Watch this interview with 16 year-old Wimbledon start-up kid
TechCrunch has interviewed the 16 year-old Wimbledon kid that has snagged $300,000 from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing for his start-up. The start-up itself does something boring – summarising text into small briefs – but the guy is unbelievably self-possessed.
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Forget SOPA, it's ACTA that people in the UK need to worry about
Call it the Americanisation of fear. Last week the Internets went black, or tweeted themselves silly over two proposed laws in the US Congress that would empower the US Justice Department to remove websites from search engines and to force ISPs to create ‘black holes’ of unsites, all without a trial involved. As scary as that sounds – we don’t live in the US.
No, the last grasp of a dying business model for certain media industries that affects the UK is ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which is being worked on at the EU level. Watch this cute video to see how it works. Michael Geist is a good resources to keep up to date.
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“The tentacles of Tech City are already starting to reach out towards Dalston and Hackney Wick”
Eric Van Der Kleij, CEO of Tech City, paints a terrifying picture of East London’s future, in which super-fast broadband cables ensnare innocent hipsters in a terrifying death grip.
It’s from a typo-strewn but well reported write up of yesterday’s Economy, Culture and Sport Committee at City Hall. Sounds boring, but isn’t. This stuff could change the face of the city over the next decade, so pay attention.
Gabriella Griffith at Londonlovesbusiness – The debate: Is Tech City working?
“That hijacking of your navigation around the web is the kind of action taken by malware. It’s pushy, manipulative and user-hostile”
Marshal Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a good post on why Facebook telling you what Guardian articles your friends are reading is dangerous and wrong, as well as being really really annoying.
Oh Wow, Oh Wow, Oh Wow
— The final words of Steve Jobs, as related by his sister Mona Simpson in this lovely eulogy. Simpson, who was born after Jobs was sent away for adoption, was told as an adult that her brother was found and that he was rich and from California. She hoped he would turn out to be John Travolta.
Free software evangelist Richard Stallman is looking for speaking gigs in the UK next week. If you want him, he’ll possibly speak for free, but there is a 9,000 word rider that you’ll need to deal with. For example, “If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too. DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.”
Source: MySociety.org
Tech Job Opening Alert: Government Minister of Tweets and Nude Female Web Coders
Two extraordinary job openings today in the burgeoning field of the internet that we wanted to give our readers a heads up on, seeing as how we imagine most of you to be job-seeking web experts.
The first of the two listings is strictly for the nudist female sub-set of our readership. Oh, that’s all of you? Are you also professional web coders who are looking for a “warm and private” and naked working environment to ply this trade at? Of course you are? Well then, look no further than Nude-House, the incredibly cutting edge looking and only naked women hiring “software development” company. Since this doesn’t sound like a scam and/or a pathway to becoming a virtual sex worker at all, here’s the job description so you know how to accurately tailor your resumes.
We need a number of nude web coders to work on preliminary web pages for customers using the toolkit of facilities we provide them. The work is totally dependant on the customers having a need but you never meet the customers and they will not not know you are nude. We will pay you £2,000 each month for 5 full days per week.
Notice the strange absence of quotation marks around the words “customers,” “using,” “toolkit,” “facilities,” “provide,” and “pay.”
Next up is the far less skill intensive, substantially higher paying, somewhat less nude and definitely more prestigious position of Government Minister of Twitter, or as they’re calling it, Executive Digital Director.
The job, which requires applicants to have at least 50,000 Twitter followers, would involve srategically using the Facebook “poke” feature, posting TwitPics of David Cameron thinking about things that rhyme with socks, and would pay £142k annually (wow).
While the job itself seems exciting, cutting edge and hypercuttingedge, the job description is one of the most God awful, eye-watering jargon dumps we’ve ever seen in our lives, and basically takes all the fun out of the internet.
The successful candidate will have proven credibility in transformation through the delivery of digital channels and engagement together with a track record of leading digitally enabled change at a strategic level, in a large federated organisation with complex delivery chains.
Sounds like the government could also use a few more naked web coders in its life, because SNOOZE, that was the most boring and long winded way to say “must be able to use Tweet Deck” imaginable.
Google Needs to Stop With the Social — Now
Google. You all know what it is and does — introductions are not needed. But are you equally familiar with Orkut? I sure am not. It’s some social network Google introduced a while ago… if you click on the “more” tab in your Gmail, and then click on the “even more” option under it, you can find Orkut. I have no idea what it does — in Google’s words it’s something to “meet new people and stay in touch with friends.” What a novel idea.
Orkut, probably due to it’s angular and unappealing name, never made a splash (I hear it’s popular in Brazil — honestly). Neither, a few years later, did something Google very poorly rolled out called Buzz. Remember Buzz? Probably the most bungled product Google ever introcuded that for all I know may not even exist anymore since I disabled it after one hour when Google let every person I’d ever emailed know way too much about me by accident? Yeah, that didn’t go too well for Google either.
But like Microsoft before it, Google seems ill content to stick with what it does best, and let its competitors do the same. Granted, Google has managed to do a lot of things well, but at this point its safe to say that “social” has been their one stumbling block — possibly because Facebook is already so damn good at it.
But also just like Microsoft before it, Google isn’t going to stop trying and trying. Today, they continue that miserable trend with the “+1” button — an apparent competitor with the Facebook “like” button. Great.
This button will nestle right in with the dozen or so other buttons (I’ve seen websites with 300+ buttons next to the “share” section — not kidding) already crowding up pages. Now, in addition to being able to like, tweet, reddit, fark, stumble upon, digg, etc. a thing on the internet, you’ll also be able to “+1” it. Thank you Google for filling this void!
Rumors abound that Google is working on yet another full on Facebook challenger, and this first little toe dangle precedes a much larger impending splash. With Facebook getting about 900 billion page views a month, it’s not hard to see why this territory is so enticing. As the internet has proved time and time again, there is always room for competition, and holding on to the top spot forever is very hard to do, if not impossible. But as Google’s social blunders have piled up over the years, it seems fair to assume that when Facebook’s eventual challenger does inevitably emerge, it won’t come from a company whose name rhymes with Lougle.
Huffington Post Set to Drastically Impact Our Lives, Launch UK Edition
The Huffington Post’s success is perplexing. Launched in 2005 as a liberal answer to US aggregation sites like The Drudge Report, the only thing more confusing than it’s popularity is its editorial strategy. Stories are featured at random, with little consistency or clues as to why. They have a section devoted to pretty much everything — from sports to tech to divorce — none of which are comprehensive enough to satisfy more than a very casual reader’s interests.
And yet, it is the #1 blog on the internet.
It would take an idiot to question the Huffington Posts’s content strategy — mostly because its success has been astronomical and unparalleled. When was the last time something you made got bought for $315 million? The fact that it’s happened with a relatively minimal amount of original content being created is all the more impressive. Or enraging, depending on how you look at things.
And this summer, with a UK version of the site just announced, you’ll be able to be impressed or enraged depending on how you look at things in a whole new way. What to expect from the British edition? Probably the exact same thing you get with the US edition — an incoherent editorial strategy coupled with insightful news commentary from people almost always have no right whatsoever to be commenting on the news — otherwise known as the future of content on the internet. Yay.
ANTI-GAY APPLE CENSORSHIP IPHONE
Update: Apple Pulls Anti-Gay iPhone App
Bowing to the requests of tens of thousands of petition signers, Apple has decided to remove a controversial anti-gay iPhone app from their online store. The app, developed by Christian gay-haters Exodus International, had attracted the ire of many on the internet for continuing to propagate the fallacy that homosexuality is a curable disease.
And now it’s gone! Which is great news for all anti-bigots the world over.
As we said previously, Apple’s habit of censoring its app store is a horrible one. But at least in this case they’re censoring something that we vehemently disagree with. Censorship, it would seem, isn’t so bad when it’s working in your favour.
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