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Miss America ’s three year stint on TLC is over after the network chose not to renew it’s contract with the pageant, even though it attracted over 4.5 million viewers in January of 2010. The chairman of the Miss America Organization told the AP that TLC execs wanted a new two-year deal for less money. The pageant will be celebrating it’s 90th anniversary next year and there are a number of networks competing for ownership of the next pageant.

Yesterday, I wrote that location was going to be this year’s Twitter at SXSW . Today, my inbox exploded. It seems that just about every company, advertiser, and even plenty of users associated with the location space emailed me with pitches, ideas, thoughts, etc. To say that space is red-hot right now, is putting it mildly. One of the companies that reached out to me was Brightkite , one of the earliest hot location players. CMO and co-founder Rob Lawson admits that the network has been “pretty quiet for a while,” but hints at some exciting stuff coming up for March (yes, around the time of SXSW). But he also wanted to share some things they’re working on right now, and a few interesting bits of data. Notably, Brightkite has over 2 million active users currently around the world. While that might seem small compared to the bigger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that’s actually four times the size of the newer rival Foursquare, that is getting much of the hype these days. Another interesting tidbit: Brightkite has had localized promotions in place for some time now, and they’re seeing strong usage. What users of Foursquare may know as check-in or mayor special, Brightkite calls Local Promotions. And they have a page on the site where local businesses can sign up for free. On that page, they note: We would love to help your bar, cafe, coffee shop, or business reach out to the local community through local promotions. We’ll let nearby Brightkite folk know your business gives them preferential treatment, and that they should stop in for a visit. Fill out the form below to get started. Brightkite says these promotions are seeing a lot of interest from all types of brands. And usage is strong with over 100 brands including big ones like Gap, Ben & Jerry’s and Time Warner Cable, seeing over two percent response rates when these notifications are inserted into users stream. And the best ones are seeing five to ten percent. When compared to more traditional ads, those numbers are very solid. Like Foursquare check-in and mayor specials, the Brightkite deals offer things like free (or heavily discounted) drinks and meals, but also extend to things like discounted hotel rooms, car rentals, and even dry cleaning. So is Brightkite making any money off of these? Yes. While many of the smaller local businesses use the service for free or close to free (to both prove the model and drive growth), Lawson notes that some of the big national brands are spending some big time money to advertise locally. These campaigns range from $10,000 to $200,000, Lawson says. Something else that interests me about Brightkite is their unique approach to social relationships. When it started, Brightkite had a symmetrical model, much like Facebook and Foursquare, which requires users to accept each other as friends. But late last year, the company switched the model to be an asymmetrical one, like Twitter, where one party can follow another without permission. This may seem like a horrible idea for a location-based service given the privacy implications, but Brightkite’s is a bit different of an asymmetrical model. “ Our model is asymmetrical (like Twitter), but reversed. With Twitter, you decide who to follow but anyone can see your content.  With Brightkite, you decide who to share your content with, but you can only see others if they decide to share with you ,” Lawson notes. He continues, “ We are convinced this is the right model for location based services – people want to be in control of who knows where they are. We turned away from the handshake model (Facebook, Foursquare) because we found users didn’t like the social pressure of having to accept a friend request. Just because you are happy to share your location with me, doesn’t mean I want to share mine with you, even though we want to maintain a relationship. “ As someone who has dealt with this many times before , I see his point. Lawson says that generally Brightkite users have been receptive to the changes, but says that some older users liked some of the more advanced features of the old model better — and Brightkite is working to get some best-of-both-worlds options for them. Brightkite merged with another location-based network, Limbo , last year and raised some new funding. They face a battle in warding off the fast-charging hot location networks like Foursquare and Gowalla (not to mention Yelp and the new Google Buzz ), but all of them appear to be benefiting from brand interest in the local advertising space. CrunchBase Information Brightkite Information provided by CrunchBase

Everything moves at a lightning pace in the mobile world – everything, that is, except network rollouts. Where as handsets can go from announced to old news in the blink of an eye, network upgrades.. can’t. Take Verizon’s upgrade to 4G technology, for example: they announced the move to LTE in February 2009, and began testing in one small market nearly half a year later. They’ll be firing it up for commercial use for the first time later this year, with plans to launch in 30 markets before the year is out. Fortunately, things seem to be speeding up. Verizon has just disclosed plans to double their LTE footprint, just a bit over 1 year after launch. In an interview with Network World (as first noted by the guys at FierceWireless ), Verizon CTO Tony Melone says that their LTE network should be up and running in 60 markets 15 months after the initial launch. As we mentioned above, the initial launch should go down sometime in late 2010 – and by our count, “15 months after” that means some time around mid-2012. Alas, they’re not specifying exactly which markets they’re talking about here, though it’s probably safe to assume that major cities are pretty close to the top of the list. Interestingly, some areas that currently lack 3G will get bumped directly from the super-slow and pretty dang old 1XRTT network up to LTE. That’s like going from not having fire to being able to shoot magma out of your hands. [Photo Credit: Jschumacher on Flickr ]

25-year-old Massachusetts-based graphic artist Brandon Schaefer has created an impressive collection of retro-minimal movie posters. The Ghostbusters -inspired posters above have been making the internet rounds recently, but Schaefer has a huge portfolio of posters, some of which can even be purchased as prints on inPRNT.com . Check out some of his posters, after the jump. Check out more of Brandon’s work on SeekAndSpeak.com . Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff ? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com . Cool Stuff: Boba Fett Life-Size Bust Cool Stuff: The Coolest New Movie Toys/Collectibles to Premiere at Toy Fair 2010 Cool Stuff: Jamie Bolton’s Minimalistic Movie Posters Hollywood vs. New York: Four Decades of Destruction Cool Stuff: Movie and Television Time Travel Timeline Cool Stuff: Seven More Awesome Pieces of Art From Crazy4Cult 3D

Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress 2010 that, while not really unveiling any new products or services, positioned the company as a mobile powerhouse whom are looking out for the interests of consumers: A device that is not connected is not interesting, it is literally lonely. An application that does not leverage the cloud isn’t going to wow anybody,” he said. “It’s like magic. (via RWW ) When I hear the whole “It’s like magic” reference I think about one of the videos that kicked off the birth of Android : Back then (November 5th, 2007) Android was just a concept. Not only has the idea come to fruition – it’s flourishing: Schmidt also claimed that 60,000 Android-based mobile phones are shipping every single day. That’s a HUGE number, 21.9 million/year, and quickly gaining momentum. Yet still there are detractors who think Google has too much power and is selfishly destroying other industries as their business path travels like an unpredictable tornado. The issue came up more than once in the Q&A following the keynote: One person asserted that Google wanted to turn the operators into “dumb data pipes.” The questioner went on: “You see the operator as the data supplier, you’re the one with the service.” Schmidt fired back, saying, “I disagree with your premise completely” and asking the man to explain himself. “I feel very strongly that we depend on the successful business of the operators,” Schmidt said. “We need advanced sophisticated networks.” Later on, yet another member of the audience asked Schmidt whether five years from now a mobile phone user would “feel like a Vodafone/T-Mobile customer or a Google customer.” Schmidt responded “both.” Give me a BREAK. The mobile phone industry existed LONG before Google entered and innovation wasn’t exactly moving at a rapid pace. Microsoft could have pursued this vision with Windows Mobile. Research In Motion could have got on board with something more open with BlackBerry. Palm could have deviated from their ancient PalmOS. Anyone could have tried just about anything besides the boring old “status quo”. But nobody did… except Google. And now you’re going to blame the catalyst because they’re benefiting from improving the entire industry and creating a renewed sense of competition and creativity along the way? But it isn’t like this criticism is only coming from Q&A bizarros – we’ve heard HTC CEO Peter Chou question Google’s motives and now Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao complains about their online ad dominance: “With regards to Google, we need to be able to freely deal up and down the value chain. The fact that 80% of the advertising online goes down one funnel is something that should be looked at in the future debate on net neutrality,” he said, adding that the European Commission and FCC should ensure rules are put in place “to enable competition at all levels.” Last month we heard the Telefonica CEO, Cesar Alierta, making even angrier remarks: “Search engines use our networks without paying us anything. It’s a lucky break for them and bad luck for us,” he said. Internet searches from Web sites such as Google and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) take up a big chunk of the bandwidth on telecoms operators’ networks, he said. “We put up the network, we put the system there, we do customer care, installation service… This will change, I’m sure of that,” Alierta said. If you ask me, that’s the price you pay for complacency. Perhaps mobile operators like Vodafone and Telefonica should have been attempting a little something called “innovation” a long time ago. Just ask Eric Schmidt how it affects the bottom line… “it’s like magic”.

Monica Keller , a MySpace Group Architect who has played a key role in advancing MySpace’s initiatives in activity streams and openness, is leaving the company to join Facebook. Keller announced the news in a blog post this evening. She will be joining Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager, where she’ll be joining a team that includes David Recordon and Luke Shepard . MySpace confirmed that Keller had left the company but declined to comment further. Keller played a key role in launching MySpace’s Real-Time Stream API , helping to design the Real Time Stream using PuSH and architecting the network’s Twitter Sync Ingest.  Keller was involved with the technical aspects of the Stream, and was also involved with the design of MySpace’s developer platform. She’s also represented MySpace on numerous conference panels. While Keller has some nice things to say about the struggling company in her post, she clearly wasn’t pleased with the way some things were handled at MySpace: But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore. To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice: It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery. This is a loss for MySpace, but it certainly isn’t the end of their real-time and open initiatives (which have been more progressive than Facebook’s).  We hear that these are still being spearheaded by recently promoted MySpace co-president Mike Jones , and that Christina Wodtke , who recently joined the company after running the activity stream product at LinkedIn, is involved in running the team’s day-to-day operations. Image by Adam Tinworth . CrunchBase Information Monica Keller Information provided by CrunchBase

HTC’s no stranger to stuffing ridiculous mechanisms into smartphones. I mean, have you seen the HTC Tilt — or better yet, the HTC Universal ? Looks like they’re at it again, if this just unearthed patent is any indication. The graphic above may be a bit confusing, so here’s how it works: Imagine a clamshell phone, like the LG enV . Instead of opening the handset by pulling the hinged halves apart, however, you slide the top layer down a few millimeters, and bam! It springs open. When you slide the top half down, you’re breaking the connection between two magnets (one in each half of the phone) that held it closed, allowing the spring-loaded hinge to do its thing. If you’ve ever owned a Sidekick, you know how oddly addicting the act of opening/closing a spring-loaded handset can be when you’ve got idle hands. The patent, as dug up by the guys over at WMPoweruser , can be found here . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

HTC’s no stranger to stuffing ridiculous mechanisms into smartphones. I mean, have you seen the HTC Tilt — or better yet, the HTC Universal ? Looks like they’re at it again, if this just unearthed patent is any indication. The graphic above may be a bit confusing, so here’s how it works: Imagine a clamshell phone, like the LG enV . Instead of opening the handset by pulling the hinged halves apart, however, you slide the top layer down a few millimeters, and bam! It springs open. When you slide the top half down, you’re breaking the connection between two magnets (one in each half of the phone) that held it closed, allowing the spring-loaded hinge to do its thing. If you’ve ever owned a Sidekick, you know how oddly addicting the act of opening/closing a spring-loaded handset can be when you’ve got idle hands. The patent, as dug up by the guys over at WMPoweruser , can be found here . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Two things. First of all: No, the image has absolutely nothing to do with the post. It was between “Stock photo of a bunch of survey check boxes” and this picture of a cat with a human smile – which would you have chosen? Second: Please take this reader survey . We’re working on some awesome new stuff moving forward, and knowing a bit more about our readers would really help make it happen. It’ll only take a moment, and I’d really appreciate it. Crunch Network : TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Two things. First of all: No, the image has absolutely nothing to do with the post. It was between “Stock photo of a bunch of survey check boxes” and this picture of a cat with a human smile – which would you have chosen? Second: Please take this reader survey . We’re working on some awesome new stuff moving forward, and knowing a bit more about our readers would really help make it happen. It’ll only take a moment, and I’d really appreciate it. Crunch Network : TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies