Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
Greylock Partners today announced its newest entrepreneur-in-residence, bringing longtime LinkedIn exec David Hahn onto the team. At the venture firm, Hahn will be focused on what’s happening in healthcare and education technology, with the long-term goal of entering one of those sectors. Read More
During the height of the 2013 Bitcoin bubble, Litecoin soared, crossing the $40 mark late in the year. Since then, mostly tracking Bitcoin, Litecoin’s value has faded. Today, you can buy a Litecoin for just under $9.
That cryptocurrencies are dealing with post-bubble excesses is hardly news. What’s more interesting is that Litecoin, which largely followed Bitcoin’s price… Read More
“Miz Caramel Vixen is back for more car crushing action!” (Via Weird Universe)
North Carolina drivers were surprised to see a man clinging to the back of a car going 60 mph on a freeway yesterday. One family shot a video of the incident. “The family says they saw the man on the back of the car break the back windshield and climb inside. They say a woman was driving the car with a child in a car seat inside.” No one knows what happened to the car or its passengers. (Via Arbroath)
China spends even more on internal “stability maintenance” and security than it does on its army. Some of that incredible budget goes to forced holidays for dissidents that get them out of the way during events like the 25th anniversary of Tienanmen Square. It’s called “being traveled.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear an appeal by Google over whether it violated federal wiretapping law when its Street View mapping cars collected consumers’ personal data.
Google Glass went on sale in the UK last week, and it’s already encountering some pushback. According to The Independent, Google Glass will be banned from most movie theaters in the country, with a rule being put in place to bar them from theater auditoriums even when movies aren’t playing.
The decision was made by the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association, a trade group that says it represents 90 percent of UK theater operators. “Customers will be requested not to wear these into cinema auditoriums,” Phil Clapp, the CEA’s chief executive, tells The Independent, “whether the film is playing or not.”
Last night’s debut of The Leftovers on HBO marked Damon Lindelof’s return to TV, and viewers are already buzzing about the Lost co-creator’s new show. If you missed the premiere, you can watch the entire first episode via Yahoo Screen even if you’re not an HBO subscriber. Based on a bestselling novel by Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers begins three years after millions of people mysteriously vanish without any explanation. Two percent of the world’s population is suddenly gone, and everyone who remains is still trying to cope with what happened.
The series, adapted for TV by Lindelof and Perrotta (with Lindelof serving as showrunner), is already off to a strong and intriguing start. HBO hopes it can pull in decent-sized audience while the…
Customize your skateboarding experience and turn any skate surface into a musical playground
Halfway to space in the skies above Hawaii, NASA successfully tested its Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, a vehicle equipped with new technology for ferrying heavy payloads to Mars. A massive balloon lifted the saucer-shaped vehicle from a naval base in Kauai at 11:45 a.m. (Pacific) on…
With all the World Cup excitement, I found myself wondering what the Twitter-scape looked like. Who is tweeting? What are they tweeting about? Where are they? What language are they tweeting in?
Obviously, such questions can apply to any tweet-worthy event. Along with the idly curious like me, various types of businesses from tech startups to local restaurants might want to know: What’s my most vocal demographic? What time of day are people tweeting about my service most often? How do people feel about the new website?
Collecting all this data and analyzing it might seem like a big investment, but with the right tools it becomes trivially easy. In this article, I show you how to analyze tweet data using MongoDB as both the data store and the analytics engine. MongoDB has powerful analytics tools and straightforward pluggability into Hadoop for when you have a question that needs a more generic tool. I’m using tweets about the World Cup to demonstrate, but the concepts are generic and can be easily applied to your own data set.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google will have to contend with a class-action lawsuit alleging that its Street View cars illegally snooped on private Wi-Fi networks after the US Supreme Court declined this morning to hear a challenge to dismiss the complaint. Google said in 2010 that its Street View cars had accidentally been collecting content sent over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, explaining that it had stopped the practice as soon as it realized this was happening. Nonetheless, various lawsuits and investigations have popped up in the time since, with Google settling a major interstate investigation a little over a year ago.
Beyond that, Google has been caught up in a class-action suit over whether its actions violated the Wiretap Act. Google argued that Wi-Fi…
Ive been looking at my phone a lot less recently. Normally, no buzz in my pocket can go un-checked, no news alert or Snapchat unseen. But thanks to these watches Ive been wearing, my phone spends a lot more time in my bag. I can just flick my wrist to see whats going on.
Smartwatches have become a thing. Theyre a thing because Google says so, because it just released Android Wear and unleashed a torrent of wrist-bound devices. As a result, were being forced to consider an important…
CoreOS, a Linux distribution optimized for very large server deployments, today announced that it has raised a $8 million Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with follow-on investments by Sequoia Capital and Fuel Capital. This comes after a previous investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital last year. Read More
No company has done more to change the way Americans drink coffee in the last several years than Keurig Green Mountain. Its method of brewing coffee by injecting hot water into prepackaged plastic pods has quickly grown to rival drip coffee as the preferred means of getting a quick hit of caffeine. “It was slow to start, but now its growing by leaps and bounds,” says Joe DeRupo, communications director at the National Coffee Association. “Its the biggest change in coffee-brewing technology since Mr. Coffee was introduced in the 1970s.”
One of every four dollars Americans spend on coffee to be brewed at home is now spent on pods, and Keurig, which pioneered the process in the US, dominates the market. But Keurigs hold on the industry…
Luxury consignment marketplace The RealReal is expanding its mobile footprint today with the launch of a new app called RealBook, which lets both potential buyers and sellers better understand the value of luxury items, including fashion and apparel, fine jewelry and watches. RealBook now joins the company’s previously launched smartphone apps, The RealReal’s mobile shop and Consign. Read More
An online service called Forget.me, launched last week to quickly capitalize on a European court ruling from late May that requires Google to process requests by private individuals to de-index outdated or irrelevant personal information, has put out some early data on the kind of requests individual Europeans are submitting via its (for now) free service. Read More
Video for 20syl‘s “Kodama,” directed by Matthieu Le Dude and 20syl.
Ever since Reading Rainbow went off the air in 2006, LeVar Burton has been working to bring it back. In 2012, he launched a tablet app program, and just recently, he launched a Kickstarter campaign asking for $1 million to develop Reading Rainbow programming across all platforms, which will be provided to classrooms for free. Flash forward to today, and the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter… Read More