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.
A self-described iPhone freak, designer Norma Kamali spends each morning reading the day’s headlines on her gadget’s current-events application. To unwind, she plays Scrabble on a game app. When her miniature dachshund Zeke acts up, Ms. Kamali looks up her iPhone’s encyclopedia on canine ailments.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
A month ahead of its release, Susan Boyle’s album has more advance orders on Amazon.com than any CD in the retailer’s history, it said.
The Sony album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.
Most angel investors dream of home-run exits, funneling seed capital into young start-ups with hopes they’ll turn into Google, YouTube or even Mint.com. But the Band of Angels, an angel group flush with its third fund, believes there’s mighty value in later-stage companies and smaller acquisition prices.
When it comes to social-networking sites, women are more plugged in than men, according to data analysis by Brian Solis, president of Silicon Valley public-relations firm Future Works.
Mr. Solis used Google Ad Planner to determine the gender breakdown of users signed up for the most popular social-networking sites and found that in most cases, women outnumbered men. “The point of interest that’s worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule,” he wrote.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer emphasized Windows 7’s cost benefits Tuesday, saying businesses can expect to save $90 to $160 per computer annually with the soon-to-launch operating system.
His speech was directed to corporate customers, and he avoided the dancing and iPhone demolition that have made his prior appearances viral hits on YouTube and the blogosphere.
A new front has opened in the digital age’s war on copyright infringement. Israeli Internet surfers – used to uploading video clips of local musicians onto YouTube – discovered a few weeks ago that Unicell, a company which represents the digital rights of, among others, Sarit Hadad, Regev Hod, Koby Peretz and Lior Narkis, had closed their user accounts on the site, claiming copyright abuse.
Microsoft Corp. has closed the technological gap with Adobe Systems Inc. in a battle over software for adding video and animation to Web sites. But Microsoft’s efforts to win customers in the market are moving much slower.
Tech CEOs spend a lot of time taking questions in front of the camera. Lately, eBay’s top boss John Donahoe has been spending some time behind one.
Amid a turnaround effort at eBay’s online marketplace, he has been meeting with the company’s merchants and taping the conversations with a Flip camcorder.
SB Nation, the network of sporting sites owned by Sportsblogs Inc., is getting a makeover focused on real-time updates, a bid to increase traffic between its Web properties.
The redesign went into effect late Wednesday and includes a “storystream,” similar to Facebook’s news feed, that wraps up articles, blog posts, videos and other content about hot topics like Melanie Oudin’s U.S. Open advance and Brady Quinn’s starting for the Browns on Sunday. Editors monitor news outlets, Twitter feeds and SB Nation’s sites for each storystream and keep them frequently updated, said Jim Bankoff, the company’s chief executive.
Remember “Don’t Copy That Floppy,” the anti-software-piracy video that warned ’90s-era kids away from copyright infringement?
The nearly 10-minute clip features two classroom gamers who flirt with making a duplicate disk so they can continue playing after school. A rapper appears onscreen and tells them the error of their ways.
YouTube, CBS, NBC, ABC are going to have an awful lot in common in the not too distant future.
Google Inc.’s YouTube is in discussions with major movie studios about allowing users to stream movies on a rental basis, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, marking one of the video giant’s first moves towards charging for content instead of making it available for free with advertising.
In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library’s first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today’s discoveries and better understand the people who made them.
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