Editor's Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net.
Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast becoming one of the key the places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South By Southwest?know also as SXSW?will be a debutant party for AOL?s new Seed form of journalism..
AOL has it's hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party, according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Program Director of Seed.More
Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn't the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers.
Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it's not like you're dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?More
I'm a sucker. It's true. As much you guys think we rail against Apple, we're like abused puppies, slinking back to our master's hard ankles, shivering and awaiting praise. Why did I pre-order the iPad? Well, first I'm a gadget blogger. Second there is no certainty that mother Apple will grace us with an early review unit so I want to hedge our bets. Third? I want to see where computing is headed.
Bear with me here. Apple is not the bringer of fire to a benighted world. Far from it. In my recent writing I've been struck by a few parallels with Steve Jobs to Abraham Louis Breguet, a French watchmaker who lived in the 18th century. He was a mechanical genius, to be sure, but he was also a salesman. While the rest of the benighted world was sloshing around in an admixture of feces and mud in the streets of Paris and telling the time by whether the pikemen were stabbing them for being out after curfew, Breguet was selling watches that would not be out of place on the wrist (had they had straps) of a whale in Las Vegas. He invented secret anti-counterfeiting measures but made them part of the allure and not part of a DRM scheme. He designed elegant and beautiful watches in an age of rococo designs but wasn't above creating a "subscription" watch for the masses who wanted to own a piece of the good life without paying an exorbitant sum of money. Other watchmakers were making commodities and following Breguet's lead. That's what's happening here.More
Recently, startup Cc: Betty, a nifty service that organized and managed group email threads, decided to rebrand and relaunch its service. The new product, Threadbox, was going to be streamlined and tweaked to appeal to workspace users.
Today, Threadbox is officially launching in private beta, as a more collaborative and user-friendly service. Essentially, the site aims to combine email, IM, and collaboration tools into one platform. Instead of focusing on email like Cc:Betty, Threadbox centers around collaboration in the workplace. The service organizes and logs every type of communications with clients, allows users to share documents and images, and record decisions and feedback. The new service also has the ability to serve as a project management tool, allowing users to share and track requirements and specs, then track and follow team members from start to finish.
More
Kwedit, the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data.
The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It's not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users can pay by, among other methods, mailing in cash or paying at a 7-11.
When the product first launched they had no idea what percentage of promises would be repaid. Anything at all is incremental revenue to game publishers, and since the stuff they're selling has no marginal cost (virtual currency), it's all upside. But after nearly two months of being live, they say the repayment rate is 25.9% If you're a credit company that would put you out of business. More
We've talked a lot this week about the so-called "Location War" brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow. That war will happen, but actually, there are likely to be a lot of winners because a few of the location-based services should be able to leverage the exposure to gain usage after the conference. Those with real bloodlust should probably be watching another war: AT&T versus everyone in Austin on their network.
AT&T's struggles to stay up last year are well-documented. CNN recently ran a piece about how AT&T hopes to avoid a similar fate this year. But actually, "struggles" is way too kind of a word. If you were at SXSW last year and happened to be on AT&T's network ? like, say, if you had an iPhone, like many festival-goers did ? it was an absolute nightmare. You couldn't make a call. You couldn't send a text. Data? Ha. At a few points early on I seriously wondered if I had forgotten to pay my bill and AT&T had simply shut my phone off ? except that it was happening to everyone.
AT&T has a funny word for the failure, they like to say it is "unprecedented." As in, the usage of its network was at levels previously unseen, as a strong percentage of the over 10,000 festival goers (just the interactive part) were using iPhones. Well guess what? Word is that is year, there will be some 15,000 people there for the interactive part. As Samual L. Jackson's character, Mr. Arnold, says in Jurassic Park, "Hold on to your butts."More
Zimbalam, the digital music distributor from Believe Digital, launches in the US today.
The service lets artists submit and distribute their music through 25 of the most popular music platforms, including Apple's iTunes and Spotify, in addition to "several hundred additional stores worldwide". This makes Zimbalam the largest music distribution network as measured by number of stores and geographic reach, says the Paris-based company.
To distribute their music via Zimbalam's network, artists are charged a simple annual fee ($29.99 in year one then $19.98 per year after for an EP or album) and then once the fee is recouped, get to keep 100% of royalties - after, of course, whatever commission is taken by each store. Additionally, following year one, artists won't be charged by Zimbalam if they don't make enough sales to cover the annual fee.More
The official Foursquare account just sent out a tweet letting everyone know that today is already the service's biggest day ever. This is interesting since it's actually the day before the SXSW conference kicks off in Austin, Texas.
According to the tweet, Foursquare broke 275,000 check-ins (the previous record, set last Friday) for the day "hours ago." This means they're very likely well past 300,000 now and perhaps even higher. To put that in some perspective, just a month ago, Foursquare set a record with 1.2 million check-ins for the entire week. And that was double was it was the month prior. At today's rate, Foursquare would be doing well over 2 million check-ins a week.More
There are no shortage of location-based services launching this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Many of them allow you to "check-in" places to let others know you are there. So how do you differentiate between then and decide which to use? Well, here's one good way.
CauseWorld, is a free iPhone and Android app that lets you check-in places, but it has an added real-world bonus: big brands give money to charity when you do so. And this week at SXSW, CauseWorld is teaming up with TechCrunch to offer double point (which they aptly call "karma") when you check in to one of over 50 venues around Austin (I'll paste the full list at the bottom of the post), including the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW is held).More
Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they've taken what was a solid service, and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades.
First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events ? and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I've ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare's list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there.More
So this was obvious: Place a few dividers into an otherwise normal front-loading washing machine, and separate your reds from your whites without washing a whole separate load.
For those who have misguidedly failed to develop an Armageddon plan, it's not too late. Here are the 6 phases you would probably go through if you were the only human left on Earth.
The ?Final Fantasy? series has been going strong for more than 22 years and has been home to hundreds of memorable characters. Some have starred in their own spinoff games and movies, others have gotten next-gen graphic makeovers. But certain characters seem to keep finding their way back into gamer culture and conversation over and over again.
An American architect has broken his own Guinness World Record by building the largest house of free-standing playing cards.Bryan Berg used 218,792 cards to create a replica of the Venetian Macau, which is on display in its namesake luxury hotel and casino. Berg took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to complete his model inside the Venetian....
Ladies, we're sure you can relate. If you're sick of guys talking to your boobs instead of your face, here's a way to make them (almost) look you in the eye ...Marion Cotillard, who won Best Actress for 2007 movie La Vie en Rose, promotes Forehead Tiatties - a device designed to divert male eyes away from ladies' chests.
Failings by Lehman executives and its auditor led to the collapse of the bank which unleashed the worst of the financial crisis, according to a report by a U.S. bankruptcy court-appointed examiner.
Does Chatroulette, the popular video chat site, lose its appeal if it loses its anonymity? Chatroulette offers a welcome break from the daily digital footprints I leave across the Web on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, where every comment, tweet and ?like? is tied back to my real-world identity.
A former Transportation Security Administration contractor is being charged in Colorado for allegedly injecting malicious code into a government network used for screening airport security workers and others. The malicious code, a logic bomb installed last October, was designed to cause damage and disrupt data on servers on an undisclosed date...
We asked Apple PR to help you plan your day tomorrow, and they responded:"Customers can pre-order online at apple.com at 5:30am Pacific time on Friday, March 12."There you have it. 5:30 am PT, 8:30 am ET, and for those of you who happen to have US credit cards & shipping addresses but are currently elsewhere here's the global clock!
Half a century ago, thousands of pregnant women in 46 countries took a drug for morning sickness that would later be discovered to cause severe malformations in developing fetuses. Worldwide, roughly 10,000 affected children nicknamed "thalidomide babies" were born with multiple defects, including the characteristic shortened upper limbs (a condition known as phocomelia, Greek for "seal limbs"), before the drug was discontinued in 1961 after four years on the market.
An electric insulator, in the simplest terms, blocks the flow of electric current. So it would be a bit counterintuitive, to say the least, if a current on one side of an insulator could produce voltage on the other. [More]
African crop yields wither, along with the Amazon rainforest; Himalayan glaciers disappear by 2035. These are the erroneous predictions ascribed to the most recent report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--a document reviewed by some 2,500 scientists and other experts as well as vetted by more than 190 countries. So does the fact that a few errors crept into a more than 3,000 page report merit a revision of IPCC processes? [More]
The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies--and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients. [More]
Every 30 minutes, all of the blood in our bodies is filtered through two fist-size kidneys. But diseases such as diabetes can cause them to fail, leading to a build-up of chemicals in the blood that without dialysis (mechanical blood filtration) or a kidney transplant would be fatal. And the wait for a new kidney can be long, unless someone you know is willing to give one of theirs to you. [More]
WASHINGTON--Every second, our bodies capture carbon dioxide in our tissues, transport it via the blood, and dump it in the lungs from where it is exhaled. This unconscious process is yet another way humans contribute to the accumulation of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere--albeit in a minuscule volume compared with burning fossil fuels . The key to this metabolic process is an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase and it's efficiency at capturing and releasing CO2 is what human engineers want to mimic at the power plant scale. [More]
Spotting a disease in its earliest stages can help to facilitate its treatment greatly, yet telltale clues are often hidden at a scale too small to study accurately. This hindrance has some researchers looking for ways to use high-powered atomic force microscopes (AFMs) to study individual molecules for disease markers [More]
Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions. The lion's share live in the intestinal tract, where they help fend off bad bacteria and aid in digesting our dinners. But as scientists use genetics to uncover what microbes are actually present and what they're doing in there, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected--and perhaps at times exerting more influence than human genes themselves. [More]
Earth's robust magnetic field protects the planet and its inhabitants from the full brunt of the solar wind, a torrent of charged particles that on less shielded planets such as Venus and Mars has over the ages stripped away water reserves and degraded their upper atmospheres. Unraveling the timeline for the emergence of that magnetic field and the mechanism that generates it--a dynamo of convective fluid in Earth's outer core--can help constrain the early history of the planet, including the interplay of geologic, atmospheric and astronomical processes that rendered the world habitable. [More]
Although any T. Rex –enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away, and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago. [More]
Cliqset has produced this nifty web app that aggregates status updates and check-ins sent from people in and around Austin to all of the different major location-sharing services ? Gowalla, Foursquare, Twitter, Brightkite and of course Cliqset.
Now that Apple has fulfilled its goal of achieving quantity in its App Store, the company is making a hard push for quality. But where do you draw the line between raising quality standards and censorship?
The firebrand stand-up comic's story is told in this documentary, which makes its North American premiere at South by Southwest this week. Get a taste of Hicks' brutally funny take on drugs, religion and modern life in this trailer for the movie.
Before J.F. Daniell develops a much improved battery, the devices were impractical and downright dangerous. His innovations enable the telegraph and other technology to take off.
Shortly after the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the new organization sent 100 photographers out to document the human and natural environments. After a lively few years, the Documerica project was canceled and the photos were archived. Now, this incredible portrait of America in the mid-1970s is making its way onto Flickr.
Minnesota seeks to distinguish itself in the increasingly reality TV-esque race to convince Google to build a high-speed fiber optic network there with a video featuring junior US Senator (and former comedian) Al Franken. It's funny stuff, but also serious business as Google shakes up the notoriously uncompetitive ISP business just by showing up.
The key to your health may be the feedback loop that a lot of new health data-gathering gadgets can create. It's like a game where your stats are the score, and a better score means better health.
25 San Fransisco entrepreneurs were picked to get on a bus, drive to Austin, and conceive and launch 6 tech startups, all in 48 hours, in time for a launch party at South by Southwest.
No, that's not a reality show pitch. And no, we didn't just make it up.
This is a real life contest currently underway, called the Startup Bus. The startups will be judged by "a panel of mentors from Austin-based incubator The Capital Factory and Australian headquartered eStrategyGroup", and the winning idea's team will be mentored by angel investor Naval Ravikant.
From the New York Times: New York used to be a second-string city when it came to coffee. No longer.
Over the last two years, more than 40 new cafes and coffee bars have joined a small, dedicated group of establishments where coffee making is treated like an art, or at least a high form of craft.
Earlier this week Eric Schmidt said he expected Google's negotiations with China to wrap up "soon."
That's certainly possible, but the latest statements coming from the Chinese government suggest Google will be packing its bags and leaving the country.
Hearst's LMK division is pumping out dozens of cheap iPhone apps to bring in a new revenue stream, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Lead by executive vice president of Hearst Entertainment George Kliavkoff, LMK's five-person team uses a simple template and creates a kind of "aggregator app," gathering links to news stories, blog posts and other information, WSJ reports.
Yesterday I wrote a post about how much capital your startup should raise. In that post I was talking about how it is a bad strategy to be underfunded. In general when capital is available take it (provided it’s on the right conditions and from the best people from whom you can raise). It’s also bad to raise too much, too early. If you’re interested in that topic I cover it in the article linked previously.
I made a diversion in the article that I shouldn’t have taken. I talked about the Silicon Valley memo that has been circulated for the past couple of years that says you should “fail fast.” What I said was:
The review aims to help the U.N. climate change panel avoid the kinds of errors that have brought its work into question in recent months, officials said Wednesday.
For the first time, the complete, original manuscript of the theory of relativity, profoundly human and surprisingly moving to examine, has been put on display in Jerusalem.
When the software mogul Mitch Kapor won planning approval for his 10,000-square-foot house in Berkeley, Calif., neighbors were surprised that it will qualify as ?green.?
If your browser supports HTML5 you can opt into the experimental HTML5 video playback on YouTube. Not only will you get smoother video playback—goodbye Flash!—but you'll be able to speed up and slow down your videos. More »
Every night thousands of workers boot down their work stations and return to them the next morning, booting into a fresh system. Reboot your physical workspace in the same way to keep your office tidy and efficient. More »
If you like taking and sharing panoramic photos—or just enjoy checking out the impressive results others have gotten—GigaPan indexes high-resolution panoramic photos. More »
Windows: If you're not about to manually convert that pile of images in front of you but you've found the batch converters you've tried to be lacking, free and portable Photo Magician offers both fine tweaking and drag and drop simplicity. More »
It's that give-it-to-the-government time of year again, and we want to hear about your favorite tools for making the taxman's sting a little less severe. More »
Our favorite text expansion app for OS X updates, the latest build of Chromium adds Aero Peek support for tabs, and the inventor of the cellphone prefers Android. More »
It's hard for a lot of us to separate our work and home lives under the best of circumstances. When you work from home it's even more difficult, but blogger Pat Flynn found a method that works for him. More »
Knowing that you're getting a federal tax refund is awesome, but the wait for it to land in your bank account or mailbox can be maddening. Finance blog Get Rich Slowly show us how to check the status of your refund anytime. More »
Having the experience of an industry veteran is great, but appearing old and out of touch during a job interview is not. Follow these guidelines to avoid looking like a dinosaur. More »
Dear Lifehacker, I get bad customer service from companies time and again over the phone, and I'd like to record these calls so I have proof. I've also heard this might be illegal—are there any legal problems associated with this? More »
Editor's Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of 
Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and
I'm a sucker. It's true. As much you guys think we rail against 
Recently, startup 
We've talked a lot this week about the so-called "
The official Foursquare account just sent out a 
There are no shortage of 
Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service 
