Technology

Friday, September 27, 2013

Join us for a 'Small Empires' panel with Alexis Ohanian on Saturday, October 5th at the Paley Center in New York City!

Small Empires is coming back... and we'll tell you more soon. But in the meantime, anyone located in New York is invited to join Alexis Ohanian, Stephen Greenwood (producer of Small Empires), FiftyThree CEO Georg Perschnigg and Squarespace CEO Andrew Casalena for a special panel discussion at The Paley Center for Media's 2013 PaleyFest to talk about rising NYC startups, entrepreneurship and video production in the new media era. Other panels include those centered around Boardwalk Empire, Orange is the New Black, and The Americans, so we're in some very good company.

The panel is Saturday, October 5th at 2:00PM ET at The Paley Center for Media (25 West 52nd Street, New York, NY 10019). Tickets are just $10 when you enter the code 'S...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4777218/small-empires-panel-with-alexis-ohanian-paleyfest

'Candy Crush Saga' developer reportedly files for IPO, hopes to avoid Zynga's fate

The company behind Candy Crush Saga is going public. Social games developer King has reportedly filed for its IPO on the Nasdaq exchange, according to a report from The Telegraph . Just as Twitter did two weeks ago, King started the process confidentially, a luxury afforded to small companies by the JOBS Act. The filing is said to value King — which sees 100 million daily active users — at $5 billion. With its initial public offering, King of course hopes to avoid the fate of Zynga, another mobile / social developer that has been hemorrhaging users and revenues over the last several years. King has already attempted to streamline its business scope: the company last month announced plans to shut down five titles so that it could put...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4777118/candy-crush-saga-developer-king-reportedly-files-ipo

The terrifying, flesh-eating drug krokodil has reportedly surfaced in the US

A krokodil user with necrosis of the hand.

When the nasty, highly addictive street drug krokodil appears in a new area, it tends to spread fast. So when doctors at the Banner Good Samaritan Poison and Drug Information Center got two separate reports of suspected krokodil use in the last month — possibly only the second and third cases ever reported in the US — they alerted media, government, and the medical industry.

"We’re taking it very seriously because we’re worried that this drug has finally made it here in some substantial quantity," says Dr. Aaron Skolnik, a toxicologist at Banner. "We would love to be wrong, but whenever we hear about stuff like this, we usually get more."

Krokodil has been called a "moonshine drug,"...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4775564/super-addictive-flesh-eating-drug-krokodil-reported-in-the-us

DIY Soylent: upstart nutritionists fight the tyranny of food

In February of 2013, programmer Nick Poulden got hooked on the idea of giving up food. He’d found the blog of Rob Rhinehart, a creator of a meal substitute called Soylent. Meant to provide a full dose of calories and nutrients in a single, cheap powder, Soylent was positioned as not just a better kind of protein powder or an Ensure substitute, but a revolution. "Free your body," proclaims the site’s crowdfunding page. "What if you never had to worry about food again?" Some tossed around the notion that Soylent could solve world hunger, optimistically overlooking decades of work on malnutrition-fighting food like Plumpy’nut and complex socioeconomic problems that can foil the most sophisticated plans. Early versions of Soylent left...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4776560/the-world-of-diy-soylent-production

A camera for your cameraphone: Sony Cyber-shot QX10 and QX100 review

Celebrity sightings are a rite of passage in New York City, and there are famous people everywhere. Yet in all my time here, the best I’d done was the empty Gotham PD cars strewn all over Wall Street between Dark Knight takes. But in the last two weeks, my luck changed.

First I saw Paul Rudd, walking in cargo shorts and a very baggy white T-shirt. Then, not 48 hours later, a scruffy Paul Giamatti walked past me on the street holding hands with his son. In both cases, I knew I had to take a picture — you’re not really a New Yorker until you’ve failed to play it super cool passing an A-list celebrity. So I reached into my pocket, and pulled out my phone. Then I reached into my bag for the Sony Cyber-shot QX100.

The $499...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4774848/sony-cyber-shot-qx10-qx100-review

Microsoft expanding Office's reach with 'Reader' for Windows 8 and 'Lens' for Windows Phone

Microsoft is building another Office Windows 8-style application. Sources familiar with Microsoft's Office plans have revealed to The Verge that the app, codenamed Office Reader, is designed to be a cross format tool for consuming different types of content. During yesterday's employee-only company meeting, Microsoft's Kirk Koenigsbauer demonstrated the tool alongside a number of updates coming to Office in what he described as the "Gemini" wave.

Office Reader is a new modern Windows 8-style app that supports web pages, Office documents, PDFs, ebooks, and textbooks. At first launch it includes library, sources, and recommendations sections. Koenigsbauer demonstrated PDF support and the ability to reflow text to navigate through PDFs...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4776200/microsoft-office-reader-windows-8-office-lens-windows-phone

Humans are 'extremely likely' the cause of global warming, says landmark UN report

A UN panel of climate change experts today announced that mankind is almost certainly to blame for global warming, warning that the planet will see increasingly extreme weather events unless governments take strong action. In a much anticipated report released Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it is "extremely likely" that most global warming is manmade, asserting its claims with 95 percent certainty.

"It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together," the report reads. "The best estimate of the human- induced...

via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/27/4776120/ipcc-climate-change-report-says-man-to-blame-for-global-warming