This week on VentureBeat: The Crunchies, cemetery drones, stickers, & more

Every week, the news team at VentureBeat brings you a blitz of news day after day, but even for our most dedicated readers it can be a challenge to catch every single story.

So, we’ve decided to pull together a handful of the best stories from VentureBeat this week, just in case you missed them, or want to read them again.

The 8 weirdest moments of the 2015 Crunchies

Last night was my first Crunchies. I was excited. I was briefly on stage to present an award. I was nervous, but it was a good kind of nervous. The sold-out event took place at San Francisco’s beautiful Davies Symphony Hall, a venue that’s usually stuffed to the gills with tuxedos and evening gowns. It was the eighth year of the awards ceremony, which some have called the Oscars of the tech world. The dichotomy between Silicon Valley’s awards show and Hollywood’s was certainly not lost on the evening’s host, T.J. Miller, who occupies an odd position at the nexus of both — he’s the star of Mike Judge’s HBO satire “Silicon Valley.” Read more

Pivotal’s big-data pivot: Ditching its Hadoop distro, sources say

Pivotal, a spinoff of EMC and VMware, could be preparing to pull out of the Hadoop market, sources are telling VentureBeat. We haven’t been able to confirm the exact details of the changes. But we do have reason to believe big changes to its big-data strategy are in fact coming. Read more

Facebook is bigger than anyone knew, even Facebook

We all know Facebook is huge, and drives incredible amounts of traffic. But thanks to its recent efforts to uncloak the sources of content with no known referrer, we now know that the numbers are bigger than anyone believed. According to a report issued today by Bitly, the world’s leading link shortener, Facebook has largely solved the problem of so-called “dark social” links — those that have no referrer data and can’t be measured by web analytics tools — and as a result, the social network’s influence skyrocketed during the fourth quarter. Read more

This 500 Startups-backed company uses drones to map cemeteries

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Today’s demo day for 500 Startups’ newest class has taken a somber turn: It features not one, but two startups that are in the death business, and one uses the hot tech of the moment — drones. PlotBox, hailing from Northern Ireland, has built cloud-based software that cemeteries and crematoria can use to better manage their operations. In particular, it uses drones to map the grounds and help cemeteries make sure they’re not burying anyone in the wrong plot – something that apparently happens and causes expensive lawsuits. Read more

Here’s why a font giant just spent $27M on … stickers

Today typography giant Monotype Imaging announced a strange move: the $27 million acquisition of Swyft Media, a startup that specializes in creating and licensing branded stickers for messaging apps like Kik. Let’s say that one more time. Monotype, owner of Linotype, bought a startup that, according to Fortuneand TechCrunch, turns “emoji into cash.” Read more

Google’s slippery slope: If search giant pays Twitter for content, should it pay all publishers?

Toward the end of Bloomberg’s story about a potential deal between Google and Twitter to display tweets in search results, this bit at the end made me sit up: “There’s no advertising revenue involved in the deal between Twitter and Google, one of the people said. That suggests Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, which was $41 million in the third quarter, up from $16 million a year earlier.” Read more

Facebook gets into the robot game — and data centers could be involved

Facebook, that company with a globally popular social network and data centers to run it all reliably, is apparently interested in “industrial automation and robotics.” The company has been searching for a person to work as an electrical engineer focused on robotics at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, according to an undated job posting. Facebook has been seeking someone for this sort of role since August, if not earlier. Read more