With titles like 2010’s Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, it’s no wonder folks like Andy Weissman quoted Mr. Rushkoff to explain why Union Square Ventures led a $2.5 million investment in Codecademy, a startup that teaches anyone programming languages like Ruby and Javascript. (Not long after, Codecademy announced Mr. Rushkoff would be joining their team as a “code literacy” evangelist.)

But while tomes like Program or Be Programmed or 1994's Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace warned about the perils and responsibilities of digital citizenship, his latest book is all about time. Rather, it's about how people are driving themselves insane by approaching time in unhealthy ways.

In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, which just hit shelves a few days ago, Mr. Rushkoff coins ominous terms like "digiphrenia" (the kind of disorientation you get when you're trying to process something as fast as Twitter and something as slow as a news article in the same sitting) and "fractalnoia" (the mistakes organizations make when they try to predict major future trends using small bits of data from the recent past).

Sound a bit heady? Don't worry. To slow things down a bit, we took Mr. Rushkoff to Sutton Clocks, a sales and repair shop for antique timepieces on the Upper East Side. There, amidst the ticks and tocks, Mr. Rushkoff told us how misunderstanding time can cripple a workforce and tempt you to make dumb decisions.

Try to rein in your digiphrenia as you watch him explain what happens to our biological clock when the digital world treats day and night interchangeably and why the 24-hour blog-cycle is a terrible idea.

Abraham Riesman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Manhattan. You can see his work at abrahamriesman.com.

My penis and I are willing to work around your busy schedule. (Screencap: YouTube)

Just because you're engaged doesn't mean you don't have a hidden desire for a threesome. Meet Zach. He's "Cynthia's fiancee" [sic], and he is interested in having a threesome. The video is targeted at Cynthia's friend Zoe, but we're sure you could convince him to consider you.

Zach has never had a threeway before, but the cool thing about him is that he's super flexible with his schedule.

"I'm really open to having this three-way, could be this week, or it could be next week, or the week after that, just a three-way," he says. "I'll have a three-way whenever. Anytime really. Today, or maybe tomorrow. I'm really just looking forward to this three-way. See both of you soon, I hope, in a three-way. Bye bye for now, three-way."

Good luck, Zach!

(via Reddit)

(Photo: YouTube)

Though driverless cars are on the road (heh) to becoming legal in many states, it will definitely take some time for the American populace to adjust to the sight of a car functioning without someone in the driver's seat.

YouTube user MagicofRahat took advantage of that dissonance by creating a costume that looked just like his car's seat back and placed it over his body, giving the impression that his car was driving itself. Then he drove the car through a number of fast food drive-thrus and scared the crap out of the unsuspecting employees.

Our favorite is the girl who has the presence of mind to demand that her co-worker "Instagram that joint." Priorities!

Ain't care. (Photo: Facebook.)

Caught your breath from Instarage yet? We sure hope so, because here comes another move that's sure to inspire another round of e-riots on Planet Zuck. Ad Age reports that Facebook is prepping to launch video ads by April of next year. They'll appear both on the desktop and mobile versions of the site.

Worst of all, sources tell Ad Age they'll be set to autoplay. Bold move, Mark! Facebook might even enable the audio, which would probably be the most annoying thing Mr. Zuckerberg has done since, well, ever.

Don't think you'll be able to escape the ads by rapidly scrolling down the page:

On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user's attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns -- or rails -- of the screen.

Ad Age talked to a number of ad execs who predict the ads won't be limited to an advertiser's Facebook followers. And there's even a special nod to all of you who are worried that the Internet is destroying our ability to concentrate:

Facebook is leaning toward capping the length of these video ads at 15 seconds.... That decision could also mean that 15-second video ads would become more prevalent elsewhere on the web.

Man, it takes that long just to find the off-button for autoplay ads.

Plans are still in the works so all these details could change before the beginning of next year. So feel free to pitch an absolute fit, Facebookers. But if we've learned one thing from the history of Facebook, it's that Zuck DGAF.

EXCLUSIVE.

Get your wallet and brace for one-stop holiday shopping. CNET reports that Macy's has teamed up with Diddy-owned clothier Sean Jean to create THE must-have gift for the men in your life: A fleece sweater that comes with a video screen sewn into the sleeve.

Stylish does not even begin to describe it. Also it's great for costume parties, in case you want to dress up as a Times Square billboard.

Check these specs:

A 2.8-inch OLED display slips into a pouch on the fleece pullover and displays video at a resolution of 320x240. The palm-size video unit has 2GB of onboard memory for storing videos, so wearers can customize their sleeve showings, and it boasts up to 10 hours of battery life.

Or, as Macy's put it: "Wearable electronics is the next big thing–it’s a game changer. Just think of all the attention you'll get at the clubs!"

Game. Changer.

List price is $198, but if you act now, one of these babies can be had for $125 a pop. We give it about two weeks before the Biebs turns up wearing one.

Mr. Kobo (Photo: Admin5)

Launched just two weeks ago, the Los Angeles-based social networking startup Pheed has already seen a fair amount of ink spilled over it, perhaps most notably in a Forbes piece which wondered if the hyped platform was "the new Twitter." With an iPhone app released today, that buzz is bound to build. But O.D. Kobo, a longtime internet entrepreneur and Pheed's cofounder, argues that these comparisons are moot, and that Pheed is in fact blazing a brave new trail in the social networking world.

"I read one journalist compare us to App.net," he told Betabeat, sounding slightly mystified. "We’re original. I think that’s obvious."

Pheed is a new social network that allows users to upload multimedia content to their profiles, including audio, video, photos and text updates. What differentiates it from other players in the space--aside from the fact that it seemingly streamlines the functionalities of companies like Kik and YouTube into a single service--is that it allows users to directly monetize their content. Users can opt to erect a paywall, charging anywhere from $1.99 to $34.99 monthly, or $1.99 to $34.99 per view of a specific piece of content.

But it's not all about the monetization. "We’re by no means a premium website," Mr. Kobo stressed. "We’re a website that simply offers the ability to monetize some things. If you want to share photos or do a live broadcast, monetization is simply a feature. We think it’s fair. We think it’s about time that content providers should own and monetize their content and not the platforms."

The nine-person Pheed team operates from a mansion on LA's famous Mulholland Drive. The company is staffed entirely by engineers, who have worked tirelessly to build out an infrastructure that's as fast as it is lightweight. Mr. Kobo, an American born in Hong Kong who worked in the internet biz in China for the past 10 years, possesses a sort of humbleness that occasionally veers into bewilderment. He simply can't believe, it seems, just how far Pheed has come since it beta launched in August.

"We’re all tech people," Mr. Kobo told Betabeat by phone. "We’re developers, programmers and we’re also users of social media. We come from the space and because we’re also programmers, we like to take things apart and understand how they work. The team has been working together for almost 10 years and most of the career we spent out of China building social networks and software. We used to have 90 million uniques a month from Asia. We learned from the ground up what users like, and that gave us a roadmap to get to Pheed."

Despite its star-studded user base--Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale and Chris Brown all have Pheed accounts--Mr. Kobo is quick to dismiss the idea that Pheed is just for celebrities looking to make money off of their social media content. "We have thousands more normal, not-famous people on Pheed than celebrities. We’re for everyone," he said.

So how did an internet entrepreneur who spent the majority of his career in China convince big names like Ms. Cyrus to create Pheeds? "I think the reason we have a lot of tastemakers and influencers on the platform is that while we were in our beta stage, I went around and showed Pheed to a lot of tastemakers and influencers around L.A. I had been in China for a decade so it’s not like I have buddies at Universal, so it was really kind of me just going around and meeting people and those people were some of the first people who opened Pheed channels up."

Despite its buzzy launch, Pheed has seen a few hiccoughs along the way. A few weeks ago, Twitter revoked its API access without warning or notification, leaving users who hoped to sign up for Pheed to use Facebook Connect instead. Twitter restored its connection within 48 hours.

"We contacted the support and we never really understood why, nor did we ever get any reason why it was taken down or even placed back up," Mr. Kobo said.

Do you think that perhaps, given Twitter's recent crackdown on third-party API clients, Twitter considers Pheed a competitor, we asked?

"I’m this little mosquito coming into this arena that Twitter helped create," he replied. "I don't really think we're a competitor. I don’t think a motorcycle is a form of car--just because we both live on the internet doesn’t make us competitors."

With today's launch of an iPhone app--and an Android app hitting the Google Play store hopefully by end of year--Pheed is hoping to capitalize on users' gradual transition to mobile. The app provides all of the functionality that the website does, including uploading and sharing of photos, videos and audio, as well as the ability to set up paywalls on that content. It's also fast. The Pheed team rigged the video feature, for example, to encode video while the user records, so that it uploads almost immediately afterwards.

Even if Mr. Kobo doesn't consider himself a competitor to the social networking giants out there, he does seem to have some prominent app makers unnerved. "Yesterday we had a CEO of a very popular app company open a Pheed channel," Mr. Kobo said. "The guy was playing around with Pheed and accidentally clicked on the 'Broadcast' button and forgot to switch it off. So we were sitting there watching him talking live to their staff for like 45-50 minutes, saying 'Can we copy this? How did they build this in a year? They must have bought another company.'"

Mr. Kobo laughed. "We’re just nine guys that have been in this game for a long time."

Mr. Oringer. (Photo: Twitter)

Yesterday was the first IPO of a New York-based tech company since May's Facebook fiasco. In fact, it was the first IPO of a New York-based tech company since 2010, says Bloomberg News. Stepping up to try her luck: stock photo marketplace Shutterstock, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SSTK. Jitters notwithstanding, things seem to have gone respectably well.

Businessweek reports that the company sold 4.5 million shares at $17 a pop, giving the company a market cap of $558.3 million, and they closed up 27 percent, at $21.66.

When Betabeat spoke to founder and CEO Jon Oringer, he sounded pleased as punch. "Everyone at Shutterstock is very excited. I'm excited. It all worked out great," he said.

In its nine-year history, Shutterstock has sold a whopping 250 million images. Last year it made $120 million in revenue and paid out $30 million to its 35,000 contributors. The company, which has 250 employees, now sells two images every second. 

"It allows us to continue to be the great company we are already," Mr. Oringer cheerfully chirped of the public offering. Getting a little more illuminating, he added that the company had been profitable for years, and added, "It's an added flexibility. It's an extra thing that's going to help us move along."

"Having the currency, having the strong balance sheet, reaching a status where we can walk into really, really big companies and say, 'we're going to be around for a long time,' will help us," he said.

Perhaps that's why Mr. Oringer hadn't let the Facebook face plant worry him--or so he told us, saying, "I started this nine years ago. I'm thinking about the next nine years." He denied that the controversy over NASDAQ's handling of Facebook had influenced the Shutterstock team's decision-making process. Rather, the New York Stock Exchange had simply been the best fit.

"We met with their team, we liked their team, we saw their technology, we liked their technology, they're right next door," he said.

But we couldn't help but wonder whether someone might be enjoying a bit of enterprise schadenfreude when Mr. Oringer added, "We sell a business product, we sell a commercial product to other businesses. Businesses are not just going to stop needing images." That's the Shutterstock pitch, in essence: The increasing rate at which we consume content on mobile devices means the demand for digital images is only increasing.

Now, Shutterstock has its eye trained on video. "We're going to be there to serve this larger and larger demand," promised Mr. Oringer.  Video currently only accounts for a few million out of Shutterstock's revenues--which totalled $120 million in 2011--but "it's early days." He cited the example of a Miami real estate agency that, in search of a competitive advertising advantage, considered hiring a helicopter to shoot the South Beach skyline. That would have cost thousands. Instead, they used Shutterstock, which set them back a mere $50.

Next week, he'll be stopping by the New York Stock Exchange to ring the bell. It'll be a short trip, as the company's offices are just down the block on Broad Street.

(Photo: Yahoo)

Back at Le Web Paris in December 2010, then-TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington hosted a fireside chat with Marissa Mayer, who was recently named Yahoo's CEO. In the video, unearthed by commenters at The Verge, Mr. Arrington poses a series of hypothetical questions to Ms. Mayer, including--quite presciently--"If you ran Yahoo, for example, what would you do?" (Michael Arrington: modern day Nostradamus?)

Ms. Mayer launched into that well-known machine gun giggle, perhaps at the notion of answering hypothetical questions, or maybe even at the concept that she would some day come to head the sinking web property. She then began a diplomatic response, lauding then-Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz for some of her work.

But the most interesting part of Ms. Mayer's answer is that she leans on the notion of "smart acquisitions," saying that if she were in charge of Yahoo, she would focus on scooping up web brands with significant cache to help the company "stay relevant."

If I were Yahoo--one, I think it's a very difficult job, but I do think that Carol's done a lot of very smart things. I think that the partnership with search was smart in many ways--the partnership to have been with us [Google]. That was smart. But I also think that looking at other really interesting brands that are getting a lot of traction on the internet--those are smart acquisitions for them to make to really help broaden out their base, help broaden out their platform, and ultimately stay relevant.

So, will acquisitions be a key part of her new plan to lead Yahoo back towards relevancy? Mr. Arrington seems to think so. "I’d expect a bold new product strategy and an acquisition plan to help build the foundation of that strategy," he wrote in Uncrunched on Tuesday.

Skip to 28:10 for the exchange.

Beautiful people only, plz. (Photo: Veetle)

Sometimes when it's a boring news day, we like to troll the depths of Craigslist for story ideas, and today we unearthed quite a gem. It’s an ad posted to the NYC jobs section, seeking “mobile ambassadors” for the Valley-based startup Veetle, a Viddy-like service that allows users to stream live video clips.

Of course, you need active users to build a successful service like Veetle. If Reddit built their site with an army of fake accounts, Veetle will build its platform with an army of beautiful people, ugly users be damned.

"We're looking for actors and actresses to be Mobile Ambassadors - aka use our free mobile app to broadcast their lives on a semi-regular basis," reads the ad entitled "Good looking people needed." "You will use the mobile app to to broadcast live (can be anything - trips to the store, gyms, conversations, anything random in your life... )." Because who wants to watch ugly people doing mundane things?

The ad continues:

You should be:
*Extremely Photogenic
*Lead an interesting life (and not be afraid to share it)
*Have an iPhone or Android phone

The Veetle team will kindly pay you $10/hour to grace the site with your lovely mug, all in the name of growing their startup business. Really, it's almost like they're doing you a favor.

Sadly we only meet one of Veetle's stringent requirements. Guess we won't be serving as a Veetle Mobile Ambassador any time soon. :(

Ms. Klein (Photo: Pulse2)

On June 19th, just before a heat wave clutched New York in its punishing grip, a YouTube user named CapitalTrigga uploaded a video to YouTube entitled "Making the Bus Monitor Cry." The video shows a gaggle of middle schoolers from Greece, New York hurling vicious insults at a senior citizen bus monitor named Karen Klein, who is forced to don her sunglasses to hide the fact that she's crying. The cruelty drags on for a painful 10 minutes and 9 seconds. Anyone who was bullied as a kid will certainly find it difficult to watch.

The local school district quickly moved into damage control mode and held a press conference about the video, but several enterprising Internet denizens decided to take matters into their own hands. A Ukranian nutritionist named Max Sidorov started an Indiegogo campaign with a goal of $5,000 for Ms. Klein to help raise money for a much-needed vacation following the incident. As of this writing, the campaign had raised over $175,000.

Skeptical Internet sleuths were initially wary of Mr. Sidorov's campaign. When he first set it up, he hooked it up to his own PayPal account instead of contacting Ms. Klein and adding her information. When concerned users pointed this out, he contacted Ms. Klein's sister and added her to the campaign, changing the account information to hers. "I have spoken to Karen, her daughter, news agencies, and Indiegogo," he wrote in an update published late last night. "Please stop accusing me im getting nothing out of this, all i want to do is help."

But Mr. Sidorov isn't retreating into the ether empty-handed. He's officially become part of the story. ("Can someone tell LA Times my last name is Sidorov please lol!" he wrote in an update.)

Additionally, to reward him for his kindheartedness, another Indiegogo user named Case Prince set up a campaign to raise $2,000 for Mr. Sidorov. "Max Started the campaign that turned into a landslide of support for Karen Huff Klein and against bullying," wrote Mr. Prince. "I feel Max deserves a small reward himself."

When the Internet is nice, it's apparently really nice.

Mildly tainting this feel-good story, however, is the fact that Mr. Sidorov is advertising the campaign for himself--which has hit almost 50 percent of its goal, with 30 days to go--on Ms. Klein's highly popular campaign page. In an update posted about an hour ago, Mr. Sidorov added a link to the campaign raising money for himself, as well as a link to his own ebook on Amazon entitled "7 Steps to Health."

"Guy who raised over 100k for a bullied bus monitor is promoting a fundraiser for himself: over 1k," tweeted Buzzfeed's John Herrman. "Not how this works!"

Ms. Klein, for her part, has become a sensation herself, emblematic of the notion that anyone, anywhere, at any age, can be bullied. She appeared on Good Morning America and TODAY this morning to tell her story. "Everyone at Indiegogo was so proud this morning to see Karen Klein on television talking so bravely about her experience," Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin said in a statement emailed to Betabeat. "We hope that this Indiegogo campaign contributes positively to the important national discussion about bullying."