If you’ve ever shopped for a pair of prescription glasses, you’ve probably seen first hand how expensive a set can be.  Warby Parker’s co-founders are right there with you. Both fed-up and puzzled over paying hundreds of dollars for a product that’s been around for hundreds of years, the Warby Parker team is shaking up the eyewear industry by selling prescription glasses online, at a price tag of just $95 a pair

140 Proof , a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup. Like the company’s existing 140-character text units , the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads (and yes, they should work on mobile).

Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: Googlighting, Microsoft’s Latest Viral Attack On Google Docs [Video] Samsung Galaxy Note Review: Who Do You Think You Are?

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues. The analyst firm of Ovum , part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services.

Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad. The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets.

There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is an unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc.

Moral ambiguity, thy name is advertising . How are we to parse this advertising campaign in London in which an intelligent bus stop billboard only displays its content to women ?

“Wait, you want us to be your lab rats?” “Pioneers” If you need more proof that Microsoft and Google hate each other , just watch the video above. It’s a direct message from Microsoft to businesses everywhere.

12 months ago at SFMusicTech, I talked to StageIt founder and CEO Evan Lowenstein about what he called “the new intimacy economy”. And last week at SFMusicTech , I met again with Lowenstein, a former popular musician himself, to talk about StageIt’s progress and how he is helping reinvent the music industry by enabling a new kind of intimacy between artist and audience. Backed by angel investments from Jimmy Buffet and Shawn Parker, StageIt offers musicians a live video platform to connect with their fans

There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.