Lark, the vibrating wristband alarm clock that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last September, has had quite a year, from being given the run around by homeland security because it was an “unidentifiable product,” being featured in the Apple Retail store in May and even making the Regis and Kelly show.

And now, aside from a coveted Father’s Day retweet from Aol’s one and only Arianna Huffington, the folks behind Lark have the above Conan show clip to brag about. Says host Conan O’Brien on the innovative wakeup device, “Experts estimate that every man who bought one is using it wrong.”

I really wanted to do the headline without the Santa bit, but I didn’t want to be that much of an ass.

Regardless, let’s see how many people report this as fact just from the headline. In other words, let’s catch who doesn’t bother reading beyond the headline — or even the entire headline. In other words, let’s see who is an idiot that should be fired or stripped of their right to blog.

But wait, my headline does have a point beyond being a (weak) trap. My point is that if you believe an Apple Television is coming later this year, I have a nice iPhone nano to sell you. Catch my drift yet?

After reporting the Android Market’s increasing rate of growth in April’s research, app store analytics company Distimo is releasing a new study that focuses on Apple’s App Store development in Asia. The company took a look at iOS app data in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

One of the key findings from the report is that while some Western countries witnesses a decrease in download volume (France and Germany), iPhone app download volume in Asian countries has grown significantly in the past six months in the Apple App Store. In fact, Distimo says that China recently became the second largest market after the United States. That’s pretty fast growth considering Apple only opened a tailored App Store for China last Fall.

Earlier today, TUAW noted that according to Flickr’s stats, the iPhone 4 is now the most popular camera across the site. Yes, it has overtaken all those professional cameras, all the point-and-shoots, etc. That’s huge.

But the news came with a caveat. And it’s actually a big one.

As TUAW notes at the bottom of their post, the caveat is Flickr admitting that they’re only able to detect the camera used to take photos “about 2/3rds of the time”. But the key part is the next sentence: “That is not usually possible with cameraphones, therefore they are under-represented.”

Interesting story breaking that Yahoo put an unsolicited bid in to acquire Hulu. For all I know it’s completely true. But I’ve just received an unsolicited message from a source close to Yahoo that says it’s completely untrue (probably because of all my digging the last week on this Yahoo story).

Yahoo hasn’t had any meaningful conversations with Hulu about a buyout, says this source. The source added that Hulu is actively looking for a buyer and has hired Morgan Stanley to represent them.

Like I said, this is all I’ve got right now. The WSJ and the LA Times say they have sources confirming that Yahoo made an offer. With big acquisitions the press is a huge pawn in negotiating strategy. The one thing I’d like to know is who’s the source for the LA Times article. If that source is close to Hulu or Morgan Stanley, I’d be wary. Of course, my source has her own agenda, too.

Love photos but utterly bored by wave after wave of iPhone photo sharing apps? Lytro is the company for you. This is also the company for anyone who thinks Silicon Valley has fallen into a rut of innovation-less posing. And it’s the company for anyone who complains that the Valley is more about media and marketing than brass-knuckles, hardcore technology. This is the company that jaded, cranky, rap-lyric quoting investor Ben Horowitz says, “blew my brains to bits.”

Daily deals are growing like crazy, and it’s not just Groupon and LivingSocial. Daily deal aggregator Yipit just raised $6 million in a series B led by Highland Capital Partners. Existing investors RRE, DFJ Gotham and IA Ventures also participated.

I caught up with co-founders Vin Vacanti and Jim Moran (pictured) today in New York City. Saved from Wall Street jobs a few years ago, they now work out of General Assembly with 7 people total, but are looking to ramp up to 30 (mostly engineers, Web designers, product managers, and mobile developers). They’ll have to move out of General Assembly and are already looking for their own space.

Wordpress.org has just posted the following on its blog:

“Earlier today the WordPress team noticed suspicious commits to several popular plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache) containing cleverly disguised backdoors. We determined the commits were not from the authors, rolled them back, pushed updates to the plugins, and shut down access to the plugin repository while we looked for anything else unsavory.”

According to founder Matt Mullenweg, Wordpress .org has decided to reset all Wordpress.org passwords, because of suspicious activity surrounding popular plugins.

Oof, Yahoo. The Alibaba dispute, just the most recent Yahoo trainwreck, is still a fresh wound for shareholders. And things are getting worse.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has long promised a turnaround at the lagging company. But we’ve been digging for new information about the state of Yahoo in advance of the annual shareholder meeting later this week, and everything we’re hearing isn’t good. One investor we spoke with said “It’s a turnaround alright, but it’s a 360° turnaround. Basically, they’re spinning in circles.”

Things we’ve learned from multiple sources:

There’s been a lot of hype around 4G of late, with talk about how the new network standard provides increased speeds, better device functionality, and all that jazz. But is 4G a term that actually has real world meaning, or is it just some place-holding buzzword used by marketers to stoke consumer excitement over buying a new phone?

Morpace, a market research and consulting company, released an interesting report today designed to provide a bit of insight into questions surrounding 4G, hoping to discover whether or not the improvements of these networks over their 3G predecessors play a significant factor in the purchase decision for a new phone or plan and just what the current perception of the 4G brand in today’s marketplace. Perhaps unsurprisingly, consumers don’t seem to care much about 4G — it’s just not worth the price of admission.

We’re back for a new episode of TC Cribs, and it’s featuring a startup long-time TechCrunch readers will know well: Justin.tv. The office is a quirky mix of hallways, rooms that probably shouldn’t be rooms, and secret stairways — and it’s loaded with character and condiments.

The company got its start back in 2007 as founder Justin Kan livecasted his life with a camera hooked up to a backpack that was loaded with batteries and modems, letting thousands of viewers watch his every move. He’s a brave man.

The company’s come a long way since then: they’re now one of the most popular live streaming platforms on the web (Kan has hung up his backpack, which you’ll see in the tour). And they also recently launched a sister product called Socialcam, which is best described as an Instagram for video. Tune in!

Food aside, what’s missing from your fridge? As long as it keeps food cold, and hooks you up with some cold water or crushed ice from time to time, there’s really nothing more we can ask from our fridges. At least, that’s how I felt before I went to Samsung’s appliance line unveiling and met my new favorite home appliance: the app fridge.

The app fridge comes in two different models: one with two vertical doors, and one with two vertical doors up top and two drawers down below. What’s different about this fridge is that just above the ice/water dispenser, there is an 8-inch Wi-Fi supported LCD screen that features a total of eight apps: Memos, Photos, Epicurious, Calendar, WeatherBug, AP, Pandora, and Twitter. Some of the apps are built by Samsung and specifically designed for the app fridge, while others are apps we’ve come to know and love.

What’s a surefire sign that a web service has hit the big time? Well, when the celebrities start to pile on of course!

The guys behind GiantThinkwell and the Mixnmatch game have teamed up with the Grammy award winning producer, emcee and lover of the natural female form Sir Mix-Alot for a rare Turntable.fm performance celebrating the game’s launch.

“We’re huge fans of turntable.fm.,” says GiantThinkwell co-founder Adam Tratt. “In fact, we’re Cameron-Diaz-in-Vanilla-Sky crazy for it. (We <3 you, @seth & @billychasen.) Having Mix host a set in Turntable would be slick, but having Mix as a skinny white guy with a faux-hawk simply wouldn’t do. With our release on the way out the door and the sun rising in Seattle, we set our plan in motion: to get Sir Mix-A-Lot hosting a Turntable.fm room… with a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar.”

A brand new Nissan Leaf rolled out off a car carrier and into my life earlier today. I plan on spending a good deal of time with this red devil over the coming week. You see, here at CrunchGear, there’s been a raging format war of sorts. Devin, a hipster of a moderate degree, is very fond of the Nissan Leaf. He’s proclaimed on numerous occasions that an EV is perfect car for him and he’s going to replace his ’91 Plymouth Voyager with one whenever they drop in price. I hail from the other side, Team Chevy Volt. I very much respect the  expensive but versatile series hybrid powertrain found in the GM product. We both however agree that the future will not be made up by just one alternative power source and both the Leaf and the Volt are aimed at slightly different markets.

As much as I like the Volt, the Leaf is a very important step in the right direction. Never before has a consumer-level EV been mass produced and sold like the Nissan Leaf. Several different trim levels are available through ten countries. It’s a tad pricey, but first gen products almost always are. The one parked in my driveway (and connected to my power) has a window sticker price of $35,440, which includes the $940 SL package that includes fog lights, rear-view cam, and a solar panel spoiler. That’s not cheap. Thankfully, the Leaf doesn’t feel cheap either.

Adobe reported strong second quarter earnings at market close today, posting revenue of $1.023 billion, up 9 percent year over year. The Company says revenue came in at the higher range of its targeted revenue range of $970 million to $1.020 billion.

GAAP diluted earnings per share grew 61 percent year-over-year to $0.45. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share grew 25 percent year-over-year to $0.55, beating analyst expectations of $0.51 per share.

After declaring war against all governments Sunday night in Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec), hacktivist group LulzSec has spent all Tuesday morning in a battle repudiating various media claims, coincidentally all UK related.

In response to reports that one of their own was arrested by Scotland Yard in Essex, UK, the hacker group has tweeted, “Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it’s all over now… wait… we’re all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?”

We’ve had crowd-sourced book reviews (Amazon), crowd-source location (Foursquare, Waze), so why not a crowd-sourced advertising network? Sounds crazy? Well the fact is display banner ads have been just a tiny bit dissappointing and basically create clutter on the real estate of the web. At the same time companies try to monetize what they do to fund free apps with these things. The answers are tricky.

So relevancy is the key – and this remains very hard. But still the banner ads come, plastering web and mobile. Google AdWords has helped but the problem is that the long tail of small businesses still finds it hard to buy banners, where campaigns can run beyond the budgets of smaller companies.

Seed backed by the France/Israel based Kima Ventures, InfluAds, a crowd-sourced ad network which doubles-down on ad placement, launches today. Its aim is to eliminate unsold and remnant inventory and removing ‘bad’ ads with good ones.

This post is about an iPad application that’s over two months old and has already been chosen as an App Store app of the week. But I’d never heard of it, and, given that the app only has around 95 reviews, I’m guessing a lot of TechCrunch readers haven’t seen it either. And it’s just so damn cool.

It’s called The Civil War Today and was put together by A&E Television Networks (which owns the History Channel) and developed by Bottle Rocket. It isn’t a game or social networking app or anything else even remotely sexy.

It’s a daily newspaper that’s over 150 years old.

A San Francisco-based renewable energy fund, CleanPath Ventures, announced plans today to invest $800 million over a period of about five years into the development and construction of large-scale, solar photovoltaic projects. The company’s chief executive and co-founder, Mike Cheney spoke at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in New York, today revealing a goal to help bring more than 1,000 megawatts of clean energy to the U.S.

A managing director with CleanPath Ventures, John Balbach (formerly a managing partner at The Cleantech Group) told TechCrunch in a phone interview on Tuesday: “We’re in a new era in cleantech investment where it’s less about innovation and more about financial solutions to put things in the ground at scale…”

As we heard in April, Kevin Rose and former Digg designer Daniel Burka have teamed up to start Milk, a mobile app development lab in San Francisco. The company also raised $1.5 million from a number of all-star investors, including our own Michael Arrington. Now, we’ve just found a little more information on the first app that will be debuting from the incubator, Oink.

It appears from the site that Oink will be an iPhone app that lets you ‘rate the adventure’. From the tagline on the front page, ‘Life’s an adventure. Vote, rank, and share the world around you.’ The app is connected to Twitter, but not Facebook (yet).