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Reddit community member elmstreeter’s mother passed away this week, and yesterday he turned to the social news site to create a photographic memento: his last photo with his mom had her breathing tubes obscuring her face, and he wanted them removed. He wrote in a posting to the site: My mother died of cancer yesterday. This is the last picture of us together and I wondered if anyone with mad Photoshop skills could touch up the picture and remove the oxygen cannula. I would greatly appreciate anyone who could be of assistance.
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It has been a busy week for our former partners on the CrunchPad. The company has deleted their corporate blog, taken the time to hire a PR firm and schedule an event Monday morning to “give their side of the story.” They still have not returned our calls or emails. But they have spoken to press, and say that their side of the story has two key elements. First, that none of this was a surprise and we knew they were likely to break ties with us. And second that TechCrunch hasn’t done anything to help build the CrunchPad and therefore has no rights to the device.
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Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary. It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you’re logged in, you can star a word for future reference. The new dictionary obviously isn’t good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.
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Just before Thanksgiving we broke the news that Canopy Financial was cooking its books. Everyone involved tried to point the finger to someone else. Well, now the SEC has weighed in with lawsuit alleging fraud on the part of Canopy and one of its co-founders Jeremy Blackburn, who was the COO. He misled investors about Canopy’s financial condition when raising a $75 million round. When the fund-raising was complete, he paid off existing investors to the tune of $40 million, and took about $1.7 million for himself, according to the complaint (embedded below).
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BillShrink, the startup that looks to help users save money across verticals including cell phones, credit cards, and savings accounts, has just announced that it has grown to 1 million members since its launch in April 2008. Alongside the milestone, the site is also announcing that it has found “$1 billion in savings on everyday bills”. That second statistic is a little confusing. BillShrink basically means that if its users had signed up for the top matches generated by its cost cutting tools, they would have saved a total of $1 billion.
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Whenever you want to take a reading of the current zeitgeist, popular search terms can tell you a lot about what’s on people’s minds. Right now, for instance, the hottest search terms on Google Trends include “lakewood police shooting,” “tiger woods mistress,” “surviving Christmas,” and “cyber monday 2009 deals.” If you look at Trending Topics on Twitter, however, you’ll see “#isitme,” “Google Wave,” and “Soul Train Awards.
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One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”. Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”. Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”.
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The year is 1963. It’s November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.” Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in. Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It’s just a matter of time.
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As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map. 4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map.
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The relationship between sports and social media is unique. On any given day Sunday an NFL football player’s tweet will get him released from the team, and yet the next day a basketball superstar will handsomely reward his one millionth Twitter follower. Such is the nature of a platform that supports real-time updates from athletes.
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