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The Tech Innovators Series is supported by Lenovo. Lenovo does not just manufacture technology. They make Do machines — super-powered crea…

The Reddit community has grown substantially in the last year, and links that hit the front page can send boatloads of valuable traffic to int…

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your st…

“Artists need to be business people too,” filmmaker Tiffany Shlain told me when she came into San Francisco’s TechCrunchTV studio. Shlain, whose movie Connected launched earlier this week, is a pioneering movie maker not only because of her award-winning films but also because this innovative businesswoman has figured out a way to make money in today’s digital economy.

“The gates are open right now,” Shlain told me about a 21st century movie business that is, she says, “completely different” from the 20th century studio model. And that’s because, she explained, filmmakers now have the technology to directly connect with their viewers. Put 50% of your energy into the making of the movie, she thus told me, and the other 50% into promoting it on networks like Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re advertising a product, would you rather simply have an image of that product, or have your consumers be able to watch a video of that product in action? Unless you’re sarcastic like myself, you probably answered with the latter, because the truth is that videos help products sell online. This is true even for those vendors that sell products that one wouldn’t necessarily assume would be made more attractive with video. Consider Zappos, for example, which currently offers over 50,000 product videos. Zappos also happens to do a pretty good business.

For SellStage, a startup from this summer’s batch of Y Combinator companies that is launching today, Zappos is the standard. But most big eTailers are far behind the shoe seller in terms of video content. So SellStage is launching a platform that is designed to make it easy for both big and small businesses to add video content to their websites to showcase their products.

If you haven’t noticed, photos are big on the social web right now. Running a contest is a great way to tap into that content and boost c…

One of the cooler gadgets we saw at Disrupt this year was the new Retrieva GPS dog tracker. Completely redesigned, this device lets you track Fido wherever he does roam and will let people know where to take him or her if lost.