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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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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Something is clearly rotten in our Republic. Americans are disillusioned with the political system and angry as hell. They feel like outsiders in their own nation, powerless over their own lives, blocked from having a real voice in how they are governed. But all of this can change. Lawrence Lessig, the renowned Harvard Law School professor and political activist presents a user-friendly, bipartisan manifesto for revolution just when we need it the most. His audaciously simple solution? Kill po...

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You know those huge multichannel mixers--the massive boards that audio engineers manage during concerts to control everything from sound to lights? It’s the sort of highly specialized hardware that the average person would never come into contact with, because why would they? But what if you could just draw it? That’s the idea behind the SketchSynth, by Carnegie Mellon student Billy Keyes. It allows you to draw your own specialized piece of sound hardware--in this case, a MIDI board--on any ran...

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Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. More »

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An ode to the father of the electric age. View

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This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today: Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit.  Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices ke...  show all text

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All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up. Time spent on Facebook’s mobile site and apps per month (441 minutes) has finally surpassed usage of its classic website (391 minutes) — for Americans who use both Facebook interfaces according to the latest report from comScore. And that’s actually a big problem for the social network. Facebook usually shows four to seven ads per page on its website, but only a few ads p...  show all text

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When Eduardo Saverin was 13, his family discovered that his name had turned up on a list of victims to be kidnapped by Brazilian gangs. Saverin’s father was a wealthy businessman in São Paulo, and it was inevitable that he’d attract this kind of unwanted attention. Now the family had to make a permanent decision. They hastily arranged a move out of the country. And of all the places in the world they could move to, the Saverin family saw only one option. They took their talents to Miami. Would ...  show all text

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Facebook’s founder will soon face the unfamiliar landscape of running a public company, monitored by a merciless stock market.

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Gina Trapani says the technology companies that promote a culture of frat house fun will lose out in attracting the smartest people.

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Mark Zuckerberg is known for having arrived late for a meeting with prospective investor Sequoia Capital and giving a less-than-serious pitch while wea

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#BigData – Twitter Influencers We are aimed at becoming an authority on business innovation and want to help you identify the top influencers so you can follow the latest trends, news and opinions of these influencers in the field of Big Data. We’ll be publishing more lists on cloud computing, analytics and enterprise mobility in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here is the list of Top 50 Big Data Influencers on Twitter. Note: Big Data Twitter influencers were determined based on tweeted topi...  show all text

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Airtime looks to be finally ready for takeoff, as Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s stealth video startup just put up a blog stating “We look forward to saying hello on June 5th. Sign up to be first in line.” Airtime took a limited round of pre-registrations last month but is now letting people sign up for early beta access. No one’s sure what exactly the startup does, though many believe it will help people meet each other through live streaming video. Here’s a look at all the clues hidden in the  show all text

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Disclosures in the company’s S-1 filing along with data from other public sources reveals a raft of metrics about how many users, pages, “Likes,” apps, messages and other forms of activity Facebook captures about us.

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With all the press releases masquerading as news, Techmeme has felt more like Craiglist for articles in the past few months, or is it years. But recently we finally got some real news, when Google of all people released Gdrive. We knew of course that it was coming, but not how it would actually feel when it got here. I haven’t signed up yet, but already it’s a big deal for me. I haven’t signed up because the iOS versions are not done, or ready, or whatever imminent means. When they are shipped,...  show all text

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On Foursquare, I rarely check in anymore. I'm nearly in last place on my leaderboard--a feature designed to create competition among friends who earn points for check-ins--and I can't remember the last time I unlocked a badge.

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Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents. But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message: “This ...  show all text

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In 2010, 28 million American citizens over 18 were not registered to vote -- but you can change that. Get started now.

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On top of being Antichamber's audio designer, Robin Arnott is the mad scientist behind Deep Sea, which is perhaps one of the furthest "fringe" experiences - and one of the most truly intense and successful experimental games ever produced. In playing it, players don a light-and-sound-blocking WW1-era gas mask, hold onto a joystick, and descend into a terrifying, sound-only world, where the enemies - a brand of sea monster you never want to meet - are attracted to the sound of your real-life bre...  show all text

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In a rare foray into social engineering, Facebook announced a plan to encourage users to list their donor status on their pages, a move that organ transplant experts are calling historic.

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Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I'm cautiously optimistic to see the company's response, and willing to give them time to do it properly. Maybe we can get a good result. I like Popchips; I probably eat them once a week. Well, I used to. But they stopped that habit, and revealed a much larger, more complex problem...  show all text

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I’ve been a long-time supporter of MediaTemple’s (MT)Residence program along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel, and many others whom I respect. I wanted to share my “7 questions to answer to become a social business” with you here.. Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing. Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebo...  show all text

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Today, The Weather Channel celebrates its 30th birthday. It will officially feel old at concerts and hot new night clubs. To mark the occasion, the company has revamped their website, weather.com, to keep up with the times. Weather is a very information-based vertical — there isn’t a whole lot one can do to spruce it up. But TWC is looking to personalize the experience as much as possible. That said, you’ll notice the redesign as soon as you visit the site. Information on your area will be disp...  show all text

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When Vox Media's The Verge launched last year, it looked like it would be another rival to gadget sites like Gawker's Gizmodo and AOL's Engadget. It turns out editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky and publisher Marty Moe (both AOL veterans) have much bigger ambitions: "to become the destination for all things technology." To that end, the company is about to announce the hiring of another half dozen writers, many of whom will expand the site's coverage from gadget reviews and coverage into business new...  show all text

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If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you're in, know the history of those who've done your kind of work before, understand the lessons of their efforts, and in general look beyond the things that are making noise right now in order to understand bigger patterns of how technology works, both literally and socially. This is a difficult challenge, b...  show all text

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Small start-ups that make money often find it difficult to recruit additional investment. By keeping their revenue at zero, they can pluck a projected valuation out of thin air.

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