PornHub, a popular site feature people in various stages of undress, saw 33.5 billion visits in 2018. There are currently 7.53 billion people on Earth.

Y’all have been busy.

The company, which owns most of the major porn sites online, produces a yearly report that aggregates user behavior on the site. Of particular interest, aside from the fact that all of us are horndogs, is that the US, Germany, and India are in the top spots for porn browsing and that the company transferred 4,000 petabytes of data or about 500 MB per person on the planet.

We ignore this data at our peril. While it doesn’t seem important at first glance, the fact that these porn sites are doing more traffic than most major news organizations is deeply telling. Further, like the meme worlds of Twitter and Facebook, Stormy Daniels and Fortnite made the top searches which points to the spread of politics and culture into the heart of our desires. TV manufacturers should note that 4K searchers are rising in popularity, which suggests that consumer electronics manufacturers should start getting read for a shift (although it should be noted that there is sadly little free 4K content on these sites, a discovery I just made while researching this brief.)

Need more frightening/enlightening data? Here you go.

Just as ‘1080p’ searches had been a defining term in 2017, now “4k” ultra-hd has seen a significant increase in popularity through-out 2018. The popularity of ‘Romantic’ videos more than doubled, and remained twice as popular with female visitors when compared to men.

Searches referring to the dating app ‘Tinder’ grew by 161% among women, 113% among men and 131% by visitors aged 35 to 44. It was also a top trending term in many countries including the United Kingdom and Australia. The number of Tinder themed fantasy date videos on the site is now more than 3500.

Life imitates art, and eventually porn imitates everything, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see that ‘Bowsette’ also made our list of searches that defined 2018. After the original Nintendo fan-art went viral, searches for Bowsette exceeded 3 million in just one week and resulted in the release of a live-action Bowsette themed porn parody (NSFW) with more than 720,000 views.

Bowsette. Good. Moving on.

The Bible Belt representing well in the showings with Mississippi, South Carolina, and Arkansas spending the most time looking at porn. Kansas spent the least. Phones got the most use as porn distribution devices and iOS and Android nearly tied in terms of platform popularity.

Windows traffic fell considerably this year while Chrome OS became decidedly more popular in 2018. Chrome was popular when it came to browsers used while the Playstation was the biggest deliverer of flicks to the console user.

Porn is a the canary in the tech coal mine and where it goes the rest of tech follows. All of these data points, taken together, paint a fascinating picture of a world on the cusp of a fairly unique shift from desktop to mobile and from HD to 4K video. Further, given that these sites are delivering so much data on a daily basis, it’s clear that all of us are sneaking a peek now and again… even if we refuse to admit it.

Hello, Las Vegas! We are all heading to LV for CES next month and instead of spending all our cash on a booth we’ll be wandering the halls and want to meet you as far away from the Convention Center as possible without ending up in the Grand Canyon.

And we need your help.

While I have some ideas, I’d love it if someone could recommend a nice place to host about 150 people with drinks, food, and other goodies. We’ll have beer, exhibitors, and some good times.

If you have any ideas or would like to take part as a sponsor or exhibitor, please drop me a line at john@techcrunch.com. I’m thinking something nice out in Old Las Vegas or somewhere off the strip where we don’t have to push through crowds of people in lanyards. This event will be open to all of you so get your blue suede dancing shoes ready.

I’m heading back to Europe to hang out in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

I’ll be at a Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, which is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th at WeWork in Warsaw. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

Three dimensional modeling used to be hard. It used to require something at least as big as the Xbox Kinect to get really high quality scans you needed high-powered laser sensor systems. Now all you need is your phone and Capture.

Capture is a proof-of-concept for a company called Standard Cyborg led by Jeff Huber and Garrett Spiegel. These YCombinator grads have worked in a number of high-profile vision startups and raised $2.4 million in seed from folks like Scott Banister, Trevor Blackwell, and Jeff Huber.

They launched the app on December 3 and it’s already making 3D waves. The tool, which uses the iPhone X’s front camera and laser scanning system to create a live color point cloud, can create 3D models that you can view inside the app or in an AR setting. You can also export them into a USDZ file for use elsewhere. The app is actually a Trojan horse for the company’s other applications including a programming framework for 3D scanning.

“We are at the bleeding edge – deploying 3D dense reconstruction and point cloud deep learning on mobile devices,” said Huber. “We package up this core technology for developers, abstracting away all the math and GPU acceleration, and giving them superpowers in just 3 lines of code.”

I’ve tried the app a few times and the resulting scans are still a little iffy. You have to take special care to slowly scan all facets of an object and if you move, as you see below, you end up with two noses. That said it’s an amazingly cool use of the iPhone’s powerful front-facing sensors.

“Standard Cyborg is building the API for the physical world,” said Huber. “We make it easy for developers to build 3D scanning, analysis, and design into their applications. Our Capture app is a showcase of our technology that makes it easy for anyone with a FaceID-enabled iPhone to play with the technology and share scans with their friends. Our scanning SDK is launching in January and is currently in beta with a few enterprise-level sporting goods companies.”

While you won’t be scanning your loved ones into a TRON remake with this thing just yet it’s cool to think about how far we’ve come from flailing around in our living rooms with a clunky Kinect next to our TV.

I’ve been thinking hard about the concept of sponsored content – you can find some of it on TechCrunch if you look hard enough and it appears almost everywhere else. It’s an important consideration because as a online journalist I’ve heard everything from “How much did Apple pay you to post this?” to “How much can I pay you to post something to TechCrunch?”

And I’m sick of it.

Journalists afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Marketers comfort the comfortable. The only person who wins in that struggle is the guy with the biggest wallet to buy as much coverage as possible. Crypto, for all its faults, promises to change that.

Now I’d like to introduce something else I built (and I never do this on TC so I think it’s pretty important and interesting.) It’s called HypeHop and it’s an experiment in sponsored video. Most sponsored video appears in front of your YouTube selections like a cold sore – you know it’s there, it’s unwanted, and you know it will take a while for it to go away. For example, this deeply applicable ad appeared as my son was watching Nerf videos, for example, proving that algorithms aren’t always the smartest.

Enough.

In the current system marketers pay media platforms for their audience. The marketer gets eyeballs, the media platform gets money, and the user gets bupkus. I wanted to try to change that.

With a few friends I made something called HypeHop. It basically pays you for watching videos. At this point it’s a proof-of-concept that accepts uploaded videos, a small payment for hosting, and then watches the viewer to ensure they are watching the video. “Watching the viewer?” you ask? Sure. We’re being surveilled every day. Isn’t it time we were paid for it?

Viewers currently get about 40 cents in BTC per view. I created a demo video with my son here to show off how it worked and preseeded some videos with BTC to test. Thus far it’s been an interesting experiment.

I’d love to talk to like-minded folks about expanding this technology. I could, for example, see this as a tool to make sponsored posts more interesting to readers – who doesn’t want a few pennies for reading marketing dross – and a way to monetize many marketing tools for readers, producers, and marketers. Ultimately this is a win-win-win in a win-win-lose world and it’s vitally important we look at it as a way forward in our fight against fake news and faker marketing.

I’m heading back to Europe to run a pitch-off in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

The Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

Leica’s pricey – but sexy – CL camera is the closest thing you can get to an original portable luxury shooter without spending more than a used Toyota Corolla. The CL, which launched last year, is essentially a pared down M series camera that has gotten rave reviews over the past year. Now, in time for Noel, Leica is offering a Street Kit that includes the CL along with a Leica Summicron-TL 23 mm f/2 lens. This flat pancake lens gives you a “tried and true 35 mm equivalent focal length for the quintessential reportage style of shooting” and should suffice for street shots taken on the wing while wandering the darkened alleyways of certain Central European cities.

Now for the bad news. Leica is traditionally some of the most expensive and best made camera gear on the market and this is no different. While you get a camera that should last you well into the next millennium, you’ll pay a mere $4,195 for the privilege, making it considerably less than the M series but considerably more than the camera on your phone. The package a saves you a little over $800 if you purchased each item separately.

That said, it’s nice to see a bundle like this still exists for a solid, beautifully-wrought camera, a nice lens, and even a leather carrying strap. Besides, isn’t the creation of photographic art worth the price of admission? As noted Leica lover Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “Au fond, ce n’est pas la photo en soi qui m’interesse. Ce que je veux c’est de capter une fraction de seconde du reel.” Preach, brother.

The year is 1940. Through the use of arcane atomic technologies, the Axis have brought back modern technology from the year 2018. Their main prize? This amazing Enigma Pocket Watch. This tiny watch, created by a maker calling himself asciimation, uses an Arduino Pro Micro and a small OLED screen to recreate the Enigma machine in pure code.

Asciimation previously built an Enigma wristwatch and he is working on a 3D-printed Enigma machine. The Enigma was a seemingly unbreakable encoding machine used by the Germans during World War II and was about the size of a small briefcase. Stuffing all of the logic into a tiny watch case — of WWII vintage — is an amazing feat.

Luckily the aforementioned time travel device was never built and this wild little pocket watch never made it into enemy hands, but we can only imagine the havoc it would wreak if some Panzer captain somewhere had one of these on his belt. You can read all about the build on Asciimation’s site.

I’ll be heading back to Europe in December to run a pitch-off in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

The Wrocwal event, called In-Ference, is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen to pitch. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th. You can sign up to pitch pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen to pitch and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. It’s always fun to get back to the stary kraj.

Laco is a small German watch company famous for its Flieger watches – pieces designed for pilots featuring big crowns and legible faces. Now brand has teamed up with ABlogToWatch on a Fallout-themed watch that looks like something pulled out of a deserted vault.

The $2,950 watch contains an ETA 2824.2 movement and features a massively distressed case and band along with a clever case that hearkens back to 1950s A-Bomb/military design. It’s limited to 143 pieces and you can pre-order it for shipment in March. The entire package looks like something out of the Fallout game. Bethesda is not involved in the product, incidentally, but the entire thing is an homage to the Fallout universe.

From the site:

On the outside of the heavily-worn tin box, we see a stamp showing that it was issued to the Overseer of Vault #43. Inside the box, you’ll find the Laco RAD-AUX, a user manual, and an accumulation of a few odds and ends. Presumably, the additional artifacts were collected by the owner of the Laco RAD-AUX before it was discovered. There are realistic Polaroid-style photos depicting abandoned landscapes, mutated plant-life, and a curious panther named Gloria. A bottle cap bearing the mark of a sunset, which has been turned into a pin. There is also a New California Republic ’protection postcard’ which instructs you to place it near the entrance of your domicile, and each item included looks realistically tattered and aged.

The most interesting thing about this watch is the partnership with ABlogToWatch, a popular watch blog run by Ariel Adams, and Laco. These sorts of partnerships usually result in a boring, branded watch with an ugly blog logo hidden somewhere on the case. This partnership is more about Laco and Adams’ imagination taking flight over a mushroom cloud. Regardless, this is a great piece for folks who haven’t yet picked up a 3D-printed Pip Boy. Good luck, Vault Dweller!

As a former Arby’s sandwich artist I understand the value of a background check. Had I not been investigated back at age 16 no one at the restaurant would have known I was a lapsed Boy Scout and read Stephen King novels. But what would have happened had I taken up a life of petty crime after being hired? No one except Intelligo would know.

Run by former lawyer, Shlomo Mirvis, Intelligo began as a manual background check service that pivoted to use AI and machine learning to speed up the process. Now Mirvis and his team have added a further twist, allowing for constant background checks over time, ensuring nothing untoward comes up after five months behind the keyboard or meat slicer.

Both Mirvis and Chief Research Officer Dana Rakovsky have connections to public and private intelligence. The company raised a $5.7 million series A and they declined to mention growth numbers although they did mention a number of high-ticket clients.

“Unlike most other players in the market, we’ve created a way to give customers continuous exposure to the people that matter to their investments,” said Mirvis. “Standard background checks are outdated the minute they’re published so we built a method to give businesses live alerts to the individuals they invest in, called Ongoing Monitoring. Unlike other products that exist, Ongoing Monitoring is built on an AI algorithm to provide a thorough scope of review, yet remove noise.”

Mirvis said that other services depend on humans poring over arrest records and other important documents to find mention of key employees. Their system looks at multiple databases and data sources and never gets tired.

“Any suspicious information found is highlighted with a red or yellow flag on our interactive report,” he said. “Copies of the original sources that our report is based on can easily be accessed.”

“Everyday people must make critical, and often difficult, decisions,” said Mirvis. “Whether the decision is to invest money or move ahead with a hire, the implications could affect a person’s financial standing or a company’s survival. At Intelligo, our mission is to create a way for people to leverage technology so they can rely on, and value, trust.”

Given background checks have become a given in many industries it’s no wonder Intelligo is running constant monitoring. After all, what would have happened if I had been found, months later, to be an undesirable sort while making my fiftieth beef and cheddar of the day?

With Big Dog busy pulling Santa’s sleigh what horrible robotic hybrid is left to haunt our dreams? How about Elowan!

Elowan is a project out of the MIT Media Lab and it’s essentially a mobile houseplant. The plant sends signals to a wheeled transport that rolls back and forth trying to find light. Created by Harpreet Sareen, the robot senses changes in the plant’s electrochemical reactions to tell when it is thirsty for light or even when it is being hung the wrong way.

Elowan is an attempt to demonstrate what augmentation of nature could mean. Elowan’s robotic base is a new symbiotic association with a plant. The agency of movement rests with the plant based on its own bio-electrochemical signals, the language interfaced here with the artificial world.

These in turn trigger physiological variations such as elongation growth, respiration, and moisture absorption. In this experimental setup, electrodes are inserted into the regions of interest (stems and ground, leaf and ground). The weak signals are then amplified and sent to the robot to trigger movements to respective directions.

Such symbiotic interplay with the artificial could be extended further with exogenous extensions that provide nutrition, growth frameworks, and new defense mechanisms.

Will this plant eventually learn to ride towards the scent of blood and eat us? Possibly! To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could make a mobile houseplant, they didn’t stop to think if they should. I, for one, welcome our cyborg houseplant overlords.