With up to 500 developers expected for the inaugural developer conference in San Francisco, the company is bullish about its future prospects. “We are replacing the hard drive,” said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, according to a report on Wired. “I don’t mean that you’re going to unscrew your MacBook and find a Dropbox inside, but the spiritual successor to the hard drive is what we’re launching.”
via Dropbox wants to replace your hard disk | News | PC Pro.
Good luck with that!
In 2010, GFK’s survey of U.S. homes found just 14 percent of households relying on broadcast-only TV. In 2012, that number jumped to 19.3 percent and now it has risen well above the 20 million mark.
via Light Reading – Antenna TV Roars Back.
There are a lot more channels on OTA ever since they went digital and added all sorts of sub-channels.
The rise of the iPhone and mobile platforms in general, along with developer-friendly app stores, has made the idea of commercializing interactive fiction possible again. In the age of Infocom, the crude graphics on top-end hardware meant the potential market for text-only games for personal computers was in the millions, and this was enough to fund a whole company of developers. Today, people aren’t likely to pay money to sit down at a PC to play a text adventure game, but enough of them might want to play such a game on their mobile device to fund teams of one or two independent developers.
via Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today | Ars Technica.
Video on Instagram will allow app users to shoot videos anywhere from 3-to-15 seconds long—unlike the mere six seconds of Vine. Video allows for the use of multiple cuts,
via Instagram hopes 15 seconds will be better than six for social micro-video | Ars Technica.
The gist of the study: Narcissists “like” Facebook and Twitter. A lot. And social media in general both “reflect and amplify” our culture’s deepening narcissism.
The study, by University of Michigan researchers Elliot Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath, was published online in Computers in Human Behavior.
via University of Michigan study links social media and narcissism – chicagotribune.com.
Everyone’s Facebook feed is pretty much the same as everyone else’s of the same age. Twenty-year-olds pose in the club, 30-year-olds share wedding photos, by age 40 you’re looking at a lot of cute pictures of your friends’ kids. But with Tumblr, you never know what you’re going to get — even with people you know personally. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between a social graph and an interest graph.
via Why Tumblr Was a Massive Steal for Yahoo – Adam Rifkin – Voices – AllThingsD.
Here’s an interesting tidbit from TechCrunch written Feb 2013. From Tumblr Is Not What You Think
Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America. That figure struck me while reading Garry Tan’s January 2013 survey and I wondered why? So I delved deeper; this article describes what I discovered while exploring the Tumblr network.
The star of HP’s show, or at least the product with the biggest number, is the FlexFabric 12900 core switch, which can fit 768 10Gbit/s ports or 256 40Gbit/s ports. Cisco’s 18-slot Nexus 7018 claims to have the same 10Gbit/s density but only has cards to support 96 40Gbit/s ports.
via Light Reading – HP Calls Out Cisco With Data-Center Switches.
Casado noted that the term SDN was coined in 2009, and at the time, it did mean something fairly specific.
“Now it is just being used as a general term for networking, like all networking is SDN,” Casado said. “SDN is now just an umbrella term for cool stuff in networking.”
via OpenFlow Inventor Martin Casado on SDN, VMware and Software Defined Networking Hype [VIDEO].
I wondered this after seeing almost every other article in networking blogs like Light Reading with SDN in the title. Click out the sdn tag to see all that made it here.
At this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram offered up some interesting details about his computational engine. Wolfram Alpha contains more than 10 trillion pieces of data cultivated from primary sources, along with tens of thousands of algorithms and equations. Solving complex math problems is one of the system’s key abilities.
via Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep into Facebook Data.
More information from Data Science of the Facebook World
Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical. And most of it isn’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above—kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life.
The story, which was first-reported by VentureBeat and then by sites including Huffington Post, Yahoo! and AOL, was unique. Here was Hanson, a 19-year-old college student from Seattle, ditching the traditional college route and utilizing a silent auction site to help achieve her entrepreneurial dreams.
Now it looks like the story may have been too good to be true.
via Does ‘Sarah Hanson’ exist? The story of this 19-year-old entrepreneur may be a hoax – GeekWire.