By Patrick Clark 2/20 8:01am

Linkages

She's laughing at you, fandom. LAUGHING AT YOU.

Booting Up: Marissa Mayer Would Like You to Meet the New Yahoo

Marissa Mayer introduced Yahoo users to a “new, more modern experience” for finding “the best of the web” in a blog post early this morning. [Yahoo]

Ever dream of founding the next Apple, Facebook or Twitter? That might be a long shot. But if you act fast, you can probably get your computer hacked by visiting the same website that compromised the recently-hacked tech giants. [AllThingsD]

“We used to have these ads, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, and the Mac was always the cool guy,” Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak told Bloomberg. “And ouch, it’s painful, because we kind of are losing that.”[Bloomberg]

Apple’s lead designer Jonathan Ive dropped some knowledge on a British children’s television show. [Quartz]

“You cannot be cross-shopped on Amazon is like e-com 2.0,” said Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. [PandoDaily]

By Patrick Clark 1/29 7:49am

Linkages

ap_chad

Booting Up: Etsy is Big In Alaska (and Everywhere Else)

Etsy community sales topped $895 million last year, according to CEO Chad Dickerson. Who bought? The knit scarf-wearing citizens of Alaska and Massachusetts more than pulled their weight. [Etsy]

Meanwhile, pour out a little bit of Earl Grey for Regretsy, as the craft-snark blog is shuttering. Wrote founder April Winchell in a blog post: “After three and a half years, I’ve said everything I have to say about it, and now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse.” [The Daily Dot]

The nice thing about a Yahoo earnings call, if you’re Kara Swisher, is that you don’t have to hide in the vents to hear what Marissa Mayer is saying. The good news: Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates. The bad: Revenue was flat, and oh, can someone do something about that pre-call elevator music? [AllThingsD]

That was a short-lived experiment: Months after Tumblr gave users the option of paying $5 to pin content to the top of followers’ dashboards, the pay-to-pin feature has been abandoned. [The Daily Dot]

This hardware will self-destruct: the Pentagon is interested in military hardware “capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner”—the better to keep enemies from collecting and reverse-engineering the detritus of war. [Wired]

Less than a week after Twitter launched Vine, the video-sharing app it acquired last year, the company went back to the acquisition well, announcing a deal for Crashlytics, which tracks bad code when apps fail. [Business Insider]

By Patrick Clark 1/28 8:00am

Linkages

Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle sluttin’ it up at CES. (Photo: Gizmodo)

Booting Up: ‘Objectify a Man in Tech’ Day Over Before It Started

“Objectify a man in tech” day is no longer a thing. Tech journalist Leigh Alexander proposed the exercise last week in hopes it would “catalyze discussions about the way we use language and how seemingly-innocuous ‘compliments’ are belittling and distracting”;  now she’s “worried that point will be lost and that harm can be done.” [Sexy Videogameland]

The Department of Defense is gearing up to add 4,000 employees to its Cyber Command; The Pentagon may make an honest hacker out of you yet. [NYT]

Is Marissa Mayer’s relationship with Wall Street already on the rocks? Analysts will be looking for tangible improvements under Ms. Mayer’s leadership when Yahoo reports quarterly results later today. [CNN Money]

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has a prediction for e-hailing in New York: “Drivers will make a lot of money.” [WSJ]

“Wait, how ’bout we trade you some promoted tweets for a tax break?” [BuzzFeed]

It’s the year of the sexy, sexy enterprise startups. [Tech Crunch]

By Jessica Roy 1/07 8:29am

Linkages

(Photo: Blogger)

Booting Up: That Pesky Business Model Edition

Is Snapchat representative of a new wave of apps that tout privacy as the defining feature? Fred Wilson thinks so. [A VC]

Google’s obsessive drive to quickly index and display as much info as possible on search results pages could diminish Wikipedia’s traffic. [Optimize and Prophesize]

Coursera and other startups offering online classes could totally be the future of education…if only they figured out a stable business model. [New York Times]

Marissa Mayer made a Yahoo employee dance to “Gangnam Style” as cruel punishment for not participating in the employee feedback survey. [AllThingsD]

Is Reddit raising a new round at a $400 million valuation? [TechCrunch]

By Kelly Faircloth 11/30/12 9:10am

BABIES!

I mean, WTF.

What’s More Alarming: Naming a Kid After Apple Software, or After 50 Shades?

Hot on the heels of the rumor that some terrible, unfeeling parents have named their newborn Hashtag comes the news that names from Cupertino are the latest thing. The parenting website BabyCenter has released stats on the popularity of various names among the parents registered on the site, and The Next Web reports that Apple has increased its popularity 15 percent as a girl’s name. Siri (apparently a real Norwegian name) increased 5 percent. And among the lads, Mac jumped 12 percent.

Hang on–the littlest Yahoo’s name is Macallister, which you’d presumably shorten to Mac. What are you up to, Marissa Mayer? Read More

By Jessica Roy 11/26/12 3:22pm

Planet GOOG

(Photo: Google Play store)

Much Like GOOG-411, Google’s New Augmented Reality Game Ingress Is a Genius Ploy to Get You To Collect Data

When Google launched its new worldwide alternative reality game earlier this month, the web lit up with widespread questions. The game, called Ingress, allows users to move through the physical world with their Android devices, collecting pockets of energy in various locations that they can then use to complete virtual quests. It was an interesting idea, but on the surface appeared to not make any significant contributions to the company’s bottom line. Why would Google, which has $217.59 billion market cap, allocate time and resources to a free Android game?

Technology Review called it “augmented reality’s first killer app.” AllThingsD reported that because the game incorporates real stores and businesses into its plotline, it’s a natural next-level venue for advertisers–Zipcar, Jamba Juice and Chrome apparel have already all signs on to host ads on Ingress. Read More

By Patrick Clark 11/14/12 11:31am

Insurgents

Daniel S. Loeb Headshot

Tech Insurgents 2012: Daniel Loeb

The Poison Pen

Six months ago, Yahoo was a tech dinosaur, a moribund dot-com bypassed by the evolution of the social web and seemingly oblivious to mobile platforms. Kara Swisher had all but written the company’s epitaph when Yahoo made a headline-grabbing hire: Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee who had played a key role in such varied projects as the design of Google’s iconic landing page and the development of Google Maps and Gmail. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 11/14/12 11:30am

Insurgents

Mr. Dash

Tech Insurgents 2012: Anil Dash

Amiable Agitator

The day after Barack Obama won his second presidential term, @FakeDorsey, a satirical Twitter account mocking serial entrepreneur Jack Dorsey’s precious worldview, tweeted, “Pretty incredible to think we made any progress at all in this world before we had twitter, and @anildash telling us all what we should do.”

As the adage goes, it’s funny because it’s (partly!) true. Read More