Dragon stout: good reward for braving black Friday in NYC
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Google Brings Local Business Coupons to U.S. Mobile Users
Printable coupons have long been available on Google Maps, but - let's face it - more and more consumers have abandoned the desktop/printer paradigm for a more mobile/digital approach to search, on-the-go directions, and local business research.
Product manager Alex Gawley wrote on the Google Mobile blog, "With more of you going mobile to search for this information, it makes sense for coupons to go mobile too... We hope you find these mobile coupons useful and that they help you save money, trees (fewer printed coupons), and your hands (from paper cuts) when you're on the go."
Place Pages for the desktop have also been revamped to ensure that mobile and printed coupons will share a common look and feel, regardless of the device, the OS, or the browser in which they originated.
It will be interesting to hear and read post-holiday metrics and success (or "opportunity for improvement") stories about these new mobile coupons. While we certainly hope the setup will allow users to quickly and conveniently engage with the world around them - and we likewise hope local retailers can reach out to customers wherever they are - we wonder how many quickly the coupons will take off and how much users will be inclined to use them.
Would you redeem a mobile coupon you found through Google search, and under what circumstances or conditions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
via readwriteweb.com
Friday, November 20, 2009
Nasdaq Capitalization as a % of GDP | The Big Picture
via ritholtz.com
Disturbing. Empiricism doesn't work well if your observational history has all been an aberration.
Twitter and Facebook Client Brizzly Now Open to All
Brizzly is a web-based Twitter and Facebook client that has been gaining some momentum and buzz over the past couple months.
It has some slick features like being able to view photos and videos in-line in your TwitterTwitter
stream, threaded DMs, and built-in photo uploading. It also recently added support for Twitter Lists. However, it’s remained in invite-only mode. That changes today though, as BrizzlyBrizzly
is flipping the switch and allowing anyone to sign up for an account.
The company tells us that they’ll “still be in beta for a bit, which just means we’ll be continuing to experiment as usual.” One of those experiments, which launches today, is on-the-fly translation of tweets, which in theory lets you follow people who tweet in different languages and have them translated into your language of choice in your stream.Brizzly is trying to compete in a very crowded space, but have an exceptionally strong team including Jason Shellen, who worked at Bloggerblogger
with Evan Williams, and Chris Wetherell, who’s credited with having created Google ReaderGoogle Reader
. Today, the company also announced they’ve added another ex-Googler to the mix, Ben Darnell, who was most recently working for FacebookFacebook
via the social network’s acquisition of FriendFeed.
If you’re not yet familiar with the product, this video gives a brief overview:
Let us know what you think of Brizzly in the comments.
via mashable.com
This looks pretty interesting. Definitely would love to see more Google Reader like functionality in this space.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
More Details On SimpleGeo, The AWS For Location
This morning at Under the Radar, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan are taking the stage to unveil SimpleGeo, their new infrastructure for location based services. We’ve been following the company over the last few months and uncovered some basic details earlier, but this marks the first time the founders are talking about the company in public.
SimpleGeo is akin to an ‘Amazon Web Services’ for location: developers looking to integrate location based services (LBS) can plug into some simple APIs and SimpleGeo will do most of the legwork for them. The startup originated as a gaming company, but after spending four months building out their location platform, Stump and Galligan realized they had stumbled across an opportunity: location is soon going to become an expected feature in many applications, and there’s no reason developers should have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to include the feature. SimpleGeo is looking to do it for them.
I spoke with Galligan last night, who says that one of the ways SimpleGeo could help spur radical change in location based services has to do with real-time (incidentally, he’ll be speaking at our Real-Time CrunchUp tomorrow). Galligan says that the technologies currently used to process real-time data can’t cope with the rapid read/write operations required as a LBS scales. In other words, these technologies simply weren’t built with real time in mind (he says this is one reason why companies like Foursquare have partitioned their users by city). SimpleGeo, Galligan says, was built from the ground up to support real-time on a much broader scale.
SimpleGeo is currently in a private beta (you can apply to join from a form on their homepage), with plans to roll out broadly early next year. The service will be available for free to apps just getting started, and paid packages will kick in as they hit scale (the more API calls you use the more you’ll pay).
For more details, check out the slides below.
Website: simplegeo.com Location: Boulder, Colorado, United States Founded: May, 2009 Funding: $195k SimpleGeo (formerly CrashCorp) provides ready-to-use solutions for enabling location in applications. The company was founded in May 2009 by Joe Stump and Matt Galligan. Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
via techcrunch.com
Friday, November 13, 2009
Why Nice Flys Get The Girls
via sciencedaily.com
This is great on two levels:
First a very entertaining anthropomorphism. The biggest jerks will get the girls when you are locked in a group of 100 in high school, but when you grow up, women have more of a chance to choose their mating venue. Douchebags may still reign in the confines of a bar, but the best girls may not hang out in said bar....
Second, it's a nice example of multilevel selection. It always seemed likely to me that natural selection operates on different levels. Technically it has to, and some of those levels will produce significant selection pressure in certain cases. When outlined this as a freshman to certain famous Harvard Biologists, they scoffed at me. I wonder if they have changed their tune since...
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Gene Therapy : Diabled HIV used to treat brain disease
Pretty fascinating: putting the power of HIV to work for good. You have to admire the incredible efficiency of viruses.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Junk Food Diet Causes Rats’ Brain Pleasure Centers To Become Progressively Less Responsive
ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2009) — Brain pleasure centers became progressively less responsive in rats fed a diet of high-fat, high-calorie food, a new study has found. As the changes occurred, the rats developed compulsive overeating habits -- and became obese. The overeating continued even when it meant the rats had to endure an unpleasant consequence (a mild foot shock) in order to consume the food.
The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
The researchers also found that as the activity of the brain's pleasure centers decreased, the rats became less likely to eat a well-balanced, nutritious diet -- even when the less palatable healthy food was the only food available to them.
"Not only did we find that the animals' brain reward circuits became less responsive as they continued to overeat and become obese," said senior author Paul J. Kenny, PhD, of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., "but that decrease in responsiveness was similar to what our laboratory has seen previously in rats as they become addicted to cocaine or heroin. The data suggest that obesity and addiction may result from common neuroadaptations," he said.
The finding may have implications for humans, as the diets fed the rats (unlimited access to such high-caloric foods as bacon, sausage, cheesecake, and chocolate) were similar to those of millions of people who live in developed countries. Such diets are considered a major contributing factor to the current obesity epidemic in the United States.
Research was supported by Bank of America, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and The Landenberger Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by Society for Neuroscience.Email or share this story:
via sciencedaily.com
Sadly I think I have a lot in common with these rats. Speaking of which...time or me to eat some cheese.
Bad Driving May Have Genetic Basis, Study Finds
via sciencedaily.com
Is bad driving in the genes? I am always skeptical of these studies, but they are nevertheless fun to read about....
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