It’s early in the morning here in Moscow, so I’m probably late to the party, but this New York Times piece on the dynamics between top Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and two of its portfolio companies (picplz and Instagram, which was recently acquired by Facebook for $1 billion) confuses me to no...
Daily Archives: April 20, 2012
A Mid-Career Switch: From Massachusetts State Trooper to iOS Developer-To-The-Rescue
After writing about Lovestagram, the app that Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger’s girlfriend made for him as a Valentine’s Day present, we didn’t think we could find a cuter story. But we totally did. Smoopa, a mobile commerce app I wrote about yesterday, is also the by-product of a little love story. Derek Langton, who...
Larry Page And Eric Schmidt Have Funded A New Company To Mine Asteroids (GOOG)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mager/2576024888/ Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, director James Cameron, and others have funded a new company: Planetary Resources Inc. Its mission: mine asteroids, “add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.” Ross Perot Jr. is also an investor. There’s going to be a press...
Whoops: Symantec was wrong, some 650K Macs still infected with Flashback
After a report Wednesday from security company Symantec put the number of Macs affected by the Flashback malware at just 140k, it appeared that Apple’s Java patch was working to reduce infections. But today the discoverer of the Flashback malware, Dr. Web, has produced new numbers that show some 650K Macs still infected by...
Got Pot? Leafly Can Help
During my daily combing of tech news feeds/breaks to learn more about the wide world of drugs, I stumbled upon this interesting little service called Leafly. Essentially, you hop on over to Leafly.com to do one of two things: find local dispensaries or explore various strains of the Mary Jane. But the set-up is...
Twitter’s Code Class promises to teach n00b employees to understand nerd jokes
Twitter is getting a reputation for producing some awkwardly great recruiting videos. The latest is called Code Class and it promises to deliver the skills that its employees need to make engineering jokes with the best of them. I would totally take this class. There are apparently a bunch of easter eggs hidden in this...
Worried you’ll outgrow the cloud? You’re not alone.
If you think about it, Netflix’s metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is truly remarkable. It’s a very large company with a very large IT operation and, presumably, a rather large bill in the mail every month from Amazon Web Services. Engineering effort aside, the fact that Netflix...
What Would You Do For A TCTV Interview? Digital Ocean Employee Does 100 Pushups [TCTV]
Yesterday at New York Tech Day we met with quite a few great companies including Digital Ocean. These guys are pretty established in the cloud space. They offer OS agnostic cloud servers and are giving away some service space for free to NYTD participants and their minimum package is $5 a month. Pretty basic...
Instagram restricts ‘thinspiration’ hashtags and bans accounts that glorify self-harm like cutting
Instagram has taken action to prevent users of its service from ‘glorifying self-harm’ and using it to promote extreme weight-loss topics like anorexia and bulemia. This has become a major issue across many online communities lately, with the ‘thinspiration’ tag causing issues at Pinterest and Tumblr updating its policies to ban self-harm blogs. Instagram...
Tiggzi’s Drag-And-Drop Mobile App Builder Goes Beyond Templates
There are plenty of services out there that will let you build simple mobile apps without the need to know how to program. The problem with most of these is that you quickly reach their limits once you want to build more complex apps. Tiggzi, a new cloud-based service by software engineering company Exadel,...