Add Amazon to the list of online video providers that could soon release some new original programming. The company is looking to hire creative executives to develop and produce original comedies and kids shows for online and traditional distribution.

According to a couple of job postings on the Amazon jobs site, the online retailer is hiring creative execs to develop programming through its Amazon Studios initiative. The jobs specifically are for the “People’s Production Company,” which is the name of the production studio producing original content, located in Sherman Oaks, Calif. Successful applicants would report to Amazon’s VP of Series Development and would be expected to:

• Assess pilot proposals
• Work with writers and artists to develop series ideas
• Staff, cast and produce pilots in a cost-efficient way
• Supervise series production when series are greenlit

While Netflix, Hulu and YouTube have already introduced their own original programming, the Amazon Studios project preceded all of those other initiatives. However, while Netflix, YouTube and others are sourcing their programming from professional production companies, Amazon took a different approach with its studio plans — it’s crowd-sourcing scripts and projects from a community of artists and optioning them for free.

Amazon Studios apparently paid $ 580,000 to script writers and $ 2.1 million for test movies in 2011, but programming has yet to make it to distribution. But the fact that Amazon is hiring creative execs to shepherd projects through the development process means that we could see some original shows popping up soon.

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Want to really embrace the quantitative self? Forget tracking your sleep and start tracking your dental hygiene. Beam Technologies, a year-old startup is set to introduce a Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush and app that will launch next month. The toothbrush contains a sensor and Bluetooth radio that will send your brushing information to a smartphone app. Later versions will also track how long you spent in certain areas of the mouth and might add some kind of gamification layer to help encourage better brushing.

Alex X. Frommeyer, the CEO and founder of Beam says the Beam Brush should hit shelves in early March and retail for about $ 50 for the base and $ 3 for a replaceable brush head. The Android app is ready, and the iOS app should be ready when the toothbrush launches or soon after. His startup, which is based in Louisville, Ky. is set to close on an initial round of funding in a few weeks. He didn’t disclose the amount but said it is less than $ 1 million.

Wait, what? Why put Bluetooth in my toothbrush?

The idea for creating a connected toothbrush came from a deeply personal and deeply practical place for Frommeyer. He had long been interested in the ways broadband and connectivity could upend the medical market, and had a personal connection to dentistry thanks to several  family members working in the field. On a practical side, dentistry is an easier entry point into the medical field because the Food and Drug Administration has more lenient rules around approving toothbrushes. They are medical devices, but as long as someone submits the design to the FDA, he can sell it. That means Beam can sell its toothbrush without spending millions and waiting for FDA approval.

The first generation toothbrush may not appeal to those seeking the ultimate in data on their dental hygiene, as it will consist mostly of letting you track how long and when you brushed your teeth. To jazz up the experience, Frommeyer will let the app play songs and may incorporate a social element or game element to the process. At first this seems bizarre (although maybe not to those people who share their pictures of their dinners), but as a parent I would love one of these things so I can monitor how often my daughter brushes her teeth without standing right there in the bathroom.

Future iterations will also be able to show the user how long they spent in certain areas of the mouth. The sensor works via contact with the mouth, so it registers when the brush is scrubbing your teeth. I’d love for the app to become almost a reward system and prompt for good brushing, so when my daughter (or me) is brushing, the app could play a video or something fun, but if the brushing slacked off or spent too long in one place, the video stopped playing. I’m sure there are those of you who are scoffing at the idea that one can’t just suck it up for the two minutes it takes to brush your teeth, but I’m on board. After all, I already read a book or magazine while brushing, so I’m happy to be entertained while performing a mundane task.

Giving dentists your data opens up a can of worms.

The promise of a connected toothbrush isn’t just a better brushing experience in Frommeyer’s eyes. He’d like patients to share that data with their dentists and hygienists. On an individual level that means better patient care (and you can still lie about flossing if you want) and on a macro level it could mean sharing aggregated data from millions of Beam Brush users, and finding patterns or shifts in how tooth decay occurs.

Of course medical data is a touchy subject and one that’s governed by laws such as HIPAA, but if this is a way to bring user-generated data from devices such as the beam Brush or a FitBit (see disclosure) into doctors’offices, I’m interested. My own doctor showed absolutely no interest in the data collected from my FitBit, even though she does ask me to tell her what I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours every time I see her. Still, connected pedometers, sleep monitors and even apps that track blood pressure and other function are getting picked up by consumers, so maybe by the time I go to my next checkup my doctor will have changed her mind.

At that point, these types of devices might actually live up to the promise of helping change the medical industry, by offering better data, holding users accountable (perhaps through social sharing or merely with a doctor checking in on your progress) and letting people take charge of their health and habits. So as silly as a connected toothbrush might seem at first glance, it might be the lever that helps move the medical world.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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It’s getting hard to keep up with the stacks of legal filings related to Apple today, but bear with us. On Friday, Apple filed another lawsuit against Motorola, this time in California district court, over technology in mobile devices that Apple says it has licenses to use.

Motorola sued Apple in April last year over use of technology covered by U.S. Patent No. 6,359,898 in Germany. Apple for its part says because Motorola has licensed Qualcomm to make chips that allow devices to connect to UMTS and GRPS networks, and Apple is a third-party licensee of Qualcomm, Apple can legally use the MDM6610 chip from Qualcomm and other components from the chipmaker in its devices.

The latest is that the iPhone maker is now suing Motorola in the U.S., asking the District Court for the Southern District of California to step in a prevent the company from suing Apple for using technologies it says it is already licensed to use.

From the complaint:

Motorola’s German lawsuit is in direct breach of a Patent Licensing Agreement between Motorola and Qualcomm. As a Qualcomm customer, Apple is a third-party beneficiary of that contract. Moreover, under this same contract, Motorola’s rights under the ‘336 and the ‘898 patents are exhausted.

Apple also claims breach of contract and is asking for an injunction.

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Today happens to be the 8th birthday of Flickr, a groundbreaking photo-sharing service that introduced to the world the founding principles of the social web: community, sharing, openness and social connections. It was a service that first told all of us that “liking” was as meaningful as actually creating photos themselves.

Thomas Hawk, a longtime member of the Flickr community writes:

Today is Flickr’s 8th Birthday. Whatever you may or may not think of the service today, without a doubt Flickr pioneered social photography. I joined Flickr during year one in August of 2004, shortly after it was launched to the public. What I found there was more than just a place to host my photos, I found a vibrant community full of great photographers who were willing and eager to engage with each other through the site. I found an audience that appreciated creativity and the ability for us to come together and share art in mostly a non-commercial setting.

When Yahoo bought the company — I broke the news – it was pretty clear that Ludicorp, the tiny Vancouver-based company behind Flickr, could change the search engine, which at that time was trying to differentiate itself from its main rival, Google. Of course, none of that came to pass. Flickr today languishes in the shadow of newer photo sharing services such as Instagram. It never really adapted to mobile. The beautiful, simple user experience has become cluttered.

Yahoo has never really appreciated what it has in Flickr: a community of passionate people who share moments and experiences through photos — a concept  that has since found its way into Path, Instagram, 500px and Facebook. Talking about Facebook — it is 8 years old too and is about to become the greatest wealth creation engine since Google.

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You may be familiar with the humor blog that aggregates examples of iPhone spelling correction malfunctions that cause (amusing) communication chaos called DamnYouAutoCorrect.com. Samsung lawyers are probably thinking something along those lines right now. That’s because Apple is using that feature of its iOS devices to peg Samsung with a new patent infringement lawsuit in California.

Our friends at PaidContent this morning reported that Apple filed a complaint earlier this week in a federal court in San Jose citing two patents and asking for an injunction against the Korean electronics maker. The patents in question are  8,074,172 and 8,086,604. The first is related to spelling and autocorrect. The second is described as a “universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system.”

What Apple is asking for in this case is unclear — as in whether they’re targeting the Galaxy Tab or Galaxy phones or any other product — since most of the court documents haven’t been made publicly available.

But it’s clear that Apple is not through trying to use the courts to punish Samsung for, as Apple put it, “slavishly copying” its iPhone and iPad products.

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McKay Brothers, a firm that sells high capacity links to trading firms, is connecting the financial districts of New York City and Chicago with a new network that aims to execute the fastest trades in the country. This new network, however, won’t be built on private fiber lines. Instead, McKay is taking to the airwaves, building a chain of tower-mounted microwave radios between the Big Apple and the Windy City.

Why is microwave faster? Electromagnetic waves travel at different speeds depending on the materials they traverse, said Gary Corke, director of product marketing for Aviat Networks, the vendor McKay selected to supply its Eclipse Packet Node radios. Optical fiber has a much higher refraction index than plain old air, thus slowing down light waves moving through it, Corke said in an e-mail interview. By sending microwaves over the air, McKay is able to cut down the round-journey of a packet by 4 milliseconds, Corke claimed.

That may not sound like much, but according to McKay and Aviat, those 4 millionths of a second can make all the difference in the world to a high-frequency trader. Executing a trade even the tiniest fraction of a second earlier than a competitor can lock in the smallest change in pricing, which, when applied over massive volumes of shares or commodities, can translate into millions dollars. Aviat estimated said that a single millisecond advantage could equate to an additional $ 100 million a year to large high-frequency trading firm.

McKay isn’t revealing the exact route or number of towers of radios used in the network, which is scheduled for completion this summer, though it is sure to use as few links as possible. The more times a transmission passes from radio waves to electronic components the more it’s slowed down. Fiber transmissions have the same limitations, passing through routers and repeaters many times along their journey. McKay wants to ensure its not only using the fastest medium for transport but also that it has the fewest hops.

Fiber also has to move burrow under streets and wind around obstacles, lengthening the overall distance over which signals must travel. Meanwhile, microwave, in most cases, can take the most direct path as transmitters must only be within each other’s line of sight. The only fiber components in McKay’s network will be in the end cities itself, completing the final mile link between the end-point transmission towers and McKay’s financial firm customers.

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Kickstarter’s exploits as a fundraising platform have been well documented but the company is now entering some uncharted territory. For the first time, not one but two Kickstarter projects eclipsed the $ 1 million pledge mark, within hours of each other yesterday. All told on Thursday, Kickstarter received $ 1,605,981 in pledges, blowing past the previous one-day record of $ 736,730, set the day before.

The Elevation Dock, an elegant iPhone dock passed the $ 1 million mark Thursday a little after 2 p.m. with a couple days to go before its deadline. It now sits at $ 1,163,192 with more than 10,000 backers. A little less than five hours later, Double Fine Adventure, an adventure video game proposed by game veteran Tim Schafer, shot past the $ 1 million mark in less than a day and now has a total of $ 1,345,382 with about 37,000 backers. It originally launched Wednesday night with the goal of raising $ 400,000, which it reached within eight hours.

“It’s really exiting and interesting,” co-founder Yancey Strickler told me in an interview. “If it was just one project hitting a million dollars, the story is about this cool project but with two, it’s about what Kickstarter provides and how it’s maybe an efficient way to turn audiences into dollars. Certainly, today people are looking at Kickstarter differently than before.”

The milestones highlight the bigger momentum behind Kickstarter, which is rounding into form as a funding tool. Seven of the eight biggest funded projects in the history of Kickstarter have been launched in the last three months and there is at least one new project that could be on pace to join the million dollar club in the coming weeks. Strickler recounts in a blog post the crazy 24 hours starting Wednesday night when the two projects started their run past a million dollars.

The Double Fine team celebrating

Previously, the TikTok+LunaTik multi-touch watch kits came close to hitting a million dollars in pledges with $ 942,578 pledged after launching in December 2010. A year later, Hidden Radio has raised $ 938,771 with 5,358 funders and Printrbot, a 3-D printer kit has managed to raise $ 830,827. Most of the successful projects have received a modest average of $ 6,300, but that figure has steadily grown over time.

Strickler told me he’s still trying to wrap his head around the achievements. He said Elevation Dock was expected to eclipse the million dollar mark but Double Fine Adventure was a surprise.

“It’s an incredible validation and a great sign of how this platform can work. I have no idea if we will see a lot of these million dollar projects or if these two are only ones for the next five years but I do like what it says about the kind of opportunities here and the kind of scale you can do by working with fans.”

Strickler said the Double Fine project was especially rewarding because Tim Shafer, maker of Psychonauts, was a hero to a number of people at Kickstarter. Cindy Au, a community support staff member at Kickstarter had some informal talks with Shafer but it was Shafer who decided to launch his project on Kickstarter. Strickler said the funding shows how Kickstarter can be a game changer in the video game business, similar to how the success of TikTok opened up the market for product design.

Kickstarter’s success has been exploding since its launch in 2009. Last year, it hit $ 100 million in pledges, up from $ 28 million in 2010. And it had 27,086 projects launched last year, compared to 11,130 the previous year with a 46 percent success rate for fund raising.

The momentum isn’t just reflected in the sheer number of projects. Kickstarter is becoming a powerhouse in helping quality films get made. It had 17 films in the Sundance Film Festival, or 10 percent of all the films there, and had three documentaries shortlisted for the Academy Awards.

Strickler said Kickstarter embraces the idea that it can be used for much bigger endeavors. But it’s still trying to keep the focus on creative projects, not on building companies. He said the magic of Kickstarter is that it’s not just another form of capital. In the VC world, projects are only funded if there’s a chance it can make money. What Kickstarter is doing, he said, is giving an opportunity to projects that may have dimmer chances of making money but are still worthy of being made:

“From an investment perspective, VCs are are looking to make money, but that only happens with very few things. 99 percent of products fail so very few things should exist. But if the question is, ‘Do I want this to exist?’, a lot more things become possible. That’s the disruption of Kickstarter, changing the question from ‘Can this make money?’ to ‘Should this exist?’”

In the case of Double Fine, Strickler said traditional VCs and publishers were not likely to fund Shafer’s vision of an adventure game. But by opening up another funding channel, Shafer can go direct to his fans. That’s something that Kickstarter is making possible, going around the studio or publisher layer that keeps fans from directly supporting the content and projects they like.

The Kickstarter crew celebrates

Strickler said he believes other creators are going to take note of the milestones because they show that even bigger projects can be undertaken through Kickstarter. And it can be a platform for creators with a large following. He said he expects some of the excitement around hitting achievements like a million dollars to fade away as crowd-sourced funding increasingly becomes normal.

“This is the year when we see this kind of creative funding start to go mainstream. It’s less of a novelty thing and this will become just the way we make things. This is a transition we’re excited for,” Strickler said.

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