We’re entering a new age of ubiquitous surveillance, when you can’t even embark on a wild night out in Brooklyn without worrying about some Glasshole uploading your embarrassing antics to YouTube. It’s enough to make you wonder whether maybe we ought to worry about what governments and corporations will do with the technical ability to Read More
Turns out having a book on the top of Amazon’s bestseller list does not make you an automatic millionaire. [Salon]
After the announcement that Google Reader would shut down in July, more than 500,000 users have already migrated to Feedly. [The Verge]
Foursquare is reportedly close to closing a Series D round that would value it at less than the valuation from its Series C. [TechCrunch]
According to his lawyer, Matthew Keys’ legal defense is going to be that he was doing work as an undercover investigative journalist. Oh, we can flout the law under the guise of “journalism!”? Brb, going to loot the Apple store. [The Next Web]
An NYU student has invented a gel that can help stop bleeding in wounds. But can it mend college’s primary injury: broken hearts? [New York Post]
Now that we’ve got all this data lying around in great snowdrift-like heaps on our servers, what are we supposed to do with it? Enter the data scientist, which suddenly every startup simply must have. And where there are jobs, universities are sure to follow: NYU announced today the launch of an Initiative in Data Science and Statistics, which involves both the creation of both a Center for Data Science and graduate-degree programs in the field. Read More
Advanced 3D printing technology is getting close to resembling replicators from Star Trek and iPads look a whole lot like the gadgets Geordi was always carrying around. Now, physicists have taken another step towards making Starfleet technology a reality by inventing a working tractor beam, which is essentially a laser that can move things. Sure, currently it can only move itty bitty molecules, but the fact that it works at all opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities.
NYU professors David Ruffner and David Grier have developed a way to harness Bessel beams in order to pull particles towards a laser source. The result is the beginnings of a very tiny tractor beam capable of moving silica spheres suspended in water. Read More
New York University’s premier tech club, Tech@NYU, is in the midst of its annual Startup Week. This year’s series of panels featuring familiar faces from Silicon Alley are all organized under the theme ”Hacking as a mentality.”
Hence last night’s event starring Charlie O’Donnell, partner of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, and David Tisch, the former Read More
This weekend, students from all over the east coast descended on NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to participate in hackNY’s fall student hackathon. HackNY is an intercollegiate organization designed to keep the tech talent off Wall Street and interested in startups. The students spent 24 coding in order to impress judges like former TechStars NY managing director David Tisch and Chris Poole, aka Moot.
A large number of the hacks presented used Tumblr’s API, including one smut-filled surprise. Naturally, three of the projects also incorporated GIFs.
The most impressive showing of the day was definitely Dom, a video game “on top of the Internet.” The game turns the layout of any website into a 3D landscape where players have to shoot away oncoming robots. Their fully-functional demo drew actual gasps from the crowd as 3D characters climbed all over Vimeo’s homepage to destroy some bad guys. The game also uses Tumblr’s API to alternate between changing background images of outer space. Dom won first place and a cash prize of $1,001 to split between the team’s five members. Read More
Healthy Hills? Everyday Health, the SoHo-based and more successful version of WebMd, has acquired EQAL, the creators of Lonelygirl15 and the owners of LaurenConrad.com. Everyday Health’s ad revenue grew 40 percent in the first quarter, compared to WebMD’s decline of 20 percent. This coincides with Everyday Health’s announcement that they’re moving beyond YouTube and launching a version of it’s web show “Recipe Rehab” for ABC stations around the country.
Diller Brings Back Dog Ben Silverman’s multimedia entertainment studio Electus, part of Barry Diller’s IAC, just sold ten episodes of a new show starring Dog the Bounty Hunter and his wife Beth to CMT. “Dog and Beth are not only great television characters,” said Electus CEO Chris Grant, ”They are the best bounty hunters in the world, and this show is a natural evolution of their life story.” Read More
With UPenn making moves on the title of “Stanford of the East” and Eric Schmidt advising Cornell on the evolution of its new tech campus, NYU doesn’t want its students left behind in the college tech revolution. Hence the school’s new partnership with Codeacademy. Students in the Steinhardt School’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) can now opt in to a ten-week course where NYU professors and Codecademy instructors will teach them how to code. Read More
On a mild, sun-dappled Sunday, Betabeat applied our sunscreen and ventured to the Long Meadow in Prospect Park for an event aptly named “The Internet Picnic.” A few weeks ago, a friend of ours named Nicole He had won the Listserve lottery and was tasked with sending an email out to 20,000 random Internet strangers. Ms. He works in community at the crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter. “What should I write??” she frantically gChatted us, before eventually deciding to invite all 21,288 subscribers to a picnic yesterday in Brooklyn.
“I have a mole under my eye and I’ll be wearing red,” she wrote, and then posted the same invitation to her Tumblr, where it received almost 300 notes. Read More
Today is the online debut of Forbes‘ “Top Colleges” issue. Only they should have called it the “Top College” issue, because–though the rankings aren’t online yet–that big splashy profile of Instagram founder Kevin Systrom makes it pretty clear that Stanford is coming out ahead. Apologies all around to Cornell, Technion, Columbia, NYU, MIT, Harvard…
Mr. Systrom’s debt to his alma mater is no secret, and Ken Auletta’s New Yorker profile is really patient zero in this epidemic of Stanford Fever, but Forbes takes it to the next level, devoting a fair bit of the piece to crowning the Palo Alto Trade School as king of the academic hill, tech-wise. The feature is full of lines like this: Read More
