Day 1 Highlights of the founder's day Successful entrepreneurs gave advice during the Founder Panel Hjalmar Windblah did a talk about Navigating the Startup Rollercoaster Day 2 Highlights of product and marketing day Startups received advice about product development from the Product Panel and on marketing from the Marketing Panel Eric Ries gave a masterclass called "The Lean Startup" Day 3 Main highlights of day 3, which was dedicated to technolgy and investors The Technical Panel gave great advice on technology Dave McClure gave a masterclass on Startup Metrics for Pirates Sean Ellis gave a masterclass on Startup Customer Development The Investor Panel gave advice on receiving investment Day 4 Highlights of day 4, when startups gave their final presentations Fred Wilson gave a masterclass on the 10 Characteristics of Great Companies Day 5 Highlights of the last day, when winners were announced.
A new study from the England's Northumbria University breaks down the science of sexy dancing.
WOMAN ANCHOR: “Oh nooo.” (CNN)
The animated dancing figures were actually created from real men dancing in a lab. They were recorded by 12 cameras with sensors and then made into the digital figures the women saw. The BBC reports the whole study was actually inspired by observations in nature.
“The experiment was inspired by watching birds, like many animals they use movement as part of a courtship ritual to show they have good genetics. Scientists say the same may well be true of people. They found form blood tests that those who dance well are healthier.”
Sky News from the UK breaks down the study with professional dancer “Supple”, who wasn’t too surprised that the bigger and more varied dance moves were seen as more attractive.
“To me this is an obvious fact, because dancing is a form of expression. People in general are attracted to people who can express themselves really well. So anything that kind of springs up and gets people’s attention is something that would be naturally attractive whether to male or female.”
Finally, the Fox and Friends crew show off some dance moves, but it doesn’t look like one crew member was paying quite enough attention to the computer-animated dancers in the study.
DOOCY: “When you do the little thing when you just barely move your feet or just the little shimmy, they don’t like it. Now women love that... now get the breathalyzer.”
Now that you know the science -- are you gonna change how you get your groove on?
Protesters gathered in front of the Japanese Embassy shouting slogans and waving flags against the Japanese government.
A Chinese spokesperson tells CNTV the captain’s detention is absurd and warns its neighbor against further provocation.
“We stress the Diaoyu islands and adjacent islands have been part of China’s territories since the ancient times. We demand that the Japanese coast patrol not carry out the so called petition activities at sea near the Diaoyu islands nor can it take any actions that endanger Chinese fishing boats and personal.”
But as Press TV reports, the Japanese government sees the collision a little differently.
“The Japanese foreign press secretary said his country’s ownership of the islands, which he calls the Senkaku was an indisputable fact. On Thursday, the chief cabinet secretary said the collision case has been sent to prosecutors for investigation under Japanese law.”
Al Jazeera's Melissa Chan says this event is all about China’s image and pride.
"You can look at this as a case of China saying 'these islands belong to us'... ‘It's about territorial integrity and this is something we've seen in China time and time again. China is saying that Taiwan is part of China, that Tibet belongs to China, so it's part of a wider theme."
Finally, China’s People’s Daily Online suggests it isn’t in Japan’s interest to escalate the incident any further.
“China is a promising market for Japan and has been Japan's biggest trading partner since 2009. Bilateral trade reached $138.4 billion in value in the first half of this year, a year-on-year jump of 34.5 percent, according to Japanese statistics.”
The Samsung Galaxy Tab is likely to be the first Android-based competitor in the marketplace to take on Apple’s iPad, and boasts some features the iPad cannot - like Adobe Flash.
Boy Genius Report says, it looks like Verizon will be the carrier, if its inside sources are correct.
“Confirmation that the very sexy and very unannounced Samsung tablet device for Verizon Wireless is actually Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablet. It is currently sitting pretty in Verizon’s internal systems, and a source of ours has sent in proof.”
And PC World says, if the Chinese-language site Ifanr is right, the Galaxy has some cool hardware, too.
“... there's definitely a big camera on the back of the tablet (3.2 megapixels, says ifanr), with a little dot next to it that's probably a flash. Samsung's teaser lists video calls as a feature, so I wouldn't rule out a front-facing camera, either. Navigation and mapping apps are shown in the video, so GPS is a safe bet. The same source that claims 800-by-480 resolution also said the Galaxy Tab has a 1 GHz processor and Bluetooth, based on leaked firmware.”
PC World admits the res screen now appears to be higher 1024 by 600 pixels. On CNBC’s The Next Big Thing, two analysts say, getting a second player into the tablet wars is big on several fronts. Most importantly, competition will breed better products. For now, competitors have a niche.
“What did Apple leave out ... Uh, front facing camera for video chat. Easy ways to docket into your other products, the rest of your lifestyle. High definition video. That sort of thing. So these are some the things these other companies are hoping will create a tablet war ... More people plan on buying a tablet in the next year than they do a computer, a netbook or a notebook.”
The Samsung Galaxy Tablet is one of many products to be unveiled at the huge world technology show in Berlin, on September 2.
Get more multi-source tech and business news from Newsy.com.
AT&T announced it will be doing away with its unlimited data plans for iPhones and iPads. This will affect new subscribers after June 6.
Joe Wilcox, a writer for BetaNews, calls the move "sleazy." He says the timing was deliberate with the new iPhone coming out at the end of June and other changes being announced by AT&T.
"AT&T announcing data caps the day after raising smartphone early termination fees from $175 to $325. Customers looking for better data plans but still under contract would be less likely to jump to another carrier."
But an LA Times article says iPhone and iPad users were going to "bring Apple to its knees" if unlimited data plans weren't reined in.
"Industry analysts say it's only a matter of time before other mobile service providers follow suit, bringing an end to the days of all-you-can-eat data plans for smart phones and other mobile Internet-connected devices that use cell data networks."
But on The Wall Street Journal's Digits, Spencer Ante says AT&T is looking to the future, when 2GB of data is nothing.
"A few years from now, this whole universe is going to be completely different. People are going to be downloading apps all over the place, they're going to be streaming video. That 2GB threshold is going to actually probably seem kind of low in a few years from now. That's I think the concern of people thinking out of the future, that it might be more expensive than cheaper, which is what AT&T is saying today."
So, what do you think of AT&T's latest move? Money hungry? Or just smart business?
Some are projecting Apple will sell 48 million products featuring its Facetime feature before the end of the year. In order for that to happen, another shoe has to drop.
"(Applause) Elation for the first person in the UK to get their hands on Apples latest gadget, the iPad. Hundreds have spent a cold night camping outside a London store." (Al Jazeera)
iPad Mania has struck worldwide. Last week, the gadget was unveiled at Apple stores from the U.K. to the Pacific Rim. This week, Apple announced, 2 million iPads have been sold -- in just 59 days.
We're analyzing reaction from Al Jazeera, The Guardian, ITN, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Mashable.
Al Jazeera interviews two sources. One who understands iPad mania, and another who won't join in.
"What Apple sells is sort of excitement, and fashion and newness. And this tactile -- you can touch it -- what Microsoft is selling is utility. ... I'm not going to buy an ipad ever. Because i think there are much better cheaper devisces coming in the form of google android based tablets which will offer things that I personally want."
The Guardian got in line and asked people...
"Why queue rather than order online? "For the atmosphere" and "to be there", according to 44%. However, 2% (only?) said they were "die-hard" Mac fans; 29% "couldn't admit" why. (This is puzzling.)"
ITN reporter talks with David Phelan from TimeOut Magazine who says, the iPad lovefest could have serious staying power.
"I think there will be a huge sale at first with people who are passionate about Apple or passionate about this beautifully designed product. And then it will inevitably tail off. Except that I didn't think the App Store was going to huge on the iPhone and it's now got 200,000 applications and sales of the iPhone are growing rather than declining."
The Sydney Morning Herald's Adam Turner says, his experience at an Australian Apple store felt something like attending a cult meeting.
"Told to throw down their netbook and walk, the faithful were led like lambs to the cash register. Perhaps it was sleep deprivation, perhaps it was something in the water, but at that moment they looked as if they would follow Steve Jobs into the fires of hell, although some suspect that's whence he came."
Just how popular is the iPad overseas? Mashable points out, in China, there's already a knock-off, called the iPed. No translation required.
"(Chinese translation unavailable)"
So what is it with iPad? Hype? Coolness? Or a cult mindset?
99 percent of us have the dream of listeners. Not being the musicians -- the listeners, right? And we crave one thing, even though we kind of don't know it all the time. We crave to be in the room with the musician the day it was recorded, the day it was played. And we go to live concerts, and we get that as much as we can. But then we listen to the other 99 percent of our stuff recorded. And it turns out the further back you go in history, the little rougher it sounds. And so we said, there's a solution to this. Let's separate the performance, as a thing, out from the recording, which was how it was made. You know, the thing with microphones in the room and all that day. But the performance itself was how the musicians worked their fingers, and what instruments they were using. And it's the data hidden inside the recording. In order to do this, it's a lot of hardware and software that runs in a very high resolution. And Yamaha makes an incredible thing called the Disklavier Pro, that looks like a nice grand piano there -- and you probably didn't realize it's going to do all these things -- but full of solenoids, and fiber optics, and computers and all this kinds of stuff -- the highest resolution out of Japan. And this just didn't work until we could cross this line that says high-definition. And we were able to cross this line, called the uncanny valley, in terms of -- artificial intelligence terms. We have a process where we, you know, kind of put it into the computer and digitize it, and then a whole lot of analysis. And we look at every single note, and all the attributes of those notes: how hard they were struck, and how they were held down, and how you move the fingers. So we had to develop a whole new science of how you move your fingers. And, you know, it's a thing your piano teacher teaches you, but we never had a science behind these kinds of things.
I'm going to start with Glenn Gould. He died 25 years ago this year, and was born 75 years ago this year. Was a beloved pianist, maybe the great cult pianist of the 20th century. He just got tired of being in front of an audience, and felt like -- "a performing monkey," was, in fact, was his term. So he stepped back, and did nothing but the crafting of his work. And Gould's specialty was playing Bach. His maybe most famous recording was something called "The Goldberg Variations." Bach only wrote themes and variations one time. He wrote some early pieces, but late in his life, in his mature period, he said, "Here's a theme -- 30 variations." In fact the theme isn't even the melody, it's the bass line. And Gould recorded it in two major recordings that you may know about, one in mono, and one in stereo. And the one in mono, by the way, he used the pedal, and as he got older he said, "No, no, wait a minute. I'm going to get very scientific about this and not use the pedal." What I'd like you to hear live is the 1955 version, and we'll play the first couple pieces of it. Glenn Gould, 1955. (Music) How about that? (Applause)
So let me tell you a little bit how this was done. First of all, let me get you to the end step. This is -- we have a fairly complex process that, you know, software and musicians and so on, but when we're all done, we know that the ear is the final arbiter. We can play the original in one ear, and a new recording in the other. So I'm going to do this for you right now, what you just heard. And in the right speaker is going to be the original recording and the left speaker is going to be the new recording -- actually of an instrument just like that one, and I'm going to play them together at the same time. (Music) That's the original. (Music)
Before Jurassic Park, there was no science for how skin hung off of muscle, right? So in the video world, we've been able to invent, in our lifetimes, natural behavior. And this is kind of another example of putting a science behind natural behavior. And then you heard the original. Ultimately, I started with the experience. And the experience is: I want to be in the room and hear the musicians. Lots of you can afford to buy one of these. But, if not, there is now high-definition surround-sound. And I got to tell you, if you haven't heard high-definition surround, go down to your audio dealer, your audiophile dealer. It's so involving compared to regular stereo. But if you don't have that, maybe you can listen on your headphones. And so on the same disk we have five recordings -- Sony has five recordings. And you could listen in headphones with this thing called binaural recording. And it's a dummy head that sits in front of the instrument, and it's got microphones where the ears are. And when you put on headphones and you listen to this, you're inside of Glenn Gould's body. And it is a chuckle until -- you know, the musicians, who are musicians who play the piano, listen to this, say, "I can't believe it! It's just what it's like to play the piano." Except now you're inside Glenn Gould's body playing the piano, and it feels like your fingers are making the decisions and moving through the whole process. It's a game-changer.
Here's now something we know in spectacular quality. The whole process is very sensitive to temperature and humidity. What you heard today was not perfect. It's an amalgam of wood and cast iron and felt, and steel strings, and all these, and they're all amazingly sensitive to temperature and humidity. So when you go into the recording session, you get to stop after every piece and rebuild the piano if you need to. There's the whole action there sitting, kind of, on the side, and the dummy head and our recording engineers standing around while we rebuild the piano. Without putting dates next to these things, step-by-step, music will be turned into data, like every field that's occurred in the past 35 or 40 years. Audio has come very late to this game -- I'm not talking about digitizing, and bits, and re-mastering -- I'm talking about turn it into the data that it was made from, which is how it was performed. And audio came very late because our ears are so hard to fool -- they're high-resolution, and they're wired straight to our emotions, and you can't trick them very easily. Your eyes are pretty happy with some color and movement, you know.
All right, there's this episode of Star Trek. (Laughter) I get it -- it was all just laid in for me yesterday there. The episode of Star Trek for me was James Daly played Methuselah -- remember this one? And at some point he's dancing with his -- and I won't ruin the episode for you, from 1967. Right, do you know where I'm going? And Nimoy, I'm sorry, Spock sits down at the piano, and he starts playing this Brahms waltz, and they all dance to it. And then Spock turns round, he goes, "James, I know all of the Brahms waltzes, and I don't believe this is one of them in the category." That's where I'm at. I want to hear the waltzes Brahms didn't write. I want to hear the pieces that Horowitz didn't play. But I believe we're on a path now when we get to data that we can distill styles and templates and formulas and all these kinds of things -- again, that you've seen happen in the computer graphics world. It's now coming in this world. the transition will be this one. It says right now, we think music is notes and how they're played. And I believe this is coming. Because what you've just heard was a computer playing data -- no Glenn Gould in the room. But yet it was human. And I believe you'll get to the next step, the real dream of listeners. Every time you listen to a recording today, every time you take out your iPod and whatever, every time you listen to it, it's the same thing -- it's frozen. Wouldn't it be cool if every time you listened, it could be different? This morning you're sadder, you want to hear your song, the same song, played sadder than you did yesterday. You want to hear it played by different musicians. You want to hear it in different rooms and whatever.
We've seen all these Star Treks, and they're all holodeck episodes as well. Every time I listen to that, I get goose bumps. It's so amazing, it's so exciting. Every time I listen to that recording it's like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm in the same room. I can't believe this is happening. It's a way better experience than whatever you're used to listening to in whatever form. And lastly, I will wrap up with one minute of Art Tatum. So I've really overshot my budget here. We made a new recording of him playing in the Shrine Auditorium in September. It was a concert he recorded in the Shrine Auditorium in 1949. And I've got to tell you, we have this lab where we build and measure everything, back in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we flew out to Los Angeles. And as the president of the company, I didn't feel real comfortable about where we were. That's a real uncomfortable feeling when all the equipment's come out and a whole Sony team, and people are going to be sitting there in the audience. And we put the piano on the sweet spot of the stage in the Shrine -- which has not changed since 1949, still seats 6,000 people -- and on the sweet spot on the stage, Tatum starts playing ... and every note, every beat, every slur, every accent, every pedal was perfect, because he played it for that room on that day. And we captured all that data all over again. And I want you to hear that right now. And fortunately it's right in here -- this is an encore he used to do. It's one minute long. It's an Irish jig, and I want you to hear his humor. (Music) (Applause) And that's just what the live audience did. (Applause) So thank you very much, Michael, thank you for the opportunity.
Football season is upon us and that means many of you are making your fantasy football picks. While ESPN, Yahoo and others provide data and statistics on players to help you make decisions, numberFire is hoping to be an additional useful resource for fantasy football picks.
Originally presented from the TechCrunch Disrupt DemoPit, numberFire is an application that applies quantitative analysis and statistical reasoning to the world of fantasy football. Not only does numberFire have recommendations of pics, but the site also provides contextual data supporting each decision.
For example, let’s take Tom Brady, who is playing against Cincinnati this week and is known has one of the best quarterbacks because of his accuracy and decision-making. In order to find comparable players to Tom, numberFire evaluates his statistics and compares that data to players in the past in order to find a past QB who plays in a similar style and has performed with similar statistics. For Tom Brady in 2010, his closest comparable is Brett Favre in 2007.
NumberFire founder Nik Bonaddio says that the player is only one part of the equation. His site also factors in the team (Patriots), the defense he’s going up against (Cincinnati) and the situation (the start of the season so players may be rusty, off the field distractions such as injuries). numberFire also evaluates games and situations to find comparable situations. In this case, says Bonaddio, the closest comparable is San Diego vs. Atlanta in 2004.
NumberFire will be free for the first month (as to prove to people that the site can beat the predictions that platforms like ESPN provide, says Bonaddio), and will then charge a monthly subscription ($7.99/mo) or a flat-fee for the rest of the year ($19.99).
One interesting tidbit about Bonaddio: Before he demoed numberFire at TechCrunch Disrupt, he was on a primetime episode of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” hosted by Regis Philbin and won $100,000. He subsequently quit his job to develop and launch this project.
Tyrangiel Talks Foxconn, Terry Gou
Josh Tyrangiel Interview on Foxconn, Gou
Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Josh Tyrangiel talks about the magazine's interview with Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou. Tyrangiel spoke with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television's Taking Stock
In this video we find AT&T’s rep, Seth Bloom, reaching out to New Yorkers in particular and explaining, as simply as possible, while their calls suck and how AT&T is trying to fix the problem.
Essentially AT&T is starting to move some calls to the the 850 MHz band for more in-building coverage. The best thing about this video is that Seth the AT&T Blogger Guy looks like someone you’d want to give a noogie to (that’s a good thing) and they show you whats inside those crazy switch boxes on top of buildings. Double rainbow.
I think AT&T really hit it out of the park with this: they explained in plain English what was wrong and they showed how they are fixing it. And they did it not in an email but in a detailed discussion with an AT&T who explained the technology clearly and succinctly. I’m almost starting to like AT&T again.
Sadly, their other outreach efforts didn’t work so well.
On the streets of 'The Wire', Thomas Ferguson on financial crisis and the people of Baltimore
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. Many of you might recognize the row of housing behind me and maybe the sound of the sirens. We're in Baltimore, where The Wire was shot, and many of you probably have seen that show. We're here discussing the economy, Wall Street, state financing, and what's happening to people living in houses like this. And joining us to discuss all this is Tom Ferguson.
TOM FERGUSON, POLITICAL SCIENTIST AND AUTHOR: Hi. JAY: So tell us, what has Wall Street got to do with people living in houses like this? FERGUSON: Well, Wall Street affects people here, you know, in the Wire part of Baltimore the way they affect pretty much the whole rest of the United States. They basically take enormous risks. If those work out for them, they keep the profits. If it doesn't work out for them, we end up having to make up the losses. And since they're banks, they take down the rest of the economy, and they take down not only themselves but the rest of us, and then the place stays down for years. I mean, you know, the problem of a financial crisis is bigger than just an ordinary recession. That's what Wall Street—I mean, it's that sort of second-order effect, not just on the fact that they've—we've had to make up their losses themselves [sic], but the way they can do all the collateral damage. JAY: One of the big problems in Baltimore is affordable housing, even though so many houses are actually sitting empty and boarded up. But there's no money for affordable housing. There's a big crime problem in Baltimore, but apparently right now in Baltimore there's a no-overtime policy at the police department, something people have seen in an episode of The Wire. So how does that—those two things—. FERGUSON: Okay. There's—they connect in not just the one but in several ways. First of all, just on mortgage financing, what you get is the system that pushed mortgage loans out on people, in many cases deliberately unaffordable, where you do these, you know, adjustable-rate mortgages that jump real fast, that they can't possibly be paid off, and are often sold through mortgage brokers, where the mortgage broker, because they get paid deliberately from the company making the loan, which then sells it to Wall Street, which goes into the collateralized debt obligations, which go into the mortgage bonds, etc., all that stuff, they saddled this place with an enormous amount of debt that was essentially unpayable and that they knew was unpayable to begin with. One effect of Wall Street on a place like this is it bankrupts big chunks of it, and that of course then, as it collapses, well, not just the value of the houses that people couldn't pay the mortgages on but all the houses around them go down. The usual problem in towns like this is there's no tax base, and so it's tough to issue bonds that anybody wants. And nobody is going to make them big loans, because they've [inaudible] just yesterday or so Harrisburg said it was going to miss a bond payment, for example. You'll have to go beyond just sort of fixing on banks on that problem. I mean, somebody's going to have to come in and provide low-interest finance to solve that type of a problem. You probably can't get that through a private banking system. JAY: For people that watch the TV show The Wire, they know that the city of Baltimore was constantly running out of money for its policing, particularly problems running out of money for schools and not enough money to pay teachers. You can see behind us boarded-up houses. There's not enough money for affordable housing. At municipal and state level, there's this financial crisis that's hit and likely is going to hit even more seriously as some of the federal stimulus money that was going to states runs out. FERGUSON: Sure [snip] if the Wall Street role in this was simply to take the enormous risks that collapsed the economy. And whenever the economy goes down, the tax collections fall way off. And, you know, the states and the localities cannot borrow endlessly, so they're sort of stuck. They can't print money. And so the debt limits are really hard and fast. In that situation, you have a problem. You know, in a market-driven society like that, where you've got this huge cyclical downturn and you won't use federal policy to effectively pump up the economy to get to full employment, cities are—you know, it's really a catch-22. It won't work, no matter what you do. These people in effect can run all they want. Their problem is the national income's way lower than it should be. It's a super-cyclical problem; it's not just cyclical. It's a financial crisis gives you worse than a regular business downturn. If you don't have a national policy either to get back to full employment pretty fast or to bail out towns and cities, then they're caught between a rock and a hard place, and you just get this endless nightmare, which you can see in, you know, both cities and state. Baltimore, obviously, state of California, they're cutting back. The income is still either not rising at all or falling. Tax collections fall off. It just gets worse and worse. JAY: So there's elections coming in November. So if you lived in one of these areas, or to people who do, what should they be asking their politicians? FERGUSON: Well, they need to be asking the Democrats: why didn't they act like Democrats? And that answer—and actually do something for ordinary people? Why did you just rescue the banks? That's the question they should be asking the Democrats. And, of course, you don't have to ask that question, I think, if—I mean, I wouldn't like to get directly into partisan politics, but who would ask a Republican, you know, why they rescued the banks and not the ordinary population? The unemployment is the—you know, you only have to have one panacea, and full employment is the panacea. If you get people back to work, almost everything else will right itself. JAY: Alright. So how does the government get [inaudible] FERGUSON: Well, we all—I think we all know what they did wrong, which was, when they came into office, they offered a stimulus program that was about half the size of the one they should have. And they also didn't do anything on housing [inaudible] the Obama administration's housing programs have just been—and mortgage relief, they're not—they just do nothing. They should have just done what they did in the New Deal: moved vigorously to put people back to work. You should have seen, you know, cranes and construction stuff everywhere, kids who couldn't find jobs, Civilian Conservation Corps, Federal Emergency Relief, you know, all that stuff should have—that should have happened. JAY: [inaudible] still what they should be doing? FERGUSON: Yeah. Their—well, their problem is we all know we're stuck in a kind of underemployment equilibrium, meaning you're stuck with high unemployment for years and years. Yeah, they need to move vigorously against this. It's plain that the invisible hand is just waving goodbye. Okay? JAY: So the Republicans say you do that and you wind up, number one, creating an inflationary cycle, and two, they say these kinds of government-made jobs eventually run out and don't actually build anything. FERGUSON: Republican—well, Republicans—first of all, do the government jobs build anything? You know, if we go down the street, you'll run over a whole load of WPA [Works Progress Administration] bridges and buildings in this town that were built. Now tell me they didn't build anything. You know, I'm looking down the street, okay? The question about the deficit is, if you come back to full employment, national income goes back up, the tax base goes back up. The claims about inflation are just nonsense. That's the thing that was so crazy. When everybody—when Obama came into office, it is true, exactly what you said, Republicans said, you do this, you'll get a huge inflation deal. Well they did about a half-size thing, and there's no trace of inflation at all [snip] people now fearing deflation. You know, when was the last time in our lifetimes—I've never seen deflation specters before, and yet that is plainly a possibility here. And, I mean, we're not—there's—you show me where inflation is in the United States. JAY: So the counterargument goes, whether it's inflationary or not, you can create a kind of crisis of credibility about the currency, 'cause where is all the stimulus money coming from? FERGUSON: The whole world's buying dollars. You know, I mean, since this crisis began, stepping back from 2008, I mean, the dollar has gone up and up. Indeed, the administration's plans to some extent were—I think they were hoping for an export boom. That's never going to happen. And when you have a crisis in the euro, nobody wants to sort of lay in 25 years' worth of euros much. It's not like there's lots of currencies out there. I mean, people are even buying the yen right now. There's a limit to the yen for yen. I think that whole story is, frankly, a fantasy. JAY: But is part of the issue, too, is that it's just the question of taxation, which is that there's going to be enormous pressure, if you have this kind of government works program, to start taxing wealthy people to pay for it? FERGUSON: Oh, if you've got an issue with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, you know, and the administration basically wants to freeze them in place for middle- and lower-income folks, and the upper 2 percent or so they want to do taxes, it's not much of a tax rise. It just puts it back to where it was in the 1990s, where nobody was particularly claiming they were hugely overtaxed. JAY: If you forget that some people like it or don't like it, in terms of its pure economic effect, does taxing the wealthy slow down the economy? 'Cause that's the argument. FERGUSON: Well, if you tax anybody in a recession, you will slow buying, I mean, in the sense that aggregate demand will fall. But, you know, that's an easy offset: you just do a government program [inaudible] which in general it won't be spent at the same rate it's all saved anyway. I mean, that's part of the problem. So you're better off with a vigorous government program. And the real issue on those tax cuts is what happens 5 or 10 years out. And, you know, I think there's a case for not—I'm not an alarmist about the state of the US deficit. Most of the stuff that's written on this is just nonsense, and, you know, we're nowhere near going all bankrupt or anything like that. That's why people are buying dollars, and it's just—that's all they're—and the—why the yield curves don't look at all like an incipient financial panic in dollars or anything like that. Quite the reverse. So I wouldn't—you know, I don't worry about that stuff very much. JAY: Alright. So a final word, if you're going to say something to people living around here. FERGUSON: They need full employment more than anything else. That's what you've got to have. You need an economic program to put people back to work fast. End of Transcript
Cloud storage and file synchronization is becoming increasingly important as users access the Internet and their data via a plethora of devices – desktop computers with large hard drives, laptops with smaller drives, and netbooks and mobile devices with relatively small internal storage. There are a lot of online storage/syncing startups and products out there to choose from, ranging from Microsoft Foldershare, dropbox and Sharpcast to pure online storage services like Wuala, box.net and drop.io.
Newcomer Zumodrive, from Y Combinator startup Zecter, enters this space with an interesting twist. Like other syncing services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.
That’s not such a big deal when in comes to PC-to-PC syncing where hard drive storage isn’t an issue. But I have far more music files than will fit on even my laptop. Zumodrive lets me access them (even via iTunes) in a way that makes them appear local. And when it comes to netbooks and mobile devices with very limited hard drive space, Zumodrive is a Godsend. It just appears to make your hard drive limitless in size.
One other thing Zumodrive does that’s smart is it actually syncs files you use a lot across all your devices. That way you’ll have access to those important files when you’re offline. You can right click on any file to make it local on that machine. The service also makes guesses as to other files that should be synced locally.
The product is launching into private beta today. If you’d like to try it out, we have 1,000 invitations, just use the invite code ireadtc or click here.
And that’s not all. Zumodrive will soon have an iPhone application to allow users to access files from that device. If you are interested in testing out an early private version of the iPhone app, you can sign up here once you have registered for Zumodrive.
The Zecter guys previously launch a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. Work on the product is on hold for now as the founders focus on Zumodrive, but they say they may develop it further in the future.
Zecter has raised a total of about $1 million and is based in San Mateo, California.
Ford and Microsoft has been hard at work upgrading their lovechild named Sync 3.0. The latest version upgrades simply adds more features but maintains the easy-to-use voice-activated system. Simply press the button on the steering wheel and say one of the pre-recorded commands. That’s it. Simple and easy. Exciting video demo after the break.
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity and peer interest. Why you should listen to him: In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education." "Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong." Linux Journal
The impact of massive waves that struck a cruise ship during a storm off New Zealand have been revealed by CCTV footage posted on the internet.
Pacific Sun Cruise liner, carrying 1732 passengers and 671 crew, was caught in a severe storm on July 30, 2008, encountering seven-metre swells and 50 knot winds.
Passengers who were aboard the journey were offered a 25 per cent reduction in the cost of a future cruise.
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Pretty scary actually, I pity the poor lady that face plants against the column in the center of the video.
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