Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…

Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen.

The games that scam the most, win.

We interrupt normal programming to bring you an issue that’s affecting our ability to create a better tech ecosystem in Europe. At TechCrunch Europe we’ve been trying to help really energize the startup tech community across Europe – which suffers from the difficulty of being disparate and spread out – with a series of organised meetups featuring speakers, pitches and live video streaming on to TechCrunch.com.

Now, we’ve done this so far in plenty of places, such as Helsinki, Paris, Stockholm, Barcelona and more recently Berlin and Munich. Wherever we’ve been we’ve attracted 200 or more attendees – that’s practically a full conference. So we’d like to do more. But – and here’s the point of this post – we are fighting against Europe’s high venue costs. So we’re on the hunt for venue partners – maybe startups with really large spaces, or maybe universities – that can help us. Please contact our events team.

It’s Halloween, and nowhere more obviously so than in San Francisco.

This is my first 31st October as a resident of the United States and I have to say, the effort you yanks go to in celebrating the ancient Celts’ holy evening is truly astounding. Every corner store, diner, dry cleaners, police station, library and undertakers has embraced the – uh – spirit, adourning their windows with spray-on cobwebs and pumpkins and sparkly witches hats and coffins. (Although, to be fair to the undertakers, the coffins are sort of a year-round thing.)

We celebrate All Hallows’ Eve in the UK too of course, and like most things on our side of the Atlantic it’s just as commercial, albeit with more irony and a better accent. But the real difference back home is that Halloween is an evening – just one evening, not a whole fucking month – aimed squarely at kids. Here, by contrast, it seems to be something far more grown-up. Something far more – well – creepy.

In case you didn’t yet realize it, tonight is Halloween. And if you didn’t yet realize it, maybe you don’t have plans yet. If not, as usual, the Internet comes to your rescue. If you’re stuck at home tonight for whatever reason, you’ll be able to load up Facebook and watch Heidi Klum’s Halloween party, streaming live.

Sure, it’s not as good as being there, but it beats doing nothing. And it’s being done with the help of Modelinia, a site devoted to capturing the lives of super models. Enticed yet?

Our favorite jingle guy is at it again. Jonathan Mann, who TechCrunch readers will best know as the guy behind the awful Bing jingle, has released another new video (as he does every day), this time to serenade the children of Keith Valley Middle School who recently performed his Bing jingle. “It’s kind of creepy,” Mann admitted at the time, but he was happy to see his work live on, so he came up with this gem.

But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this,” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2]” for the 21st Century.

Sample sales are an amazing resource for marked down goods for both mainstream and luxury brands. Online private sample sales are picking up serious speed. Here is how they work: big designers, such as Marc Jacobs or Versace, place excess inventory on a sale site at 50 to 70 percent discounts over a several day period. The sales are private, available only to members, with upcoming sales from brands announced via emails. Products include clothing for men, women and children as well as jewelry, handbags and home accessories. You can get invites from other members or request invites via the site.

Startups in the online sample sales space like Gilt Groupe, Ideeli and Hautelook are all raising huge amounts of money, growing their user base at a rapid pace and turning a strong profit. The concept has even attracted retail giants like Saks and Neiman Marcus, which are now jumping on the bandwagon to offer their own private sales. Even GSI Commerce, which previously wasn’t directly involved with selling luxury goods, is getting into the private sale business with the recent acquisition of sale site RueLaLa.

Startups like Bump Technologies, which recently got some funding, and My Name is E are trying to kill the paper business card, but even in 2009, many of us, including myself, still use business cards. The biggest hassle with business cards is getting the contact information into your address book as fast as possible — that’s where Business Card Reader [iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch comes in.

Business Card Reader scans and “reads” the picture using ABBYY’s text recognition technology and enters the data into the iPhone or iPod touch address book. Basically, you open the application, and choose either to take a new picture of a business card, or if you’ve already taken a picture, you can upload that as well. After you take a picture, or upload a picture, the application scans the business card, and after about 15 seconds, you get the address book field to edit the scanned information if there are errors. Once that’s all done, it adds the new contact into your address book. It’s really that easy.

The following post is by guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal), an entrepreneur who has launched and sold several companies, including Relegence to AOL. Today, he runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures, which recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

Media scarcity is dead. In the future my son will have a flash drive that he will pay $29 for that will have the capacity to hold all movies and music ever released by a major label, studio or tv/cable network. It will take 30 seconds to clone the data over the network to a friend who will pay $14.99 for a device with double capacity a year later. How does the media industry survive such a coming disruption?

For many of us that have been in this game for a while, the word “convergence” harbors some shameful vibes. It conjures up many false hopes, dashed dreams and misfires. Nevertheless, I would contend that convergence is upon us and it has arrived from an unexpected delivery man: Steve Jobs. Apple has created a media consumption experience that has reduced friction to such a point that soon the consumer will not know if he is buying music, a movie or a game. The notion of App is changing. The lines between these different forms of media are quickly blurring and soon will be completely artificial. Already these distinctions are merely fossilized conventions that stem from consumers’ discovery habits. As those evolve, like learning that it is easier to go to Amazon and search to find a product than going to aisle 9 at the store. The coming confusion of the consumption experience where a user won’t care or know if what they are buying is a movie, a game or a music track presents vast opportunity.

It’s time to put on the Swami hat and predict just what we have in store for 2010 and beyond. Considering all of the movement in the gadget world in the past few months, I’m fairly sure most of this going to be accurate. Given the current status of some of these technologies, it’s hard to prognosticate very far out but there are a few things that have become apparent over the past year, especially the rise of Android and our expectations for the iPad.

Without further ado… the envelope please:

Apple TV -> 27-inch iMac -> Wall Mount for 27-inch iMac

It’s sad but true: Apple doesn’t care about Apple TV. All the real brain power is going to the desktop and laptop and probably onto the iPad. They’ve made it clear with the 27-inch iMac that they can make a high-resolution screen and powerful computer inside of a case the thickness of a college textbook. Who needs a TV, let alone an Apple TV?

The obvious conclusion here is that the 27-inch iMac becomes a real Apple TV. The Mac Mini already makes a great multi-media system and a quick update to FrontRow, now considered abandonware, may make it a great 10-foot interface.

No one disputes that Silicon Valley is the global capital of the tech world. But this wasn’t always so. It is the Valley’s dynamism and networks which have given it an unassailable advantage. Silicon Valley has simply left rivals like Boston’s Route 128 in the dust.

I mentioned a little bit about my first Columbus Day in California in a previous column. But I didn’t tell you the whole story. I was invited to three amazing events on the night of October 12. Venture capital firm Alsop-Louie—known as one of the wackier and unconventional VC firms—invited me to their legendary Columbus Day party. On that same evening I had an invite from Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California-Berkeley to attend a dinner party for his forum. Down in Silicon Valley I also had an invite to speak at an event with India’s former Minister of Disinvestment, Arun Shorie—the guy who was once in charge of privatizing the country’s moribund nationalized firms and who is as close as you can get to financial royalty in India.

It was a really hard decision which one to pick. And I found myself wondering, where else in the world would I have to face such a decision? The answer is nowhere. Silicon Valley, which has expanded to embrace the entire Bay Area as an engine of entrepreneurship and innovation, is a unique place of powerful and concurrent overlapping networks. As a new arrival to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, I had read about this and did believe it. But it was hard to understand to what degree these types of concentric circles of connections were pervasive in the Valley. I am now studying how some of these networks develop and their influence on success rates in entrepreneurship.

Want to be the head of Barnesandnoble.com’s international business? Because they’re definitely hiring a whole team, and they’re starting at the top.

Recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates is representing Barnes & Noble in a search for the “head of their international business,” according to a source who was contacted about the position. The job entails building the international business for BN.com from scratch, hiring the team and “building the infrastructure outside the U.S.” They prefer the executive live in New York, but Europe is ok, too. Global ecommerce experience is preferred.

Barnes & Noble is no Amazon, but it is a billion dollar company and they have an upcoming ebook reader that kicks the Kindle’s butt (it’s so easy to love unlaunched products, isn’t it?).

If hype were to be believed, the Motorola DROID is the pièce de résistance of the mobile world; the conclusive creation sent down by the Great Smartphone in the sky to rid us of our woes. It would prepare your breakfast promptly each morning, tuck you in at night, and, maybe — just maybe — knock the iPhone down a notch or two.

Beginning about a week before its launch (largely due to Verizon’s incredibly intense marketing campaign) I began getting calls and tweets from friends and colleagues asking about the Droid. They always had two questions: the first would be something like “What do you think of the Droid?”, followed by “Would you recommend it over the iPhone?” Same questions, each.. and.. every.. time.

I’ve been using the Droid as my primary phone for a few days now, and I think I’m finally ready to answer them.

Jed Stremel, Facebook’s Director of Mobile who has been with the company for four years, has resigned, according to a post on his Facebook profile. Stremel was charged with leading the company’s mobile strategy, and was previously involved in Business Development at Facebook.

Below is Stremel’s bio, taken from last year’s MobileBeat conference page.

Jed Stremel oversees Facebook’s mobile strategy transforming how individuals find and express information relevant to their life. Prior to Facebook, Jed played key partnership, business operations, and strategic roles at high-growth businesses. He spearheaded mobile initiatives for Yahoo! building the company’s efforts to empower seamless communications across SMS, WAP, Java, BREW, and other mobile technologies. At Tellme Jed managed distribution, promotion, and licensing relationships with leading online and telecommunications partners.

Wait! Before you head off to that weekend costume party, snap yourself in your Halloween costume and enter our First Annual(TM) Halloween Costume Contest.

We’re offering one Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 2 Limited Edition Console to the winner of our First Annual CrunchGear Halloween Costume Contest.

Here’s how to enter.

YouTube has just posted a series of videos highlighting one the more impressive feats of Mother Nature: the colorful transition from summer to fall. It may sound a bit lame, but if you’ve ever enjoyed the changing colors of autumn leaves or the charming landscape of a local pumpkin patch, the videos are well worth a look (they remind me a bit of the Planet Earth series that came out a few years ago). You can find the four videos featured at the top of YouTube’s homepage, or you can check out the ones we’ve embedded below.

Twitter tweeted out a message today about a special Halloween feature if you Tweet “#trick” or “#treat.” It was difficult to figure out at first, but if you tweet either from your Twitter home page (this is key, you can’t enable the feature when you are on a client), your home page background will go “ghoulish” and the avatars on the Tweets on your page will turn into zombies and ghouls.

The way to trigger it is by tweeting ONLY “#trick” OR “#treat” with nothing else. #Treat is the top trending topic on Twitter so it looks like the masses haven’t figured it out. If you only post #trick or #treat, it doesn’t actually Tweet it out (if you post from Twitter’s site). Happy Halloween!

Nobody wants to be the kid who only gets invited to birthday parties because his mom calls up the other mom and asks. Everyone knows that only succeeds in making you even more unpopular.

Our guess is a fair number of the geeky employees at Facebook were exactly that kid. Which is why I’m sort of surprised that they’d think asking people to help out Facebook friends who don’t have a lot of Wall activity, or even many other friends. These people get mocked. Obviously.

We’ve all seen the messages under Suggestions on the Facebook home page. So and so only has two friends on Facebook, suggest friends for him? Others are urged to write on the Wall of unpopular users.

A reader writes to us today with a screenshot:

British stealth startup Zkatter is launching a real-time microblogging service in the next few months that could be a hit. Similar in theory to Twitter, Zkatter asks users “What do you see now?” vs. Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

The service, which has been in development since 2008, will allow anybody to broadcast and archive ‘live moments’ comprising location, media (image, video and text) to ‘friends only’ or ‘the public’ which can then be discovered instantly via search and friends time-lines. Zkatter’s focus is towards capturing information that you physically see live which offers a interesting addition to the real-time space.

The wait is over. Twitter’s new Lists feature is now available to all users, project lead Nick Kallen has just confirmed through a tweet. The functionality has been in testing for weeks now with a select group of users, and a couple of weeks ago, opened to a wider audience. As recently as yesterday, only 50% of Twitter had access to Lists, but after an unrelated bug forced Twitter to briefly remove the feature, they were able to roll it out to everyone else quickly.

This means that not only can all users now finally make their own lists, but perhaps more importantly, you can now see which lists you have been included on. The latter is quickly becoming a new metric for measuring popularity on the service (which users seem divided about if that’s a good or bad thing). And everyone will now have access to the third party sites already starting to pop up around the Lists API, such as Listorious, a Lists directory.

Ever since our first Realtime Crunchup last July, the momentum behind realtime streams just keeps getting stronger. Which is why TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I are putting together another Realtime Crunchup on November 20 in San Francisco. Tickets are on sale now (the price is $395 until the final week when they will go up to $495—there are only 500 available).

The one-day event will take place in San Francisco’s fabulous new Intercontinental Hotel. The agenda is still coming together (hey, they don’t call it realtime for nothing). But I am pleased to announce some phenomenal speakers who will be joining us. Many of the members of our Realtime Board will appear on stage, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, FriendFeed founder (now Facebook exec) Paul Buchheit, Microsoft’s FUSE Labs chief Lili Cheng, and angel investor Ron Conway. Twitter COO Dick Costolo will also sit down with me for a conversation about the transition from RSS to Realtime, among other subjects.