See the 5 Finalists For Doritos' Crowdsourced Super Bowl Ads

It's that time of year again. While there have been drips and drabs of Super Bowl announcements over the past few weeks and months, the season has begun in earnest with the airing of Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" contest.

For the sixth year in a row, the PepsiCo brand is crowdsourcing its ads in the big game. After casting for entries from Oct. 8 to Nov. 16, the brand has settled on the five finalists above. Two of the ads -- one chosen by the people and one by Doritos execs -- will run during the Super Bowl. If the ad scores number one on USA Today's AdMeter, the ad's creator will get $1 million and the opportunity to work with Michael Bay on the next Transformers sequel, which is set to premiere in June 2014. (Second-place on AdMeter nets $600,000; third-place, $400,000.)

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While three of the ads won't make the cut, the creators at least get a $25,000 and a trip to New Orleans to attend Super Bowl XLVII in a private luxury suite at the game.

What do you think? Which is the best and worst ad? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy of YouTube

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Cats Get Their Own Social Network

Fellow cat owners: ever caught your feline stealing jealous glances at your laptop? Wonder why they keep walking all over your keyboard?

Turns out they're not trying to catch your attention or steal your lap heat. They just want you to get off Facebook so they can have their turn.

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OK, not really -- but the world's smartest pets are long overdue for their own social network. And now, thanks to a couple of developers in Malaysia, they just may have found one worthy of them.

The site in question is Catmoji, the brainchild of Matthew Phiong and Koekoe Loo Wan Koe. "We want to be Facebook for cats," the Penang-based programmers told Betabeat.

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Facebook isn't the first social network you'll think of when you see the design, however. Check it out:

Pinterest, anyone?

Then again, a picture and video-based social network makes a lot of sense when cats are your subject. None of that pesky text that dogs (so to speak) sites such as Catster or United Cats. Given the international appeal of cats -- and the rather shaky English of Catmoji's founders -- that's probably for the best. The site does offer the option to tag and filter cat pics according to their emotion (hence the name).

Catmoji only launched on Christmas Eve, so it doesn't have anything in the way of impressive user numbers just yet. But given its founders' obvious passion for the topic, we'll be keeping one beady kitty eye on its growth.

And if you're thinking you've already seen a parody video along the lines of a feline social network, you might be thinking of this:

It goes on too long, and could do with a little more motion to justify the Stealer's Wheel soundtrack. But these are forgivable sins in the cat video world, it seems; Tom Tom's spherical plastic antics have racked up more than 11 million views.

Click here to view this gallery.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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