By Jessica Roy 6/27/12 7:45am

Linkages

(Photo: Virtual Business Lifestyle)

Booting Up: Meditating to a Poster of Tim Ferriss Edition

Apple has won an injunction against Samsung, preventing the company from selling its biggest Android tablet. [AllThingsD]

A day in the life of a startup founder: “Shower and then spiritual time. I have a small shrine set up that allows me to focus on the important. I light an incense and gaze up at posters of Tim Ferriss, Kevin Rose and Warren Buffet.” [Hacker News]

Zynga announced a new hub for their online games, which will probably still not do much for their stock. [Wall Street Journal]

Apparently changing your email address to @facebook.com was a “visibility” change, not a privacy change. Welcome to the wonderful world of Facebook semantics! [New York Times]

Surprise! Most of BuzzFeed’s content is just repackaged Reddit posts. [Slate]

By Jessica Roy 3/14/12 2:05pm

Exit This Way

kevinrose

Digg Founder Kevin Rose Shutters Oink Four Months After Launch

Milk Inc., Digg founder Kevin Rose’s new app shop, announced today that it was shutting down its first app project, Oink. The iPhone app was meant as a servicey rating tool, where users could highlight and rate specific aspects of a restaurant or bar, like meals or drinks. It saw fast growth upon release in November 2011, but apparently very little after the initial excitement died down. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 12/13/11 7:39pm

It's Who You Know

wonderful life

As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit

Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”? Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 10/17/11 4:41pm

We're Going to be TV Stars

(facebook.com)

Betabeat Has Started Receiving Submissions to ‘Real Professionals of Silicon Valley’ Reality TV Show

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a new We checked out Mr. Commagere’s LinkedIn, where he lists his specialties as “games” and “viral marketing.” The CEO created or worked on several blockbuster Facebook games, his profile says, including Zombies and Vampires. He was also “a key member of the team that created ‘Causes on Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 10/06/11 10:24am

We're Going to be TV Stars

"Developers--make it work."

The Real Professionals of Silicon Valley: Bravo Casting for a New Reality Show

An ad for auditions for “a new reality show” set in Silicon Valley has appeared on Craigslist and in the inbox of Digg founder Kevin Rose. “NOW CASTING ‘Silicon Valley Reality Show’ Young Professionals (palo alto)” reads the headline, and the major cable network behind the idea is … Bravo. Project Startup, anyone?

The show isn’t explicitly tech-focused, it seems, as “any career goes, as long as you’re living life in the fast lane, we want to hear from you!” Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 8/24/11 10:39am

Social Strat

aboutme

About.Me (Tries to) Take Manhattan

If you’re anything like Betabeat and routinely find yourself chasing down founders and venture capitalists (it’s all very professional, we assure you), chances are you’ve come across more and more About.me profiles recently.

The San Francisco start-up, which AOL snatched up last December, lets users create a free splash page-like personal profile with a big photo, short bio, and handy little buttons connecting to your other profiles scattered around the web (Twitter, Foursquare, WordPress, etc.). Users can also access analytics in terms of traffic to their About.me page.

In the battle to become your “single online identity,” About.me certainly certainly has an aesthetic and utilitarian edge over say, your drab Google profile. And its list of advisers–Kevin Rose, Om Malick, Tim Ferriss, Andy Weissman–is impressive. But we have yet to see anyone outside of the tech world’s earliest-of-adopters latch on. Which might be why the start-up is making an aggressive push into the streets of New York. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 7/12/11 2:21pm

Master of Your Own Content

I had to wonder, is Google+ really more of a minus?

The Tech Equivalent of a Carrie or a Samantha: Are You a Kevin or a Fred?

The launch of Google+ has brought former MySpace president Tom Anderson–now one of its most popular beta users–out of the woodwork recently. (You’ll recognize the white t-shirt.) In a guest post on TechCrunch, Mr. Anderson reacts to Kevin Rose’s recent, seemingly-brash decision to migrate his entire blog over to Google+ by posing the ontological question: “What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson?”

In that equation, Mr. Rose would be the looser blogger, willing to jump in bed with a new technology to attract new readers and Mr. Wilson, who blogs at A VC, the more cautious Carrie, wanting readers to come to him. Even though Union Square Ventures has invested in Tumblr, for example, Mr. Wilson doesn’t use the platform for A VC.  “Kevin abandoned his blog in an instant, whereas Fred built up his blog over years and years. What school do you belong to?” asks Mr. Anderson. Read More