They’re really going to strike a cord!

Beginning today, twenty-five solar-powered charging stations will be make their debut in New York City parks, beaches and outdoor spaces throughout the five boroughs.

The 12.5-foot structures — a joint venture between the city and AT&T — will be popping up in places such as Union Square Read More

Erin Lee Carr has left Vice, where she was a video producer, for The Verge. Ms. Carr, daughter of Times media reporter David, joins The Verge as a video producer and will work on video features for Vox Media’s tech enterprise.

“Looking at Erin’s incredible work from both an editorial and creative perspective made it obvious she would be a perfect fit at The Verge,” editor in chief Joshua Topolsky said in an email to The Observer. “She’s a rare talent who is not only able to conceptualize big, important stories — but can actually execute on those ideas. As we push online storytelling forward, I have no doubt that Erin will contribute in both unexpected and wildly exciting ways.”  Read More

Anthony De Rosa, former Reuters social media editor and soon-to-be editor in chief of Circa, tweeted that N.S.A whistleblower Edward Snowden was dead.

“CONFIRMED: Edward Snowden is dead,” Mr. De Rosa retweeted, assuming that the tweet came from Glen Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who broke the NSA story, when in fact it was a fake account purporting to be from Mr. Greenwald. Rumors of Mr. Snowden’s death, apparently, were greatly exaggerated, especially since the Twitter feed that Mr. De Rosa retweeted misspelled the Guardian reporter’s surname as “Greenwild.” Read More

Salon’s editor in chief Kerry Lauerman is leaving the website to partner with Lerer Ventures on a new startup, Politico’s Dylan Byers reports. Mr. Lauerman, who joined Internet journalism pioneer Salon in 2000, took over from Joan Walsh as editor in chief in 2010.

According to sources at Salon, staffers were just summoned to an all-staff meeting where Mr. Lauerman announced the news of his departure and, according to a source, named Dave Daley as interim editor in chief.

[UPDATE]: Mr. Daley confirmed that he has been named interim editor in chief. Read More

Susan Rice, Condi Rice—who can tell the difference?

Certainly not The New Republic, who tweeted “With today’s news, our Facebook page is starting to resemble a Condie (sic) Rice photo shoot” earlier this afternoon.

At the time, The New Republic‘s Facebook page featured a large photo and portrait of Susan Rice, President Obama’s new National Security Advisor. There were no photos of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State. Read More

WeWork, a co-working space on Little West 12th Street, is a warren of glassed-in office cubicles populated by aggressively branded startups with names like Strike Force and Savage. Rodawg is quite like the other young design and marketing businesses there, except that the product it centers around is illegal in the state of New York.

Founder Josh Gordon wants Rodawg to be for weed what “Billabong is for the surfing industry.”

Tall and scruffy, Mr. Gordon was dressed to meet The Observer in the casual-but-expensive mode popular among entrepreneurs: designer jeans, a plaid collared shirt opened to reveal a hefty gold chain and a T-shirt screen-printed with a steer skull. One arm draped over the back of a chaise, he spoke in the laconic, “bud”-peppered tone of someone who had had a positive high school experience. Read More

For eight months, since the inception of the co-working space Alley NYC in Midtown, Harry Raymond was hard at work on the 17th floor of 500 Seventh Avenue with his team developing Shindig, an iPhone app that helps users identify liquors, wines and cocktails. Mr. Raymond, co-founder and chief executive of the company, is now working out of Hamilton, NY, as part of the Entrepreneurs of NY Fund.

Shindig represents a success story for New York co-working and an achievement of the goal of space providers: for members to outgrow their space.

“We are successful if we help companies outgrow us,” said Jesse Middleton, co-founder of WeWork Labs, during a tour of WeWork’s 175 Varick Street space last month. Read More

Earlier today, everyone at Atlantic Media received an email warning them to “reverify” their Google Apps account. But the email wasn’t actually from Google; it was from Atlantic Media’s Chief Technology Officer Tom Cochran, who wanted to test his staff to find out it they would click the fake link.

And within two hours, 58 percent of people at Atlantic Media did.

“Across our entire company, 58% of us clicked the email after opening it. Wow. Fifty-eight percent!” Mr. Cochran wrote in a follow up email chastising Atlantic Media employees. “With those odds, all a scammer needs to do is craft an intriguing enough subject line and they have a great chance at getting your account information. Then, you’re hacked and so is Atlantic Media.” Read More

Their days of Apple picking are over.

Police yesterday stumbled upon hundreds of stolen iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches at the Queens residence of three students.

Adam Jaffer, 20, William Chen, 20, and Justin Pinder, 20 were collared after officers found 443 iPhones, 20 iPads, 11 iPod touches and $9,000. Oh, and a bag of Read More

Have you visited the New York Times website on an iPhone recently? If so, you were probably prompted to check out the Times‘s newly redesigned mobile website.

The whole idea of a publication touting it’s mobile site may seem like a relic from 2006, that long-ago time when the most advanced phone was the Blackberry, which was hopelessly unable to display and navigate full websites. When the iPhone was unveiled in 2007, one of its main selling points was that users could “see any website the way it was designed to be seen.” Blackberry users who visited the Times site saw a boring list of articles, but iPhone users saw the full Times site in all its glory. Read More