This is the 1942 yearbook from the Temple University School of Medicine. The design of the embossed leather cover drives me wild. It's on eBay right now with a buy-it-now price of $1495. Temple University School of Medicine Skull Yearbook
The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak has a thought-provoking feature on the use of laptops and Internet services by homeless people, who, like everyone else, use them for civic engagement with politicians, social interaction, job hunting, and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.
And even then, there will be destitute former music execs, living rough on the streets, using their laptops to argue that no, it's not a human right: you should be deprived of your Internet access if you're accused of copyright infringement, because the Internet is just a machine for making copies of trivial, copyrighted entertainment products.
"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet..."
Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life...
Aspiring computer programmer Paul Weston, 29, says his Macintosh PowerBook has been a "lifeboat" since he was laid off from his job as a hotel clerk in December and moved to a shelter. Sitting in a Whole Foods store with free wireless access, Mr. Weston searches for work and writes a computer program he hopes to sell eventually. He has emailed city officials to press for better shelter conditions...
Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn't find another when the economy tanked.
When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.
Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted a stellar Team Fortress-themed mobile:
One of Valve's most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they're instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.
And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and "extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze," and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow's jarate-tossing champs today.
If there's a Left 4 Dead one, I'm doomed -- it's all the wife can talk about these days; we'd end up with one in ever room, and Alice running around making pew-pew noises at them.
My friends from Youth Radio were at the Maker Faire Bay Area today, creating a live soundscape. Students roamed the fairgrounds collecting audio samples on flash recorders. As the roving reporters brought back their "tape" to the Youth Radio booth, others used Peak and Reason software to cut-up, loop, and collage the audio into a sick soundscape. The young people on the scene were Kenyon Colvin-Williams, Skyler Brynat, Luis Florez, Derrick Underwood, Khadejhia Kassenbrock, and Austin DeRubira. Production support came from Ben Frost, Charlie Foster, and Rachel Krantz.
(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
Looking back over the advance of physics over the last two hundred years, it's staggering to realize how much our world view has changed. As a science fiction writer, I'm always trying to imagine how much more things might change in the coming two centuries. The really hard thing to anticipate is the completely game-changing advances that occur every so often.
My sense is that, for one thing, we won't be using chip-based computers in two hundred years---any more than we use mechanical calculators now. That's why, in my recent novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, I've been speculating about a world in which our computations escape from our machines and filter into our ordinary matter.
Nick Herbert is one of my favorite offbeat physicists. One of his papers in particular is something I've thought about a lot over the years: "Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra." Here Nick argues that our conscious minds display some of the same features as quantum mechanics. When we're not thinking about anything in particular, our thoughts evolve in a continuous, multi-universe kind of way---but when we focus on something, we carry out something like the quantum collapse that characterizes the process of measurement.
As I've been saying, I think it's at least in principle possible that the quantum computations in ordinary matter might be capable of carrying out these same kinds of processes---which we normally associate with living, conscious minds. And Nick's paper helps you to think about this idea.
The basic idea is that quantum mechanical systems can act as universal computers, and it's generally believed that any universal computer can emulate a human mind (given the right program, and, aye, there's the rub).
One of our big problems is that we still have such an imperfect notion of how to build a software system that's like a human mind. The best idea along these lines that I've seen in the last few years is in the book On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.
Two more rich sources for futuristic ideas.
(1) The arXiv.org site---for instance look at their New Papers on Cosmology and Extragalactic Physics page. It blows my mind that you can so easily access all these wild new papers, easily readable in PDF form. Even if, for the average person, a lot of the writing is incomprehensible gibberish (like the backwards neon sign shown above), you can skate through and pick up some great concepts and buzzwords.
(2) The physicist John Baez's pages. Baez is a deep thinker and a gifted popularizer, adept at imparting the true strangeness of this world.
It's liberating to realize that, as always, we're very much on the edge of knowing what's really going on.
Patrick sez, "A Canadian cinema has been fined C$10,000 for invasion of privacy when it searched a mother and daughter's bags for video cameras, but instead pulled out birth control pills from the daughter's purse. The mother had no idea. She sued. She won."
Staff at the theatre were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy.
Security guards didn't find any video equipment in the family's bags, but did turn up a large selection of snack food, which they asked the family to take back to their vehicle, Lurie said.
"They did so willingly. But they continued the search of the bags and while searching they also uncovered some birth control pills belonging to the older daughter," Lurie said.
"Needless to say the mother was not pleased to find out in this manner that her daughter had those pills in her possession."
This week on the most excellent Pseudopod horror podcast, David Nickle's fantastic story "The Inevitability of Earth," a tale about the ignobility of those who would fly:
When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.
The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing -- flapping his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long, beak-ish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin, middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his neck. Grandfather's apparent foolishness was compounded by the face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved, and Michael was gone -
And so was Grandfather.
Dave's got a new short story collection coming soon, available for pre-order: Monstrous Affections.
Whoops! An eagle-eyed tipster spotted this today on the front door of Pete Wentz's East Village bar, Angels and Kings, which got smacked down with an NYPD closure. Looks like they were serving to minors. An inside source notes that Angels and Kings was issued a third citation for serving to minors, so they've been shut down for three days. They also noted that their first two violations were previously thrown out in court, though, so the cops are - as they're wont to do with New York City bars - actually kind of just fucking with them. Sugar, they're going down swinging. Last time this fair website heard from Wentz, he got all different kinds of pissed off and mad and upset when we posted a Gawker Stalker sighting of him. He blogged about it on his Tumblr, and we ran a pretty pie graph about what all of Pete Wentz's fans had to say to us! Wentz, despite Twittering his whereabouts, was primarily concerned with the safety of his kid, who was with him and wife Ashley Simpson (along with their two-ton bodyguard, who probably doesn't stick out at all). And we can respect a guy who looks out for his kids, and who encourages his fans - mostly kids, too, we might add - to be concerned, too. But he's clearly not too concerned with anyone else's kids, or their drinking habits, which their parents might not approve of. Being a rock and roll parent: rough stuff. Bummer. On that note, Gawker Stalkers are encouraged to be more vigilant in reporting their sightings of Pete. We wouldn't want him spiking anybody else's punch. Sightings go here. Closeup of the notice here: Oh, and related: if you've never been to Angels and Kings, Joshua Stein put it best when he noted that, upon opening, "our douche canary in our douche mineshaft keeled over and died." Which is everything you need to know about the place. MORE >>
What a mess. The Daily Telegraph reported on Thursday that Major General Antonio Taguba had seen the Abu Ghraib photos Barack Obama's trying to suppress, and that they were really, really bad. Now Salon's reporting that Taguba hadn't actually seen them. This is ugly. The Thursday report Salon called into question found Taguba - who retired from his military career in 1997 - noted that the Abu Ghraib photos the ACLU's suing to have released show "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." Last night, Taguba admitted that he hadn't seen the photos the ACLU is suing over: "The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen," Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress. Taguba then went on to mention that he still thinks "no other photographs should be released" because he fears it could generate and incite more violence and retribution against American soldiers. The Daily Telegraph, now embarrassed at getting the story wrong and trying to find cover, ran their own version of Salon's story earlier this afternoon: their spin is that despite their initial report implying that Taguba had seen the suppressed photos, he had CONFIRMED their story in CLARIFYING that the photos he had seen weren't the ones Obama was trying to suppress. Ohhhhh. Got it. Hate to admit it, but Robert Gibbs was right about one thing: the British Press - kinda stupid, sometimes. They also cited The Daily Beast: Scott Horton, who wrote yesterday about some of the photos Obama was trying to suppress, also had sources confirming their contents! Exciting! The photographs differ from those already officially released ... In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position ... In one withheld photograph, not previously described, Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr., an Abu Ghraib guard, is shown suturing the face of a prisoner, a reliable source tells The Daily Beast. Well, guess who else looks stupid, here: yes, The Daily Beast. Salon published those two photos in 2006, and Salon's Alex Koppelman took to the streets (blog) about an hour ago to scream that those photos were so three years ago, they had already been there (First!!11!!) and that none of you morons claiming to actually have some kind of exclusive on these photos or their content do. So Salon's playing their own horn really loudly - fine. But both The Daily Beast and the Telegraph both look fairly ridiculous, today: they bought a story without trying it on, took it home, and wore it out to the club. And then Salon pointed out the giant skidmark near their collective ass while they were in the middle of doing the "Soulja Boy." They did a great job... MORE >>
There's been a lot of hootin'-and-hollerin' about Sonia Sotomayor and her rags-to-riches life story. But who's going to the Bronx to find out what her peeps think? I can do that. South Bronx, stand up! Last time me and my video-homie Ray hit the streets it was in Williamsburg, on the hunt for The Hipster Grifter. After listening to the media elites preen-and-prattle all week I decided to go the Boogie Down (my birthplace as well, Sonia. We taking over!) in search of Justice Sotomayor's roots, and some real talk. Here's the video report. A Bronx Tale: In Search of Sonia Sotomayor from weekendvids on Vimeo. MORE >>
Keith Olbermann devoted a good deal of time on his show tonight to our reporting on Erich "Mancow" Muller's fake waterboarding escapade. He says we're conspiracy theorists. We never said anybody conspired with anybody to do anything, but his puzzling, false, and hysterically paranoid response makes us wonder. Muller is a shock jock who made his name by pulling stunts like shutting down traffic on San Francisco's Bay Bridge with his station's news van and having his sidekick get a haircut on the asphalt, making prank calls to Chinese restaurants and asking whether they make their Egg Foo Yung with dog or cat meat, saying "nigger" on the air, and making repeated calls to the hair salon next to his studio and insinuating that the male owner is a gay. Seven days ago, after a week of on air hype, Muller—who has always denied that waterboarding was torture—purported to undergo the procedure on the air, after which he dramatically announced that he had changed his mind about it. This would have probably gone largely unnoticed except for the fact that Keith Olbermann designated him as the leading critic of torture. So irresistable was the idea of a nominal conservative coming over to Olbermann's side of the torture debate (the right side, we might add) that even after we reported that Muller's stunt was at best a half-assed spectacle that didn't come close to the actual conditions that waterboard victims experience and at worst a deliberate con job designed to get publicity, Olbermann double-downed and blamed us for ruining his fun. Based on the evidence we've gathered, and Olbermann and Muller's confusing and contradictory responses, we're increasingly convinced that Muller's waterboarding escapade was a purposeful fabrication—that he set out to engineer a publicity event based on the reversal of his position. But even if you take the most charitable view of the evidence from Muller's perspective, all that emerges is a fake waterboarding that frightened a callow radio host. Olbermann brought Muller—with his wife and daughter wandering around aimlessly and confusingly behind him in the studio—back to his show tonight to rebut our stories. He said that "the only actual evidence" that Muller's supposed waterboarding was not, in fact, a waterboarding was "the use of the word 'hoax' in an e-mail." Well, we'd say that's something, considering the e-mail in question was from Muller's publicist, Linda Shafran, who wrote outright that the event was indeed a hoax. Muller explained it away, as he did earlier today, by claiming that he would not have been permitted to do the stunt by his bosses if he let people know that he was actually planning on going through with it. He wasn't clear, but the implication was that Shafran wasn't in the loop—she thought it would be a bullshit stunt: "I didn't think it was a big deal, she didn't think it was a big deal. We were going to prove that it was nothing." Shafran wrote the e-mail on the... MORE >>
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Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads.
Larry Chang, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Chang admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers. But the list is a good starting point. Chang says he will be highlighting the best VC blog posts from this list on his blog every two weeks and will update the directory to add new VC blogs quarterly.
Here are the top 20 on the list, with their Google Reader subscriber numbers (you can see all 100 on Chang’s blog):
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service.
Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT.
Smub is a very basic service, but a useful one that’s been pretty well executed. Once you’ve saved a bookmark to your Smub profile, you can set a relatively short URL which redirects to it (e.g. smub.it/robinwauters/netflix.ceo - yay, another toolbar-in-a-frame) and you can also add keyword tags and comments to the article in one swoop. You can manage your bookmarks from your account too, and share them on the services cited above later if you choose to. To get started, you can import the bookmarks from whichever browser you’re using, and you can easily pull in your friends’ contact details from Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail to make it easier and faster for you to share ‘Smubs’ with them.
I like Smub already, and I suspect that while the team clearly wants to make sure the service is mobile-friendly (it works particularly well with the iPhone) some people will be interested in simply using it on their computers. For those, the Smub guys added a Firefox extension and toolbar which can come in quite handy if you’re using multiple social bookmarking services.
Now go smub something and tell us what you think.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Over the last 15 years or so, most of us have adapted to the new forms of communication that pervade the web, ditching letters (and in many cases, phone calls) in favor of rapid fire IMs and Email. But there’s still at least one formality embedded in most of us that’s been hard to overcome: the personal signature. The simple act of signing a document, silly as it may seem in an era of fingerprints, photographs, and passwords, is something that has been engrained in us. And while signing a digital document with an “Okay” button or check box may be legally binding, they’re so basic that it makes the gesture feel insincere.
Cue the digital signature - handwritten signatures input using either your mouse or a tablet, which are then embedded alongside the document in question. These have around for quite a while, with companies in this space including DocuSign and EchoSign. Now RightSignature, a new startup that launched to the public last month, is looking to make things even easier.
CEO Daryl Bernstein says that the existing digital signature companies don’t focus enough on the user experience, making it difficult to actually read the document you’re meant to sign. So RightSignature has built a proprietary PDF viewer that shows a large portion of the document alongside a box for your John Hancock. Bernstein also says that competitors tend to focus on large companies, so RightSignature is trying to make its service more accessible to smaller businesses (you can send a document out for signing in around sixty seconds). You can get a feel for the document signing process on this page.
The service supports Google Docs, as well as native formats like PDF and .DOCX. Other extras include the option of requiring a photo taken by your computer’s camera alongside a signature and a free iPhone app that lets you sign documents on the go. The service offers a variety of distribution options, allowing users to send documents to a bulk list of users, and can also be used for petitions.
Users can send five documents per month for free, or can choose from a number of plans starting at $11 a month per user to get unlimited document sending. TechCrunch readers can get two months of the premium service for free by signing up through this link.
The service seems to work well, but RightSignature has a long road ahead - its competition is already quite well established, and some businesses may be hesitant to rely on a new service for their important document signatures. That said, the simplified UI may be enough to entice small businesses who had previously been scared off by the daunting nature of some of these other services.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook updating its terms to get ready for the roll-out of its payment system. Well guess what, it’s already here.
The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big “Pay With Facebook” button, similar to the “Facebook Connect” buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc.
Clicking on the “Pay With Facebook” button pops open an overlay which asks you to confirm payment via your Facebook Credits. My $2.99 card cost me 30 Facebook Credits. Expect to see this roll out to other applications soon.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Google’s head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, will join the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, according to a report by the New York Times. McLaughlin will assist former Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra, who President Obama appointed as CTO in April.
McLaughlin has been leading Google’s public policy efforts for quite some time now. According to this blog post, he was the first member of Google’s policy team in 2005.
Before his time at Google, McLaughlin launched the nonprofit group Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, where he serves as vice president, chief policy officer, and chief financial officer. Previously, McLaughlin was a senior fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet. Most recently, McLaughlin was working on the Obama/Biden presidential transition team in Washington.
McLaughlin isn’t the only Googler to join the Obama administration. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who was speculated to be CTO, was recently named to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Former Google product manager Kate Stanton joined the White House as its director of citizen participation earlier this year.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Spymaster, the Twitter-based game that we covered last night, is spreading like crazy today. It’s been a trending topic on Twitter throughout the day, even ahead of the hype around Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Because of this popularity though, some Twitter users are getting inundated with tweets from the service in their streams. It’s not really spam, because it’s their friends doing it, but to some, it’s very annoying. Former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump, is particularly pissed off.
“I've started both unfollowing and reporting users of this game to @spam. This isn't because I hate my friends, it's because I have no other recourse to stop this application's abusive behavior,” he writes in a blog post today. While Stump isn’t entirely accurate that the only way to gain points is by tweeting out your actions in the game, the spirit of what he’s saying is correct because you are encouraged to tweet out your actions in the game to earn more points. He notes that this is similar to what happened with Facebook Platform early on, as games like Zombies took over people’s streams. This is something that VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes as well, joking that maybe they should rename the game “SpamMaster.”
But the real issue here, which both Stump and Eldon bring up, is that this is the perfect example of why Twitter needs filters of some sort. We’ve been railing on this for a while, and I’m actually quite glad this game has come along to bring the issue to the forefront. The problem isn’t that the game is spam, it’s that Twitter is not at all set up to handle games like this, even though it is positioning itself to be a robust platform.
You need to be able to do things like block certain hashtags or keywords, and to be able to group together certain friends. Currently, various third party sites/services handle thing on top of Twitter, but it’s not enough if Twitter is really going to be a new form of communication. Because if Twitter gets overrun by these types of viral games, people will simply stop visiting Twitter, and it will destroy the platform’s backbone.
Not that these are trivial things for Twitter to implement given its crazy rate of growth right now. But it will be needed if that growth is to continue in the future. At the very least, Twitter should allow you to block which apps you get updates from — though I think it still considers Spymaster updates to be coming from the “web.”
For his part, Spymaster co-founder Eston Bond says, “Backlash has been pretty minimal. Some people find Spymaster noisy but I’m amazed at how many people defend their tweeted spymaster actions to others (search can give you some examples.) For now, everyone’s having fun and I want to make sure that we can keep the game compelling in the long term. I have lots of content ideas that I’ll be hopefully implementing soon.”
Again, I don’t consider this Spymaster’s problem — but there is a problem, it’s Twitter’s. You’ll see this as more of these style games come along. It’s a matter of when, not if.
A couple years ago, Netflix began supplementing its DVD mail rental business with movie streams over the Web. for a few thousand select titles. Today, millions of Netflix customers stream their movies instead of waiting for them to come in the mail (or, more often, do both). ComScore Video Metrix estimates Netflix’s online viewership a bit lower at 645,000 unique viewers in March. They watched 6.9 million video streams and the average time spent watching per viewer is an amazing 128 minutes for the month, which is right up there with YouTube in terms of time spent (having full-length feature films helps keep people around longer).
You pay Netflix a subscription, and you can watch your monthly allotment of movies any way you want. Netflix doesn’t care where you watch your movies, whether it is on your TV, xBox 360, Windows Media Center, or other devices.
Streams still make up a small portion of the overall movies watched by Netflix customers, but it is growing as the company expands its streaming catalog, broadband improves, and computers become more like TVs (and vice versa). I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at the AllThingsD conference this week, and asked him in the video above how his streaming service is going and how its economics compare to that of mailing out DVDs. As you can imagine, it costs much less to stream a movie over the Internet than it does to mail it as a DVD. But Netflix ends up paying twice anyway because it already owns the movies on DVD. It has to pay the studios an additional streaming fee. The studios like that. “If the studios have their way, we’ll pay them two or three times,” quips Hastings. But he is resigned to paying wtice for movies he’s already bought. The way he looks at it, Netflix is paying the studios instead of the Post Office.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just released a draft of its proposed new Payments Terms, which will dictate how transactions will be conducted going forward. While the updated terms are in line with Facebook’s recent trend towards using simplified language in its legal documents, the company’s blog post also notes that the new terms will “give us the flexibility to try new features”. This isn’t particularly surprising - there have recently been reports of Facebook planning to begin testing payments some time soon, after months of delays.
Facebook is using the same community commenting process it used during its site-wide Terms of Service fiasco before it officially rolls out the new terms, giving users three days to voice their thoughts on the site’s Governance site.
You can read through the proposed list of rules here (there’s also a FAQ). Most of them are pretty straightforward - Facebook basically says that it licenses all of your virtual goods and credits to you (you don’t own them), and it can do whatever it wants as far as changing the price of credits. It’s also not responsible for anything you buy (aside from ensuring that your Facebook Gifts are delivered), and there are no refunds (though the company says that it may intervene in disputes betwen users concerning payments, but that it is under no obligation to do so). Some of the language refers to transactions between users and third parties, which is indicative of the upcoming payment system.
There are a few interesting tidbits worth looking through. My favorite is this one, which seems to indicate that Facebook can randomly disperse virtual gifts to friends if you fail to use your credits in three years (which could have some potentially hilarious consequences, depending on who receives those virtual bikinis and cans of Coors Light):
3.6 If you leave a balance of credits unused for three years, we may redeem those credits by sending virtual gifts to your Facebook friends or donating the credits to a nonprofit organization of our choice (and charging standard redemption fees for those transactions).
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Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like voicemail and hand shakes, we’re officially declaring war on any middleman component required to pump audio from a cell phone, along with the phones that require them.
There was a time when this sort of thing was acceptable. It was only a few years ago. Most phones were hitting the shelves with but a few hundred megabytes of storage space, while standalone audio players touted capacities that all but the most dedicated downloaders had a hard time filling. Then came microSD and its high capacity variant, allowing users to pack up to 16 gigs of data (soon to be 32 gigabytes and, with the eventual evolution of SDXC, up to 2 terabytes) onto a card roughly the size of your thumbnail. Then came the iPhone which, whether the decriers like it or not, made much of the general populace give a damn about what their cell phones could do. With 3G networks up across the country and 4G networks beginning to roll out, audio streaming and on-the-go music downloads are becoming commonplace.
Phone manufacturers can no longer afford to implement media playback as an afterthought - but if they insist on requiring headset adapters, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
It’s been over 2 months since Foursquare launched at SXSW and something strange is happening: My friends are still using it — a lot. Sure, for the service to have real success, it will have to spread well beyond pockets of tech hipsters, but even this success is something we haven’t seen with the majority of location-based social networks so far. But Foursquare’s strategy is smart in that it’s just as much of a game, in which you collect badges and gain mayorships of your favorite local places, as anything else. And now it’s gearing up for a further expansion with an API.
Initially, team hopes this API will be used to build more mobile clients, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Right now, there is only a native app for the iPhone, but he says that there are already a few people working on a native Android app as well. And they envision someone building a BlackBerry app shortly as well. I know that will be music the ears of a lot of my friends who are forced to visit Foursquare’s website from their mobile browsers, which is a less than ideal experience right now.
Crowley also says that someone has already used the APIs to build a desktop client on Adobe AIR.
But the recent news that most interests me has to be how some cities have establishments that are acknowledging mayorships. You can a mayorship in Foursquare basically by being the person who checks in there most often (on different days). One bar in LA, Good Hurt, is giving away a free beer to the “mayor” every time they come in! Another place in Denver is giving away free lunches to the mayor, and some bar in Brooklyn has a blackboard which they write the mayor’s name on, Crowley tells us.
He says that the team is thinking about ways to work with more establishments to offer these sorts of deals. It’s really a pretty ingenious idea for both the service and the establishment, as it drives usage of both. It’s sort of like what some brands are using Twitter for, but the location aspect is particularly interesting and could be much more targeted. And yes, that could even eventually blossom into business model.
But basically, I just want some San Francisco bars to acknowledge my mayorships and give me a free beer. That’s my business model.
Yahoo 360, which was supposed to close early last year, is finally officially shutting its doors on July 13, according to a blog post written on the site today. The social network/blogging service that nobody really used (except in Vietnam) steadily lost its steam, especially in the U.S. According to ComScore, Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April. But only 982,000 of those unique visitors were from the U.S. This is down from 1.8 million unique U.S. visitors a year ago (see chart below).
Yahoo 360 was built to create a social network around a blogging platform, and simply couldn’t compete with other social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other more popular blogging platforms like Wordpress and Movable Type. Similar to the company’s original announcement in 2007, Yahoo is promising to help move blog posts and friends lists over to a more general Yahoo profile. What took it so long to pull the plug? Yahoo says it took almost two years to shut down the service because the company was trying to find “a sustainable and adequate solution” for retaining user’s personal data from the site. The blog post also mentions that they have a solution for users but neglects to mention what exactly that is.
If you don’t use GOOG-411 when you are away from your computer and need directory assistance, you should. It is free and will give you the address or phone number of any local business. Today, GOOG-411 added an obvious feature it should have had all along: it now tells you the street intersections where a business is located.
Since it knows the location information and can presumably cross-reference that with Google Maps, giving out the intersection is not too hard. To get the intersection, just ask for “details” after you get the phone number.
The thing about GOOG-411 is that it is all automated using Google’s speech recognition technology. While you are waiting for it to find the phone number and address, it plays a recording of a human voice pretending to be a computer calculating the answer (”bidabudabidabudabidabudabid”). It’s a nice touch. Almost makes you forget you are talking to a computer. Almost.
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This is the 1942 yearbook from the Temple University School of Medicine. The design of the embossed leather cover drives me wild. It's on eBay right now with a buy-it-now price of $1495. 
The Great Frog's Michael Mouse Ring is a sweet chunk of chunky, infringing silver: a skull in Mickey ears. 
Staff at the theatre were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy. 
When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value. 
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. 
Facebook developers are dying for a unified payment platform, and all signs are pointing to one coming soon. In the latest news, the site has just 
Listen up, 2.5mm-to-3.5mm headset adapters. You too, crappy shape changers required by an absurd chunk of the worthwhile phones out there: We’re through. Game over. Just like 
It’s been over 2 months since 
