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TechStars is coming to New York City. The first program runs from 1/10/11 to 4/8/11. Applications are open now. The NY mentor list is stunning and includes the following:
Phin Barnes (First Round Capital), Alex Blum (KickApps), Matt Blumberg (Return Path), Brad Burnham (USV), Jeff Clavier, Dennis Crowley (FourSquare), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Roger Ehrenberg, Darren Herman (The Media Kitchen), Jennifer Hyman (Rent The Runway), Alex Iskold (Adaptive Blue), David Karp (Tumblr), Zach Klein (Boxee, Vimeo), Evan Korth (NYU/HackNY), Mike Lazerow (Buddy Media), Ben Lerer (ThrillList), Sam Lessin (Drop.io), Joey Levin (MindSpark, IAC), Howard Lindzon (StockTwits), Eric Litman (Medialets), John Maloney (Tumblr), Dave McClure, Hilary Mason (Bit.ly/HackNY), Jeremie Miller (Telehash), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital), Eric Paley (Founder Collective), Raphael Poplock (ESPN), Alex Rainert (FourSquare), Avner Ronen (Boxee), Naveen Selvadurai (FourSquare), Justin Shaffer (HotPotato), Tim Shey (NextNewNetworks), Andy Smith (Daily Burn), Rex Sorgatz (Kinda Sorta Media), Jon Steinberg (BuzzFeed), Vinicius Vacanti (YipIt), Albert Wenger (USV), Fred Wilson (USV)
David Cohen, who is relocating to NY for January to March of next year, and David Tisch (I’m encouraging him to change his name to just Tisch to save me the brain damage of “which David”) will be running the program. When we went about setting up the NY program, we evolved our funding model to be as inclusive of...
I often point to my first post on Twitter, the day it launched in 2006. Why? Mostly because of how wrong I was. Best line: “I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.” I also love that original vowel-free logo.
The first couple of comments to that post are classic as well:
I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap.
and
i do not want to be woken up at 4 a.m. because my friend got drunk and decided to text Twttr with “asdl im at barasdf sooo drunksalkfjs”…i find it interesting such an annoying feature is supposedly causing viral growth…i’m done developing social software if the key to success is to be intrusive
and
So is it pronounced twitter or twatter?
With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that I was…a bit off on how Twitter would play out. As were most of the commenters, although commenters are often negative just to be negative. And the most wrong of all? The Odeo investors who elected to take their money back rather than port it over to Twitter.
My point here is that you never know which startups will make it and which won’t. As a blogger I say it like I see it, but I’m wrong a lot. It’s why I’m not a venture capitalist, where wrong decisions tend to have real consequences. And this is also a reason for us all to give startups a little breathing room when they’re finding their space in the world. Startups evolve. The world ev...
Apple debuted a social network for music yesterday called Ping. It's built into Apple's iTunes software for computers and iOS devices.
After taking it for a brief spin, it seems to be functional, but I'm not sure it's going to be a place I return very often. Maybe only when I'm looking for new music.
I'm most worried that people aren't going to use it enough for it to be useful. Sort of a chicken-and-egg thing. But we'll see.
In the meantime, some questions:
- What the heck happened between Apple and Facebook? As I pointed out earlier, you COULD use Facebook Connect with Ping earlier, but it seems Apple pulled the feature. Was there a big security flaw? Or does this have something to do with the "onerous" terms Facebook imposes on its partners, according to Steve Jobs?
- Will there ever be a web interface for Ping? Or will it always remain within iTunes apps? Perhaps when iTunes itself becomes a web product?
- Will your Ping profile ever show up in Google search results, like your Facebook profile? That would be a handy way to drive traffic to iTunes store listings.
- How long until there's a location-based or "check-in" element to Ping?
- Will musicians give a crap about Ping? Will they ever use it, the way they sorta use MySpace...
Ever since it became stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis on a Mac last year, Google Chrome has been my browser of choice. Other browsers have been adding some nice features — but Chrome keeps adding them faster. And today on its second birthday, that rate of change isn’t slowing down.
Google has officially rolled out Chrome 6 as the latest stable version of the browser today. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone using the dev or beta builds of the browser, but it’s nonetheless an important mark as it means it’s stable enough for mass consumption.
Remember that it was just two years ago when Google surprised the world by announcing a new browser (a little early) via a comic. The next day, we got the first shots of what the browser would look like — and it was released as a beta for Windows users. It actually looks pretty much the same today, but it’s now much, much faster (and when it launched it was already faster than most browsers out there).
Google says that Chrome today is a full three times faster when it comes to JavaScript performance versus Chrome circa 2008. The rapid speed increases have also undoubtedly pushed rival browsers to become faster, so we’ve all benefited.
Arguably more important to me is that ...
- Updated UI
- Form Autofill
- Syncing of extensions and Autofill data
- Read More
[Thanks, Iain]
Apple's AirPlay music streaming coming to third party speaker docks, receivers, and stereos originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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When it comes to seed investing, New York City is becoming a hotbed. And now TechStars, the incubator that began in Boulder. Colorado and has spawned nearly 40 startups, is coming to New York. This will be the fourth (and supposedly last) city TechStars expands to, according to CEO David Cohen (the other two are Boston and Seattle).
TechStars is accepting applications for the New York City Class of 2011, which will start in January. TechStars provides a little bit of cash ($6,000 per founder for a three-month program) and a lot of mentorship. The list of New York City mentors includes Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Tumblr founder David Karp, VC Fred Wilson, Hunch founder and seed investor Chris Dixon, Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures, StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, and Hot Potato founder Justin Shaffer. Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure snuck in there as well, even though they live in California.
TechStars takes a 6 percent equity stake in each startup in common stock (no board seats), and has a decent track record. Cohen and David Tisch will be running the program. They are looking for about ten startups for the initial New York City class.
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We just released 1.5.6 to the Chrome extension gallery. This new release adds support for Bandcamp as well as Keyboard Shortcuts and better sync between computers.
Bandcamp is an amazing service that offers bands the ability to create their own pages where they can stream music as well as sell it directly to their fans. We are proud to say that ExtensionFM now supports these pages. When you come across a Bandcamp album page, songs will automatically be added to your library. Of course, songs always have links back to the album page where they were found. If you like the music (and we know you will!), you can easily buy it by right-clicking on a song and then choosing ‘Buy’.
Check out some of these great artists and albums on Bandcamp:
- Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People
- Zoe Keating - Into The Trees
- Amanda Palmer - Who Killed Amanda Palmer
Keyboard Shortcuts
You now have the ability to control playback using keyboard shortcuts. This makes it really simple to play, pause and skip tracks without having to change tabs or click on the Ex button. These will work on the player page as well as any page you currently have open. To enable, visit your Settings page and turn on this option. Please note, that these will not work on secure https pages.
N...
Under normal conditions, an Amazon S3 object in a bucket that is part of a CloudFront distribution can be cached at a CloudFront edge location per the object's TTL (Time to Live). In many situations it is possible to come up with a reasonable value for the TTL ahead of time. In other cases you may want the benefits of CloudFront's caching but you may also need to make changes to the S3 object at unpredictable times.
We've just added a new invalidation function to the CloudFront API. You can now POST a list of one or more objects to a CloudFront distribution and the objects will be removed from all of the edge locations within minutes. The invalidation happens in an asynchronous fashion and you can have several invalidation requests pending at the same time.
You can use this new feature in many different ways. Here are some ideas:
- Update a CSS style sheet or some JavaScript that changes very infrequently.
- Remove a video that was not properly encoded.
- Remove information (e.g. a news story) that is inaccurate or no longer relevant.
- Remove information that is the subject of a DMCA takedown notice.
There are no charges for the first 1000 invalidations per month. After that, each one will cost you $0.005 (one half of one cent).
You can still use the TTL feature and you can also use versioned URLs. Both techniques are preferred when you have the ability to control or predict the proper hold time for an object. There's no additional co...
Continue reading Palm puts webOS 2.0 SDK into limited release starting today
Palm puts webOS 2.0 SDK into limited release starting today originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Perhaps you’ve noticed that a couple days ago we flipped the switch to enable the shiny new commenting system here on TechCrunch powered by Disqus. So far, the feedback has been very, very positive — and we’re pleased with how well it’s performing. But Disqus is just one step of what we need to do.
As many of you are well aware, the commenting situation on TechCrunch has been completely out of control for a long, long time. That seems to be one unfortunate side effect of when a site gets large enough (see: YouTube and Digg for other great examples). But we also realize that things don’t have to be that way. Some popular sites have very good comments (see: Hacker News and Quora for good examples of that). We’d like our comment section to be useful too. So we’re going to try to do something about that.
As I said, Disqus is the first step. The service offers a very nice set of tools for on-the-fly moderation. We’ve also worked with them to do things such as make it very obvious when an actual TechCrunch writer is responding to a comment (I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that something like a quarter of commenters claiming to be us — or at least me — were impostors over the past few months) — you’ll see our names in bright green when it’s actually us.
But as we’ve learned over the past several months, comment moderation is a big job. So we’re going to hire someone to help us with it. On the face of it, this may not sound too attractive, but the job we’re cre...
“The Wilderness Downtown” is set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait”, and showcases many of the latest developments on the web. It features a mash-up of Google Maps and Google Street View with HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, an interactive drawing tool, and choreographed windows that dance around the screen. These modern web technologies have helped us craft an experience that is personalized and unique for each viewer, as you virtually run through the streets where you grew up.
Browsers and the modern web have indeed come a long way since Chrome was introduced, and we hope this project provides a glimpse at some of what the future holds. The project was built with Chrome in mind, so it’s best experienced in Chrome’s beta or stable builds. To launch the project and learn more about how we made it, please visit our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.
Posted by Thomas Gayno, Google Creative Lab
Forced perspective is a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It is used primarily in photography, filmmaking and architecture. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation between them and the vantage point of the spectator or camera.
There are many ways to attack photography and some are much more expensive than others. Here in this showcase, we presenting a Stunning collection of Forced Perspective Photography and Pictures taken by various artists in which all pictures are linked to the author’s pages. You may want to explore further works of the photographers we’ve featured below.
When it comes to inspiration then there is no limitation on resources. Photography is one of the key sources of inspiration for some of our past work. Here we talking about photography of Specific form named as “Forced Perspective Photography” which I find usually amaze me. If you know how to shoot a photo then you can also change something fairly simple to something creative or abstract or otherwise more artistic. You don’t need any special skills for taking such shots. It all depends on the environment and perfect timing.
You may be interested in the following photography inspiration related articles as well.
“some say that I’m they favorite
but I aint hearing none of that
I’m about my team ho
young money running back”
—Drake
“stay in your place
while I sit here and rule
I’m king of a cow
and I’m king of a mule”
—Yertle the Turtle
In my last post, I mentioned that you should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. Surprisingly to me, I received a large number of responses from readers questioning whether or not this was good advice. Here’s how one commenter phrased it:
I agree with much of this post but I disagree with the following:
“As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory.”
That may have worked in the past but I believe today, the company’s success and the executive’s success should go hand in hand, not one coming as a by-product of the other, particularly as described above.
Curious why should an employee be motivated first by a company’s success? Would this work in all departments—i.e. sales?
In addition to comments like the one above, my business partner Marc Andreessen suggested that I write a post on how to screen for the right kind of ambition. In response, this post aims to clarify why you should care about senior managers having the right kind of ambition and give some tips on how to screen for them in an interview.
Why should senior managers have the right kind of ambition?
At a...
At this point, I think paying for music is essentially based on the honor system. And as a lover of music, I’m happily paying my share for music. I pay for it in many ways right now - Rhapsody, Pandora premium, Spotify, Amazon and iTunes. In the world of music, DRM is dead.
I happily pay for music although I can get it for free the wide range of free torrents or invite only torrent aggregators.
In addition to paying for music and consuming it on the services I mentioned above, I rarely discover new music on those pay services. Instead I discover it on blogs, on twitter, on tumblr, on the hype machine and more recently on Ex.fm. Then, when I find a song or artist (or when they find me), I buy it. It’s an honor system and it works (recent example, I blog about a new album that I love and it leads to a purchase from a someone that checks out my post as you can see in the comments).
It turns out that in our household we pay for a lot of video content too. We pay hundreds of dollars a month to Verizon for FIOS TV. We watch live sports when we can, and DVR a bunch every week. I usually get around to watching 1 or 2 shows a week time permitting. That’s about it. We are also loyal Netflix subscribers. It turns out we are also highly profitable for Netflix - I just returned 3 DVDs yesterday that was sitting in our kitchen for well over 3 months.
In August we were gone for 3 of the 4 weeks in the month. And that experience leads me to believe that video is quickly moving to an honor system business model as well. If I didn’t want to pay for video content we could basically replicate the content we purchase from Verizon and Netflix for free over the web. It’s available right now but it’s not ...
A few successful websites were built almost entirely through viral growth. The vast majority, however, started off by partnering with other, already successful websites. Even Google began by partnering with Yahoo. As superior as Google’s search algorithm was, it was very hard to get the masses to switch to a new search engine.
In the web 1.0 world (approximately pre-2004), integrating two web services involved lots of manual work, such as negotiating legal contracts and custom technical integration. Creating these kinds of partnerships is usually referred to as “business development” or “BizDev” (personally, I usually just call it “BD”). In the web 2.0 world, it became common for websites to create fully functional, self-service API’s with standardized legal terms. This made it possible to drastically reduce the friction of integrating services. My Hunch cofounder Caterina Fake coined the term “BizDev 2.0″ to refer to this idea (and of course Flickr was a pioneer of super robust APIs).
There is no question that removing legal and technical hurdles is a win for everyone (except lawyers). However, unless your service is extremely high profile and its value is easily understood, it still needs to be marketed to potential partners. Many websites won’t consider using a self-service API until they’ve seen it working on other sites with measurable results. So how do you overcome this particular kind of chicken-and-egg problem?
During his interview process, Hunch’s Shaival Shah, said something that struck a chord with me: he didn’t want to be called “VP BizDev” because, he said, a good BizDev person makes BizDev irrelevant. The idea is to create a number of BizDev 1.0 partnerships while simultaneously building and marketing a full service API. If you can do BizDev 1.0 with some number o...
Even though mobile devices are getting increasingly powerful, most mobile browsers are still limited versions of their more fully featured desktop counterparts. With today's release of the latest alpha version of Fennec for Android (2.0 or higher) and Nokia N900, Mozilla is aiming to change this. Specifically, Mozilla hails Fennec as the "world's first mobile Web browser to support add-ons."
Sponsor
In addition, Fennec supports Firefox Sync, which allows users to synchronize their bookmarks, open tabs, passwords and form data between different machines. Fennec also offers pinch-to-zoom support, a personalized start page and context menus. The amount of mobile extensions for Fennec is currently still limited. Mozilla's add-on gallery currently features about 120 addons.
Update: As one of our commenters pointed out, Dolphin Browser HD for Android also supports add-ons.
Focus on Speed
Besides these new and improved features, the Mozilla team notes that the main focus of this release is increased performance and responsiveness. The Fennec team managed to achieve this by splitting up the processes that render the browser interface and the Web content. Thanks to this, the browser interface will remain responsive, even while it is rendering a complex page or running CPU intensive JavaScript.
A Long and Rocky Road
The earliest preview versions of Fennec for Android appeared <...
“Meet ExtensionFM, The Music Startup That Google Should Buy”
by Peter Kafka, August 27, 2010.
Featuring the startup of ITP Alumnus, Dan Kantor (‘05).
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/
...