Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?
Twice a year, close to 200 teams of aspiring tech entrepreneurs, most in their 20s, converge on Mountain View, in Silicon Valley, vying for a spot at Y Combinator, the seven-year-old seed-funding firm–cum–accelerator co-founded by venture investor Paul Graham. Their dream: becoming the next Y.C.-backed sensation, like Dropbox, Airbnb, or OMGPOP. In an adaptation from his new book, Randall Stross follows one of the summer 2011 start-ups from tryout to “Demo Day,” to see what it takes.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/10/y-combinator-start-up-think-tank
Hype and Hope: Test Driving Google’s New Glasses
Google’s glasses are escaping from the laboratory. But they aren’t ready for the real world yet.
I had the opportunity to test-drive the eyewwear on Monday with Google Inc.GOOG -0.85% co-founder Sergey Brin at the company’s New York office. The glasses are one of the projects Mr. Brin is overseeing as the head of Google X, a research lab for the Internet search giant.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10000872396390443779404577643981045121516-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwMDAxODA3Wj.html
The Difference Between Apple & Amazon In One Chart
Apple and Amazon are both in the business of designing small computers – tablets, ereaders, phones, media players – and selling them to the public. But how they do it is the big difference. And that’s best depicted by the astonishing difference in the two companies’ profits.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the-difference-between-apple-amazon-in-one-chart.php
American Airlines first to get FAA approval to use iPads in ‘all phases’ of flight, saving some $1.2M
American Airlines has become the first commercial carrier to get Federal Aviation Administration approval to kit out their pilot’s ‘electronic flight bags’ with iPads for use in “all phases of flight”. The development was pointed out by Fantastical developer Michael Simmons on Twitter.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/11/american-airlines-first-get-faa-approval-use-ipads-all-phases-flight-saving-1-2m/
Nielsen: Majority Of Mobile U.S. Teens Now Own Smartphones
Nielsen announced in May that more than half of U.S. mobile owners now owned smartphones. Today that metric has grown again, going from 50.4% to 55.5%. But the more interesting figure in the firm’s release of July 2012 data is not this incremental increase — although it’s notable as an indication of just how fast the smartphone market is growing. It’s the fact that today, the majority of mobile-owning American teens (58%) now own smartphones. That’s up from roughly a third (36%) in 2011.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/nielsen-majority-of-mobile-u-s-teens-now-own-smartphones/
The Misstep of Quora and The Importance of Trust Amongst Your Community
You know the old saying about trust … “It takes years to build and seconds to destroy.”
And once destroyed it is very difficult if not impossible to repair. You need to be the guardian of your own reputation. You need to constantly ask yourself whether your actions in rapidly scaling an online community are worth the potential downsides of destroying trust amongst your users.
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/10/the-misstep-of-quora-and-the-importance-of-trust-amongst-your-community/
Careful Who You Friend: Taliban Posing as ‘Attractive Women’ Online
Tech-savvy Talibs have posed as pretty girls on Facebook to lure Australian troops into giving away military secrets. That’s one disturbing — but not totally surprising — conclusion of a recent Aussie government review of military social media usage.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/taliban-facebook/
How Apple’s iPhone 5 could singlehandedly rescue the U.S. economy
The conventional wisdom holds that we shouldn’t expect too many tech miracles from the iPhone 5. The latest iteration of Apple’s popular smartphone will mainly just be an incremental upgrade over previous versions. Ho-hum.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/10/how-apples-iphone-5-could-singlehandedly-rescue-the-u-s-economy/
Google’s standalone YouTube app and the curious sharing purgatory of third-party apps in iOS 6
Google released its standalone YouTube app for iOS tonight. We all knew it was coming because Google and Apple both confirmed that YouTube is being dropped in the next version of iOS last month.
But what still isn’t clear is how it will fit into Apple’s built-in sharing service menus and whether the way that it does heralds a change for all third-party apps in iOS 6.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/11/googles-standalone-youtube-app-curious-sharing-purgatory-third-party-apps-ios-6/
Amid Outage, GoDaddy Moves DNS to Competitor VeriSign
Following a day-long Domain Name Service server outage, web hosting provider GoDaddy is letting its competitor, VeriSign, host its DNS servers.
On Monday afternoon — about four hours after it was knocked offline — GoDaddy’s administrators made a change to the company’s DNS records, indicating that they were shifting control of the servers from GoDaddy to VeriSign.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/godaddy-moves-to-verisign/
