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This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is with the originator of the modern Batman movies and creator of the Batman franchise, Michael Uslan.

I’ve found that you never know where or when you’re going to receive amazing entrepreneurial advice. You have to keep your eyes, ears and heart open and then you’ll stumble into some amazing people who have extraordinary stories to tell that you can learn from. Entrepreneurial advice for tech companies doesn’t need to come from someone who’s been in our trenches. Businesses are businesses and we can all learn from each other, no matter what industry we’re in.

Michael Uslan’s story is the typical story of success. From the outside, it seems like an obvious win, but from the inside there was a long and painful struggle to get to the other side. It took Michael 10 years of pitching a dark and serious Batman in order to get it made into the first movie. It was written up as an “overnight success”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here is one of my favorite parts of our interview:

“I’m a blue collar kid from New Jersey. My Dad was a mason, my mom was a bookkeeper. I couldn’t buy my way into Hollywood. I didn’t know anyone in Hollywood, didn’t have any relatives in Hollywood. My last name isn’t Warner. I only have one brother and for me its the story of how I, at every opportunity, tried to put my foot in the door and tried to make a path – carve a path. If I had said when I was a kid, “Oh, I’m going to produce the greatest Batman movie ever – dark and serious”, might have well as said I was going to jump across the Grand Canyon. You can’t do it. But, if you keep taking steps that lead you on a certain path, and don’t let anyone – friends or anyone else veer you of course, you can, if you have the passion. If you have a high level for frustration, you can do it. That’s how I did it. These dark serious Batman movies, the Batman franchise, was built on my bloody knuckles.”

Michael tours colleges and universities to share his story and is releasing his autobiography, “The Boy Who Loved Batman” on Chronicle Books in fall of 2011.

Last month, Google let people know that the pace at which they deploy builds of Chrome would be greatly increasing. The thought is that work is happening so quickly in Chrome but much of it is stuck in the developer channels (or in Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based) because of code freezes and long waits to deploy the stable versions — so why not just speed the whole process up? Google is wasting little time doing that as the latest version of Chrome, version 6, is being released into beta today.

So what do we get with Chrome 6? As users of Chromium and the dev channel builds of Chrome will know, the entire browser UI has gotten a facelift. The buttons (back, forwards, reload, etc) are now seamlessly integrated into the toolbar. The two menu drop-downs have also now been consolidated into one. And the Omnibox has also been tweaked to make it a bit simpler.

But the biggest changes in Chrome 6 come in the JavaScript speed increases, Autofill, and the syncing capabilities. With the latest version, you’ll finally have full Autofill capabilities that you’re likely used to with other browsers (though Chrome’s version is pretty slick). This means that anytime you have to enter your name, address, phone number, or credit card information, it can all be automatically inserted by the browser. Google notes that your credit card information is never saved without your explicit permission. It’s also worth noting that your credit card data is not included in the browser sync, which has also been updated with Chrome 6. Other Autofill data is now included in sync, as are extensions.

In terms of performance, Google says Chrome 6 is 15% faster than Chrome 5 beta in both the V8 benchmark test and the SunSpider benchmark test (two JavaScript tests).

With Google now saying that new stable builds of Chrome are due every six weeks, you can expect Chrome 6 to go stable quickly. And then in the Fall we should probably be on the look-out for Chrome 7, as well.

TweetDeck is preparing to release its first Android app in beta tomorrow. I got a hold of the beta build and some screenshots. The app adds some new elements which go beyond TweetDeck’s popular iPhone app, and even introduces some new elements not yet found in its desktop app. But this app shows the direction where TweetDeck is going. As CEO Iain Dodsworth noted in a blog post yesterday that it “also represents the future of our iPhone and iPad applications.”

The mobile app, which is TweetDeck’s first foray onto Android phones, supports multiple streams beyond Twitter, namely Facebook, Foursquare, and Google Buzz. (The desktop is also multi-stream, but the iPhone app only supports Twitter and Facebook). The biggest departure, though, is a blended stream that combines updates from all four services, color-coded with different backgrounds for each one. TweetDeck’s other apps maintain a separate column for each stream. The Android app supports columns as well, and if you have an existing TweetDeck account, it populates them with your existing preferences.

There is also a new “Me” column which pulls together all messages that mention you from across multiple streams, including Twitter @replies, Facebook likes and comments, and Buzz updates on your posts. It is essentially a unified vanity search column. When you compose a message, you can pick which service you want to send it out on from the same screen (much like the desktop app)

The app takes full advantage of the Foursquare API. In addition to being able to see where your friends are checking into Foursquare, TweetDeck acts as a full Foursquare client. You can check into a location, leave a shout or a tip, or see a location on a map. Each location has a detail view which shows you all your friends who checked in there recently and any messages they left.

A general map view shows all nearby Foursquare venues and any geotagged Tweets. Friends who have check in nearby are also placed on the map. The app has a contacts page with quick links to each of your account profiles, and slots for the people you talk to the most.

One thing it doesn’t have that is in the desktop app is user streams, which delivers Tweets as fast as they are produced without any limits or throttling. Apparently that feature kills the battery life on mobile.

This is a beta, which means TweetDeck is still working on it. For instance, it doesn’t handle multiple Twitter accounts as smoothly as it should or video uploads. But these issues will be fixed in the near future. Another thing to note is that seems to be an older build of the Android beta floating around, which has even more bugs. Better to wait for the official beta release which should come tomorrow.

i/o ventures has partnered up with notable females Arianna Huffington, Donna Karan and Sarah Brown to put together the first Women In Engineering Prize, and will be announcing the winner at the first WIE Symposium on September 20th.

The deadline for hopeful female founders to apply is Sept 10th, and the lucky and hard working winner will receive 25k in investment, become part of the i/o program, get free office space for a month as well as a trip to New York to attend the conference.

i/o’s Paul Bragiel and Ashwin Navin initially put the award together because they noticed a lack of women applying for incubator funding at i/o, and was wondering if this was possibly because women lacked clear cut mentors in Silicon Valley.

This wasn’t unique to i/o either. Bragiel said, “I’ve talked to various other incubators and there were very few females there, so we figured we’d market directly to women and make it clear that there were opportunities specifically for them.”

The award will target young female startup founders looking for exposure and access to the i/o incubator, which mentors founders from product launch through the next stage of company development, sharing what has proven to work for product scaling, revenue growth and fund raising.

Bragiel holds that the competition and prize are the first of their kind, “The goal in our collaboration is to help more companies founded by women get exposure they need to the best investors and mentors both in the valley and world wide.”

Female entrepreneurs should also consider this an open call to go mentor at i/o. Aspiring WIE Prize winners can apply here.

It was almost exactly one year ago that Jonathan Mann won the Bing Jingle contest with his, well, awful song. At the time, no one seemed to know who he was and I was perhaps a little harsh in knocking him down for it. But he got me back — not with the song he wrote about me, but rather the creative tear he’s been on recently. You could make an argument that no one has benefitted more from Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna issue — as Mann wrote a great song about it, which Apple then played at their press conference as Steve Jobs took the stage. Mann then followed this up with a brilliant song about Jobs. Today, he’s back again.

In case you didn’t open a web browser yesterday, there was a little incident involving a JetBlue flight attendant. Specifically, 38-year-old Steven Slater got pissed off at passengers after his flight landed in New York City, so he grabbed the airplane intercom, started swearing, then grabbed two beers from the food area, opened the emergency door of the plane, and slid down the emergency slide. The news exploded on the Internet, with Facebook pages being made in support of Slater, as well as video re-enactments. And, of course, he’s been the top Trending Topic on Twitter (as has “flight attendant”) for two days running now. And now he’s getting the Mann treatment as well.

Slater got out of jail last night, hopefully he enjoys his song. It’s not exactly safe for work, but it’s awesome. We’re proud of you, Mann — but where’s the Delta song?

Cliqset, a realtime online social identity platform is going mobile today, with the launch of iPhone, Android and Web apps.

The free apps include much of the same functionality as the web client, with the ability to post and syndicate content on Cliqset, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and 80 other services. And the apps provide full access to Google Buzz and Twitter content and conversations including DMs, mentions, timeline, search and more. You can break content down within the apps by users, type of content (Image, video, text), or by source. And the app includes support for Evernote and Foursquare check-ins.

For Cliqset, these apps have been in the works for some time and the company has been working to make the apps as user-friendly as possible. The startup, which enhanced its Twitter functionality recently, is also deepening its integration with Google Buzz, allowing users to not only post and share to Google Buzz but also subscribe to Google Buzz users and engage in real-time conversations between the two services.

Cliqset’s CEO Darren Bounds says that the startup wants to be a destination for a decentralized social web with no siloses of data. A mobile presence should help further that goal. And Bounds is hoping to create a deeper Facebook integration when the social network releases that functionality to developers. While Cliqset faces competition from a number of other applications, including Threadsy, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Brizzly; the startup’s userbase seems to be growing. The app is closing in on 60,000 users, which is up from 6,000 in November.

Hold onto your hats. A new version of the Zeus trojan, called Zeus3, has wreaked havoc on thousands of bank accounts worldwide, stealing just over $1 million. The best part? There’s pretty much no way to detect the trojan if it’s on your system. Hooray for humanity, right?

Twitter is still growing at a fast clip, according to recent numbers from web analytics firm comScore. A recent study found that in June, nearly 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com, an increase of 109 percent from the previous year. Twitter saw 93 million visitors in May of this year. It seems that the network is seeing increased traffic from international markets, particularly in Asia and South America. Indonesia reported the highest traffic, with 20.8 percent of Internet users in the country visiting Twitter.com that month, followed by Brazil and Venezuela.

It’s important to note that these stats aren’t necessarily a good measure of the total number of people people using Twitter’s platform (it only includes data for people who have been to Twitter.com, and not any applications that access Twitter through the API).

In terms of region, Latin America experienced the strongest growth, surging 305 percent year-over-year to 15.4 million users in June. Asia Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region, climbing 243 percent to 25.1 million visitors. The Middle-East Africa jumped 142 percent to 5 million visitors, while Europe increased 106 percent to 22.5 million visitors. North America only saw a 22 percent increase to nearly 25 million visitors in June. This last stat isn’t surprising considering that Twitter has more saturation in the the U.S. than in international markets.

comScore also analyzed Twitter usage via mobile phones for the six mobile markets currently reported by company (U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy) which unsurprisingly showed that Twitter is seeing increased traffic among smartphone users. In the U.S., 8.3 percent of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices. In Europe, 2.8 percent of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the U.K. experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8 percent, followed by Germany with 3.1 percent and France with 2.1 percent.

The total web traffic numbers are impressive considering that these don’t include third-party apps, like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, which are relatively popular amongst users. And it’s also important to mention that with the World Cup, Twitter was seeing record amounts of usage and traffic worldwide. In June, Twitter COO Dick Costolo shared the company’s internal stats, which show that Twitter gets 190 million visitors per month, and 65 million tweets a day.