The finals of Microsoft’ Imagine Cup, the world’s largest student technology competition, are taking place in Sydney this week and StethoCloud, the Melbourne-based home team, is definitely making a good case for Australia’s growing tech scene. The competition’s theme challenged students to build apps that “help solve the toughest problems” and the Australian team decided to tackle childhood pneumonia, which – despite the fact that it’s highly curable when detected early – sadly still kills more children than measles, malaria and HIV combined. The key to survival, says the Australian team, is to detect the illness early, but that’s obviously not easy for community health workers or unskilled staff in developing countries. → Read More
With so much information, content and so many services now living online, there’s a lot of choice — even for something as simple as where to go to buy a new pair of socks. Oh, and there’s a lot of data. As it’s evolved and gotten better at making sense of its new Big Data, the Web has become an extraordinary engine for discovering new stuff: News, cat videos, porn, you name it. Naturally, scores of sites are becoming (or are building) recommendation engines to help users wade through the noise, and, dining on Big Data, they get smarter every day.
However, as it stands today, the discovery process is pretty fragmented, as recommendation engines tend to be domain-specific. Want to find a good movie? Try Netflix. Want to find a good book? Go to GoodReads, etc. And this fragmentation makes for a crappy user experience. So, frustrated with the fact that there’s no one-stop shop for great recommendations on, well, everything, a couple of seniors at MIT have developed, and quietly launched, Tipflare to be that general solution. → Read More
Stop the presses! Facebook and LinkedIn are going to become archrivals in the recruiting market! At least, that’s the subtext of a new article in the Wall Street Journal which reports that Facebook plans to launch a job posting board later this summer.
It’s a nice scoop if true (the Journal cites “people familiar with the matter”), but reading the story is a strange experience. Basically, it starts out by explaining why the job board isn’t a big deal. Then, having established that it isn’t a big deal, the story talks about what a big deal it is. → Read More
Yahoo and Facebook signed a contract today that says they cannot sue each other over patents. Yet Yahoo may be trying to convince investors that Facebook would still pay to buy or license some Yahoo intellectual property. But according to a source familiar with the exact wording of the Yahoo-Facebook contract, the two companies have rights to each other’s entire patent portfolios, so Yahoo would have no leverage to extort money or value from Facebook.
I smell something fishy. Let’s investigate. → Read More
Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Now it is offering a beta program that will allow a small group of developers to get one of the laptops and join what it calls the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program.
Project Sputnik signals Dell’s changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking offerings and solutions.
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Marcus Nelson, co-founder of customer service startup UserVoice, left his role as head of social media at Salesforce.com back in April to start a company called Addvocate — and now he’s starting to talk about what he’s up to.
When I met with Nelson yesterday, he gave me a quick demo of the initial product (currently in private alpha testing) and talked about his broader vision. He says the idea came from his work at Salesforce, where convincing his coworkers to share content on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites was always a bit of a struggle — a complaint he’s heard from other companies. The problem is that “share this blog post!”-type requests usually come at the wrong time, like when someone is just trying to read through all of their email or catch up on all of their updates on an internal social network like Chatter. Sometimes, they’re even passed along via Excel spreadsheets (ouch). → Read More
Sony’s announcement this week to buy Gaikai for $380 million shines a light on the startup ecosystem in Los Angeles and the explosive growth that’s taking place. Though the majority of the conversation to date has been about LA’s historical strengths in digital media and commerce, Gaikai represents a new class of companies built around engineering talent solving hard problems.
LA has once again become a hotbed for technical leadership, as indicated by the flurry of investment activity. Entrepreneurs in the LA region attracted $567 million in venture capital in the first quarter of this year, 50% greater than the NY Metro area in the first quarter of the year, according to PriceWaterhouseCooper’s Money Tree report. Between the outstanding technical talent and the passion and vision of great founders, those dollars are being invested into technology-driven companies that break the stereotype of startups in LA.
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The tech news cycle is a desperate bitch, as we’ve brought up before; A brief rundown of yesterday’s bitchmeme sparked by a mere tweet from my colleague MG Siegler once again proves how absurd it is.
“I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites,” MG wrote in response to developer Marco Arment’s concise analysis of the insatiable tech news beast. → Read More
Mozilla is not “stopping” Thunderbird development, it has just decided that: “continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals.” And it’s pulling people off the project. But it’s not stopping? Right.
This, according to a letter shared with “Mozillians” ahead of the official announcement to be revealed on Monday. Recipients were asked not to share the letter, blog or tweet about the news until then, but obviously someone out there didn’t agree with that plan. → Read More
The flight is boarding and you are in a rush. You get on the plane. At 10,000 feet, you reach into your bag. Your laptop is not there.
It happens all the time. In fact, according to a new survey, more than 8,000 devices at seven of the largest airports in the country, including: Chicago O’Hare, Denver International, San Francisco International, Charlotte Douglas, Miami International, Orlando International and Minneapolis/St. Paul. → Read More
Twitter has just implemented a massive set of improvements to search, allowing you to search just within tweets of people you follow, autocomplete, and related results including similar hashtags and usernames. These will all help you find what you’re looking for even if you’re unsure of the exact hashtag or someone’s handle.
Today’s updates are already live on Twitter.com, and related search suggestions, autocomplete, and spelling corrections are also now available in Twitter for iPhone and Android. You can try them out now with a search for “Jeremy Lin” which returns his username and the real names of teammates as suggestions, plus a filter for tweets from People You Follow. → Read More
It’s something of a 21st Century nightmare — headlines are declaring that come Monday morning, thousands of people could wake up to a startling lack of Internet access all because of a crafty bit of malware. How chilling!
Well, it would be more chilling if people haven’t had plenty of advance warning. What’s more, the steps to detect and eliminate that malware — unimaginatively called “DNSChanger” — are relatively simple, so less-than-tech-savvy folk out there can take care of business with too much outside assistance.
But first, a little background. → Read More
Here we go: tomorrow we’re heading to the offices of Creative Coast, 15 West York Street for our first ever Savannah meet-up. We’re excited to see what Savannah has to offer. You can RSVP here.
Special thanks to The Creative Coast for hosting the event.
The Creative Coast is a non-profit organization supported by The City of Savannah and SEDA. We exist to nurture the members of our community engaged in creative or innovative endeavors and to cultivate an environment in which they can thrive.
Rails Machine is a full-service web operations and hosting company. We’re a small team of experienced, dedicated, and focused people who have a genuine interest in technology and enjoy working with and giving back to the Ruby on Rails community. We founded Rails Machine in 2006 to create the ultimate hosting environment for Rails applications.
Photo editing apps are pretty popular, which becomes obvious when you see things like Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram. And there’s a ton of them, so sorting through the various capabilities can be taxing. That’s why it’s great to see apps like Over, which just launched to enable users to quickly and easily add beautiful typography to photos. Because you know, it’s all about doing one thing and doing it really well.
Unlike other photo-editing apps, which let users add filters to make their photos look old-fashioned or fancy or whatever, Over is focused pretty much entirely on adding whatever text they want to photos. The Over app lets you take a photo or pull one from your camera roll, add whatever text you want, then choose from various different fonts and sizes, add tint, and adjust the alignment of the text. When all that is done, you can save the edited photo to your camera roll or share it out to various other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and (surprise!) even Instagram. → Read More
The libertarian super-duo, Congressman Ron Paul and his son, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, launched an “Internet Freedom” campaign this week that has come out swinging against net neutrality, branding it as a clever attempt at more government intervention. “The Technology Revolution” manifesto decries any attempt to regulate private Internet service providers as an affront to liberty, yet seems to ignore that powerful telecommunications monopolies can wield as much coercion over the future of the internet as the government. A world without a level playing field of Internet bandwidth allows powerful companies to favor their well-endowed corporate friends over the scrappy startups that power the most vibrant innovation on the web.
The father/son manifesto praises the Internet as an unqualified libertarian success story, “companies, like Apple,” it explains, are ” responsible for creating almost half a million jobs in the United States since the iPhone was introduced…All in less than 5 years, and all without government permission, partnerships, subsidies, or regulations!” → Read More
Facebook and Yahoo are calling off their heated patent lawsuit battle, and in fact have just agreed to cross-license their entire patent portfolios to each other without money changing hands, sources directly familiar with the deal tell me. Sources also confirmed that the two web giants are entering into an ad sales partnership that will let Yahoo show Like buttons in its ads, as first reported by Kara Swisher of AllThingsD this morning.
Update 1:15pm PST 7/6: Facebook has just confirmed the patent portfolio cross-license agreement as well as the ad sales and distribution partnership in a press release.
However, Swisher noted the companies would only cross-license “some key patents”, and Facebook might have to pay to license others from Yahoo. The patent deal is actually much larger. It encompasses their entire intellectual property stockpile such that they won’t have to pay be able to use each other’s patents, and won’t be able to sue each other over them either. → Read More
If you get a sudden hankering to watch Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (who hasn’t?), and the only device handy is your iPhone, starting today there’s even less standing between you and instant gratification.
Vevo (the joint venture music video site from Sony Music, Universal Music, and Abu Dhabi Media) already has a strong mobile presence, with apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry Playbook. Previously, however if you visited the site on your mobile device, you wouldn’t have been able to watch videos — instead, it directed you to download one of the apps. Now, thanks to the launch of Vevo’s new mobile Web experience, you can watch directly form your mobile browser, no downloads required. (You can also watch a bunch of music videos, including “Call Me Maybe”, via YouTube’s mobile apps and mobile website, but with Vevo you get a music-focused experience and access to a library of 50,000 videos.) → Read More
“Under most existing laws, if our findings were extrapolated nationally, several million teens could be prosecuted for child pornography,” explains a new study on teen sexting, which finds that a whopping 28% of teenagers text fully-nude pictures of themselves. We took a deep dive into the much reported Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine article, and found some weird insights into a 21st century trend that is quickly becoming the norm among teenagers.
1. White kids love sexting. More than any other demographic (Hispanic, African American, and Asian), white students reported sexting in the highest percentage (35%), nearly double that of Asians (19). African Americans were a somewhat distant second at 27%, followed by Hispanics (21%), and Asians. → Read More
I don’t know too many people who would look at the Galaxy Note and its 5.3 inch display and say “y’know, it would be great if this thing was just a little bigger,” and I now I know why. As it turns out, those people live in Korea, work for Samsung, and may have decided just that.
According to their usual unnamed sources, Korea’s MK Business News reports that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 will sport an even larger 5.5-inch display when its unveiled at Germany’s IFA 2012 trade show in August. → Read More
Good news, Android fans. A developer over on the forever awesome XDA Developers forums has figured out how to extract Google Now from Android Jelly Bean and port it over to devices running Ice Cream Sandwich. The process for doing so requires a slightly geeky skill set, of course. You have to have a rooted device and you’ll need to be comfortable navigating through the Android file system, for starters. But assuming that’s you, then you can be among the first to try Google Now in (nearly) all its glory.
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San Francisco, CA
CrunchUp & August Capital Party 2012
Redwood City, CA
San Francisco, California
Atlanta, GA
Raleigh-Durham, NC
Charlotte, NC
