be able to reach customers that it otherwise could not.

“We’re obviously not doing this for a few percent,” he said. “We think this has appeal beyond our base to segments Cricket has not appealed to before.”

Here is one of the oddest videos out on the Web right now.

It’s a six-minute ad for a Norwegian television talk show called “Gylne Tider” in which a strange collection of some very whatever-happened-to celebrities lip-synch to the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

There is former James Bond, Roger Moore; former George Costanza, Jason Alexander; former skating thug Tonya Harding.

And many, many more:

The acquisition talks between Google and Groupon have ended.

“It’s as over as these things get,” said one person close to the situation.

The reasons for the collapse of the discussions are not clear at this moment, but it seems to center on the decision by the social buying site to remain independent and perhaps go for an IPO.

There are sure to be conflicting stories over the next few days. Did Google get cold feet first? Was there a tussle over a breakup fee, in case of too much regulatory scrutiny? Were the cultural differences too much?

As BoomTown reported earlier today, the annual revenue run rate for Groupon is $2 billion.

Groupon gets to keep about half of that and the rest goes to the myriad merchants it strikes deals with worldwide.

That’s still tremendous growth since its founding in 2008.

And that’s why Silicon Valley search giant Google and Chicago-based start-up Groupon have been in talks in recent weeks about a mammoth acquisition at a $6 billion price tag.

Groupon had turned down a bid of $3 billion from Yahoo earlier this year.

Now, it’s likely that the company will begin a new funding process.

Its closest competitor–LivingSocial–just got $175 million in a strategic investment from Amazon.

Chicago Breaking Business first posted a report of the talks ending, also citing a desire to be independent on the part of Groupon.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

It’s designed to get me to mention today’s Windows Phone 7 launch (Katy Perry! Maroon 5!), and I’m totally fine with that. Because in return, Microsoft has provided us with a series of great statistics about “Bad Mobile Phone Behavior,” gleaned from a poll conducted by Harris Interactive.

If you like bathroom humor, you’ll enjoy these stats (via TechFlash):

• 48 percent of adults think that it’s bad to talk on the phone in a public restroom.
• 43 percent of adults think it’s not okay to text, email or Web surf in a public potty.
• Which means, presumably, that the majority of adults think it’s just fine to talk, text and type away while you’re in the stalls.
• Unless that means you drop your phone in the toilet, which 19 percent of adults 18-24 say they’ve done. (Me too, though I was well out of the demo by that point.)

Still reading? You can get the press release, which has a link to the survey itself (via a Word document–go figure) here. Oh. And here is that clever Windows Phone 7 Ad*.

*Here’s why these ads are really great, by the way. Not because they’re funny–they’re funny, but more grin funny than laugh funny. And not because they sell cell phones, because who knows? They’re great because they’re inadvertently but fundamentally honest about something uncomfortable: Many times, often times, in some cases all the time, we want to be distracted by our phones. We want them to take us away from the place we’re at or the person we’re with. No one wants to say this out loud, so Microsoft deals with it by pretending that we’re all dying to get back off our phones and into the real world. But we’re in on the joke, us and Microsoft, so we just nod and grin. Truth-telling = great ad.

It’s a smackdown of chit-chatting ladies, as CBS’s “The Talk” debuted this week, in an attempt to grab audience from the powerhouse daytime ABC talk show “The View.”

It’ll be hard, since those are some tough women on “The View,” which recently was in the spotlight after Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked off the set in the middle of a segment with Fox News cable pundit Bill O’Reilly, after he impugned Muslims.

Here is a clip from “The View,” in which O’Reilly comic clone Stephen Colbert pretends to walk off the stage.

It’s followed by an opener for “The Talk”–the best part comes at the end, when Julie Chen’s husband, CBS CEO Les Moonves, offers his support in a welcome video, but also threatens to cancel the show if ratings are not good.

Enjoy:

With only a few weeks to go till the debut of his new late-night talk show on TBS, Conan O’Brien is taking his marketing to the Web.

And it’s very explosive, both personally and in a crazy stunt kind of way, as you will see in the two videos that the television funnyman has released in the windup to his November 8 launch.

The popcorn was a nice touch.

Enjoy:

The question is: Which movie was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinking about when he decided recently to fork over $100 million to public schools in Newark, New Jersey?

Was it a bid to spiff up his image–with a splashy announcement on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television talk show tomorrow?

That would be the very same day of the New York premiere of “The Social Network,” a movie that rakes the now-26-year-old Silicon Valley wunderkind over some very hot coals in the sordid tale of how he founded the powerful social networking site while at Harvard University.

Or was it actually the impact of another film, “Waiting for Superman,” a just-released gripping documentary about the crisis in public education?

It’s become a topic that has apparently become of great interest to Zuckerberg, as he has been considering his approach to big-time philanthropy in anticipation of huge wealth after Facebook eventually has its long-anticipated IPO.

In fact, said sources, the timing of the donation was hotly debated within the company, with worries that it would look like Zuckerberg was trying to counter the flood of negative press from “The Social Network.”

And for good reason.

After seeing a screening of the movie recently, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted that “the film portrays him as an insecure jerk who screws over people and becomes a much-richer insecure jerk…He’s the bad guy in his own creation myth.”

In fact, said sources, Zuckerberg actually has been cooking up the deal since he and high-profile Newark Mayor Cory Booker started kibitzing over the idea while both attended the Allen & Co. conference in July.

From there, Zuckerberg decided it was best to flood the zone–in this case, the deeply troubled Newark school system, which had previously been taken over by the state.

Now, it will instead get a big dose of friending–um, funding–from a foundation that Zuckerberg is funding with $100 million worth of Facebook stock, which will be sold off in secondary markets as needed.

Sources said his interest in the area was apparently sparked by watching the up-and-down experience of his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, whose first job out of college was as a teacher. She is now a medical student.

It’s all an unusual bipartisan effort, with Zuckerberg working with the Democratic Booker and also New Jersey’s new Republican Governor Chris Christie.

The pair of politicians, who will formulate a plan, pushed for the announcement this particular week on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in order to give the topic national attention.

Winfrey has been focusing on education reform this week on her show, and the Obama administration is reportedly going to do the same in the weeks ahead.

Thus, Zuckerberg himself decided to move forward now, sources said, apparently concluding that even if a prominent movie was portraying him as the villain, he did not have to act like one in real life.