Inspiration, Lifehacks, Marketing, Social Media, Startups, Security, Technology
There are certainly many easy ways to remember something- program it in your cell phone, tie a ribbon around your finger, maybe write a note to yourself and stick it in your wallet. But, like, a lot of that requires effort, man. Well strain no more with Memorari, which will remember what you need and remind you at the specified time, date, and communication method via phone, IM, email, etc. Memorari
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is the architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft, building augmented reality into searchable maps. He’s also the co-creator of Photosynth, software that assembles static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.
In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Agüera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 8:14)
His TEDTalk on Seadragon and Photosynth in 2007 is rated one of TED’s “most jaw-dropping.”
For years, techies have sought to display huge files in high resolution without crashing a computer. Blaise Agüera y Arcas did it, with technology called Seadragon. At the 2007 TED conference, he showed a multigigabyte quilt of slides, then magnified one slide to reveal the entire text of Bleak House, and finally zoomed in on one letter in the book. Seadragon dived in and out of the enormous images seamlessly, stunning the audience. Microsoft, which had already bought Seadragon, has since integrated the technology into photosynth, the 3-D photo application popularized by CNN in its presidential-inauguration coverage. As Microsoft incorporates zooming into more applications, Aguera y Arcas, 33, will transform how we experience visual data.
Leo Laporte has been a pioneer in creating tech podcasts such as his TWiT network, developing a business out of his popular radio show on KFI, and the remnants of Tech TV.
Jonathan Marks drops by Leo Laporte’s production studio in the heart of Petaluma, Northern California. The town is about a half hour’s drive North of the Golden Gate Bridge, at the foot of Sonoma County, the famous wine belt of Northern California. It has been used a backdrop for “American Graffiti” and “Peggy Sue Got Married.”
Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.
Image Credit: Leo Laporte Flickr
In this Mixergy interview Andrew Warner invited AJ Vaynerchuk, Co-Founder of VaynerMedia, to show how his company helps organizations like the Jets and the NHL build their brands using social media — and how you can use some of the same ideas to grow your brand.
Fiverr is a place for people to share things they’re willing to do for $5.
Fiverr is a marketplace for gigs that are priced at $5. Essentially, you can sell and buy tasks for $5. So anyone can create a gig for small service on the site, and visitors can accept gigs as well. Gig prices are fixed at $5. Buyers can order gigs and are required to pay for the gig in advance. Fiverr takes $1 off of the $5 fee.
Gigs range from installing WordPress on a server to reading Tarot cards to writing a romantic sonnet. Tasks are divided into categories, including Funny and Bizarre, Social Marketing, Graphics, Writing,Technology, Business, Silly Stuff and Programming.
The idea is kind of brilliant and also entertaining. While you don’t necessarily have assurance that your task will be completed to your standards, you are only shelling out $5 for the task, so it’s not a total loss if the gig falls through or isn’t done well. Fiverr will also post buyer feedback on people who perform tasks. Task performers will be given a positive feedback score, which can be seen by users who are considering hiring them for gigs.
Pulkit Agrawal from Ahmedabad, India asks: “Organic link building, according to me is one of the most difficult tasks for SEOs of SMEs. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?”
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures talks about some of the trends he sees in the startup space. Fred’s blog has been an excellent place for information around venture investing as well as general entrepreneurial ideas and advice.
Vadim Lavrusik on Vimeo.
Time-lapse of one year walking, growing a beard
Christopher Rehage spent one year walking from Beijing to Urumqi, China and chronicled his epic foot journey (and simultaneous beard growth) in a cool little vignette. Rehage had originally wanted to strut his way all the way to Germany, but after 4646km, he opted to shave his beard and return to school to finish his degree.
Here’s the latest Improv Everywhere stunt, which was featured on This American Life. This time the organized pranksters get a bunch of people to throw a random person a birthday party. They all call him Ted and pretend to know him from somewhere specific, such as university, work, and elementary school. See how the joke pans out.
Read the full story at Urban Prankster.
Happy Hours by SF Weekly shows you all of the food and drink specials going on in your city. Not sure where to go? Shake your phone and the app will randomly select a place for you.
Happy Hours, is an free application for the iPhone, Android, and the mobile web. With it, you get access to some 15,000+ happy hours in 30 different cities around the country. You simply load the app up, tell it where you are (which it can know automatically on the iPhone and Android phones), and let it show you happy hours close by.
The app launches today for the following 30 cities: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Broward-Palm Beach, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Orange County, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Washington DC.
Just a few years ago, burglars might lurk in the bushes or a parked car and wait to see a family leave their house, or turn out the lights. But in this day and age, all you have to do is send a Tweet. A new site, PleaseRobMe.com, reposts such tweets by Twitter users who disclose when they’re away from home. Host Scott Simon speaks with Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center about Internet privacy and security.
Full story at NPR.
Fifteen years ago, the Internet was a complete mess. No Google, no Twitter, no Facebook—imagine the horror! That’s probably why Newsweek, in 1995, printed the now infamous article entitled “The Internet? Bah!”. If you haven’t yet read the piece, it’s worth a look. The article is a hotbed for quotes that’ll have you grinning proudly about how wrong the author, Clifford Stoll, was, and how far the Internet has come.
See some excerpts below:
Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Internet: 1 Stoll: 0
Full story at The Next Web.
A devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Chile Saturday morning, causing widespread damage and triggering a Tsunami warning across the Pacific. The quake, one of the strongest ever recorded, toppled buildings and left an unknown number of people homeless.
Boston.com’s Big Picture has collected some truly remarkable, and a few disturbing, images from the scene showing the destruction in a way only the internet’s finest source for photo essays can do.
Full gallery at Boston.com’s Big Picture.
HOW TO: Donate to Chile Earthquake Relief Online
Silicon Valley doesn’t just produce innovative web companies — it’s also a mecca for the green tech boom. Bloom Energy, which launches officially on Wednesday, has built a refrigerator-sized box that can power your whole house.
Bloom Energy has actually been operating for 8 years, raising $400 million in funding from VCs including Kleiner Perkins (investors in Netscape, Amazon, Google and others). Its “Bloom Box” houses fuel cells that run on oxygen plus natural gas, landfill gas, bio-gas or even solar.
The company’s first customer was Google, which has been powering a datacenter on 4 Bloom Boxes for 18 months. Google’s boxes run on natural gas. eBay is also a customer — the company has 5 Bloom Boxes in San Jose, which it says have saved $100,000 in energy costs over 9 months.
The Bloom Box got its first TV appearance on CBS’ 60 Minutes tonight, which will no doubt drive interest in the launch. Look out for more news on Wednesday.
What do you think? Could Bloom Boxes power the future?
