The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal “bittorrent.” → Read More
YCombinator-funded WebMynd, which launched in 2008 and was most recently responsible for the browser addon Search Smarter, is today announcing that it is the recipient of one of our heralded 2010 TechFellows Awards, from none other than Paul Graham himself. WebMynd will be using the 100K in financing to develop a new product, the WebMynd Addon Developer Platform. → Read More
Launching today from the YCombinator Class of 2011, Tutorspree is a online marketplace for K-12 tutors along the lines of accommodations network Airbnb, but specific to tutoring (yes I’ve made this comparison before). Founded by Aaron Harris, Josh Abrams and Ryan Bednar, the startup is disruptive in the sense that the tutoring space up until now has been monopolized by agencies like Sylvan and Huntington Learning Center or risky alternative Craigslist. → Read More
Confirming some speculation and defying some other speculation, Motorola announced today during its earnings call that its Xoom tablet is still on track for a late-February release, despite rumors that Honeycomb is only half-baked. I think we all know Honeycomb is going to be a bit of a rough launch; I’m waiting for 3.1. → Read More
You may have seen a few reports going around the webosphere to the effect that Keanu Reeves and the Wachowski brothers were in the midst of planning a pair of Matrix sequels. Not only that, but the two films were to be in 3D. It turns out the whole thing was basically made up, so never mind. Don’t propagate. → Read More
We saw some seriously interesting hardware at CES this year, but MWC is just around the corner, and it looks like Samsung was keeping a few surprises for the big European mobile show. This schedule, the source of which isn’t given, quite clearly shows two new Galaxy products coming out soon: the Galaxy S 2 handset and a new Galaxy Tab. → Read More
The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal “bittorrent.”
It’s a new high for antipiracy theater, because you can of course still search for the terms by hitting enter, and get the same results as before, including direct links to torrent files hosted on well-known indexers. The move will accomplish two things, though: first, it will damage consumer trust of a company whose services are ostensibly objective, and second, it confirms for the hundredth time how quixotic and misguided the efforts of the MPAA et al. are in every action they take. → Read More
It’s a fundamental difference between real and virtual keyboards that with one, you rest your fingers on the home row, and with the other, you hover. This means that with the real keyboard, you are typing with muscle memory, and on the virtual keyboard, while that muscle memory helps, you can’t rely on it completely and must augment it with visual confirmation.
This concept by the University of Technology, Sydney, for a new kind of onscreen keyboard, called LiquidKeyboard, places the letters above wherever your fingers are resting, but still in their original QWERTY positions. Check out the video inside. → Read More
A month ago, Polaris Ventures principal Ryan Spoon wrote up a quick blog post looking for a developer with Chrome extension/app experience. He had a pretty simple idea for something to help him with his job. Matt Basta saw the post and created the extension Spoon was looking for almost instantly. Now they’re opening it up for all to use and calling it Polaris Insights.
The straightforward app is very, very slick. You simply visit the website of a company you’re interested in, hit the extension button, and you get an overlay of the CrunchBase, LinkedIn, and Quora data for the company. The CrunchBase column shows you the funding information, the LinkedIn column shows you your connections within the company, and the Quora column shows you some of the Q&A conversations going on about about company. → Read More
I’m not quite sure I buy the physics behind these speakers entirely. The idea is that instead of simply vibrating a driver at the correct frequencies and projecting those vibrations out into the room, you use ultrasonic waves to vibrate only the air molecules along a path, and things outside of that path won’t hear the sound. → Read More
Last August our own Michael Arrington wrote a post addressing a topic that’s as important as it is sensitive: the lack of women who are running startups. In short, his point was that there simply aren’t enough women who are setting out to become entrepreneurs — and it’s not because the issue is being swept under the rug or because the industry is heavily weighted against them.
Now Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston has written an insightful article discussing her own experience with this. Livingston is as qualified as anyone to analyze the problem — she wrote Founders at Work and has also interviewed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of founders for Y Combinator. And her conclusion is similar to Michael’s:
So why don’t women want to start startups? I wonder if it’s not that not enough women want to start startups, but that not enough women even consider it as an option.
Oh, Verizon iPhone; you’re not even on the shelves yet, and you’re already stirring up drama.
Just yesterday, Verizon COO Lowell McAdams disclosed that they’d be offering $30 Unlimited Data plans to iPhone users at launch (though, as he later clarified, that offer won’t last forever.) That may very well be enough to convince a chunk of AT&T’s iPhone-toting crowd to jump ship, given that AT&T’s $30 Unlimited Plan was killed off months ago in favor of the new $15/200MB and $25/2GB plans.
It looks like AT&T’s $30 Unlimited Plan might not be totally dead, though. → Read More
Although the headline oversimplifies Nintendo UK’s James Honeywell’s comments on piracy (what are headlines for?), it’s more or less what he said, and Nintendo seems to actually think that its steps to curb piracy are going to be effective. To be fair, Honeywell also described crowing about piracy countermeasures as being “like a red rag to a bull,” which mirrors my own thoughts. → Read More
In the wake of the sensible legislation banning on texting while driving and requiring of hands-free in cars, it seems that lawmakers are setting their sights a little too high — or low, depending on your perspective. Some nascent proposals in New York aim to make it a crime to cross the street while using an electronic device. I don’t often cry “nanny state,” but this situation really is verging on requiring that term.
And yet there clearly is some need to address the fact that pedestrians in urban areas are more distracted than ever, and increasingly tend to throw themselves in front of cars, if the most recent accident statistics are any indication. But surely such a unilateral ban is not the answer. Is it even a starting place for a discussion? → Read More
In perhaps one of the most like-minded and forward-thinking acquisitions I’ve ever seen, career-driven social network LinkedIn has bought CardMunch, a Shoeboxed-like startup that scans your business cards and accurately converts them into phone contacts using Mechanical Turk. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. → Read More
Now this is nice. If you’re a heavy Gmail user you’ve probably installed some kind of desktop notification system — be it a browser extension, a separate Gmail app like Mailplane and/or Growl. But now, hot on the heels of launching a dynamic unread count in browser tabs, Gmail is launching something that doesn’t require any downloads: built-in desktop notifications.
A small banner on Gmail just prompted me to enable the feature, which works for both inbound chat and email messages (you can opt to receive notifications for all new emails, or just ‘Important’ ones as deemed by your Priority Inbox). Google is probably rolling this out gradually (there’s no blog post yet), but I’m seeing it in both of my accounts. → Read More
I wouldn’t say this teardown of a D7000 is of particular interest over, say, a Canon or Pentax, but you don’t often get to see brand-new DSLRs cracked open like this. When you think about it, there really is quite a lot of computing power packed into these guys. Being able to process and write thirty 16-megapixel RAW or JPEG images at five or six per second is a serious task. Go ahead, open 30 right now in your favorite image editor. Like lightning, right? No, not so much. → Read More
Another six months, another iteration in the CX series from Ricoh. This time, though, Santa has been a little stingy, and the improvements are minimal. I’d say the most relevant feature on the CX5 is how it’s going to drive down the price of the nearly identical CX4. → Read More
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that Hovensa LLC — a joint venture between Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. — will pay a civil penalty of more than $5.3 million, and spend more than $700 million in new pollution controls as part of a settlement resulting from a complaint about Clean Air Act violations by the company at its St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands refinery.
According to the government-filed complaint, Hovensa made changes to its petroleum refinery that increased its emissions, after having failed to obtain pre-construction permits, and failing to install required pollution control equipment there.
The proposed settlement requires the company to spend $700 million on upgrading its refinery business with… → Read More
