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Funnyjunk's Lawyer, Charles Carreon, Is Charging The Oatmeal With "Impersonating A Charity"
Jul 02, 2:22AM
In Part Umpteen of the endless struggle by Matthew Inman AKA The Oatmeal vs. weird lawyer Charles Carreon, we find our hero beset by the accusation that he is impersonating a charity for collecting a large amount of money and giving it to the NWF and ACS. ""If IndieGoGo pays Inman the money in the Charitable Fund, and Inman personally donates the money to NWF and ACS, he will be unjustly enriched by receiving a large tax write-off that should properly be allocated pro-rata to the 14,406 small donors who contributed to the Charitable Fund," wrote Carreon. Yeah. He really thinks differently than you and me. To recap, Carreon asked for $20,000 in damages from Inman for insulting Funnyjunk, a site whose users stole Inman's comics. Inman wrote he would collect the $20,000 in cash and photograph it with a crude representation of the lawyer's mother sexing up a bear. A few days later, Inman had collected over $200,000 for the National Wildlife Fund and the American Cancer Society. Then the lawyer got weird. He wanted to sue the charities and now wants to prevent the money from being dispersed.With "Connected Apps," Foursquare Firms Its Position As The Social Network For Places
Jul 02, 1:00AM
The timing was horrendous - right in the middle of Google I/O - but location-based social network Foursquare announced a major change to its mobile platform this week which shouldn't go unnoticed (even if it didn't involve skydivers wearing futuristic eyewear). The company introduced a developer preview of what it's calling its "next evolution" - Connected Apps. The new framework allows developers create their own experiences inside Foursquare, which enables them to connect with Foursquare users as events are happening. The result? Foursquare is setting itself up as mobile users' go-to app for socializing around a location.RIM Is Hurting, But It's Not Dead Just Yet
Jul 01, 11:00PM
There's been plenty said about RIM since it released its rough fiscal financials a few days ago, just about all of it negative. It's hard not to be, honestly — the company reported its first operating loss in eight years, announced that a full 5,000 employees would be getting the axe, and topped it all off by revealing that the first BlackBerry 10 devices wouldn't hit the market until the beginning of 2013. It seems to me that RIM's problem (well, one of them anyway) is that the company's brass seems to look at the game they're playing as one of time, and they think they have plenty of it.Saturday's 'Leap Second' Added More Heat To This Weekend's Tech Meltdowns
Jul 01, 10:07PM
If you were hoping to spend the last couple days catching up with your favorite websites while maybe streaming a Netflix movie, you've probably discovered by now that you had pretty lousy timing for a lazy web-surfing weekend.Social Media Is Making Today's Girls Actually Say What They Mean
Jul 01, 9:28PM
The stereotype is that women generally enjoy talking and communicating more than men. But they haven't always been known to be the most straightforward with the nitty-gritty of what they really think and feel -- females are sometimes wired to be a people-pleasing bunch. But according to a recent article in the UK's Daily Mail, some language experts say that today's girls are becoming more blunt and direct, thanks to the rise of technologies such as texting and social media.How to Rebrand A Social Network And Live To Tell About It
Jul 01, 7:33PM
Editor's Note: This guest post is written by Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook. Imagine the outcry if Facebook were to change its name. People would grab their pitchforks, join a posse, and burn the Internet down. That nightmarish vision led to many sleepless nights for our team after we decided to do the unthinkable: rebrand a social network used by more than a million people a day. We changed the name of myYearbook, a social network for meeting new people, to MeetMe.Facebook's Mobile Future Rests On Today's Feature Phone Users
Jul 01, 4:00PM
Editor's Note: The following guest post by Thomas Clayton, the Chief Executive Officer of voice blogging startup Bubble Motion. Prior to Bubble Motion, Clayton was GM of the Worldwide Telecom Business at BEA Systems, an infrastructure software company acquired by Oracle for $8.5B USD. Clayton holds a BA from Harvard Business School and a BS degree from UC Berkeley. Rise Of The Enterprise "Toys"
Jul 01, 1:00PM
The enterprise software market has been uncharacteristically turbulent of late. Beyond several hefty funding rounds and well-performing IPOs, the ecosystem has experienced some major consolidation with SAP's purchase of SuccessFactors and Ariba, Oracle's acquisition of RightNow and Taleo, and even IBM's multiple cloud additions. All totaled, we've seen more than $10 billion in enterprise cloud consolidation over the past three quarters. But Microsoft's $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer is a little different. Not just because it underscores the importance of social in the enterprise and cements Yammer's rapid rise to more than a billion dollars in value. Rather, it's different because it signals the severity of the disruption occurring in enterprise software – disruption that will make it very difficult for incumbent vendors to hold on, and disruption that's coming from entirely new places and in new ways.The Art Of Manipulation
Jul 01, 9:00AM
Let's admit it, we in the consumer web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people "users" and even if we don't say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted. Users take our technologies with them to bed. When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates before saying "good morning" to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the "cigarette of this century" and warns of equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects.Facebook Just Removed The Home Page Ticker, But It Should Be Back Soon
Jul 01, 6:57AM
Poof. Vanished. Gone. Many Facebook users are no longer seeing the real-time news "Ticker" on the right side of their home page, but apparently it should reappear soon. While nothing was posted to Facebook's Known Issues Page, one Twitter user relayed that his friend who works at Facebook said Ticker "will be back online soon". There's a chance the removal could be more permanent, though. The Ticker is essentially Facebook's firehose, showing abbreviated stories about nearly every action taken by your friends, no matter how insignificant. If Facebook did remove the Ticker, it could make it harder for third-party apps to grow, but give Facebook more prime real-estate above the fold to show ads.With Tech From Space, Ministry Of Supply Is Building The Next Generation Of Dress Shirts
Jul 01, 4:42AM
Nobody likes to admit it, but if you're a working professional, there's a good chance you're familiar with sweat stains. The commute to work, the stress of meeting a deadline, the faulty air conditioning in the boardroom, cotton weaves -- all of these things and many more have been known to conspire against you, the working professional. Luckily, Ministry of Supply feels your stinky, stinky pain. While athletes have Under Armour, business attire has more or less remained the same for the last century. Armed with some of the same technology NASA uses in its space suits, Ministry of Supply has developed a line of dress shirts -- called "Apollo" -- that adapt to your body to control perspiration, reduce odor, and make you feel like a million bucks. So, to help get these futuristic shirts onto the backs of sweaty professionals, the project's founders, MIT grads Gihan Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, Kit Hickey and Kevin Rustagi, took to Kickstarter, where the project has blown up.Thanks, Science! New Study Says CrunchBase Is An Information Treasure Trove
Jul 01, 3:00AM
"I believe CrunchBase will gain a lot of attention from the academia soon, which is always eager for high-quality data set," writes Guang Xiang of Carnegie Mellon University, who found that he could predict Mergers and Acquisitions much better using the unique business variables available in CrunchBase than the traditional databases used by academics. Thanks, Xiang, flattery will get you everywhere.Steve Would Be Proud: How Apple Won The War Against Flash
Jul 01, 1:01AM
Late Thursday, an extraordinary thing happened: Adobe announced in a blog post that it would not provide Flash Player support for devices running Android 4.1, and that it was pulling the plugin from the Google Play store on August 15. The retreat comes five years after the introduction of the iPhone, the device which led to Flash's mobile ambitions, almost even before they began. That Adobe would make such an announcement nearly five years to the day that the first iPhone was sold is kind of funny. I'd like to think that the Flash team has a sense of humor and was well aware of the timing when it posted the blog entry, but I could also see the entry as unintentionally ironic. Either way, it caps off a five-year battle to win the mobile landscape -- one which for Adobe ended in defeat.Where Are All The iPad Shopping Apps?
Jun 30, 11:00PM
For a tech company founder in San Francisco, I'm a terribly late adopter of new technology. My buddy in med school had a smart phone before I did. The iPhone was out for a year before I bought the 3G. The iPad? I'm embarrassed to admit, I got my first one a month ago. I held out on the iPad because I didn't get it. It didn't have retina display, and comparing the screen after looking at the iPhone 4, it just seemed... pixelated. My friends who had the original version bought them as a novelty, which quickly seemed to wear off. I didn't know what I would do with one once I had one. So, when I finally buckled and got the iPad 3, I came to the realization that the rest of the world had over 2 years ago: the iPad is an amazing consumption device. You don't need a keyboard, because if you're doing any work at all it will be to send iPhone length one-liner emails. Most of what you'll be doing on the iPad is playing games, watching videos and shopping.NFC Is Great, But Mobile Payments Solve A Problem That Doesn't Exist
Jun 30, 9:00PM
For the past few years, we've been told over and over again that NFC will eventually replace the common wallet. And yes, NFC is a great technology. Parts of Europe and China are using it for public transport transactions, and the sharing of content between devices is incredibly cool (just check out this commercial). And moreover, the ability to ditch all of your loyalty cards and combine them in one place (potentially) PassBook-style would be highly convenient. But where mobile payments are concerned, there is no problem to be solved.#waywire, Cory Booker's Personalized News Startup, Uses Video To Give Youth A Voice
Jun 30, 8:44PM
"There's an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up" Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker tells me. So he's building #waywire, a news site that features original and syndicated video content, but that also lets viewers record and share their responses. "Traditional news sources aren't in any way talking to millennials" Booker says, so #waywire is designed to deliver them content from their perspective. It's now taking registrations for its upcoming private beta. #waywire's got big name investors including Eric Schmidt and Oprah, some serious digital expertise, and a mission to disrupt both traditional news outlets and the social networks that surface them.HackerRank: A Social Site For Hackers, Complete With Challenging Launch Page
Jun 30, 7:00PM
If you're a startup aficionado, you may be getting tired of the same old launch pages. You know, the ones with a big, splashy image, a message about how something awesome is coming soon, and a box where you can enter your email address. If that's the case, then you'll probably get a kick out of the sign-up process at HackerRank. The team behind the site plans to start sending out beta invites next week for "a fun social platform for hackers to solve interesting puzzles, build quick hacks, code game bots and collaborate to solve real-world challenges." In the meantime, it's doing something a little different with the launch page — the page features an interactive terminal, where, yes, you enter your name and email address, but then you're invited to participate in a sample challenge, facing off with the computer in a candy-grabbing game.Could Instagram And Other Sites Avoid Going Down With Amazon's Ship?
Jun 30, 5:52PM
When we heard about Instagram (and other sites) going down when Amazon Web Services' North Virginia hub was hit by a storm -- not the first time AWS has gone down (April 2011 was another notable outage) we couldn't help but wonder: could it have been avoided? Mike Krieger, one of the founders of Instagram, once presented a great slideshow describing how Instagram was able to scale up so well. "The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible," has been one of the guiding principles for the photo-sharing app, bought by Facebook in a billion-dollar deal earlier this year. Could that too-simple architecture have played a role here? We've reached out to Twitterverse and beyond to get some thoughts on that.So What Do I Do With My Food Now? Eat It? [Instagram Is Still Down, Bad Jokes On Twitter Ensue]
Jun 30, 5:39PM
Oh yes, the social media food humor is rolling in -- eat it up, people. According to Twitter's real-time search, Instagram being down, as a result of an Amazon Web Services storm-related incident, is unleashing a cornucopia of Instagram-related food jokes, at a rate of about one every couple of seconds. They're a little cheesy (sorry!) but do underscore just how much the photo-sharing app is used (or, least how much it's used by the kind of folks who also take to Twitter when they have an issue with the world). And how much it's become a part of life's everyday small events, perhaps more than any other social media app.Gillmor Gang: Over the Freaky Line
Jun 30, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement and not a little fear as Mike Arrington baited @Scobleizer from the Friendfeed chatroom. What started as a Mr. Greenjeans-like pulling of various Google I/O tablets and weird music balls from out of his pants suddenly went south in a hurry when @jtaschek noticed Arrington in the chat. Normally we don't call this out, but Robert's Rant starts at somewhere around the 36 minute mark. Arrington wanted us to make him a clip and a ringtone out of this, but it's late and I barely have enough energy to write this. Maybe tomorrow. Feel free to download the file on iTunes and cut Mike a version. Enjoy at your peril: Not safe for work or anything else for that matter.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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