The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s father would relentlessly hound him to “Get better”, so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won’t go through. But the legend? It’s a hoax.
Here’s the real story… → Read More
If only Facebook IPO day were a little less of a snoozefest than it is now. If only it had Zuckerberg impaling investors while riding a bull rampaging through a city. Or an elevator to space. Or Zuckerberg bouncing Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar off a giant scale. But sadly, our surrealist dreams will never be realized.
We will just have to settle for the ho-hum performance of Facebook’s shares so far. In the meantime, you can watch this re-enactment from NMA TV or Next Media Animation, that Taiwanese animation subsidiary that riffs off current events with 3D animated videos that look like what the lovechild of Salvador Dali and Reddit would make. Oh, and did we mention that their parent company invests in tech startups too? → Read More
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They say if you want to understand the future, you have to look at children. And if my 10-year-old cousin’s chat history is any indication, we will soon be communicating in emoji, Egyptian hieroglyphics or some other kind of pictographic language that renders the 2,000-year-old Roman alphabet obsolete.
Sometimes she sends me full e-mails with dozens of lines of straight emoticons, which either means ‘My cat ate my homework,’ or symbolizes the Five Stages of Grief in a single word. I’m not really sure. Anyway, there is a mobile app for that. It’s called Zlango and it’s backed by Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners and DAG Ventures.
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Aliens are streaming our music! A crop circle bearing a striking resemblance to the Spotify logo has appeared in Wiltshire, England near Stonehenge. The Swedish startup denies having anything to do with the formation pressed into a canola seed field.
Sirius XM satellite radio must feel a little jealous, as it’s been beaming music into space for years. Hopefully the extraterrestrials like to party, as Fun.’s drunken anthem “We Are Young” has been topping the Spotify charts for weeks. Otherwise, we may need to assemble Will Smith and others with experience fighting aliens. → Read More
“She told me that she Googled my name up / Shootings, robberies and big coke came up”. These are lyrics from “Google That”, a vulgar, violent new rap song from NORE Styles P, and Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon immortalizing the search engine. In it, the rappers brag about how their crimes and jail time are so famous you can find them on the Internet.
Most tech companies probably wouldn’t mind being mentioned in pop culture, but probably not like this. Rap enthusiast Ben Horowitz might love it, though. Here’s the video and full lyrics. → Read More
Earning calls are super fascinating when you think about it; For multiple hours a quarter we tune in with the thousands of other tech bloggers to dissect the financials of the public companies we spend our lives covering. Here at TC we’ve started calling covering these calls “putting our Rao face on,” inspired by our star senior editor Leena Rao, who is just amazing at covering earnings.
Like any other collective experience, these calls have their own unique culture; Yahoo earnings calls were particularly hilarious back when Carol Bartz was CEO (“I’m going to go get a Diet Coke,” I recall her randomly interjecting with once). And I’ve played more than one drinking game with fellow bloggers on the Google call (Larry Page says “excited,” A LOT. Like so much that this happened.). → Read More
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Oh San Francisco, has it really come to this?
Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so.
I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy at the Caltrain station. He handed me a business card, cut out of cardboard with the URL fingg.com scrawled onto it in black Sharpie pen.
“Find me a programmer and we’ll buy an island together,” he said. → Read More
Late last week, one Justin Watt discovered something suspicious going on with the wi-fi at his hotel, the Times Square Marriott. Not content to charge him hundreds for the room and $16.95 for internet access, it appeared that the service provider was using JavaScript injection to serve banner ads on every website guests visited.
The story spread like wildfire for obvious reasons, and at last Marriott has responded, saying the problem has been remedied and won’t happen again. → Read More
The Big Apple is looking into upgrading its existing pay phones, and a pilot study is underway that replaces everyone’s favorite anachronism with something a little more 21st-century: giant touchscreens. According the NY Post, the city will unveil 250 revamped phone booths next month that have been revamped with 32-inch touchable displays. These access points would be set up for Skype and other video services, email, wi-fi access, and *11 numbers.
It’s ambitious, and depending on the execution could be a big step forward for public communication points. On the other hand, city dwellers are likely to be skeptical of the devices; smartphone owners will find no use for them, and pay phone users won’t know what to make of them. Are they really going to Skype their dealer? → Read More
Richard Clarke was a major feature in US security for a decade, serving as a member of the National Security Council and special adviser for cybersecurity to President George W. Bush. He has written a column for the New York Times that details just how serious the threat of cyber attacks is for this country, something increasingly evident in light of things like the creaking infrastructure of things like NASA and general cluelessness in legislature.
But Mr Clark gives the world a lesson in cluelessness with the conclusion of his column, where he suggests that the United States should, under provisions made to regulate the movement of goods to and from this country, inspect international internet traffic. The suggestion is nothing short of idiotic.
Believe it or not, the following was written by someone who worked in national security — specializing in cybersecurity, no less — for years and years. → Read More
Today’s PSA is brought to you by the letter L. What word starts with L? Linen! If you’ve ever used Google Docs, you’ll recall that the interface is wildly ugly. Well no longer. Using a plugin and a nice big Linen JPG, you can turn GDocs into a thing of beauty.
For whatever reason (probably for SEO), a Brisbane, Australia driving school is hosting this Linen background for GDocs and is offering a set of simple instructions to set it up. While I don’t want to ruin their Google juice, here’s how to do it:
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When Mark Zuckerberg called for a “Space Hackathon” to decorate Facebook’s massive new headquarters at 1 Hacker Way, he probably didn’t expect employees to take him so literally. A few scurried up to the roof with some tar paint, and now there’s a 42-foot wide QR code on the roof that’s visible from space.
Scanning it opens the new FB QR Code Page on Facebook which may host puzzles, jokes, and other flavor to humanize the company. For now you’ll need an airplane or Facebook security badge to get a look at it first-hand, but once indexed it should appear on your favorite satellite mapping website. → Read More
A slightly cryptic announcement by the Pirate Bay yesterday has the Internet speculating whether the site might have accidentally posted their April Fools joke early. “We’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air.”
You can be skeptical, it’s all right. One does not simply launch a fleet of autonomous server drones. But the fundamental idea of physically inaccessible data is compelling even if this first, perhaps jesting, plan disappears into thin air. → Read More
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
6 drinks for an 160-pound, 30-year-old male? That’ll take 2 days off your lifespan. Just in time for SXSW, 100Proof is a mobile web app from healthtech startup 100Plus that calculates how your drinking shortens or even lengthens your lifespan. Cute graphics shows you how much sex or time boxing a kangaroo you’d have to spend to work off those calories.
Founder Chris Hogg tells me 100Proof delivers the serious message of being mindful of your habits but with a fun tone, and that it previews some of the functionality the full 100Plus app will offer when it launches. He also shared with me some real-time data from the app like that 50-somethings are drunker than those in their 40s, and that Android users drink more than those on iPhones.
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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.
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Ahead of Mobile World Congress and an appearance by Facebook to explain its next moves in mobile, the social networking giant is coming under increasing strain over its use of users’ personal information. Mobile startups and operators are both fretting over the issue this week, as smartphones and the apps that come with them increasingly eclipse the feature phones of old. We’ve already seen how Path ignited the debate around privacy by uploading iPhone address books to its servers without explicit permission, just as many other apps have done without anyone realizing for some time. Path was by no means the only offender.
The latest accusation is being leveled at Facebook. In today’s Sunday Times newspaper, published out of London, a story (behind a paywall) alleges that Facebook has “admitted” to “reading text messages” during a trial to launch its own messaging service. Now, given that British Sunday newspapers have a tendency for crying wolf to help copy sales, we’re trying to ascertain what the substance of this is. → Read More
Out of the annals of history comes this doozy. A man by the name of Theodore Gray is a co-founder of Wolfram Research, best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, the two-year-old computational answer engine, which Siri uses for 25 percent of her mobile searches.
Yesterday, a new video, or rather episode of “Bytesize Science,” emerged on YouTube wherein Gray discusses the tale behind his periodic table table. The video has been making the rounds, and was tipped to us (thanks to Kirk Zamieroski). We thought it was worth sharing, based on pure awesomeness, the high quality kitsch, and DIY mastery. Luckily no radioactive elements made it into the table — or at least we didn’t spot any lead. No one was hurt in the making of the table, as far as we know, other than perhaps Schrödinger’s cat? → Read More
Are you enough of a photo geek to build your own camera? Maybe. But are you enough of one to build it out of LEGO and some spare bits you had lying around the house? Probably not. But Carl-Frederic Salicath over in Norway is. And he did. He calls it the Legoflex B1. → Read More
Some rather inflammatory news has been making its way around the web today: a user posting on the Pirateweb message board has accused Google of removing copyrighted MP3 music files from a Gmail account — possibly using the scanning services that Google employs to block illegal content on YouTube, possibly using something else.
Shocking if true, so we went to Google to get a response. And the short answer is: no. Or not, at least, just like that. → Read More
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