Earlier this week we saw that McLaren got together with Specialized to make their exquisite Venge road bike. Apparently Audi felt left out of the party, and has announced the fruits of its collaboration with Portland bike-maker Renovo: the “duo” series.
The bikes’ primary differentiating feature is, of course, the wood frames. Audi has built them out of “woods selected to match the look of Audi vehicle interiors.” One assumes they also picked the wood based on its strength and weight, but they don’t really mention that. → Read More
Facebook corporate development manager Michael Brown (pictured left in happier days) recently and abruptly left Facebook, and the company then hired a senior Google employee to replace him. It was a curious departure and the chatter around Silicon Valley was that there was a lot more to the story.
And in fact there is. Via a scandal that could have far reaching consequences by bringing even more SEC scrutiny onto rampant secondary trading in non-public startups like Facebook and Twitter.
Brown, multiple sources have confirmed, purchased Facebook stock on secondary markets (like those occurring weekly on SecondMarket), which Facebook considers insider trading and grounds for immediate termination. Sources say this is well communicated throughout the company. It’s unclear how egregious the trade may have been. We’ve heard the trade was related to knowledge of the Goldman Sachs investment that value the company at $50 billion earlier this year, and we’ve heard from others closer to the situation that it was just a naive mistake and Brown has paid the price and moved on. One source says the trades were made last September, well before the Goldman deal was in the works. Either way, Facebook took it seriously and no doubt the SEC would too. → Read More
New York City announced the winners of its second BiggApps competition tonight. BiggApps is a way to get developers to use city and government data to create useful apps for citizens and visitors to New York City. The prize money was doubled to $40,000 split up among 14 winning apps.
The first prize went to Roadify, an iPhone app that crowdsources information about public transport and parking spots. Users can give or get parking spots, realtime updates about buses and subways, or transit schedules. The parking finder is genius. It shows the spot using GPS on a map. I think everyone who has ever tried to park in New York City has dreamt of an app like this. Now someone actually built it. → Read More
Thanks to the influence of owner and tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks season ticket holders will be able to enjoy a touch of the technological when claiming their 2011 playoff tickets. The Mavericks have teamed with Qualcomm to add augmented reality to this year’s playoff tickets.
Augmented Reality — or “AR” for those “in the know” — refers to a display in which simulated imagery or graphics are superimposed onto a view of the real world. In the case of these basketball tickets from the future, viewing on your Android will allow you to play an interactive game. → Read More
The website and show “Know Your Meme” were swallowed up this week by ICanHasCheezburger networks in a seven figure deal, proving once again that Internet memes are serious business. In light of this news, the Know Your Meme crew, Internet folklorists Elspeth Rountree, Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Wilkinson, Patrick Davison and Mike Rugnetta actually performed an episode of their heralded show live on stage today at Web 2.0 Expo. → Read More
Head to YouTube after 4AM local time and you’ll notice that it looks a little old fashioned — and not in a 1999 blinking construction sign sort of way.
YouTube is reverting back to what it would have looked like had it been around in 1911, complete with grainy, sepia video footage, no audio tracks (save for piano accompaniment), and title cards in place of the site’s normal comments. Yes, it’s time for April Fools, and the world’s largest video portal is ringing it in once with some video player trickery — a tradition it started in 2008 after RickRolling all of its users.
YouTube has accompanied the gag with a blog post from President Taft, and it’s also put together some 1911-ified memes, featuring the ancestors of Annoying Orange and a certain musically-inclined feline. Even some of the ads are old fashioned. → Read More
If ordering a new mouse off Amazon — because it looked cool and you have prime — only to find that it clicks like a 1980s keyboard frustrates you, then check out the Nexus 7000 quiet mouse. It has a great shape and look, comes in white or black, has one of those really tiny USB receiver dongles, and costs only $28. [via The Awesomer] → Read More
Some photos of Pentax’s NC-1 have leaked ahead of the supposed May / June release. If anything, this says they’re close, if not finished, with the smallest mirrorless camera in the world. → Read More
Not every Apple patent that comes down the line is worth gawking at, but these two are definitely worth a quick note. First, putting a battery in a charger is a pretty good idea — though I doubt they’re the first to do it. And this touchable OS X patent is a nice reminder of Apple’s convergence strategy. → Read More
Road and Track is a great car magazine, but they forgot an important fact about April Fools’ Day: the date. Yesterday, March 30th, they outed some pictures of the Volt sans roof. Their post even discussed some new tech for the unsightly little thing, despite its lack of a regular size gas tank. “We’re extremely excited about the new GM-patented photovoltaic film that covers two-thirds of the soft-top’s surface,” says GM spokesperson Taylor Wildwood. Uh-huh. Nice try guys, but those Volt engineers have more important things to do, like building rebadging the Volt. → Read More
With 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the Google-owned video behemoth would be the second largest search engine were it standalone site. Web video has become a powerful medium. But, I think it’s also fair to say that this powerful medium is in serious need of curation. What if you’re just looking for a quick laugh, a short video, and don’t want to wade through billions of videos — what if you want to create your own, personally curated streaming video channel? Hmmm? Thankfully, content curation has come to video: ShortForm shows it’s here to stay.
The San Francisco-based startup allows users to create personalized channels of web video content, easily pulling clips from YouTube and other video sites. You can play videos back-to-back to create a stream of video, not unlike the TV viewing experience. Creating custom channels is simple, and I would say the UI is more user-friendly (or at least more attractive) than that of YouTube. → Read More
You might have heard of the da Vinci surgical robot — it’s the state-of-the-art system used by surgeons to operate remotely, and although it’s quite a bulky setup, it’s also nearly as precise as human hands. Seattle surgeon Jim Porter, in order to show off the da Vinci’s capabilities, folds a paper airplane using the system’s little grippers.
Check out the video inside, it’s really quite cool. → Read More
Wow, this is a pretty crazy deal. Impulse is selling Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which the guys tell me is just excellent, for the ridiculous price of $5. It’s normally around $20, and even in the Steam winter sale, it only got down to $8, I think. → Read More
If you’re thinking of picking up HTC’s Arrive, the Windows Phone 7 QWERTY slider of your dreams, now might be a good time. Sprint is selling it at the premium phone price ($199 with a two-year contract), but if you order today from Wirefly you can grab it for only $25. With contract, of course. Be sure to put in the coupon code “ARRIVE0331″ before checkout to get that extra $25 off. [via LogicBuy] → Read More
It must be an absolute nightmare being a Hollywood executive in 2011. Four big studios (20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.) have announced plans to introduce a premium video-on-demand service, to debut on DirecTV next month as “Home Premiere,” that will screen movies a mere 60 days after their theatrical debut. Renting such a movie will set you back $30. And if you think you’re angry about that, just imagine how theater owners must feel. → Read More
Google is planning to introduce a smartphone app that can identify faces. If you capture someone’s head shot on your smartphone, Google will search their database of photos to try name them. We were pretty excited when Google Goggles came out. But this is a bit excessive. → Read More
Google launched the +1 feature of its social layer yesterday and if you’re like most tech journalists you probably likened the move to attaching a Facebook Like button to Google search results.
Well now someone has gone and done exactly that, no joke. Meet +Like, a Firefox, Safari and Chrome extension that lets you see how many people have liked a specific Google search result on Facebook as well as which of your Facebook Friends have recommended a specific piece of content, whether or not that action took place on Google search. → Read More
Common sense, for once, has prevailed. For whatever reason Boston College was telling its students that using a wireless router could be considered a “common example of copyright infringement.” Word got out, the Internet complained, and now the offending bullet point has been removed. → Read More
