You remember Snow Fall, don’t you? It was that awesome interactive reporting piece by The New York Times that everyone talked about for a week.
It was called “the future of online journalism.” It was praised as a way for The New York Times to courageously battle back against online upstarts like Buzzfeed and their non-serious cat spreads. Or to not change the company’s fortunes at all.
It even won a Webby! (Oh yeah, and a Pulitzer.)
The Saturday Evening Post has a prominent spot in the history of American magazines. It’s where artist Norman Rockwell made a name for himself, and it has published classic American authors like Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But if you had no idea that it was still around, you’re not alone — the magazine’s technology director Steve Harman said that many people “are surprised we’re still publishing.”
Yes, it is still putting out a magazine every two months, with a circulation of about 350,000. Subscribers are mostly in their 50s, but The Post is trying to reach younger readers and adapt to the digital world, as recounted in a couple of stories earlier this year. Now it’s taking the next step in that direction with the release of its iPad and iPhone app, which was built by digital publishing company Yudu.
“Lately, there’s been a lot of commitment convert the post into a 21st century media company,” Harman said.
Basho Co-Founder Antony Falco has raised $3 million for Orchestrate.io, a database API similar to Twilio in its capability to ease the complexity of adding features to mobile and web applications. True Ventures led this initial round joined by Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners.
Falco, who left Basho a few months ago, said Orchestrate.io solves the problems that developers face when building feature-rich applications. Often it means adding multiple databases for geo-spatial, time series or any number of other features.
The database problem has been ongoing. It in part stems from the limits of scale with relational databases. Over the years, companies like Amazon and Google reached their own ceilings and were forced to develop new kinds of databases for high-volume queries. The result is a lot of time spent babysitting databases so the applications run well.
OK Go (the band behind hit music videos like “This Too Shall Pass” and “Here It Goes Again”) launched its very own game for iOS and Android earlier this month.
You can play the game, titled Say The Same Thing, with one of your friends or with a randomly chosen player. (If you sign up now, you can also participate in a temporary promotion where people are randomly selected to play with a band member.) Each player types in a word, then you see what the other player said, and you use that as prompt for another word. As the game’s title implies, you win when each of you enters the same word.
It helps if you understand the other player’s interests. For example, I was playing with Graphicly‘s Micah Baldwin — after several rounds, I entered “Perry White,” he entered “Smallville,” and we won by both entering “Lana Lang.”
Wall Street apparently wanted something more revolutionary out of the Xbox One that launched today, as Microsoft’s stock is down 0.66%. In turn, investors pushed Sony shares up 9% as they expect its new Playstation 4 to give the Xbox One a solid fight for console gaming dominance.
Microsoft’s debut of the Xbox One today touted features including live TV, Skype group video chat, split-screen multi-tasking, voice command, social recommendations, a more sensitive Kinect, and stronger hardware for next-generation graphics. A deep partnership with Electronic Arts, Steven Spielberg’s involvement in a Halo TV series for Xbox, and exclusive early access to downloadable content for the new Call Of Duty game were all announced as well. Still, there wasn’t one thing that left people saying “Playstation is screwed”.
As edtech startups continue to challenge the current state of higher education, and various niche startups focus on educating people through digital means, yet another company is getting a boost when it comes to helping people learn.
PopExpert, a learning marketplace that lets students connect with experts in one-on-one video chats, has just raised a $2 million seed round led by Learn Capital, with participation by Jeff Skoll, Ken Howery, Michael Chasen, and Expansion VC.
The site’s premise is simple: users can sign in and search for what they want to learn. Right now there are experts in multiple fields across the spectrum of “life, work, and play,” including meditation, nutrition, relationships, productivity, career mentoring, language and music.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that goes straight into the heart of the action at the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what it’s really like for the people who work there.
For this edition we headed out on the road to the New York City headquarters of Fab, the super-popular e-commerce site that has quickly grown over the past couple years to be one of the web’s key shopping destinations (and one of the industry’s hottest companies from a valuation perspective.)
Fab is known for selling all types of products ranging from art to jewelry to furniture, with the key commonality being great design, so our hopes were pretty high when entering into the company’s Manhattan headquarters. As you’ll see in the video above, our tour did not disappoint, and Fab co-founder and chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer was the perfect person to show us how gorgeous design and high fashion doesn’t have to be intimidating — it can actually be really fun.
Ditto, a startup that helps users virtually try on different pairs of eyeglasses, has launched an Indiegogo campaign to help fight a big threat — the company says it’s being sued by 1-800-CONTACTS and another company called Lennon Imaging Technology.
Ditto’s technology allows users to create webcam recordings of their faces, which they then use to see how different designer glasses will look with their facial shape and size. Both Lennon Imaging and 1-800-CONTACTS are claiming that this technology infringes their own patents. But Ditto’s campaign describes them as “patent troll” lawsuits — Lennon is a non-practicing company, meaning that it doesn’t have a product or service of its own, and Ditto co-founder and CEO Kate Endress said 1-800-CONTACTS (which is owned by WellPoint) didn’t purchase the patent in question until after the company’s CEO visited the Ditto website.
1-800-CONTACTS did not respond when I emailed for comment. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published its own blog post in support of Ditto saying that 1-800-CONTACTS has “a long record of using the courts to bully its competitors.” That prompted a complaint from the company’s lawyer saying that 1-800-CONTACTS is not a patent troll. The EFF writes:
Gaming has evolved from single-player to head-to-head to massively multiplayer, but it’s also retreated from public arcades to isolated homes. Today’s launch of the Xbox One makes the whole console experience social, not just the gaming itself. You’ll still be battling other humans, but how you communicate with them and choose what to play is about to change.
Think back 20 years ago, before home gaming devices became the powerhouses they are today. You’d go to an arcade, and the way you’d discover what was fun and popular was looking for which game cabinet drew the rowdiest crowds. I remember discovering Street Fighter 2 in a hotel arcade while on vacation. I couldn’t even see the machine, as it was surrounded by older boys swearing like sailors at every Haduken and thousand-hand-slap.
I knew I wanted to play that game. And when I finally got my turn to get beaten mercilessly as the mob swelled around me, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything nerdy. I was partaking in a new culture, a new community.
The Xbox One was just unveiled at Microsoft’s Redmond campus and, true to multiple reports that circulated before the official reveal, the new console will indeed come with a Kinect.
And what a Kinect it is! The rumors of a vastly improved Kinect sensor array were right on the money — this next-generation model is capable of tracking motions as minute as wrist rotations, and Microsoft’s Marc Whitten said the new Kinect would even be able to read users’ heartbeats when they’re exercising or when players shift their weight. The new Kinect’s main camera is capable of recording 1080P RGB video at 30 frames per second (for a bit of perspective, the original model could only capture VGA video). Perhaps most importantly, the Xbox One will be capable of chewing on all the data the newfangled Kinect (no one has dropped an official name for the thing yet) captures at a rate of about 2GB of per second, which is probably partially why the onstage demos looked so brisk.
