In her weekly (sometimes bi-weekly!) column Art Catch, The L's Patricia Milder tells you which art exhibits and theatrical productions are worth visually stalking. Mark Zuckerberg, this one's for you. Maybe the fact that I’m the only person I know who isn’t on Facebook and doesn’t video chat makes me, individually, the wrong target audience for Continuous City. But I don’t know, you tell me – do people actually think this kind of Internet communication (chatting, video dating, games, and so on) is a satisfying alternative to actual human contact? In my eyes the play’s conclusion seems overly obvious:...
We think both Seattle and Silicon Valley are hotbeds of technological creativity. It’s not a winner-loser, either-or, single-elimination business tournament. Without both, the world would be far less prosperous and productive. There are big differences between The Emerald City and The Valley; but they just do things their own way. We’ve picked up on five stereotypes that define the Seattle-Silicon Valley rivalry. Soul on Ice: Silicon Valley is portrayed as a soulless, mechanistic place where monomaniacal technologists write software code 24 X 7. Seattle, meanwhile, is seen as an idyllic quality-of-life haven where hikers take precedence over hackers. Seattle is...
I went over to visit Peter Went this week, his company WCC Group produces a Fuzzy Logic Database which amongst other things used for matching Biometric Data. He said he was going to be in Milan today giving a talk to start discussion on the following point. Governments only really know about 5-10% of their population, a few because they have had a security clearance check performed and the rest because they have a criminal record. The remaining 90-95% of their population they have no clue about, they only know whether they paid there taxes. (Percentages may vary slightly.) A...
Mufin, an automated music recommendation service, has publicly launched today. The Berlin-based company has been getting some positive reviews because of its technology, built by the Fraunhofer Institute, the German research organization that created the MP3 music file format. It uses an algorithm to parse more than 40 different aspects of music, like the rhythm structure of a song, or its tempo. To use the service, you search for a song on Mufin’s home site, or on its MySpace or Facebook applications. Then you can listen to a short clip of the song and to clips of other songs it...
This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services. Since kicking off the voting round of the Open Web Awards yesterday, we’ve seen nearly 10,000 votes cast across 26 different categories. In the Mainstream Social Networks category, Twitter has the early lead, but has some tough competition from last year’s winners, Facebook and Netlog. With voting open until November 30th, perhaps one of these contenders can make a run for the award: Dotblu – A social network geared primarily towards teens, where users compete in various games to earn virtual...
App developers know that Facebook’s restrictions on application emails have made the use of email as an effective communication channel much more challenging. Tonight, there is good news: Facebook is announcing several new features for developers to employ in their application emails. Here’s a quick summary: Many new formatting tags are available for the first time. For a complete list of which HTML tags developers can use in their emails, see the Developer Wiki page. Demographic restrictions are now available in email through FBML Personalization is now available in subject lines through FBML (”Justin, your latest updates…”) Internationalization tags are...
User Interface EngineerFacebook Palo Alto, California Facebook is looking for an experienced User Interface Engineer to support a small group of designers and function at the intersection of product and engineering. This position is part of the product organization and candidates are required to be able to build and implement complex interactions in collaboration with product designers. The position is full-time and reports to the Product Design Lead. » view The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.(more...)...
by Brian Solis Austin, what are you doing tonight? Microsoft StartupZone, The TechSet and Austin’s Startup District present “Ignition,” an event to commemorate the launch of Microsoft BizSpark and celebrate the spirit of entrepreneurialism. Join Stephanie Agresta, Brian Solis, Austin entrepreneurs, the BizSpark team and partners for this can’t miss event from 7-10pm with free drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Plus, you will have the opportunity to meet some of the most influential technologists around. RSVP here. SD|2020 is also bringing together the best early-stage startups in Texas - 20 slides, 20 seconds each slide, on the 20th of this month. Pitching...
Last year when Microsoft invested in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation I doubt they expected Yahoo! would soon fall below that level. As of yesterday’s closing price, the company now has a market capitalization of $12.67 billion, over $2 billion less than Microsoft valued Facebook at. Facebook is now valued at around $4 billion according to leaked reports about internal stock sales. In terms of traffic, Facebook still pales in comparison to Yahoo who attracts hundreds of millions of users each month to the site. Facebook has serious momentum though as it has more than doubled its traffic in...
by Brian Solis It’s that time again, hard to believe that it’s already been a year. TechCrunch has announced the second annual Crunchies, co-produced with GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider, and VentureBeat. But, before we talk about attending the event, let’s focus on nominating the most deserving startups, or those who can solicit the most votes, as well as products across 15 categories based on their 2008 performance. Nominations are open until December 10th, Midnight PST. The ceremony will be held on Jan. 9, 2009, 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater across the street from City Hall in San Francisco. Tickets...
It’s not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent’s head against the corner post, but outside the ring it’s hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends. Wrestlers aren’t stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That’s why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it’s not really a social network....
