A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: A video visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Chris Wetherell and his creation, Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.
Earlier this week, we told you about a project by real-estate site Zillow.com to use their data to figure out which are the best neighborhoods to hit on the trick-or-treat circuit.
Initially, Zillow’s Trick or Treat Index was only available for Seattle and Los Angeles. But after being inundated by blog interest and requests for additional data, Zillow added lists of the top candy-harvesting neighborhoods in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston.
Next week, hundreds of high-tech’s most geekiest participants will flock to San Francisco for the Intel Developer Forum, better known as IDF. But one of their most prominent cheerleaders will not be there.
Patrick Gelsinger, a senior vice president who also served in the past as Intel’s chief technology officer, says he will then be in Hopkinton, Mass., starting his new job at data storage giant EMC.
Google’s experiments to help the publishing industry adapt the Web continue.
In April, the company introduced an interactive news timeline, newstimeline.googlelabs.com, that displays summaries of news articles chronologically and allows users to slice and dice their view by source.
Last week, it disclosed its plans to help publishers earn money, saying it was working on improving its payment service to help publishers charge for their content online.
The “Web toy” is hot. Who cares how Twitter will make money?
While much of the tech sector has fallen on hard times during the recession, the videogame industry has thrived, as penny-pinching consumers look for lower-cost entertainment. Why go out when a family of four can buy a videogame and get 50 hours of entertainment out of it?
Virtual worlds have had some real problems. Google, for instance, recently shut down an animated environment called Lively only five months after it was announced. And Linden Lab, whose Second Life online community was once front-page news, has neither reached many mainstream consumers nor created an important meeting place for corporate users.
The footage is shaky and low quality, with chaotic shouts and protests from onlookers at a subway station in San Francisco’s East Bay. But it clearly shows three policeman roughly handling a group of young men–including one who is pinned to the ground by two officers and shot in the back.
Steve Jobs didn’t show up to the first Macworld Expo, which was held in San Francisco in January 1985, one year after the introduction of the Macintosh. He was in the city, but he spent most of his time holed up at the Union Square Hyatt Hotel with his strikingly beautiful blond girlfriend, whom I only knew as Tina.
Tokyo is currently the largest city of origin of Twitter messages in the world, more than twice that of second place San Francisco and New York in the U.S. as of this summer. (Incidentally, while the Japanese Kanji language Twitter service, which only launched in April of this year, contains advertising, the rest of the planet’s Twitter service currently does not).
Why is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7×7.
Vroom, vroom, vroom: I was driving south on 280 from San Francisco late this afternoon and found myself following an ultra-cool dark-colored Tesla (I think it was dark green. Maybe black.) with a piece of blue duct tape on the rear bumper. And, oh my, that car was flying.
More risk remains for Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom, the two leading providers of personal navigation devices. That’s the conclusion of Pablo Perez-Fernandez, an analyst at Global Crown Capital, in San Francisco. Perez-Fernandez picked up coverage of both companies this morning with an Underweight rating, asserting that both stocks could drop 20 percent or more over the next six months.
Apple’s much-anticipated “Let’s Rock” media event yesterday featured a group of largely expected announcements on updates to iTunes, the iPod Nano and the iPod Touch that left investors distinctly uninspired.
The third annual WordCamp San Francisco was held this past weekend, bringing together WordPress users and developers to discuss the past, present and future of their favorite Web publishing platform. Since its humble beginnings as a fork of the b2\cafelog blog software in 2003, WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular blog publishing platforms.
This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."
We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.
The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.
That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.
So here is exactly what we do:
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
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