As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft approaches orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, researchers aren’t sure what’s causing the “bright spots” on its surface. The imaging orbiter snapped the above picture from 29,000 miles (46,000 km) away just last week, but u…
Twitter has been criticized on numerous occasions for how it handles trolls, and it has made a serious effort in recent times to change that. Early this month, for example, a message from Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo surfaced in which he took personal responsibility for the social network’s trolling troubles and vowed that Twitter won’t be tolerating such abusive users … Continue reading
Pulling your smartphone out of your pocket, clicking the screen on to check the time, and then tucking it back away is entirely lacking the classy feel that comes from doing the same with a pocket watch. There are smartwatches to check the time, as well, but soon enough there will be a third choice: the Runcible, a wooden pocket … Continue reading
Everyone knows of Leonardo da Vinci – the brilliant thinker who has come up with a whole lot of ideas and actual products that work, not to mention being a true master with the brush as arguably his most famous work, the Mona Lisa, continues to puzzle and inspire people even until today. Well, what we have here is a little bit of da Vinci magic which you can bring home, in the form of the $799.95 Da Vinci Auto Coach, which was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches from 1478 of a self propelled car.
This would be different in a sense, since it is a working auto coach that will pay homage to the polymath’s original design. It has long been considered as the ancestor of the modern car, where da Vinci’s concept mobile moved about using coiled springs which were wound by pulling the vehicle backwards. Similar to its inspiration, the da Vinci auto coach will feature coils that are attached to the rear wheels, and you wind those up by pulling the car backwards. Upon release, the energy will be transferred to the clock-like spur gears in order to drive the auto coach forward for several feet. The entire shebang is made up of 1/8″-thick, laser-cut stainless steel and brass bearings which will be able to generate smooth, elegant movement of the gears, axles, and wheels.
[ Da Vinci Auto Coach is an inspiration from the master copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
All eyes were on a team of researchers who unveiled their new high-tech contact lenses earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) in San Jose, California. Optics specialist Eric Tremblay and scientists from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland had the chance to show-off a prototype of their telescopic contact lenses – an invention that will certainly offers plenty of hope for nearly 300 million people worldwide who are visually impaired.
In the 21st Century world of remote videoconferencing, wearing blue
jeans to an online meeting has become commonplace. In fact you can also
show up in sweats or pajamas if you like. That’s because this type of
video communication is more about the collaboration and saving costs,
than it is about fashion.
How do you demonstrate why people should pay attention to flood infrastructure? Show them what a flood would really look like.
Today the entire internet was riveted by a live llama chase in Arizona. All work ground to a halt while the world watched the furry creatures’ daring escape. This is hardly the first time the internet has had a collective breakdown. What’s the weirdest clusterfuck that got everyone talking? We need your help to remember.
Twitter o Twitter, what’s a Twitter worth? A tweet or a song? Investors have been debating this the past month and I’m not sure anyone has it right just yet.
Twitter has come a long way in user growth, gone public (NASDAQ:TWTR) and come under fire for growth/lack of growth and revenue numbers.
The stock chart looks like a runaway iceberg ran through the Grand Canyon. Here it is:
Meanwhile, back in startupland, private ventures such as Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb and others are getting valuations that’d make a public market investor blush (or laugh).
Twitter’s market value stood at about $30 billion last I checked. Compared to the lesser-known compadres above something seems amiss. Take Facebook value at $223 billion and the debate extends to another level. Is Facebook really 7x a Twitter?
So what’s holding Twitter value back?
Opportunity.
Where Facebook seems to leverage its platform more to sell ads, Twitter doesn’t yet seem to be “fully realized” in terms of what it could be.
To understand this let’s consider the levels of interaction. Facebook revolves around personal or quasi-personal interaction, someone you know sharing a tidbit of info or funny photo. Engagement level is high, “emotional meaning” built in.
Facebook is kind of like a private dining room at a popular restaurant. Stories and moments shared among a circle you know.
In contrast, Twitter’s “conversations” and information flow seem more “corporate,” “branded,” less personal. A lot of media use Twitter as link referrals to stories and companies do the same for announcements.
Twitter is more like a banquet hall, noisy and echoing with a cacophony of voices. Today that is. And that’s why I believe the stock pales compared to Facebook and even the value of some of the private ventures I mentioned.
On the plus side Twitter is a global brand, very difficult to build that. Media the world over use Twitter as their media outlet. Celebs use it. It has changed public relations and marketing.
That said, the “true” value of Twitter lies in what it could be doing. I don’t own the stock. What I’m sharing today has to do with seeing a company and potential, avenues and expansion, to what it could be “grown up.”
As an analogy, as a sophomore in high school Michael Jordan stood 5′ 11″ tall. He didn’t make the varsity squad that year. Of course we all know what happened later.
Unlike Jordan, however, Twitter may or may not grow to it full potential. There is no predetermined DNA here.
The DNA will be choices Twitter makes to grow.
A few of the areas I see with massive potential for Twitter are:
Personal
Private
Regional
Local
and half a dozen more even more powerful. Many observers show stats that Facebook, Twitter, or ads don’t convert to clicks, etc. This is seen as a negative and it is — if you’re in the ad business. What Twitter has yet to realize is it is a content network, yet lacks a self contained way of benefiting (other than sloppy promoted tweets).
Anyway, the product pipeline at Twitter could be magical if thought of differently.
Back to “worth”…
While many writers will use the word “worth” in a story I don’t. The term ‘value’ is the proper way to address a company valuation.
As someone who’s been in business development since Netscape I can see this flatfooted geeky “teen” called Twitter and wonder if it’ll always lay up or ever get to dunk?
—
Steve is the founder of hapn.cool, and has been a venture capitalist and executive at public and private companies.
WASHINGTON — A Nevada state Senate committee considered a controversial package of gun-rights provisions on Wednesday, just a day before the third anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death.
The Nevada legislation includes a provision that would allow people who feel threatened in their cars to defend themselves using deadly force; a provision that would grant immunity from civil lawsuits when a shooting is ruled justified; and a provision that would allow people with a concealed weapon permit from any state to carry their weapon in Nevada for up to 60 days. It also includes a provision that would make it illegal for anyone convicted of domestic violence to own a gun.
Critics say the first provision would expand the scope of the state’s “stand your ground” law. Republican Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson, the bill’s sponsor, rejected that characterization during a state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, saying that the provision merely clarifies existing “castle doctrine,” under which a person has no obligation to retreat before using deadly force if a conflict takes place in their home.
“[The bill is intended] to allow law-abiding gun owners to appropriately defend themselves in their vehicles as they can in their homes, and to ensure that our citizens’ Second Amendment rights are upheld in a fair, uniform way across the state,” Roberson said at the hearing.
Twenty-three states have passed “stand your ground” laws — statutes that allow people to use deadly force in public places if they fear for their life, even if they can avoid the conflict by safely leaving the area, and regardless of whether the alleged aggressor is armed. A 2013 report from Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy organization, showed that in states that passed “stand your ground” laws between 2005 and 2007, the following years saw a 53 percent average increase in homicides deemed justifiable. Meanwhile, in states that didn’t pass any “stand your ground” laws between ’05 and ’07, there was a 5 percent decrease in justifiable homicides in subsequent years.
Research has shown that for white people in “stand your ground” states, killing a black person is much more likely to be deemed “justifiable” than killing a fellow white person.
At Wednesday’s hearing, a debate erupted over how to define the vehicle measure. Lucy McBath — the mother of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, a black Florida teen whom an armed white man shot and killed in a dispute over loud music in 2012 — said the provision would encourage a culture of shooting first and asking questions later.
“These laws embolden individuals to settle conflicts by reaching for their firearms, instead of using their words,” McBath said in testimony against the legislation. “Nevada already has a ‘stand your ground’ law that allows someone to kill another person to defend him- or herself, even if there is a safe and easy way to avoid the conflict.”
McBath added that the new legislation “would make this bad law even worse by creating a legal presumption that shooters on their property or in their cars are justified in their use of deadly force.”
When Davis was killed, many compared his case to that of Martin, a black teen who was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, three years ago this Thursday. Martin was 17.
In an interview with The Huffington Post Thursday, Nevada Senate Minority Leader Aaron Ford (D) said that he couldn’t support the bill no matter how it is labeled. Ford, who is black, said that he has had to explain to his four sons how “stand your ground” laws put their lives at risk.
“I think that there’s certainly a disagreement as to whether this is an extension of ‘stand your ground’ doctrine — the terms have been used interchangeably,” said Ford. “You could call it ‘stand your ground,’ you could call it ‘castle doctrine,’ you could call it Spam. But the truth is, this bill presents a problem when you expand the definition of justifiable homicide to include the protection of a vehicle.”
Ford accused Republicans of having “co-opted” the domestic violence provision from his own party in order to make the overall package more appealing.
“That’s been the modus operandi for the Senate Republicans in this building. They’ve done this before,” he said. “They defiled the protections, the concepts, and included all these controversial, right-wing gun-related issues that run the risk of defeating the bill.”
Republicans took control of the Nevada legislature in last year’s midterm elections, giving the party the ability to immediately initiate legislative action on gun rights and voter identification, among other issues.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
