Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield. Even though we will have brand-new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant co...  show all text

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After weeks of speculation, online video creator Machinima announced Monday that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Google, which also included existing investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. The new financing comes as Google’s YouTube has been investing heavily in bringing in all sorts of new original programming. The Machinima network is the largest single page view generator for YouTube, with more than 1.6 billion video views in the month of April. And YouTube is an invalu...  show all text

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The sophistication of federal lawmakers' speech patterns is on the decline, with members of Congress now talking, on average, at the level of high school sophomores. According to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation, Congress has fallen by almost a full grade-level since 2005.

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Startups like SocialCam and Viddy, two of the fastest growing social networks for sharing video on smartphones, may be on a collision course with Google-owned YouTube. While initial indicators are far from conclusive, rumblings of a possible market tsunami are afoot. From January to March, people spent 10% less time watching YouTube videos online, while users of mobile video apps increased their viewing time by 52%, according to San Francisco-based Flurry, a mobile advertising and analytics pla...  show all text

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Apple's Siri has been transforming how people interact with their phones. It taught us that it's not just OK to talk to our phones, but that, in many cases, it's actually a more useful way to get things done. Along those same lines, a company called Saygent is launching a mobile feedback solution which developers can insert into their application to collect feedback from the app's users. Available as an SDK for easy integration, the toolkit can be used within any type of application. But Saygen...

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About.Me is set to get a bit more social. The AOL-owned property just released a public API and SDK into the wild in partnership with Reputation.com, Smarterer, Forkly, Kred and Showyou. While the online profile site already worked with most popular social platforms, today’s announcement is huge for both about.me and their legions of users. Plus, for attendees of Disrupt NYC this week, the company is celebrating the news by having a professional photographer on hand to help create free killer p...  show all text

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This article is by David Armano, executive VP, Global Innovation & Integration at Edelman. In the wake of Facebook's IPO, and despite where the stock goes from here, one thing is clear: Entrepreneurs--especially successful ones--are the new rock stars of business culture. Despite this trend, the reality remains that for [...]

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Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups...at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters.The problem of too much social data and too little discoverab...

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greenlight for girls presents Greenlight@OSCON Days 2012 -- Wednesday, July 18, 2012 | Thursday, July 19, 2012 -- Portland, OR

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We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregi

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Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf on Monday warned that Internet freedom is under threat from governments around the world, including the United States. Cerf, a computer scientist who was instrumental in the Internet’s creation, now employed by Google as its Internet evangelist, said officials in the U.

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While entrepreneurs and venture capitalists waste their time on me-too projects, it's refreshing to find a standout start-up called DIY. It is developing a do-it-yourself community for children that is like Never Never Land. Children learn to make things, fun things.

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We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregi

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The idea behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is pretty simple - break programming work down into bite-sized chunks, and put it in front of a large workforce that can do the work quickly and cheaply. Part of the challenge of that is making it easy for requesters to create the bites that workers are chewing on. The new categorization app from Amazon removes some of the hurdles of creating HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that ask workers to pick the best category for items. The result could make the c...  show all text

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(Bryan Rhoads, Editor-in-Chief of iQ at Intel’s offices in the Presidio, San Francisco.) I met the team responsible for this week’s launch of ‘iQ by Intel’, an online magazine featuring daily news and feature articles from around the globe plus original content from Intel. The magazine is curated by Intel employees, choosing and sharing articles from a river of media content surfaced by special tools developed by Intel. I was pleased to hear Bryan Rhoads, the mastermind behind the project, and ...  show all text

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About.me lets you quickly build simple and visually elegant splash pages that points visitors to your content from around the web. Get started today.

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I’m proud to tell everyone that two of your regular writers here, me and Nichole Kelly, have decided to merge our companies to form a new digital marketing agency. It will be a division of Social Media Explorer called SME Digital. Nichole is now the president of our new effort to combine forces. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help your company with strategy and implementation of social media and digital marketing to produce measures that connect with the three things that matter: sal...  show all text

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Facebook shares dropped more than 13 percent to $33.14 -- below the company's final $38 price in the company's highly anticipated initial public offering last week. Today is an interesting test for Facebook's worth because the company's shares will no longer be supported as heavily by the IPO's lead underwriter Morgan Stanley.Facebook's performance today may further stoke the debate over whether its IPO was priced well. To save face on Friday, Morgan Stanley had to step in to make sure that Fac...

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The Atavist, which helps produce multimedia storytelling for digital devices, has a content management system that has turned into a business opportunity.

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Kicking off our series on People, I am going to talk about the importance of culture and fit in the hiring process. What I have to say on this topic is mostly aimed at companies that are going from five employees to five hundred employees, but I do believe it is applicable to companies of all sizes. I want to start with something I wrote in another MBA Mondays post, on the management team: Companies are not people. But they are comprised of people. And the people side of the business is harder ...  show all text

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Share your Search. Rediscover search through your friends and community on the all new social search experiment from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs.

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Editor’s note: Dan Scholnick is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures where he invests in early stage cloud computing and consumerized IT companies such as New Relic, dotCloud, StackMob, Cloudscaling, and Loggly. You can read more about Dan at the Trinity Ventures website or follow him on Twitter @dschol. He is not an investor in Facebook, though he wishes he were. Judging by many of the headlines on Friday, you might think that Facebook’s IPO was a miserable failure.  The Wall Street Journal d...  show all text

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Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip. Congratulations to Facebook for going public. Congratulations to the employees that are now millionaires. Congratulations to the founders who are now billionaires. Congratulations to the bankers, lawyers and investors who have added to their already considerable wealth. You’ve grasped the brass ring we’...  show all text

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A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only just in time. It was exactly the tonic I needed after my inability to get excited about the Facebook  show all text

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To help make sense of the Facebook IPO, we caught up with Steve Blank, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. This conversation has been edited and condensed. THOMPSON: What does the Facebook IPO mean for Silicon Valley? BLANK: I think it's the beginning of the end of the valley as we know it. Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology, and, you know, actual silicon. If you were a good VC you could make $100 million. Now ther...  show all text

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Maykah Inc. is raising funds for Roominate: Make It Yours! on Kickstarter! The toy where every young girl is an artist, engineer, architect and visionary!

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