Tech + Gadgets
Soundtracking Lets You Broadcast The Soundtrack of Your Life
How many times has a song instantly reminded you of an experience from years ago buried in the back of your brain? Maybe it was the first time that band ever blew your mind, or something you listened to during your move to a new life in a new city. With SF-grown app Soundtracking, whatever songs impact moments of your life can now be broadcast to the world via your social nets.
Y Combinator Partner Harj Taggar: "San Francisco is Becoming Silicon Valley"
Few people are better situated to evaluate the current tech boom than Harjeet Taggar, a partner at Y Combinator, which twice a year, invests a small amount of money (~$20k) in dozens of promising startups from all over the country.
The startup teams move to Silicon Valley for three months, during which YC works with them to get their companies into a position where they can appeal to investors at Demo Day, when a bunch of big-time investors show up.
During the past few funding cycles, Taggar told 7x7 that he has noticed a definite pattern.
Inkling Reinvents Textbooks as Interactive, Multimedia Learning Tools on the Tablet
When it comes to a legacy technology that badly needs to be disrupted, it's hard to imagine a better example than the college textbook.
It's big, heavy, expensive (often over $200), and -- as Matt MacInnis, CEO of the disruptive digital textbook company, Inkling, jokes -- "It's out of date before it even gets to the printer."
Students have to lug these anachronisms around in backpacks, only to read a chapter here and there as assigned by their professors. New editions appear every two or three years, rendering the older editions essentially worthless.
Second-hand bookstores do a thriving business on campuses as students try to stay within their budgets. Book-sharing, renting, and lending as well as illegal copying all occur as well.
A professor trying to teach from a core textbook in many subjects often finds it resembles the Winchester Mystery House, with chapters added on willy-nilly to a structure that originated many editions in the past, often decades ago.
A Look Inside Square's New Office Space in the Chronicle Building
Jack Dorsey's Square, which may just make old-school registers obsolete with their Square Card Readers, Square Registers and Card Cases, is HQ-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle Building on 5th and Mission. In what some might say is a changing of the guard, the start up's original 10 employees set up shop in the Chronicle's Human Resources floor in December of 2009.
Hipster or Homeless? New Website Asks to Raise Awareness About Homelessness in SF
Hipster or Homeless, an SF-grown site which launched on Monday, is the latest ammo for anyone who loves to hate hipsters. In a comic nod to ridiculous hipster fashions, the site asks you to decipher between photos of hipsters and homeless (even Rebecca Black and Jared Leto have fallen victim).
Outgoing.me Throws Dinner Parties Around Shared Interests at Local Hotspots
The Brothers Morin — Jeff and Dan — as business partners fit together like peanut butter and jam, which is a good thing because the company they've built, Outgoing.me, organizes dinners for people with shared interests to meet up and talk.
This Thursday night, for example, at the Ironside, there are still a few seats left for a chat with Dan Nguyen-Tan of Public Bikes, where the conversation will revolve around cycling and high-end design. But that's just one of six to seven dinners each week organized by the Morins and their team around themes ranging from nonprofits to photography, wine tasting, hiking and running.
"We're about helping people, especially people new to the city, to meet other interesting people like them," says Jeff Morin. "It can be hard to meet anyone outside of your workplace at first. This beats going to the bars alone on a Friday night."
With, A New Twitter-Based App That Tells People Who You're With
If you follow some of those, how do you say, "influencers," on Twitter, you may have noticed a "w/" popping up in their tweets lately. It's generated by a new app called With, a side project hammered out by the developers over at Path. For those unfamiliar with Path, it's a photo and video-sharing tool for your own private network of close family and friends that's HQ-ed in SoMa and headed up by early Facebook team member (and co-inventor of Facebook Connect) Dave Morin.
Old Meets New: A Rotary Dial Cell Phone
A main theme behind steampunk design is trying to discover how products would look today if technology advanced, but never quite changed, from its late 19th century aesthetic. Hence, a cell phone with a rotary dial. Designer Richard Clarkson has created the Rotary Mechanical Smartphone that features two interchangeable brass dials (a true rotary dial and a button dial.)
Salon CEO Gingras Resigns to Become Global Head of News Products at Google
The CEO of Salon.com, Richard Gingras, held an emotional "all-hands" meeting with his staff today to tell them he is resigning, effective July 8th, to become global head of news products for Google.
Over the past two years, Gingras has retooled the San Francisco-based quality content site into a leaner operation with significantly higher traffic, but still has not been able to propel the company to profitability.
Since its founding in 1995 (Disclosure: I worked as a consultant with the founding team), Salon has consistently provided high-quality, award-winning coverage of politics, entertainment and the arts, but it has never reached the break-even point financially.
StudySync, An "MTV Meets Yale" Social Learning Tool Being Evaluated by SF Unified School District
By 2001, writer, educator and entrepreneur Robert Romano had already developed and sold a successful educational software company when he refocused his attention on raising his kids and writing a novel.
Meanwhile, as any parent can attest, the technological environment our kids are growing up in is radically disrupting the way they perceive the world around them, and changing the way they learn.
With his background in literature and writing, Romano found it difficult to see his son put off his summer reading (which included Walden) in favor of movies and video games until it was almost time to go back to school.
So he decided to try and do something about it. The result is a brand new educational product called StudySync, which is, in essence, a collaborative social learning tool that uses high-end videos and other interactive multimedia features to make books like the 19th-century classic by Thoreau more accessible to a 21st-century kid on his iPhone.
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