Saturday, June 30, 2012

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With Tech From Space, Ministry Of Supply Is Building The Next Generation Of Dress Shirts Top
79bdc32e2d5caa1cfa800ef17e94cb36_largeNobody 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 Top
full-treasure-chest"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 Top
steve-jobs-ipadLate 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? Top
giltFor 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 Top
Screen shot 2012-06-30 at 1.52.37 PMFor 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 Top
Waywire Cory Booker"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 Top
hackerrankIf 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? Top
ship stormWhen 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] Top
Screen shot 2012-06-30 at 17.52.12Oh 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 Top
Gillmor Gang test patternThe 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.
 
A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market Top
Cowboybebop_snapshot_luckysOver the past ten years, publishers have continued to monetize their sites with banners and pre-roll ads, and advertisers have continued to pump billions into these formats, in spite of tanking performance and near- universal disdain. While click-through rates on display ads started out at around 9% in 2000, they now hover around 0.2% - which means 99.8% of banner ads are completely ignored. Meanwhile, led by YouTube and Hulu, the pre-roll ad market is only shifting in one direction: towards "skippable prerolls," not forced interruption. And preroll skip rates are only moving in one direction (hint: when you give users the ability to skip annoying ads, they usually do).
 
Whither, Hollywood, Wither? Top
the_player_posterLast week I wrote about television; this week I've been thinking about Hollywood. Not least because a screenwriter with a pretty good track record recently attached himself to my squirrel book1 and is hoping to adapt it into a big animated movie. But it often takes five years or more to go from script to screen, so I can't help wondering--will Hollywood as we know it still be around by then? Internet hero Cory Doctorow doesn't think so. A few years ago he wrote an essay predicting the death of big-budget movies: "The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist: just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions." So far, perhaps surprisingly, he's been dead wrong. Theater attendance is down 20% in the USA over the last decade, but actual box-office income is flat, thanks to higher ticket prices. Home-entertainment spending--DVDs, rentals, Netflix, etc--is overall down almost 30% in constant dollars since 2005, but that's counteracted by the huge rise in 'foreign' box office over the same period. Hollywood seems to be fighting the Internet to a standstill. But does anyone out there really think that can last?
 
There Goes The Weekend! Pinterest, Instagram And Netflix Down Due To AWS Outage [Updated] Top
photoAre you out at a Friday night dinner somewhere, trying to take a filtered picture of some fancypants dessert and post it to Instagram to no avail? Are you currently making futile efforts to pin said dessert to your "Fancy Dessert" board on Pinterest but failing? Well you're out of luck, digital hipsters! Because of storms in North Virginia, power outages have impaired Amazon Web Services data centers in the region tonight, which means no Pinterest, Instagram, Netflix, Heroku and other sundry AWS-dependent services for you.
 
Why Students Should Gain Entrepreneurship Experience Before Graduating Top
Animal HouseMore and more students are realizing that they can't pass their degree in for a job upon graduation anymore. The old promise made by our education system was that if you worked really hard in school, you would be almost guaranteed a job as a reward for your efforts. Furthermore, corporations used to hire most of their interns into full-time positions. Both of these promises have been broken due to economic constraints and global competition. Based on a recent report by my company, we found that employers expect students to have at least one internship, yet only half of them are bringing on new interns and few have hired them into full-time positions. The normal path to growing your career is non-existent. In today's world, you can't rely on anything or anyone to make you successful – you have to be accountable for your own career and create your own path.
 
Twitter's All Like "We Don't Need You LinkedIn," But Still Bends Over Backwards For Facebook Top
Screen shot 2012-06-29 at 6.21.38 PMNothing is more fascinating than the tech platform API wars because they are so, so similar to high school, once a company feels it's too cool for another company, it starts shutting off parts of its API to that company, like what happened here with Facebook and Google. It's basically one of those big, swinging dick types of things, that I, as a female, don't entirely understand.
 
Unmetric Scores The Virality Of Brands' YouTube Campaigns Top
unmetric logoSocial benchmarking startup Unmetric just expanded its tools to include YouTube, giving brands a new way to measure the effectiveness of their video campaigns. Of course, companies can already see plenty of stats about their videos — views, likes, and more. But Unmetric tries to synthesize all that data into a single score, and then shows how that score stacks up against competitors.
 
Alexia's Headphones: How We Used CrowdTilt's Group-Funding Platform To Replace Stolen Property Top
Screen shot 2012-06-29 at 9.51.53 AMOn the 25th of June, our dearest Alexia Tsotsis had an incredibly rough day. First, her car was looted by very bad people in San Francisco, who stole her laptop and a pair of excellent Bose headphones that were near and dear to her heart. And as if that wasn't enough, her car then got smashed by someone running a red light, totaling her vehicle and leaving her in quite a bit of pain. When fellow TechCrunch sharks heard the news, we knew we had to do something to help out one of our fearless leaders, and so our very own Ryan Lawler stepped up to the plate with a suggestion to buy some new headphones for Alexia. "Knowing that we can't replace the sentimental value, I was thinking we could maybe (at least) help replace the item that was taken." After a little back and forth, the team settled on an app to help us accomplish the task at hand (we at TC need an app for everything), and that's where CrowdTilt enters the mix.
 
Paul Oakenfold On The Intersection Of Technology And Music [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-06-29 at 3.37.14 PMPaul Oakenfold, the world-renowned electronic music producer and DJ, has seen a lot of change in the industry since his career began more than 25 years ago. And perhaps the biggest shifts have come from technology -- from the way music is made, to how it's distributed, to where and how people listen to it, to how artists become known and signed to labels, to the tools DJs use in clubs to spin records. So it was really amazing to have Oakenfold swing by the TechCrunch TV studios while he was in San Francisco this week...
 
TechCrunch Giveaway: Another Free Ticket To Disrupt SF! #TCDisrupt Top
disrupt_sf_2012_logoTechCrunch Disrupt SF is back and everything is shaping up nicely behind the scenes. Actually, I was in a Disrupt meeting all day and that's why this post is going out so late. So, you will have an extra day to enter. Congratulations to last week's winner, Samer Karam. We asked everyone who entered to tell us who they would like to see at Disrupt, and Samer's choice was Instagram's Kevin Systrom. We've reached out and will let you know. Also, remember to keep your eyes out for announcement posts; we have some exciting news about Disrupt SF coming up.
 
Fashion-Focused Blog Aggregator Bloglovin Raises $1M From Betaworks And Others Top
bloglovin_printscreenBloglovin, a startup that has been compared to Tumblr and RSS, has just raised a $1 million Series A. The company bills itself as a fun, simple way to follow all the fashion blogs that interest you. Like RSS, you can sign up to read updates from any blog (not just the ones on a single platform or content management system), and like Tumblr, there's an emphasis on high-quality visuals and community. Bloglovin even held a fashion awards ceremony in New York earlier this year.
 

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