Five Free iPhone Unlocks from CrunchGear and WirelessImports

We just got off the phone with iPhone Unlock salespeople WirelessImports and we have five free unlocks for CrunchGear and TechCrunch readers. How can you win one? Enter our Steve Jobs look-alike contest. Take your - or a friend’s, loved one’s, or sig other’s - picture in a black turtleneck and jeans and send it to contest@crunchgear.com with the subject line “UNLOCK MY IPHONE.” Reality Distortion Field optional.

You have to have an iPhone to enter and presumably not like/not have Cingular service or be ready to buy one when we pick you. We’ll pick five entrants at random on Friday, September 14 at 12PM EDT. Visit CG for full details.

WTF: Pitzer College Offers “Learning From YouTube” Class

Pitzer College, located in Southern California, is offering a for-credit class called Learning from YouTube this Fall, taught by Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor. The class consists of students watching YouTube videos and then discussing them. They also leave comments on the videos themselves.

One of the students, Darren Grose, says YouTube is “a phenomenon that should be studied…You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general.”

Pitzer isn’t known as an intellectual powerhouse among small liberal arts schools (although to be honest I am somewhat biased as I went to a rival school, Claremont McKenna). But this may still be just about the most ridiculous class the school, or any school, has ever offered.

The classes are being recorded and, of course, posted on YouTube. Here’s an example class.

In related news, we recently mentioned that Stanford is offering a class on Facebook. But in Stanford’s case, it is a computer science course that teaches students how to create Facebook applications. It’s not a class where students get college credit for sitting around and watching YouTube.

Romney faces fierce fight for the right

His weekend victory in an Iowa straw poll only highlights the tough competition he faces for the conservative vote. By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer DES MOINES -- Former Massachusetts Gov.
Huckabee, Iowa Poll's Real Winner? Wall Street Journal
Iowa: Huckabee pulls second, Paul finishes fifth Monsters and Critics.com
Yahoo! News - Taipei Times - Chicago Tribune - MSNBC
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http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

Israel’s Kontera Nails $10.3 Million Second Round From Sequoia And Others

an Israel startup (although their official headquarters is in San Francisco), is cashing in on the full-on bonanza around anything that calls itself an advertising network right now.

A year ago they raised $7 million from Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. Tomorrow they’ll announce a second round of financing - $10.3 million more from Carmel Ventures, an Israeli venture firm. Sequoia and Lehman are also participating.

Kontera’s main product is in-text advertising. They’ll take popular keywords within the text of an article and put double lines below them to signify it’s an advertisement. Clicking on it generates cash for the publisher. A demo of the product is here. In the press release a customer claims to be seeing 10% click through rates from the ads.