Friday, April 3, 2009
Why Bit.ly Will Upstage Digg
Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company.
Yesterday, New York-based start-up incubator Betaworks raised $2 million in funding for its URL-shortener project, Bit.ly, and spun it out as an independent company.
I don’t often look to movies about beer for poignant macroeconomic commentary, but as February ended with an 8.1 percent unemployment rate (and rising), a line from “Strange Brew” struck me as particularly relevant. As they’re introduced to their new jobs as the only two workers on the bottling line, the Mackenzie brothers are told: “Welcome to 1984, the age of automation and unemployment. The rise of the machine and the fall of man. The end of the human era.”
As 2008 takes its final breaths, I am sitting in my apartment, which is enveloped in a thick fog that’s hiding both the ugly high-rises and the beauty that is the San Francisco Bay. The fog is also muting the sounds of the city–a good enough reason as any to ponder the year that was.
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