• May 17th, 2012

    YesterdayMe: A Site That Tracks Yesterday’s Alcohol Consumption

    yeme-logo-1

    Every few days something really amazing dumps over the transom here at TC HQ. Today it was YesterdayMe.com. Built by Vladimir V. Tuporshin and partner, Ilja Razinkov, the site essentially allows you to enter yesterday’s alcohol consumption. Why? Because, that’s why.

    While the Russians are known for their heavy-duty drinking – although they’re moving from vodka to beer and wine these days, perhaps to prevent liver death – this site is ingenious in that it offers a very simple, hangover-proof interface for registering how much you sucked down. By sliding little drink indicators back and forth, you can tell the world or just yourself that you had too many beers.
    → Read More

    May 13th, 2012

    To 4G Or Not 4G? Apple Pulls “WiFi+4G” Branding For iPads

    Screen Shot 2012-05-13 at 11.00.32 AM

    What is 4G? Many an armchair philosopher over the past few weeks has pondered this concept and now, thanks to a minor tempest caused by upset customers, Apple has changed their iPad branding from “WiFi+4G” to “WiFi+Cellular.”

    Although the iPads were compatible with US 4G networks, the iPads didn’t work with international 4G connections, thereby dropping a few folks in Australia into a tizzy. To prevent this, Apple put the old moniker down the memory hole and replaced it with the new naming convention. → Read More

    May 10th, 2012

    The WhaleTail Gives Your iPad A Whale Tail

    whaletail

    The Vacuum Dock + WhaleTail by Octa, not to be confused with the whale tail made popular by Midwest girls, attempts to make holding a tablet or notebook a bit easier. The $50 device suctions onto a flat surface and then provides a flexible tail, a whale tail if you will, for additional handheld support and table top mounting. The thought is that these devices are so sleek and smooth that users need a bit of help holding them. Fine, okay. → Read More

    April 6th, 2012

    Now You Know: Hotels Inject Banner Ads Into The Wi-Fi They Charge You For

    thebattle_zoom

    This story made the rounds a few days ago but I think generally it’s something more people should know. During a visit to the very expensive and not very nice Times Square Marriott, Justin Watt noticed a strange bar at the top of his blog’s home page. He had recently dealt with a PHP hack and so was alert for changes on the site and when he dug further he found some strange Javascript embedded into the page.

    Noting that nothing changed on his server, he posted on the experience and thought little more about it – until a commenter noted that the behavior he noticed was coming from an RXG A8 or “Revenue Extraction Hotspot Gateway.” In short, this box, which sits between the access point and the Internet, injects ads into Wi-Fi streams. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Let Your Nerd Flag Fly With This Linux Distro Sim Game

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    It’s OK. We’re all dorks here. We know you get into forum arguments over Gnome vs. KDE (I’m a KDE man, myself, because Gnome sucks) and we know that you’ve always wanted to fork your own Ubuntu distro but you just didn’t have the time and a sufficient amount of Club Mate.

    Never fear: now you can pretend to build your own Linux distro from the comfort of your computer by playing Linux Tycoon, the world’s premier Linux distribution packaging simulator. → Read More

    March 27th, 2012

    Now Is The Time For All Good 16-Year-Olds To Make Scientific Calculators In Minecraft

    A young man who calls himself MaxSGB built a calculator in Minecraft. But this is not just any mechanical calculator: it’s entirely “mechanical” and, if it were real, would be 5 million cubic meters in size.
    → Read More

    March 23rd, 2012

    AT&T Exec Gives FCC The Finger After T-Mobile Announces Layoffs

    death-star-att

    Really? I mean, really?

    Yesterday, 1,900 T-Mobile employees got some very bad news — they would all soon be out of jobs, as the company announced their intention to shut down seven call centers. That in and of itself is a shame, but AT&T’s reaction to the announcement is even more shameful.

    You see, AT&T’s Jim Cicconi (their Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs, no less) took to the company’s public policy blog to say that “AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved.”

    Don’t you see? AT&T could’ve saved those jobs, if only the merger was approved! This didn’t need to happen!

    Please. → Read More

    March 16th, 2012

    Introducing Dotsies: The Space-Saving Font

    dotsies01

    When last I met with Craig Muth it was in lovely Columbus, Ohio and he was a down-to-earth hacker working on memorize.com, a site dedicated to making the world a better place. Clearly a useful and noble pursuit. Craig moved to San Francisco a while back, and just sent me an email with details of his latest project: a space-saving font he’s calling dotsies.

    Dotsies characters are built from five dots which can be on or off. Capital letters are signified with a little dot above the glyph. This allows each character to consume only a single vertical row, making it essentially the perfect monospace font. → Read More

    March 5th, 2012

    DARPA’s Cheetah Robot Will Stab You With Its Pointy Legs

    Seriously: this is what is going to do our fighting soon. Imagine stand-off situations with this bastard rolling through the door and then skittering across the marble floor of Oslo City Hall straight into a crowd of hostages, aiming right at the gunman. The design is based on Big Dog, our former favorite dangerous monster robot, but this guy can to 18 miles an hour, five miles faster than the fastest cheetah – albeit in controlled conditions.
    → Read More

    March 2nd, 2012

    Philadelphia Vigilante Doesn’t Want To Hear Your Public Phone Calls

    Screen shot 2012-03-02 at 1.06.56 PM

    A man named Eric who (uselessly) refuses to give up his last name (which I swear isn’t Eldon) has taken it upon himself to rid the world of annoying public cell phone conversations. But how, you might ask, is Eric X doing this? Just through the illegal purchase and use of a wireless jammer, of course.

    “I guess I’m taking the law into my own hands and quite frankly, I’m proud of it.”

    Ah, the glorious naïveté of vigilantism. → Read More

    February 29th, 2012

    Apple Refuses To Sell Book That Links To Amazon Store

    dude-wtf

    Apple may be a big dog in music and movie sales and rentals, but it’s definitely not a big dog in ebooks. That’s what makes this note from Seth Godin particularly galling. In a post on PaidContent, Godin writes that Apple has refused to sell his new book Stop Stealing Dreams because it contains links to Amazon in the bibliography.

    The reason cited is that there were “Multiple links to Amazon store.” This could be an overzealous Apple gatekeeper messing up, but they definitely messed up with the wrong guy. → Read More

    February 23rd, 2012

    Clone Wars: Author Discovers Bots Competing To Sell His Book

    rock-em-sock-em

    Carlos Bueno wrote a book called Lauren Ipsum. It’s a book about understanding computers for kids. He priced it at about $14 and offered it as a print-on-demand title and ebook. All was going well, books were selling, when suddenly he noticed a few copies were being offered for $55 or more. But there were no copies to be sold at that price and presumably someone selling a used copy would reduce the price, not increase it.

    What was happening was that a bot had found the book and priced it at some ridiculous level – $45 at last count. Bueno was bemused, at best, and realized that bots had found the book and were essentially running a price war amongst themselves in order to offer the same print-on-demand book Bueno was offering at a massively inflated price. They were, in short, going to buy the $14 book and resell it for forty dollars more. → Read More

    February 20th, 2012

    Splitflix: A Netflix Sharing Start-up That’s Crazy… Like A Fox

    Screen Shot 2012-02-20 at 10.43.15 AM

    When I first saw the pitch for Splitflix over the weekend I guffawed a little into my bourbon. The site purports to allow you to “share” your Netflix or Hulu account with a random stranger using a P2P matching system. You and the other person pay half of the cost of the subscription and then enjoy your cheaper streaming accounts.

    However, after a bit of digging, as a product it seems solid and as an act of protest, however misguided, it’s sure to get at least a little bit of attention. It’s even technically OK – or at least not prohibited – in the Netflix terms of service: → Read More

    February 15th, 2012

    Kikbo: Like A Hacky Sack With Feathers

    It’s so rare that we get to share some of the most incredible inventions in the universe with you all, which is why I’m so excited about Kikbo, a small puck topped with feathers that lets you and your potentially stoned friends hacky sack the night away in style – with feathers! → Read More

    February 7th, 2012

    BREAKING: SV’s Sagest Soothsayers Sport Sassy Socks (Plus A Contest)

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    If you’re just waking up out of your post Super Bowl stupor, a crumble of Doritos dusting your chest and beer cans littering the coffee table, floor, and dog, you’ll be excused for not knowing that all the greatest entrepreneurs in the world (and Om Malik) are wearing colorful socks. See, apparently dudes in the Valley wear sassy socks. It’s something that’s done. But why? Well, apparently wearing colorful socks helps you stand out in the dressed-down, always-on, loosey-goosey, fancy-dancing world of Silicon Valley. In a land where no one can see your bespoke suit with working cuff buttons, how are you supposed to show your power? With socks, people. With socks.

    In fact, fancy socks are like a gang sign. → Read More

    January 31st, 2012

    Apple Is Totally Serious About That Stuff They Put At The End Of Their Emails

    Spinquisition

    Welcome, kids, to TIL – Today I Learned. Today’s TIL is “Don’t post your correspondence with AppleCare representatives or Apple will totally tell the government on you.”

    David Boles had a nice Apple monitor that died on him. He had a little trouble transferring AppleCare coverage to his new monitor after it pooped out and so he posted some advice on his blog. Nothing major, just “don’t forget to connect your AppleCare accounts.” Very innocuous.
    → Read More

    January 27th, 2012

    Mujjo Conductive Gloves Let You Slide To Unlock With Your Begloved Knuckle

    Screen Shot 2012-01-27 at 11.31.12 AM

    We get a lot of PR pitches (“Write about our social media network for fish lovers! If you don’t, we’ll take our exclusive to TetraLover.blogspot.com,” “We’ll give you a private jet if you write good things about Apple – Sincerely, Tim Cook,” “Take a look at these iPhone gloves!”) and there are few I’ve dreaded more than writing about the aforementioned iPhone gloves mostly because the founders kept emailing me about these damned gloves. These things come from a Dutch company called Mujjo and they purport to allow you to interact with your iPhone with any part of your hand, including your wrist, knuckle, and palm. The founders must have used them to punch out emails on the icy Hague metro every day of the past month because they were pretty darn persistent.

    The question when dealing with these sorts of pitches, really, is two-fold: a) does the product advertised work? and b) will I write about the product after being literally hounded for three weeks by these guys? In answer to both, I would respond with a resounding (literally) “Yes.” They work and yeah, what the heck, Mujjo, people like gloves, right? Also a post will get Mujjo to stop emailing me. → Read More

    January 20th, 2012

    Skyrim (Not Really) Ported To The TI-84 Calculator

    Are you ready to destroy the Dragons of Skyrim with your trusty orcish arrows and shortsword? Do you wish to hop on your trusty horse and ride endlessly up steep slopes and through wooded glens? Do you have a TI-84 graphing calculator? Well you’re kind of in luck.
    → Read More

    January 19th, 2012

    Megaupload Taken Down On Piracy Allegations

    uplaod

    Popular file-hosting site Megaupload, probably known to our readers for a variety of reasons, has been taken down after the FBI charged some of its staff with copyright infringement and “conspiracy to commit racketeering.” Seven people have been charged, and four arrested (in New Zealand), and the site itself appears to be down as authorities around the world closed in on the site’s resources.

    Bizarrely, it was also just revealed that the CEO of the company is none other than Swizz Beats, the husband of Alicia Keys. Clearly the rabbit hole goes much deeper than the FBI expected. → Read More

    January 19th, 2012

    Foxconn Chief Equates Employees To Animals

    the-future-of-foxconn-the-birds

    While I suspect there’s a lot lost in translation here,Foxconn chairman Terry Gou made a wildly distasteful joke this week at the Taipei Zoo, saying (according to WantChinaTimes): “Hon Hai (Foxconn) has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

    The comments came during a presentation at the zoo where the superintendant Chin Shih-chien gave a talk on feeding and taking care of his charges. Gou has apparently hired Chin to make recommendations and help Foxconn executives learn how to manage large organizations. → Read More

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    Copperfasten — Received €500k in Unattributed funding from Enterprise Ireland and Oyster Technology Investments
    5.27.2012
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    PowerReviews — Acquired by Bazaarvoice for $151M.
    5.24.2012
    Copperfasten — Received €500k in Unattributed funding from Enterprise Ireland and Oyster Technology Investments
    5.27.2012
    Undo Software — Received Unattributed funding from Cambridge Angels group
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    Soteira — Received $375k in Debt funding
    5.25.2012
    Spectra Analysis — Received $125k in Debt funding
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    Exec — Received $3.3M in Seed funding
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    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
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    Himax Technologies — Company added to CrunchBase
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