Gary Sharma’s Highlights from F.ounders NY 2012, the Michael Jordan of Tech Events
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Most Delightfully Weird Ask Me Anything Requests on Reddit
It’s now something of a celebrity rite of passage, as well as a downright pleasant way to while away an afternoon. But while it’s perfectly delightful to see Woody Harrelson faceplant at Q&A, we’ve noticed that there are several interesting requests piling up, just aching to become hours of entertainment. In fact, here are a few Read More
YouTube Stars Do New York
A crowd of casual, nondescript white-shirted people hovered near the entrance of the dark-bricked Webster Hall on Tuesday afternoon, taking a break from this summer’s New Music Seminar. Leaning casually against the wrought-iron fence chatting were teenaged singers Christina Grimmie, her long brown hair dyed red, and Charity Vance, a classic Southern sweetheart with blonde hair and green eyes. The two have a combined 1.6 million fans on YouTube.
The New Music Seminar is a festival and conference celebrating new artists. The seminar portion of the event gives producers, writers and musicians including Sean Parker, Wyclef Jean and Andrew WK the opportunity to discuss and learn about the music making process. At night, the young and upcoming stars spread across the city to perform.
For its inaugural effort, the conference brought 150 artists to perform in 17 different venues. It also rounded up four YouTube stars for its main show on Monday night. The headliners were Ms. Grimmie; Ms. Vance; smiley heartthrob Tyler Ward; and the tall, surnameless singer-guitarist Noah.
So what’s it take to be YouTube-famous? Betabeat had the opportunity to chat with each of these four young stars. Read More
Watch Microsoft’s Surface Tablet Freeze in the Middle of a Presentation
Most citizens of Startupland have probably been there: You’re about to give a presentation of a slide deck and suddenly Powerpoint won’t open, or you’re in the middle of a demo when your app fails.
Apparently even tech tycoons aren’t immune to glitches. Take this presentation from Microsoft, for example, where an exec goes to demo the new Surface tablet in front of an audience and it freezes. Read More
10 Bizarre Geocities Pages That Still Exist
Remember Geocities, the 90s-era webpage builder that you probably used to host your “About Me” page in 6th grade computer class? Yahoo shut down Geocities’ U.S. service back in 2009, but according to a link on the front page of Hacker News today, a simple Google search turns up remaining Geocities websites that are still in existence. Turns out, some of them are pretty damn weird. Read More
Forget SMS Alerts: IFTTT Wants to Switch Your Lights on At Sunset
Currently sitting atop the Hacker News homepage: IFTTT, the service that effectively lets you program the Internet to suit your needs, just announced a couple of new features. And if you are a fan of the connected home, then you had better brace yourself, because IFTTT just started integrating with its first real hardware company. Read More
Augmented Reality Glasses Could Be an Awkward Person’s New Best Friend
In this month’s MIT Technology Review, journalist Farhad Manjoo got a chance to talk with a technology lead for Google’s Project Glass, Thad Starner. An associate professor at the Georgia Institute for Technology, Mr. Starner has been experimenting with wearable technologies since the mid-90s, and was tapped by Google to advise them on issues surrounding Project Glass, the company’s attempt to commercialize computerized glasses.
Ever the skeptical journalist, Mr. Manjoo went into the meeting expecting to find the glasses polarizing and detrimental to social interaction. Also: dorky and vaguely creepy. Instead, Mr. Starner successfully convinced him that Google’s glasses will actually amplify social interaction, stripping it of those awkward phone-checking asides and lulls in conversation when we go to respond to a text. In short, Google glasses could be a socially awkward person’s best friend. Sign us up! Read More
Kony 2012 Sends Cease & Desist Letter to NYU ITP Students Behind Kickstriker
Oh good, the folks behind Invisible Children’s botched Kony 2012 campaign are at it again. After the highly-criticized campaign’s frontman Jason Russell was caught running around the streets of San Diego naked, the campaign tunneled underground to avoid further scrutiny. But now they’re back in the news for a pretty silly reason. Turns out they have a few choice words for the NYU ITP students who started Kickstriker, a Kickstarter parody that imagines a world where crowdfunded wartime might be possible. College kids, amiright? Read More
People Care More About Keeping Their Cell Phones Charged Than Their Personal Hygiene
Good news if you’re Richard Stallman! According to a travel survey conducted by Intel, Americans are so obsessed with keeping their devices tethered to their fast-typing fingers that they’re eschewing the comforts and hygiene of modern life just to keep them charged. We call this the “Stallman Quotient”: The more you embrace technology over showering, the higher your Stallman Quotient grows. The maximum Stallman Quotient score is 10, otherwise known as “eating something from your foot while being filmed during a lecture.” Read More
Team of Devs So Crushed by Google Wave’s Shuttering That They Built Their Own Version
Remember Google Wave, the collaborative workspace tool pushed by Google a few years back that (like most of the search behemoth’s social products) never really got traction? By the last death knell of Wave, Google was so over it that the email they sent out announcing that it would be shut down even misspelled the name of the product as “Google Wage.” Yikes.
Despite Wave’s lack of appeal as a commercial product, it did have some enthusiastic fans. It was one of those things where you either detested it or wouldn’t shut up about it. Admittedly, this reporter forced her entire blog staff in college to employ Wave as a productivity tool, much to the chagrin of the majority of staffers who oddly preferred frenzied Gchat messages and group emails. But it seems like we aren’t alone in our passion for Wave–in fact, our love for the product is small potatoes compared to the team at Rizzoma, who were literally so depressed by Wave’s closure that they moved to the Ukraine for two months to build an alternative. Read More
