David Lidsky's Blog, page 3305
March 21, 2014
Sculpt Sound With Gestures, Using Imogen Heap's $2,000 Gloves
Heap partners with a NASA engineer and others to bring sci-fi musical gloves to the (well-heeled) masses.
Imogen Heap, a singer-songwriter who works largely in electronic sounds (and whom you may remember from her work in the band Frou Frou or this song), has long been confronted with a problem: How do you put on a show for people who are used to seeing guitars, drums, and pianos, when your music is created largely with computers, synthesizers, fader knobs, and processors? Her solution is the Mi.Mu Glove, the next version of which is now on Kickstarter.
We're All Celebrities Now: Can Micro-Endorsements Become The New Klout Perk?
A startup called SocialRank has a new idea about how brands can find and reward the social media users who are most important to them.
When Klout launched in 2008, it unleashed a new sort of status competition on the Internet. (And more than a touch of skepticism about its product.) Retweets and Likes had always been an implicit competition--it's part of what makes the platforms that encourage them so addictive--but never before had that influence so clearly translated into a concrete "score." The Klout Score became not just a bragging point, but in some cases, a metric for hiring.
Is Citi Bike In Trouble?
The Wall Street Journal reports that the bike-share initiative is in financial trouble. But...
Citi Bike, New York City's bike share program, has been an enormous hit with pedal-pushing Manhattanites and Leonardo DiCaprio. But it might be in trouble. The Wall Street Journalreports today that the transportation initiative's leaders "are moving quickly to raise tens of millions of dollars to rescue the popular bike-share program as it loses money, according to people familiar with the matter." Per the report, Citi Bike's financial troubles are threefold:
The Top 5 Leadership Stories, March 17-21
Care a little more about people, and your own sanity--the top stories this week had everything from startup math to lots of emotion.
From getting what you want to taking control of your crazy life: Here are the stories you loved in Leadership, for the week of March 17.
This Man Will Give 10% Of His Salary To Fund Another Minority Developer If His Indiegogo Campaign Succeeds
If he gets funded, Lex Alexander says he will pledge 10% of his salary for the next two years to fund another aspiring minority developer.
Crowdfunding has become a popular means to turn concepts into products, but one man is turning to Indiegogo in hopes of financing his tuition at a coding bootcamp. But there's a twist to his campaign: If funded, Lex Alexander says he'll pay it forward, pledging 10% of his salary for the next two years to finance a minority or female developer to attend a hack school of his or her choosing. "All I ask is they do the same for the next person, and so on," Alexander told Fast Company.
Outrageous Jem And The Holograms Movie Will Be Entirely Crowdsourced
'80s kids are abuzz at the news of an upcoming live-action movie based on the hit cartoon. The series creator--who wasn't asked to participate--is encouraging the inclusion of female voices in the project.
The Internet erupted yesterday at the news that Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions, Scooter Braun Productions, and director Jon M. Chu are developing a live-action film based on the 1980s Hasbro toy line/cartoon Jem and the Holograms.
After A Government-Imposed Twitter Ban, Turkey Sets Tweet Record
"The shutdown of an entire social platform is unacceptable," the country's president tweeted.
With a major corruption scandal threatening his seat at the top of Turkey's government, and with national elections less than 10 days away, the country's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, issued a statewide ban on Twitter late Thursday night that sent shockwaves through the country.
How Planet Labs Could Have Found The Missing Malaysia Air Flight
Hundreds of little, cheap satellites everywhere in orbit, taking pictures of every place on Earth every day, make the planet a lot smaller.
At a time when it feels like we're all under constant surveillance, the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 is all the more baffling. How, the world is still wondering, can an entire passenger jet disappear into thin air? Nobody knows for sure. But Will Marshall, co-founder and CEO of the satellite company, Planet Labs, believes that vanishing acts like that may not be possible in the future.
Anti-Social Network Helps You Avoid People You Don't Want To See
Sick of running into your ex? Brian Moore was, so he developed Cloak, an app that warns you when other people are nearby.
There is no shortage of social media apps out there that will loudly broadcast to everyone where you are at every second of the day. Rarer is the app that exists to obfuscate you. This, though, is the goal of Cloak, a new app that wants to keep other people from being able to find you.
Can Better Memories Be Captured?
Two companies--OMG Life and Music and Memory--took very different paths to working on issues related to Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders. Now they're hoping iPods and smart cameras can make what we all remember more meaningful.
Your grandmother may be on Facebook --indeed seniors are signing up for the social network at a rate comparable to how fast teens are abandoning it-- but that doesn't mean she's sharing bathroom selfies with her fellow septuagenarians. Nor is grandpa likely to strap on a FuelBand as he hoofs it through the park for his daily constitutional.
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