On Friday, during a Congressional hearing on the Obama Administration’s proposal for a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gases, Al Gore had to defend his honor. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican Congresswoman from Gore’s home state of Tennessee, questioned his motivations behind supporting the proposal because of his investments in green startups through his role at Kleiner Perkins, where he is a partner. (Watch the video after the jump).
She didn’t seem to know too much about Kleiner Perkins other than that it is a “capital firm” and that it has invested “$1 billion in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation,” or at least that is what she gathered from an old New York Times Magazine article. “Are you aware of that company?” she asked him.
Then she asked Gore if he stood to personally benefit financially from these investments, and that set him off: → Read More
Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web.
Swine Flu is the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, with users rapidly tweeting about the latest news about the disease, including whether it has spread to other states, the Center for Disease Control’s announcement, etc. → Read More
A spam-less Twitter feed might just be too good to be true. Spam is becoming an increasing problem on Twitter and something has to be done to separate the wheat from the chaff. Spammers are using Twitter as a tool by replying to your @username, which then causes the Tweets to show up in your timeline. There isn’t really a way to filter Twitter spam directly from a Twitter client. But there may be soon.
Loic Le Meur has proposed to add a “report as spam” button to the Twitter desktop clients his company has created, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. This button would flag the spammer to Twitter (or to a separate database of users) and Seesmic or Twhirl could then exclude the spammer from its client apps after a sufficient number of users report them as spam. Le Meur also says that the clients would manually check the potential spammers to ensure that they are actually spammers. → Read More
A big thanks for making Geek ‘n Rolla a memorable event also needs to go to Enamel, a new indie band that stepped in at the last minute to add somespice to our after-party at Cafe de Paris. Although they describe themselves at being influenced by The Police, David Bowie and Duran Duran, personally I’d describe them as “more accessible Franz Ferdinand”.
Tim Dickinson (Vocals), Leo Dawkins (Guitar), Leon Barron (Keyboard), Chris Hill (Bass) and Chris Egglestone (Drums) also went to the trouble of getting a video made of the GeeknRolla evening, so here it is for your enjoyment: → Read More
Joe Drumgoole, CTO and co-founder of PutPlace, (@jdrumgoole) has now uploading the slides from his ‘speed speech’ at Geek ‘n Rolla, title “Launching your Startup on a cloud computing infrastructure”. The main take-away? Watch the per transaction costs in cloud computing.
Benjamin Ellis wrote on Business Tech Feed: → Read More
The idea behind Google Earth has always been a powerful one: It allows users to explore places that they either can’t or won’t go. But with its vast amount of maps and topographical data, it also is a very powerful tool for combing the Earth — and that can be very useful when you’re searching for something. Which is exactly how it helped a grieving family find a plane that crashed, and took the lives of loved ones, that had been missing for over two years.
Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth. → Read More
For the retro gaming fans out there, these clone systems are making a lot of dreams come true. The FC3 system, for example, plays NES, SNES, and Genesis games, for only like $60. And this sweet portable NES, which uses actual NES cartridges, has the added bonus of wireless controllers and a Zapper as accessories. Of course it’s got a TV-out; you’d look pretty silly aiming a light gun at this little thing. → Read More
The web is filled with video content, but there are different formats that don’t always play nicely with all players. The most obvious example of this is the hugely popular Flash format, which does not work on the hugely popular iPhone. EQ Network has an answer for that and other format issues, and wants to offers content owners a way to serve up ads in those video post-conversion.
The company’s Media Delivery Bar can be embedded on a page below any video player. This gives viewers an easy-to-understand option for converting and sending a video to a specific type of device they may want to watch the video on — like an iPhone. You simply enter an email address or cellphone number that you want to send the video to, fill out some quick demographic information, and within a few minutes, the video will arrive in a format tailored to your needs. → Read More
Well, we had a good run. The Renaissance, going to the Moon, inventing the Snuggie… but all that’s done now. World of Warcraft is no longer restricted to home and laptop use. Its grip on humanity will be total. Penny Arcade was remarkably prescient in this case; I wonder who Satan (who is the devil) is working for right now? Could Apple, could be Blizzard, or maybe he’s just freelancing. Now there will be no reason to log off for the poor souls whose evenings are already consumed in questing and raiding. → Read More
How cool is this? My friends and I have fun tinkering with audio gear every once in a while, but this awesome hack is beyond anything I would have thought up. By taking apart a drive, mating it with a tape recorder, and doing a few other really cool things, this talented hacktress has made 3.5″ floppies capable of holding about 15 seconds of analog audio. And you have to hear it, some sort of signal bleed makes it have this crazy reverb effect. → Read More
On March 18, 2008, Steve Jobs was deposed by the SEC during its investigation of Apple’s stock option backdating scandal. The deposition was never made public until Forbes published it on Friday, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request. (Full deposition embedded below)
Jobs explains his reasoning for why he asked the board for mega grants of options for both himself and his top executives, but claims ignorance of the mechanics of how that was done after the board approved the grants themselves. (It was the falsifying of board minutes for a meeting that never occurred, not the backdating per se, that got Apple’s former general counsel Nancy Heinen into hot water with the SEC—this deposition was for a case against her). There aren’t too many revelations on the legal front in the document.
But the document provides the first detailed account of the incident from Steve Jobs himself in his own words. What comes through in the deposition is how Jobs sees himself and his’ fierce loyalty to those who work for him. For instance, after selling NeXt to Apple in 1997, his initial reason for acting as a consultant was to get “some of the NeXt people into some jobs where they could help Apple.” He himself was reluctant at first to take on the CEO role at Apple because he didn’t want the people at his other company, Pixar, to “think I was abandoning them.”
Then when it came time to reward his “ultra key” executives with one million options each, two of them were from NeXT. While he was taking care of his top lieutenants by trying ti “surprise and delight them with what a career at Apple could be”, he was “hurt” that Apple’s board didn’t do the same for him. So he had to have a little talk with them about swapping his 20 million then-underwater options for 7.5 million new ones, which they did.
I’ve excerpted some of the juicier bits from the deposition after the jump. → Read More
We’ve seen some strange concepts in our time, but this has to be one of the weirdest and most unlikely. This concept KissPhone is probably going to stay imaginary, since it’s the most ridiculous thing in the galaxy. Capture the movement, warmth, and “sucking force” of a lover’s lips and transmit it in real time to a pair of robo-lips? Yeah, I see a market for that. It’s called crazy people. → Read More
Do you have an extra digital camera lying around that you wouldn’t mind sending hundreds of feet in the air? Got a couple hours and a lot of thumbtacks to spare? Well, this DIY project is for you, then. It’s a very complicated way of mechanically triggering your camera while you’re away — say 100 feet down at the end of a long piece of string. → Read More
One thing MySpace has is a lot of holes in the executive ranks. Founding CEO Chris DeWolfe has been hurriedly replaced by Owen Van Natta (our thoughts on that are well known). Cofounder and President Tom Anderson is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” And last month three of the top (and most capable) execs (COO, SVP Product Strategy and VP Technology) left to start their own company. More MySpace execs will soon be leaving, voluntarily or not, as Van Natta fills the gaps and adds loyal lieutenants.
The first announcement will likely be a replacement for the COO spot, who will be the no. 2 exec at MySpace. A number of current MySpace execs are hoping for the job, particularly Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing. But our understanding is that the COO spot is definitely going to an outsider.
The most likely candidate, we’ve heard from sources, is former AOL exec Mike Jones. Jones’ company, Userplane, was acquired by AOL in late 2006. And Jones worked closely with former AOL boss Jonathan Miller, who is now overseeing all of News Corp.’s digital assets, including MySpace. → Read More
One of the many unsavory aspects of the hiring of Owen Van Natta as the new CEO of MySpace: the rewriting of recent history around Van Natta’s involvement in Project Playlist. The communications group at News Corp. (MySpace’s parent company) is busy spinning Van Natta’s departure as a simple transition from one job to another, but that’s far from the truth. Nor does their story take into account the sad state of the company that he ran for just a few months before leaving for greener pastures.
Here’s how News Corp spins this: This is a natural changing of the guard as a CEO of a small startup takes a bigger job. There was an orderly transition, and Project Playlist has a new CEO with great experience. Nothing to see here, please move along.
Here’s the real story: Van Natta joined Project Playlist in November 2008, just about five months ago. He told investors and employees he was in for the long haul. And he hired an executive team under him that came with his promise that he’d lead the company to a win. Bob Pittman invested in the company, he told recruits, which is true. But he also let rumors that the company raised $20 million in new funding fly. In fact the company raised much less than that. And Van Natta also underplayed the problems with labels, suggesting that deals were imminent and the litigation was going to be settled. And now that Van Natta has abandoned the company, they’ve had to scramble to find someone to run the company. That’s why John Sykes, who was already a board member, was forced to step in. → Read More
The SprintCam is a pretty heavy-duty slo-mo camera. This version, v3, can take 1,000 frames per second, resulting in a look at physical actions in full HD that is unprecedented. How much does it cost? Lots and lots, but just look at that footage. → Read More
