Michael Morganella, a defender on the Swiss Olympic soccer squad, has been kicked off the team for an offensive tweet about South Koreans, hours after losing to the country’s team. Five days ago, Voula Papachristou, Greece’s triple-jump champion, was kicked off her team for an offensive tweet about West Nile virus.
Morganella’s Twitter account, @morgastoss, has been deleted, but Swiss newspaper Le Matin grabbed a shot of the tweet. → Read More
Codecademy, the startup offering online lessons and tools to help people learn how to code, is adding Python to its lesson line-up starting today.
Until now, co-founder Zach Sims says Codecademy has “been focused on client-side languages and markup – javascript, HTML, and CSS.” Starting today, you’ll be able to find user-generated Python lessons on the site, and Sims adds, “This is the beginning of new language support on Codecademy – Python is only the first server side language you’ll see.” → Read More
Microsoft’s Bing search engine launched its social sidebar last month and the company has been adding features and support for additional social networks ever since. The core of Bing’s social efforts, however, is its Facebook integration and the company today announced a nice new feature for Facebook users on Bing. The social sidebar already allowed users to ask their Facebook friends questions right from Bing, but with today’s update, Bing is also allowing users to tag up to five of their friends whenever they ask a question. This, says Microsoft, will allow you “to effortlessly tap into the collective wisdom of your social network, and get input from your friends who are in the know.” → Read More
The number of citizens wandering into ditches, on-coming cars, and each other while staring at electronics has “quadrupled”, according to the Associated Press. “Look up. Drivers aren’t always looking out for you,” reads a Delaware traffic safety sign, one of many states that are turning to the magic of PSA billboards as a substitute for state legislatures that have almost universally opposed laws criminalizing “distracted walking.” While the Internet is overflowing with hilarious bloopers, such as one man walking into a real-life black bear (video below), distracted walking is a serious problem, and is implicated in the 4.2% rise in pedestrian fatalities in 2010. → Read More
One problem with 2012 Olympics coverage is that there’s so much of it. If you’re in the U.S., you can turn to NBCOlympics.com for full video coverage of the Summer Games, including clips, highlights, and full-length video of competitions as they happen. But with all that content, it’s difficult to sort through and find what you’re actually looking for.
Want a better way to find and discover what’s happening at the Olympics? Showyou is trying to solve that problem, by automatically highlighting the Olympics content that its users are sharing with each other in the app and on other social networks. → Read More
A lot of people like to complain about their experiences on major web platforms such as Facebook, but most of them stick around as users, feeling that the pros outweigh the cons. But Limited Run, a startup that makes a software platform for musicians and labels to sell physical products like vinyl records, says it has reached the final straw with its experience as a small business advertising on Facebook — and as a result is completely withdrawing its presence on the social networking platform. → Read More
Twitter shut down Independent reporter Guy Adams after he tweeted a top NBC executive’s email address. Adams has been a staunch critic of NBC’s Olympics coverage, tweeting up a storm about NBC’s factual inaccuracies and other broadcast shortcomings.
Adams tweeted the corporate email address of Gary Zenkel, President of the NBC Olympics. → Read More
The process of recruiting volunteers is a pain felt by the entire American electorate: citizens are quick to hang up on complete strangers begging for their time and campaign organizations, as a result, are perpetually short-staffed. Amicus, a Y Combinator nonprofit volunteer-recruitment platform, may have found a clever way to ensure that citizens are only contacted by trusted friends. Amicus scours public and private databases and matches names up with their volunteers’ Facebook friends, assigning volunteer outreach only to those who have a personal bond between the caller. “Amicus’ friend-to-friend connections enhance our traditional outreach program and make it easier to mobilize our supporters online,” said Jared Schwartz, Director of Digital strategies, AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S.
The heart of Amicus is an online dashboard that presents volunteers with a ready made list of friends that need to be contacted, complete with a leaderboard, badges, and other gaming elements to incentivize the thankless job of political outreach. → Read More
Facebook is taking photo curation to next level. You can now favorite your own photos to make them appear 4X larger in a revamped Photos section of your profile. The redesign that rolls out over the next few days also sees a much better navigation system that first brings you to “photos of you” or whomever’s profile you’re on, instead of a list of albums.
The update doesn’t automatically feature the most beloved photos on your Timeline based on Likes and comments, the way Google+ now does in its news feed on tablet. Still, it digitizes a natural behavior of how we interact with photos in the physical world — making big prints of our favorites. → Read More
We’ve covered them since before they existed, but now “Factory”, Berlin’s new, vast tech campus, is taking shape. As builders adapt old factory buildings (an area which will cover 107,000 square feet or 10,000 square meters), the privately-funded initiative has announced that Mozilla will become an anchor resident in the facility, which plans to house a number of startups large and small. Jim Cook, CFO of Mozilla also confirmed that Mozilla will be hiring in Berlin.
Confirmed so far are the startups 6Wunderkinder, Four Sektor, Toast, Urge iO, Views, and local tech blog Silicon Allee. But the expanding SoundCloud team will take on a large swathe of the vast amount of space available, which will feature a basketball court, gallery, conference area, cafe and – last we heard – a swimming pool. → Read More
While the eyes of the world are focused on the global competition in London at the moment, it’s still quite rare to hear of English start-up entrepreneurs able to successfully compete globally with the Yanks. But one London based entrepreneur who might buck this trend is Dan Wagner, the founder of the successful publishing platform M.A.I.D and the current chairman of Bright Station Ventures. Indeed, his latest ecommerce venture, mPowa, has been in the news recently because of accusations from Jack Dorsey’s Square that Wagner’s mPowa has been copying Square’s images in their promotional material. But when I sat down with Wagner in his central London office, he not only rejected the idea that mPowa had borrowed anything from Square but he told me that American entrepreneurs are “slightly parochial” in their approach to the increasingly global Internet marketplace. → Read More
It’s surreal to see an entire startup engineering team that could double as a troupe of volunteer firefighters. Yet, for the growing list of startups that are sending their workforce to the Navy Seal-friendly gym phenomenon, CrossFit, having an entire team of buff employees is surprisingly realistic. “We carry so much more energy throughout the the day after a workout,” says Neverware co-founder Joshua Hefter, whose entire team regularly treks down to the Black Box Crossfit Gym in New York. The startup life has “a strong culture around group activity and intensity, and we found that those two things really describe the Crossfit experience.”
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Marissa Mayer, please build us all a better Gmail over at Yahoo. Gmail is a disaster. That’s right, I said it. There’s an undercurrent of frustration surrounding Google’s webmail service, which is still growing like crazy (likely due to Android activations), but is now widely known to be “painfully slow.” The more you use it, the worse it gets. Even Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham called out Gmail as painfully slow in a recent essay detailing ambitious startup ideas, saying that if someone were to build a service that was only as good as Gmail, but fast, that alone would allow them to pull away users from Google’s service.
Despite this, what does Google do? It keeps adding bells and whistles to Gmail. Video hangouts? I don’t want video hangouts in my Gmail. I want to read my email messages. Or rather, feel free to add video hangouts to Gmail, after you fix the damned thing. → Read More
This was probably inevitable: Google today announced that it is replacing video chats in Gmail with Google+ Hangouts. The company first brought video chat to Gmail in 2008, but ever since the launch of Google+, it was only a matter of time before the company decided to replace its old video chat feature with Google+’s marquee group video chat tool. Hangouts, Google says, “utilize the power of Google’s network to deliver higher reliability and enhanced quality” and will allow Gmail users to also reach people not only when they are using Gmail, but also “if they are on Google+ in the browser or on their Android or iOS devices.” → Read More
Netflix has become a model for the cloud, developing new tools for managing apps on a cloud infrastructure. Today the company has open sourced ”chaos monkey,” its tool designed to purposely cause failure in order to increase the resiliency of an application in Amazon Web Services (AWS.)
It’s a timely move. AWS has had its fair share of outages. With tools like Chaos Monkey, companies can be better prepared when a cloud infrastructure has a failure. → Read More
After its new owners decided to go back to the drawing board and figure out what to do with the former Web 2.0 darling, Digg is relaunching on Wednesday. Today, a week after its new owner Betaworks explained why it bought the site and announced the August 1 relaunch, the company has published the first mockups and screenshots of the new Digg v1 and explained what the user experience on the site will look like. According to this announcement, the new Digg will be a “beautiful, image-friendly, and ad-free experience.”
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A milestone for Twitter today, according to the Paris-based analyst group Semiocast. The social network has now passed the half-billion account mark — specifically 517 million accounts as of July 1, 2012, with 141.8 million of those users in the U.S., still about half as many users as Facebook has but positioning it as the second-biggest social networking site.
And just as most of Twitter’s users are coming from outside the U.S., so are the tweets: the top three cities in terms of tweets, it says, are Jakarta, Tokyo and London.
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The recent results of Zygna, Groupon, and even the mighty Facebook on the public markets in the U.S. have served to highlight a couple of major issues for European startups. One is a little jealously: there remain few viable IPO markets in Europe for tech stocks, hence why you see so many moving to the US – usually NASDAQ – when they get big, as happened with Yandex and Qlik Technologies. The second is annoyance: many solid European tech companies are now at a point where they have solid, revenue generating businesses, built on a lot more than hype and user numbers alone. And in the last year we’ve seen these companies start to look for ways to break-out.
For example, there are rumours that both the incredibly successful Wonga and King.com are considering floating on New York’s NASDAQ exchange, while Mind Candy is also alleged to be considering a float for its Moshi Monsters game.
And the latest symptom of this is another rallying cry by entrepreneurs and VCs for a tech IPO market in London, the natural home for European startups to float in a global setting. → Read More
Mike Daisey, noted fabulist, is back at his original theatre in DC, The Woolly Mammoth where he is holding encore presentations of his debunked – and now slightly rewritten – show about working conditions at Foxconn. Gone are the guards with guns, the fake crippled man who touched the totemic iPad, and the real/fake translator named Cathy. Daisey replaced those stock characters with a bit of self deprecating humor and, as far as I can tell, a few, clearer facts.
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Jury selection is starting today for the patent trial between Apple and Samsung that has already resulted in the release of tons of early Apple iPhone and iPad prototypes designs. But one design holds particular interest: an iPhone concept called “Purple.” The phone isn’t actually purple (it’s white), but the big news is not the color – it’s the date of the creation. To counter Samsung’s charge that Apple copied Sony’s smartphone and Walkman designs when it created the iPhone, Apple filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California which shows the Purple concept was from 2005 – before Sony’s Nishibori Design, developed in March 2006.
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