(Photo: Wordpress)

Rival sci fi clubs almost instigated a nerd apocalypse in the U.K. yesterday when "the force" (heh) was called to mediate a fight between the warring factions.

According to the BBC, The Norwich Star Wars Club apparently invited two Doctor Who actors to speak at their annual Norwich Sci-Fi and Film Convention. Desperate to get autographs from the Doctor Who celebs, members of a competing club called the Norwich Sci-Fi Club attended the conference, causing a fracas to break out between the opposing groups.

The treasurer of the Norwich Sci-Fi Club, Jim Poole, showed up with a friend and was allegedly verbally abused by a member of the Star Wars Club. (We're sure "This is not the sci-fi convention you're looking for" was uttered at least once.) Luckily, no lightsabers or sonic screwdrivers were drawn: it was just a bunch of nerds yelling nerd stuff at each other until the police came.

"It's a bit sad and pathetic," Mr. Poole told the BBC. Bonus points for self-awareness, we suppose.

This would never happen at a brony con.

(Photo: Vyou)

VYou, the NYC-based video question and answer site that raised $3 million back in May 2011, will be shutting down its consumer-facing product next week. The company, which operates from an office in SoHo, sent out an email to users today announcing that they will no longer be able to upload videos starting April 3rd. By April 5th, the site will shut down completely.

VYou cofounder Steve Spurgat told Betabeat by phone that the shutdown was primarily tied to the well of VC cash running dry. "A lot of it was capital related," he admitted. "I think in the end it was just more of a business decision  We had a very dedicated, very active community, but there just weren't enough of them." Mr. Spurgat declined to share user metrics.

Despite the fact that regular users will no longer be able to record and share videos on the site, VYou won't be shutting down completely. The core team of five will continue working on custom integrations for celebrities and media companies "In the end all of our traffic was happening off the site rather than on the site," Mr. Spurgat said, meaning that the majority of VYou's traffic came from VYou products embedded on outside sites.

The company had wrangled a host of big names, like Oprah, Kat Dennings and the cast of Doctor Who, to join up. Recently the site hosted high profile VCs like Adam Ludwin and Dave Tisch (both VYou investors) as part of its "Ask Angel Investors & Venture Capitalists Group." Given this news it's hard not to see the Ask a VC series as a last ditch effort to enlist financiers to spur more interest in the consumer side of the business.

Here's the full text of the email sent out to users:

Dearest VYou Community,

Video answers to life's questions, spread all over the web. VYou was founded on that simple idea and generated millions of videos, from YouTubers falling off of chairs to Martin Luther King III sharing stories about his father.

Now, sadly, this email comes with unfortunate news. VYou is shutting down. Keeping the website running is no longer possible.

Next Wednesday, April 3rd, the website will no longer allow you to record videos. On Friday, the website will come down entirely. You will be able to receive all of your videos at that time (more info here).

Through all the peaks and even the outages, the tight knit VYou community has meant so much to us. The VYou team is still together and working on awesome stuff - this won't be the last you hear from us.

We'll still be around, always. Feel free to email us at hi@vyou.com

Much Love,
The VYou Team

Call us. (Photo: BBC)

Ever stood on a street corner wondering what your neighborhood looked like a century ago? If yes, a) you are a nerd and b) the New York Public Library is working on it.

Thanks to a 2010 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NYPL has embarked on a big effort to digitize its collection of historical maps. And for the history-crazed among us, they've just posted a lengthy, detailed description of how that project works.

You might assume that digitizing a map collection is as simple as scanning the paper versions and slapping them on the open web. Not the case. In order to be useful, the maps must be "georectified," or aligned with their modern virtual equivalents. (If that sounds interesting, good news: The NYPL is crowdsourcing that part of the project, which means you are more than welcome to pitch in.) The result is something that looks like this 1909 map of Queens, which has been lined up nicely with the modern grid in case you'd maybe like to look up your apartment like we just did.

The next step after that is cropping (removing those snazzy, flowery borders so many 19th century documents have). Last comes digitization, which is really a step called map tracing, which is "preparing machine readable data to be harvested, mined, analyzed, mashed, made part of the semantic web and relate to itself, across time." And that's going to make walking tours a lot more awesome:

This type of data will eventually allow you to ask your phone a question like, "I'm standing in front of the Coney Island Cyclone, what other attractions would I see if I was here 100 years ago?" and be presented with a reasonable answer such as, "on the other side of the street you'd see the colossal elephant bazaar that stood from 1885 to 1896, etc..."

So if you were to, let's say, hop in a time machine with a goofy Brit in a bow tie, you'd have a travel guide.

Just saying.