Today’s Google Doodle is a working Turing machine that contains six puzzles. Sophia Foster-Dimino on Google’s Doodle team built the app in honor of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday.
What’s a turing machine? It’s not an actual machine, per se, but a thought experiment that allowed for the advent of digital computing. → Read More
I wanted to have 100,000 Facebook fans for my blog. I don’t have a product to sell. I’m not trying to get advertisers on my blog. I’m not even trying to get more speaking gigs because of my blog. But I believe in the message of my blog and I enjoy having an audience for it. So I wanted to expand that audience.
We have entered the “Choose Yourself” era. No longer do you have to wait for the big media companies to reach down from the heavens and bless you with a column, a book advance, a TV show, a job, a career, money, or even customers. In 2008 the tide came in, the financial system collapsed, and we saw that the myth of corporate safety was just another example of the brainwashing that we had undergone since we were kids. → Read More
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Suppose you dropped your phone — a real fall, like from the second story — and it broke. You’re picking up the pieces, cursing and trying to think of the last time you backed up your contacts, when you notice something. Deep within the phone’s hardware, hidden from everyday use, you find a message — etched right onto the chassis.
What kind of message? Let’s say you found a Darwin fish, or the letters YHWH? Or perhaps something a little more difficult to decipher — a code or symbol of some kind, not an inventory number, but still something meant to be seen and read? What would you make of it?
This isn’t actually a hypothetical situation or something out of a Neal Stephenson book. Apple has actually done this — and the symbol they’ve chosen is as arcane and ominous as it is unmistakable. → Read More
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn’t dead. In fact it’s thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV–albeit barely–but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there’s no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to Nielsen, more money is spent on TV advertising than all other ad platforms combined.
A few doomsayers say the TV industry “may be starting to collapse” and that excessive production costs are its weak spot. Yeah, if only. Television as constituted today makes no sense at all; it’s a kludged-up legacy system that’s enormously painful and expensive to maintain. But TV’s entrenched economic interests and cultural inertia are so pathological that even HBO Go wouldn’t make sense as a standalone app–as HBO confirms–and the rumors of a brand-new Apple TV ecosystem were, alas, dead wrong. Sure, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are mighty powers in their own right, but if even nigh-omnipotent Apple has given up, what hope do they have?
Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an answer. → Read More
I like Joe Fernandez a lot, more than I like most people. He’s a true entrepreneur and badass, asking specifically to be onstage with me at LeWeb London because he knew that I had serious misgivings about his product, Klout. He told me he wanted a challenge and to put himself outside his comfort zone, both before and after the interview. Cool, anyone who’s not scared of being in the hot seat garners my immediate esteem. → Read More
It was only a matter of time before healthcare providers would start prescribing mHealth apps as soon as they proved to be as or more effective than prescription drugs. Happtique, a mobile health application store and app management solution startup will launch a trial of mRx. They claim this is the first program to enable doctors to prescribe mHealth apps to patients. mHealth pioneers are calling it an “app formulary” that complements (and competes) with a traditional drug formulary (i.e., the list of approved drugs a clinician can prescribe). → Read More
Unikey Technologies, a company made known by ABC’s Shark Tank for technology that turns your smartphone into a universal door key, has raised $1.1 million according to an SEC filing. The amount appears to be in addition to a $500,000 equity stake raised from Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary earlier this year on the season finale of the program.
Once the Unikey locking system is installed in a door, any paired Android, iOS, or BlackBerry device can unlock it. The system is not dependent on an app, but rather the system unlocks the door by simply detecting when the phone is in the immediate vicinity. “As long as I’m in range of the lock, I can control it,” said Unikey founder and CEO Phil Dumas on the show. → Read More
Facebook is finally working closely with Apple — on iOS 6 — but it’s also hiring away some of its design talent. The latest is Chris Weeldreyer, who has just left his position as a user interface design manager to become a product design manager at the social network.
What will Weeldreyer be working on? “We’re excited to welcome Chris Weeldryer to Facebook, where he will be a great addition to our growing design team,” Facebook tells us. But we’ve also learned from a source close to the company that he’ll be focused on its mobile products. → Read More
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Because investors sure are. Facebook’s share price jumped up 3.8% to $33.05 today on news that it’s now showing its ads on Zynga.com in a revenue sharing partnership. Most amazingly, neither the press nor users seem to be freaking out that their private, personal data is now being used to target them with ads outside of Facebook.
That means Mark Zuckerberg waited just long enough, proving he’s even smarter than he used to be. → Read More
It’s been years since I’ve had to look for an apartment, but in that time multiple friends have sung the praises of PadMapper (TechCrunch alumnus Greg Kumparak is a fan too). Usually, they describe it as a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist. Starting today, unfortunately, they’ll have to scratch “Craigslist” from the equation.
According to an account that creator Eric DeMenthon published on the PadMapper blog, and that he elaborated on over email, Craigslist’s lawyer sent him a cease-and-desist letter earlier this week, demanding that PadMapper take down any postings from Craigslist. The lawyer also sent DeMenthon a mobile license, so he could pay to use the postings in a mobile app. → Read More
Tesla Motors, the electric car company founded by PalPal founder and all-around tech industry badass Elon Musk, today began shipments of the Model S, the electricity-powered sedan it first unveiled back in 2009. Above we’ve embedded a livestream of the event, being held right now in Fremont, California. → Read More
Here’s another chance for one lucky reader to win tickets to this year’s Disrupt in San Francisco! Congratulations to last week’s winner, Stephen Hsu. Last week, we asked everyone to let us know who they would like to see at Disrupt SF. The comments were tallied and Mark Zuckerberg was the chosen one. Our people have reached out to his people. We’ll let you know.
Disrupt SF is going to be a blast. Last year we had speakers that included: Reid Hoffman, Tom Conrad, Max Levchin, Dustin Moskovitz, Mayor Ed Lee, Ashton Kutcher, Peter Thiel and many more. → Read More
Public airwaves may be one step closer to becoming an indecent wasteland of swearing, nudity, and violence—a victory for First Amendment-lovers everywhere. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out fines against Fox and ABC for airing brief expletives and nudity, arguing that the FCC’s rule against “fleeting” indecency was too vague. The narrow decision won’t change the content of broadcasting anytime in the near future, but it has given the FCC more latitude in what it considers indecent and renewed the conversation about whether indecency rules are relevant in a world of Netflix, Hulu, and 24-hour access to the pornographic universe. → Read More
Zappos left San Francisco way back in 2004, and since then it has become closely associated with its new home in Nevada — in fact, CEO Tony Hsieh is working to revitalize downtown Las Vegas, in part by turning it into a startup hub. At the same time, the online retailer hasn’t entirely severed its connection to the Bay Area — in 2010, it reopened an office in SF, one that’s focused on experimenting with cool new ideas.
The role of the 11-person SF team is getting a little more official today, with its renaming from Zappos San Francisco to Zappos Labs. To be clear, that’s basically the role that the team was filling already, releasing products like a fashion magazine-style iPad app. And it was even called Zappos Labs unofficially. → Read More
Google employee and creator of XML, Tim Bray, has proposed a new error message for the web. Rather than hiding censored websites behind a generic 403 error – “the server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it” – these websites would return 451 – “censored.”
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Pro tip: Don’t let the following happen to your PR pitch/intern.
So I know this is a particularly egregious case of “pot calling the kettle black” (I personally am a Black Belt in typos) but, instead of being psyched up to “Party Our Apps Off!”at Google i/o next week, our team has been discussing the simple grammar mistake in the subject line of the below email for at least 30 minutes this morning.
I thought I would share the thread with you guys, if anything to remind you again that there’s a crucial difference between “your” and “you’re” (“its” and “it’s” are also tricky). → Read More
Ever since Google introduced limits to how often developers could ping its popular Maps API for free and started charging developers for usage above these limits, we’ve seen a slew of prominent developers like Foursquare switch over to other platforms, including the open-source project OpenStreetMap. Now, it looks like Google has noticed that it couldn’t keep charging up to $4 for 1,000 map loads above its free allowance. Instead, the company just announced that it is massively lowering its pricing to just $0.50 per 1,000 map loads. → Read More
There’s a “Recommend Me” feature on LinkedIn which I’m sure many readers of TechCrunch will be aware of, having been asked multiple times for references by their contacts. But what if you took that concept and created a data-oriented approach? That’s the angle the bootstrapped startup ViewsOnYou is taking, and it’s aiming it at companies that want to find out much more about you, beyond what your CV might say.
The problem with recruitment these days is that recruiters need more than paper credentials, and instead now often rely more on people’s “soft skills,” such as creativity, ingenuity, and resilience. So to address this ViewsOnYou consists of 23 sliding scales covering a broad spectrum of the kinds of things employers and headhunters look for. → Read More
A month ago, mobile delivery startup Postmates publicly launched its ‘Get It Now’ on-demand courier service in San Francisco, allowing its users to order pretty much anything from various stores and restaurants around the city. When it introduced the plan, it charged a flat $7.99 fee for all deliveries made within an hour. Now it’s changing things up just a bit, with a new dynamic pricing plan that will range anywhere from $5 up to $12, based on how difficult the delivery is.
The dynamic pricing plan is based on an algorithm which calculates the fee based on the amount of time spent traveling and distance traveled, how long its couriers spend shopping or waiting in line to pick up an item, and the type of store that the user ordered from. Prices are based on historical data from the last month of operations, and will continue to be adjusted as new deliveries provide more data. → Read More
CloudCar, a startup still in stealth mode that was the subject of rumors earlier this month when Robert Scoble reported that Andy Rubin would leave his job at Google to join it, has filed a Form D with the SEC indicating that it has raised $11.5 million in a Series A round.
The startup may not be Rubin’s next place of employment, but he is connected to it: after the rumor hit, and then he denied it on Twitter, he further clarified in a Google+ post that CloudCar “are a group of friends who I give free office space to in my incubator in Los Altos.”
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San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, California
