By Kelly Faircloth 9/17/12 7:44am

Linkages

Tech talent from Sesame Street. (Photo: flickr.com/libertygrace0)

Booting Up: The NYC Tech Talent Draft Begins

This crisp weather says it’s fall, which means it’s time for another round of the NYC Tech Talent Draft. [Wall Street Journal]

Third-party image hosts like Twitpic and yfrog are reportedly the next services to get the ax from Twitter. [BuzzFeed]

Your favorite educational puppet show was once a startup, and its founders were told the concept would never work. And yet here we are, an entire generation taught to count by the Count. [New York Daily News]

Some master thief drove his BMW into an Apple store and started stealing, only to find his getaway impeded by flat tires. [ABC News]

Marissa Mayer is giving everyone at Yahoo an electronic leash smartphone. [Business Insider]

Meet your iPhone 5 early birds: “Hazem Sayed, 54, and his marketing manager Sage (short for Sagittarius), 31, set up camp Thursday at 8 a.m. — eight days early — to promote a social media startup called Vibe.” [Fortune]

Here’s a little blast from the past, in the form of Bill Gates introducing Microsoft Excel, circa 1987. [History]

By Kelly Faircloth 8/22/12 3:40pm

XX in Tech

Boss. (Photo: flickr.com/jurvetson)

Sheryl Sandberg Leads the Tech Pack on Forbes’ Women in Power List

Forbes has just released its rankings of the world’s 100 most powerful women. Many of the honorees are exactly those you’d expect–German chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, the list also serves a kind of unofficial assessment of who’s in and who’s out in the tech business, as well.

Numero uno is, no big surprise here, Sheryl Sandberg (who comes in at no. 10 overall). The brief accompanying profile of Ms. Sandberg notes: Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 8/09/12 7:00am

Linkages

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Booting Up: Ignore the Stock Price Edition

As part of a campaign to make the Yahoos focus on things like product and customer satisfaction, as opposed to frantically emailing out resumes, Marissa Mayer has banished company’s stock price from the front page of its internal website. [Wall Street Journal]

Zynga’s COO has left the building. [Bloomberg]

In his follow-up to ripping Facebook a new one for the way it treats third-party developers, Dalton Caldwell sounds a little defensive. [Dalton Caldwell]

Big fancy brands like Starbucks and Nike love Instagram just as much as that one friend of yours who’s always posting pictures of her meals. [The New Web]

You can now opt into a free trial that integrates your Gmails into your Google results, in case you’d like to wade through a decade of emails to get the information you’d like. [AllThingsD]

Meanwhile, Google has to start all over again on the Nexus Q. Bummer. [New York Times]

By Kelly Faircloth 8/03/12 5:41pm

XX in Tech

Before you buy that bag, consider how you're going to explain it at the office! (Photo: flickr.com/megleo)

Are You a Woman in Tech Who Likes Fashion? Well, Get Ready to Justify It

Many of the tech-talking ladies of Silicon Valley, like so many women with discretionary income to burn, love fashion. Only, if this New York Times piece–dubbed ”Breaking Tech’s Fashion Taboo”–is any indication, they’re not allowed to just enjoy a thing that they like. No, they must justify it.

Let us start by trotting out a truth apparently universally acknowledged, which is that style is suspect among denizens of the West Coast tech scene (or at least style that doesn’t involve the latest fashion in socks): Read More

By Steve Huff 8/03/12 2:14pm

Lawsuits

Yahoo! (Getty)

‘Contributors’ File Class Action Lawsuit Against Yahoo for July Hack

That was fast. In mid-July hackers calling themselves “the D33Ds Company” gave Yahoo a spanking for lax security by posting the login information of some of the 453,000 mostly unpaid bloggers working for Yahoo and Associated Content’s contributor network. Less than a month later, we’ve got the first class-action lawsuit related to the breach.

New Hampshire resident Jeff Allan is the named plaintiff in the case. In papers filed July 31 in a U.S. District Court in Northern California, attorneys detailed how Mr. Allan discovered his information was compromised: Read More

By Jessica Roy 8/03/12 8:19am

Linkages

Seemed like a cat pic kind of day. (Photo: Pusheen.com)

Booting Up: The Mayer Effect Edition

Two more execs are leaving Yahoo. Call it the “Mayer effect.” Or is that the term for bringing Googlers to Yahoo? [AllThingsD]

The social media sector has LinkedIn and Yelp to thank for boosting its image by meeting their projected revenues. The rest of y’all look like chumps. [Wall Street Journal]

Hey everyone let’s freak out and say you can’t read Quora anonymously. But psst…you can. Just change your settings. Problem solved! [GigaOm]

Au revoir, piracy police. At least in France, anyway. [PaidContent]

Yes, you can go to jail for admitting to rape on Reddit. Also, you’re a monster. [BuzzFeed]

By Kelly Faircloth 7/30/12 6:15pm

Mixtapes

Man, we miss mixtapes. #SOOLD flickr.com/byebyeempire

A Mixtape for Ross Levinsohn Upon the Occasion of His Leaving Yahoo

Now that Marissa Mayer has the reigns well in hand, there’s little place left for former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn. Though once the heir presumptive to Yahoo’s battered throne, he was passed over for Ms. Mayer, becoming the media guy in a company turning in a product-focused direction. So we weren’t exactly surprised that to see All Things D report that Mr. Levinsohn is sidling gracefully in the direction of the exit.

But before keyboard cat plays him entirely off the stage, we’ve got a few suggestions for music to accompany his departure for what we can only assume will be greener pastures. Read More

By Jessica Roy 7/30/12 8:13am

Linkages

(Photo: Top News)

Booting Up: Long Live Yahoogle Edition

Marissa Mayer is reportedly getting straight to work Googlifying Yahoo. She officially made the food in the Valley HQ free again, much to the delight of the company’s starving engineers. [AllThingsD]

Speaking of Ms. Mayer, Dave McClure thinks she should focus on transforming Yahoo into a female-oriented company. Unfortunately, he called his blog post on the idea, “Pink is the new Purple.” [500 Hats]

Craigslist is stifling innovation by suing PadMapper. [New York Times]

Companies actually listen to your online reviews. Rejoice, asshole Yelpers! [Wall Street Journal]

Presented without comment: “Mr. Blodget now presides over Business Insider from a makeshift standing desk in the middle of a 50-person newsroom in New York, where he barks questions (“Is it cool?” “Can we clip that video?”) at his reporters.” [WSJ]

By Jessica Roy 7/24/12 7:00am

Linkages

(Photo: Twitter)

Booting Up: Help Us, Marissa Mayer, You’re Our Only Hope Edition

Some poor Yahoo employee made a Marissa Mayer Hope poster. We are embarrassed for everyone involved. [Twitter]

Actually, Mitt Romney’s face is following you around the Internet–and it’s freaking most people out. [New York Times]

“Keep this movement going. Keep this movement tweeting.” – A really weird music video by Kim Dotcom that you should watch ASAP. [YouTube]

The Wall Street Journal is confused about who invented the Internet. [Ars Technica]

Martin Scorsese is in Apple’s newest star-studded Siri commercial, and naturally it’s set in a cab cruising across Manhattan. [9to5 Mac]