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It’s just weird. It’s weird that Justin Timberlake – he formerly of *NSync and having sex with Britney Spears – is currently spending his days pretending to be the guy who founded Plaxo. It’s also just weird that – along with Shawn Fanning’s pivotal cameo in the blasphemous remake of the Italian Job – both of the founders of Napster have now been key plot points in major Hollywood movies.
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Here’s a bizarre use for Microsoft’s “Flash-killer” Silverlight—a ballistics calculator. Yes, Silverlight is being used to build an application that lets shooting and hunting enthusiasts “customize shooting conditions” while comparing Winchester-made bullets. Winchester’s Ballistics Calculator lets gun users choose their type of ammunition and then compare up to five different bullet types with charts and graphs. You can enter specific conditions like wind speed and outside temperature, maximum range, direction, speed and height.
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Cloudera has seen some pretty amazing growth for a year-old startup. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, Cloudera commercially distributes and services Hadoop. It’s similar in theory to Red Hat’s distribution of Linux. At tomorrow’s Hadoop World: NYC, Cloudera is announcing “Cloudera Desktop” a uni?ed graphical user interface for Hadoop applications that includes tools for job and cluster management.
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It’s October, which means its time for the Donors Choose Social Media Challenge, wherein web and social media folks get together and raise money for kids in need of educational equipment in the classroom. This year Mashable is joining in the fun: we want to help kids get a start in social media. We think it’s super-important that kids have the tools they need to become media-literate, creating the next generation of young content creators.
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Cliqset, a Friend-Feed-like online identity platform has gone through several iterations but perhaps third time is a charm. Cliqset’s most recent platform tried to stitch together the social web by allowing users and developers build, organize and share social information across a wide variety of services. Similar to Friend-Feed and other social media aggregators, users could merge and share status updates, location, photos, and more into one platform.
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We’ve waxed poetic about Apple’s mythical Tablet recently (and even seen some more evidence to support it). But Microsoft, too, has a rather attractive looking tablet-like device in the speculative stages as well: the Courier.
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TC50 DemoPit company AskYourTargetMarket is hoping to simplify market research for businesses and solutions by offering a comprehensive platform where businesses can both create and deploy surveys. Since the site is in closed beta, AskYourTargetMarket has offered 500 invites for TechCrunch readers.
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37signals founder Jason Fried probably had the post of the day today mocking Twitter’s $1 billion valuation on its latest rumored round of funding. The post, titled “PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT” is very funny. But it’s also disingenuous. By way of sarcasm, Fried raises a number of points. But the key ones he hits on are valuations, revenues (or lack thereof), business models, and hype. And he chose an easy target in Twitter, which has no shortage of naysayers who simply cannot believe the amount of funding and valuation the service keeps getting. But Fried undoubtedly knows how the game is played, and by picking on the current “it” company, a few people noted that his post looked more like a case of sour grapes. But his points are still definitely worth talking about. Valuations Fried jokes that 37signals is valued $100 billion based on a group of people who are paying $1 for 0.000000001% of the company. His point is that valuations based on investments are ridiculous. But that’s not entirely true. Certainly some are — Microsoft’s investment in Facebook that pumped its valuation to $15 billion is a great example. But the key point there is that Microsoft wasn’t making an investment in Facebook hoping to get rich when the company eventually has an exit. Rather, it was making a small (1.6%) strategic investment mainly to keep Google away. At the time, everyone went mad over the $15 billion number, but it was never realistic to begin with.
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Normally, when you use Twitter’s search service, you can avoid clicking shortened URLs blindly – which is a security risk – by expanding them and taking a look at where they’ll be taking you exactly.
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Ever wondered which US state receives the most spam? According to Symantec’s MessageLabs, it’s Idaho, where 93.
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