Somebody check on the president of the Leonardo DiCaprio fan club, because we’ve got some bad news. E! reports that someone–it’s not clear who–has paid $1.5 million for a ticket to outer space sitting next to Mr. DiCaprio.
Can you imagine a better chance to finally make your move than a turbulent ride through the upper atmosphere, followed by at awe-inspiring gander at the curve of the Earth? Read More
Prolific startup investor and jOBS star Ashton Kutcher has news for everyone: he’s a total brainiac, not unlike Steve Jobs! The whole time he was playing dumb bro characters in sitcoms like That 70′s Show and Two and a Half Men and tweeting clueless riffs on sensitive news stories, he was actually acting. Read More
Just when we all thought the furor about whether Yahoos! can work from home might finally die down, Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in on the matter–siding with Ms. Mayer. During his weekly radio show, reports Capital New York, he noted that, “I’ve always said, telecommuting is one of the dumber ideas I’ve ever heard.”
Well, Sir Richard Branson, for one, could not believe his ears. Absolutely aghast at this latest turn of events, the gallivanting founder of Virgin Group employed his blog once again to preach the gospel of working remotely and/or butt into the business of other major moguls: Read More
Chief Yahoo Marissa Mayer recently ruled that there will be no more working remotely for the company’s thousands of employees. (Scuttlebutt suggests the decision was due to slacking and flakiness.) Well, it seems word has now trickled out to Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group and prominent Caribbean island owner, and he does not approve. Read More
We’ve never paid particularly close attention to LinkedIn’s “Influencer” feature, which lets average Joe Job Hunter follow the public profiles of so-called Thought Leaders, mostly politicians and executives who use LinkedIn as a platform to share business insights.
Sure, we can understand why a business leader might choose the professionalized audience at LinkedIn over, Read More
Anyone concerned about the influence of Bravo’s “Start-ups: Silicon Valley” on the tech world might want to leave the room.
Last week, a picture surfaced of One Direction singer and former Taylor Swift paramour Harry Styles in a hot tub with Sir Richard Branson and several others on Mr. Branson’s Caribbean island. On the other side of the hot tub, in a fetching red bikini: a mysterious blonde. Only it turns out this was no stranger to the tech scene, but rather Hermoine Way, one of the star of Bravo’s much-maligned reality show. Read More
When we learned that the Mars Curiosity Rover had discovered a “shiny object” while searching the red planet, we worried that Mars would be the first planet saddled with human colonization–and we haven’t even established a Prime Directive yet! But with news today that Yale University scientists have discovered a nearby planet with a mantle made of diamonds, we’re picturing a California gold rush-style mission to its surface. Ready your engines, Richard Branson. Read More
Though commercial space initiatives have a whiff of sadness about them (RIP lots of NASA funding, RIP the space craze of the ’50s), space geeks like your Betabeat reporters are excited by the prospect of making our way into outerspace however we can. And by the looks of it, every day people like you and me could soon be headed off into the ether–provided we have the massive amounts of cash to front the trip. Read More
Some may tsk-tsk the “learn to code” meme, but that hasn’t deterred New York-based Codecademy from sticking to its vision of teaching all of us to code. Today, cofounder Zach Sims announced on the company blog that the startup has raised $10M in series B funding from VC firms Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as angel investors Yuri Milner and Richard Branson. Read More
MySocialCloud was still in relatively early stages last year when Stacey Ferreira, now 20, saw a tweet from investor and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, which read, somewhat cryptically: “Enjoy intimate cocktails with me in Miami on June 15th – $2,000 to charity,” and including an email address to contact for more details. It was the perfect chance to pitch her startup, she thought. Read More
