This week, news broke that the remaining eight episodes of the ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B In Apartment 23, which was taken off the air in January, would be posted to ABC.com, Hulu and iTunes.

The announcement is a boon for fans of the show, but they shouldn’t get their hopes up that successful online distribution will mean another season of the show; much of the cast has already moved on to other projects.

However, another show may truly get a second life: Also this week, rumors spread that Microsoft is looking at rebooting NBC’s Heroes, which was canceled in 2010, for Xbox and MSN distribution.

As television continues its evolution from a single box that sits in your living room to a multi-platform experience across many devices, resurrections like these are increasingly common — though sometimes they’re less like Lazarus, and more like zombies.

Netflix is of course a front runner in the rebirth business, thanks to picking up Arrested Development (only one more month, Bluth fans!).

But there’s a deep history to this practice. For instance: In late 2009, producer Ashton Kutcher turned to YouTube to screen the unaired five episodes of model drama The Beautiful Life, which had just been canceled by The CW.

However, while the TBL channel is currently at over five million views, not one of the five episodes on it has surpassed a million views.

They’re all still online, along with a plea posted by Kutcher saying that they’d be able to produce more episodes if the channel’s subscriber count hit a certain, unspecified threshold.

Whatever that threshold was, it was greater than 35,000 subscribers — which is the channel’s current standing, four years later. But TBL does deserve credit for being an early example of a show realizing the potential power of digital distribution — arguably ahead of its time in that respect.

The key is transitioning from digital distribution to actually producing new episodes. The most daring and ultimately successful example of this isn’t necessarily Joss Whedon getting to make a feature film follow-up to Firefly or the return of Veronica Mars as a feature — the real kickoff of digital distribution having real meaning for canceled shows comes from the early 2000s, and DVDs.

The Fox animated series Family Guy first premiered in 1999, and was canceled in 2002. But thanks to blockbuster DVD sales of the first three seasons, it was brought back to the airwaves in 2005, and has remained a key part of Fox’s schedule ever since. Creator Seth MacFarlane has even gone on to create at least two other shows for the network.

(Personal anecdote: I was working as a clerk in a DVD store in 2003, and I keenly remember how we couldn’t keep Family Guy box sets on the shelves; they sold out like crazy.)

Sometimes, things need to end. Sometimes, shows don’t work or don’t connect with a wide audience, and those involved are ready to move on. The Onion satirized this beautifully in the aftermath of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign with this piece headined “Stars Of Canceled Show Terrified Fans Will Raise Money For Movie,” centered around recently-terminated NBC sitcom Animal Practice.

The episodes of Animal Practice left unaired after its cancelation are currently available online, though it’s unlikely to come back — a zombie, for better or worse.

But as the industry figures out how to make original content on the web sustainable and profitable, we’ll see more and more examples of Lazarus.

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If you’re not familiar, Grubwithus is Los Angeles-based startup that specializes in organizing group meals for people with similar interests. Users sign up for a Grubwithus account, and then start signing up for dinners, organized weeks in advance around themes such as the love of sushi or a fascination with Ron Paul. Grubwithus pre-arranges set meals with partner restaurants, and diners prepay their bills before attending. Once there everyone only needs to cover their drink tabs.

GrubTonight works in a similar way, though much accelerated. The iPhone-only app — Grubwithus probably isn’t hosting any Android-lover meals just yet — alerts members to dinners being held that night along with their menus and locations. Unlike the regular Grubwithus dinners, there’s no theme, just social interaction. Diners again prepay and they receive a confirmation an hour before the meal is held. At launch, GrubTonight is only offering up meals in the LA area, but the company said it would expand to more cities in the coming months.

Grubwithus said that the app is focused on immediacy, making it ideal for business travelers, tourists looking to meet each other or the locals or as a means for the newly relocated to meet the community. If a group of diners hit it off they can meet for future meals using the social tools in the larger Grubwithus network.

Grubwithus is one of many startups exploring the idea of a “real-life” social network built around the communal table, but it’s developed more momentum than most. A Y Combinator alum, Grubwithus raised $1.6 million in seed funding from Ashton Kutcher, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Aviv Nevo, and other angel investors.

Last year, it announced a $5 million Series A round led by LA VC GRP Partners. In February it used some of those funds to buy up Canadian “supper club” startup The Social Feed, allowing it to expand internationally. In addition to LA, Grubwithus is now organizing meals in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user corepics

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For its part, Katalyst Media insist that’s not the entire motive in enlisting Ashton Kutcher for some light appearance time on the production company’s new YouTube channel, Thrash Lab.

Then again, it can’t hurt.

Produced with YouTube premium-video-initiative money out of the Los Angeles-based film/TV/web-video production company Kutcher co-founded in 2000 with Jason Goldberg, Thrash Lab is a somewhat self-referential concept, focusing on the youthful creative types who make YouTube videos.

Also read: OMG! AwesomenesTV closes $3.5M Series A round

Given the proliferation these days of cheaply made, cable-esque reality programming on YouTube, it makes sense that one of Thrash Lab’s early programs resemble a kind of internet version of Project Runway, where these young content creators get their work praised, criticized and judged by a panel of experts.

Katalyst calls this show Dream Bigger, and has cast Kutcher as one of the judges, alongside Anthony Batt, the Buzz Media founder who now serves as Katalyst’s president.

Batt told us Monday — the day Dream Bigger premiered — that since the channel launched June 11, Thrash Lab has drawn a “couple million” video views and around 10,000 subscriber sign-ups.

In building Thrash Lab’s audience, he concedes Kutcher’s celebrity presence is an “advantage.” Of course, Katalyst, in addition to its own channel, is also producing shows for myriad platforms across the internet — including a reality series, much like Kutcher’s old MTV show Punk’d — that was announced last week for Machinima.

Wouldn’t Katalyst benefit from rolling out its resident celebrity TV star/new media visionary a little more often?

Batt told us Katalyst works on keeping Kutcher’s on-camera work limited and strategic.

“We want to build something organic — that feels authentic,” Batt explained. “We have to make sure that when we use him, we use him effectively.”

Here’s Dream Bigger’s premiere episode:

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Airtime has been very good at keeping things quiet, with very little information leaking out during its closed alpha test this spring. However, here are a few things we already know ahead of Tuesday’s launch:

• Airtime will allow video chat both with people from your social graph as well as like-minded strangers, and it allows a bit of a blind date atmosphere by offering semi-anonymous interaction. The site’s Terms of Service were recently changed, but before revealed: “Your name is not shared when you are paired with a stranger. However, your Airtime and Facebook friends will be able to directly call you and see when you are online.”
• Airtime ties any  participation to a Facebook account and allow users to block others in order to avoid unwanted nudity.
• The company has been conducting regularly-scheduled trials with participants of the closed alpha test every week. A closer look at the site’s HTML code reveals that people who were lucky enough to get access to the private beta were told to “come back during user test time” after a successful sign-up. At times, access was also throttled, with testers being told that “the site is currently full.”
• Airtime was originally called Supyo. The company has raised a total of $33.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Google Ventures and a bunch of well-connected including Mike Arrington, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am and others.
• Clear Channel CEO Bob Pitmann is joining the board of the company, according to All Things Digital.
• Airtime’s artwork has been done by San Francico-based graphic design artist Shyama Golden.
• Airtime acquired social event tracking startup Erly two weeks ago. The deal can best be described as an aqui-hire and brings three Hulu veterans, including the video service’s founding CTO Eric Feng, to the Airtime team.
• The launch event will include appearances by a “a seemingly random group of celebs,” as the New York Post put it Monday. A-listers in attendance will include Snoop Dogg, Kristen Bell, Ed Helms, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Joel McHale, Olivia Munn and Martha Stewart, according to the paper.

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@Dropbox is excited to welcome Bono & The Edge as investors. Thanks for the support and look forward to great things! twitter.com/Dropbox/status…

— Dropbox (@Dropbox) April 2, 2012

The backstory — that the Irish rockers first came across Dropbox when they were building a project on Facebook and decided to get a toe-hold in the business when it raised $250 million last year — is sort of interesting.

But does it really mean anything? On the surface, almost certainly not. Celebrities love to court startups, and vice versa. Witness Ashton Kutcher’s attempt to transform himself from a goofy beefcake into a Silicon Valley insider — a transition that has, in some perverse sort of logic, landed him a film role playing Steve Jobs.

Yes, there is juice that both sides can bring to such relationships: celebrities can gain a bit of business credibility, while startups can get a little spike in attention and audience. The endless parade of celebrities visiting Twitter’s offices, for example, was part of a symbiotic relationship that helped take the messaging service more mainstream — even if it proved a distraction for the business and got pushed to one side by former boss Ev Williams.

Still, the culture of mutual adoration continues: Jack Dorsey recently took time out from his schedule of gladhanding politicians to mark the momentous occasion of MC Hammer’s birthday.

Happy Birthday @MCHammer! instagr.am/p/I0w5zdAQ5-/

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 31, 2012

I think it’s fair to say, however, that a little attention from U2 is not going to bring many new users to Dropbox. (It’s not clear what MC Hammer’s impact on the Twitter user base has been.)

But let’s be fair: Bono is not your ordinary celebrity investor. Since 2005 he’s been a co-founder of Elevation Partners, alongside the likes of Silver Lake’s Roger MacNamee and EA star John Riccitiello. And it seems to have done pretty well out of its investments in Yelp and Facebook.

It has, however, also backed a lot of duds. There was the $300 million pumped into Forbes, which didn’t help it get off the rocks and ended with Elevation scaling back their involvement, and the $460 million put into Palm, which was burned away as the company tried to rescue itself and challenge Apple.

And even the Facebook deal — which could provide a return of more than 10x by the time the company goes public — appears to have been one that had to take place on the second market.

All this is what led the Irish rock star to be called America’s worst investor a couple of years ago.

Bono’s music may sell millions, but his track record as an investor is something that Dropbox may not want to think too hard about.

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Ashton Kutcher may be playing an internet entrepreneur on TV at the moment, but in real life he’s also one of the backers of Gidsy — a platform for hooking up consumers with people offering real-world experiences.

What does that mean? In practice, it’s a place where people sell their time giving tours, teaching, and much more. In Amsterdam, for example, a retired cop offers red light district tours. A London cab driver promises a tour of Harry Potter locations, and a course in Berlin offers to help people create their own sock monkeys. New York options range from walking tours to a lesson in “getting shit made in the USA.”

Basically, almost anything goes, and people seem to be lapping it up: the company only started operations in Berlin and Amsterdam around three months ago, and it’s already rolled out to San Francisco, London and New York.

Trust is crucial

Gidsy has a very simple business model, taking a 10 percent cut of what customers pay for their experiences. The rest goes to the person who’s offering up the activity, making Gidsy something of a micro-employment platform.

Like Airbnb and other services that bridge the divide between online and offline, Gidsy is largely based on trust. The service plugs into Facebook, making it reasonably identity-driven and the company holds fees in escrow — only releasing them to the seller after checking the customers got what they paid for. The flipside is that Gidsy also makes sure the vendor doesn’t have to collect the fees at the event. In theory, everyone’s protected.

The moneymen seem to be impressed. Kutcher’s involvement came along with seed funding from Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures, former Nielsen Entertainment CEO Peter Read and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, all in all totaling $1.2m.

Gidsy’s Dutch CEO, Edial Dekker, told GigaOM on Tuesday that experiences lined up for the LA launch will include a Cirque du Soleil veteran teaching you how to breathe fire.

“We’re super excited to be launching in LA and can’t wait to see for which activities Gidsy will be used. It’s really interesting to see that every city has unique offerings that show a glimpse of what the city itself is like,” Dekker said.

In the future, he added, Gidsy aims to go as global as possible, taking in whole regions and branching out to support more currencies. The company also wants to add geo-search capabilities, to make it easier for people to find interesting local experiences.

“Next to the city launches, we’ve been working on a new way for organizers to offer activities through Gidsy, and we’re incredibly excited about this one,” he said. “Launching in LA brings us one step closer to a global community.”

Other LA Gidsy experiences will include a Hollywood sign hike and a course in how to avoid buying processed condiments ever again. Would it be too much to ask to have Kutcher giving a $15 studio tour?

Photograph of Edial Dekker used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Opendata Network

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So-called collaborative consumption has also started to make some companies a significant amount of money. Here are 10 signs I’ve seen that a web-based sharing economy is movin’ into the mainstream:

1. Airbnb $1 Billion Valuation. The peer-to-peer apartment and house rental startup Airbnb is reportedly raising a $100 million (or more) sized round, at a $1 billion-plus valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, the Y-Combinator company had only raised $7.8 million. No doubt such a large leap in funding will help the company grow rapidly, and continue to bring in more users beyond the early adopter crowd.

2. Zipcar’s IPO. In mid-April, car sharing company Zipcar debuted on the Nasdaq at an eye-opening $30 per share, up over 60 percent from its offering price of $18. The company’s stock is trading around $25 at last close. Zipcar has been growing its business over the past decade, but decided this was the year investors would embrace the IPO. They were right.

3. New Innovative Startups Emerging. It seems like new websites using this type of business model are emerging on a regular basis. Baby clothing swap site thredUP launched in April 2010 and has been growing its business well ever since. Neighborgoods is another newish site organized around finding objects for rent via neighborhoods and locations, instead of around specific items. Toygaroo is like the Netflix for kids toys, where parents can rent toys for use, and then return them, and get new ones.

4. Neighbor-to-Neighbor Car Rental Competition. The idea for neighbor-to-neighbor car renting (car sharing 2.0) was such a hot concept there are now at least three companies angling to build the still tiny market. Getaround launched nationwide last week (and won an award from Tech Crunch ), RelayRides has been growing its site with funding from Google Ventures  and August Capital. And Spride Share, working with tech from City Car Share, launched in September 2010.

5. Attention Outside of Early Adopters. ThredUP has managed to attract a user base of people who tend to live their lives well outside the tech industry echo chamber, CEO James Reinhart explained to us recently. And that’s the main thing that Reinhart attributes to the success of the web site.

6. It’s the Economy, Stupid. One of the reasons these types of websites are becoming more popular is because the weak economy has led consumers to look to cut out buying and owning expensive goods — like a car, or a tool that they only use once. When times are tough, why not turn to the web to rent it? That’s definitely a mainstream consumer concept.

7. Winning Web Reputation Tools. Enabling an average user to feel comfortable renting out their car to someone in their neighborhood, or convincing someone that it’s a good idea to stay in an apartment owned by a stranger, is hinged on web-based reputation tools. These reputation tools have become better and better over the years, and pioneers like Yelp, Amazon and Netflix have made peer reviews an artform. Sites like Airbnb are able to tap into that established ecosystem and level of comfort.

8. Pundits-n-Books. Any time a trend starts to break into the mainstream, there’s always a wealth of books written on the topic to guide the way. Here are two: What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, and The Mesh.

9. Ashton Kutcher. Last week, celebrity Ashton Kutcher disclosed he had invested in Airbnb. It’s Ashton Kutcher. He helped make Twitter more mainstream. Just associating his name with Airbnb kicks it officially out of Silicon Valley.

10. Car Sharing Is the Gateway. Car-sharing is the gateway drug of the growing trend, and according to a report from research firm Latitude called The Sharing Economy, people who try out car-sharing services are more likely to join in other web-based sharing services. Car sharers also share significantly more across categories than non-car sharers.

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The company isn’t sharing the size of the check, but says it represents Kutcher’s biggest venture investment to date. And while his investment probably isn’t eye popping, Kutcher is nevertheless a big get for Airbnb. The actor’s dance card is full of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs courting his new investment arm, which he called A Grade. Kutcher recently invested in another startup SeatGeek.

As part of the deal, the actor will join the Airbnb team as an “ally and trusted advisor” who will help out in a “community engagement” capacity. From the announcement:

With Ashton on board, we’ll be working together to take our community engagement to the next level and expand our international presence to reach more people from different cultures all over the world. It’s an exciting time for us. Airbnb has pioneered an industry and broken new ground as a trusted community marketplace where people from all over the world can discover and book unique spaces from people anywhere in the world. Now it’s time to expand and time to bring our concept to communities on an international scale.

Launched from humble beginnings, the company’s co-founders once sold special breakfast cereal in boxes that carried funky names (Obama O’s and Breakfast of Change) to attendees of the Democratic National Convention in November 2008 to keep the venture alive. Airbnb would go on to make a name for itself by matching frugal travelers with locals willing to accommodate them for a price. And while the site is often described as Couchsurfing for a more entrepreneurial crowd, it now also lists everything from igloos and teepees to castles, yachts and even the occasional private island.

Airbnb got a major boost in late 2010, when it snagged $7.2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, on top of the $600,000 it received in seed funding. And the peer-to-peer service is hitting critical mass with listings in more than 60,000 listings in 9,000 cities and 170 countries. In today’s blog post, Airbnb praised Kutcher for taking his “fascination with tech to new heights with his avid approach to brand marketing and social media.”

Take a look at a video interview we did with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky.

Image courtesy of TechCrunch

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Ashton Kutcher is best known in the new media space for being an avid Twitter user, where he has amassed close to five million followers. However, Kutcher has also been embracing online video, regularly posting clips on YouTube and Facebook and streaming live content via Qik and Ustream. He’s been most active on Ustream in recent months, so we shouldn’t be too surprised to see his Killers live stream pop up there as well.

Of course, streaming ten minutes of a movie doesn’t really put him in the same league as those that film an entire movie and distribute it via BitTorrent — but there are some interesting copyright implications to this promotional stunt.

Back in November, a 22-year old Chicago woman was arrested for taping three minutes of video during a showing of the vampire movie New Moon. However, it turned out the woman wasn’t a movie pirate, but merely tried to capture some pictures of her sister’s birthday party. Charges were eventually dropped after the film’s director intervened, but the company running the theater in question insisted in a press release that it didn’t have any choice but call the cops:

“Muvico will continue to enforce the “zero-tolerance policy” adopted by the MPAA and fully supports anti-piracy laws and the motion picture industry’s efforts to protect against copyright infringement. Under the law, any unauthorized audio or visual taping in a movie auditorium while the feature film is playing, regardless of the length of recording, is a federal and state offense that Muvico is compelled to report.“

Pictures from Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter account.

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OK, to be fair, it seems like the concept for KatalystHQ didn’t start off as a “hey, guys, let’s try to rip off College Humor and Black20!” effort. Instead, the show, featuring the employees of the Ashton Kutcher-founded social media company, seems to have evolved fairly organically out of real, unscripted behind-the-scenes videos that were posted to Facebook, starting in 2008.

And there’s some fairly charming content to be found in those early installments (provided you can find them — there’s currently no official site for KatalystHQ beyond its Facebook presence, so you either have to install a Facebook application or dig into the company’s account). The videos reveal a laid-back group of employees having fun and being themselves, only every once in awhile striving too hard for a joke — Kutcher makes occasional appearances, and while those featured don’t exactly have star power, it’s an engaging and likable crew, reacting to earthquakes and playing Wii.

However, last February, Katalyst began a formalized version of the show with a much more structured format and heavy inclusion of sponsorship deals. And while partnering with Slide to distribute season 2 put the show on Blip and YouTube, it didn’t necessarily put the comedy in it — KatalystHQ: Vegas, for example, is like a half-baked episode of Punk’d (also produced by Kutcher). And yesterday evening, Kutcher hosted a live episode of Katalyst HQ via Ustream — which featured a fair amount of pre-recorded material on top of some awkward improvisation with the staff, most of it feeling staged and phony. The reality’s been lost, is pretty much the problem, and the videos play like just another web series about working in an office, which we really didn’t need.

However, that Slide partnership has paid off, as the series, according to Adweek Media, had reached over 9 million unique users by Sept. 24. And this isn’t even the company’s main gig; even when it makes a TV show that gets canceled, it figures out something to do with it.

That said, I stand by my wish that the show was as entertaining as those early videos; people are always much funnier when they’re not trying to be funny.

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