A Facebook game about Facebook games was inevitable; Hence “Cow Clicker,” a spoof Facebook app created by game theorist Ian Bogost in an attempt to distill the appeal of Zynga games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and FrontierVille. Between Scamville, Mark Pincus’ “every horrible thing in the book” comments, and a particularly unfortunate speech at the GDC, 2010 is the year to hate on social games — viewed by many gaming industry developers to be simplistic derivativ
Security specialist Ron Bowes has once again proven how easy it is to glean valuable user information from Facebook, by spidering Facebook’s online directory and compiling it all into one neat little torrent that could be downloaded off his site, SkullSecurity.com.
Bowes created a torrent containing over 171 million entries with links to profiles that provide access to the names, addresses and phone numbers of 100 million users, one fifth of Facebook. Bowes accessed Facebook’s dire
Former Yelp VP of Finance/Administration Vlado Herman takes a step up the ladder and becomes, as of today, Yelp’s Chief Financial Officer. The Yelp Blog introduces his promotion with an adorable poem:
Faster than BP’s falling share price.
More powerful than a bull market on steroids.
Able to leap across the Atlantic in a single bound.
Look! Up in the sky!
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s our new CFO!
Founded by former PayPal employees Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel
Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who’s experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs.
Chamillionare got his first taste of the magic of the Internet in 2004, with the launch of his
Due to the proliferation of deals sites like Groupon and Livingsocial, couponing is currently the hottest thing on the Internet. At yesterday’s Social Currency CrunchUp, TechCrunch CEO and resident coupon expert Heather Harde sat down with News America Marketing VP Ginny Byrnes to dispense couponing advice to startups, which tend to approach the problem from a technical perspective.
As we enter the next generation of couponing, this list of tried and true lessons is a must-read for those vying
The crux behind game mechanics is the feeling that you’ve accomplished something; “If you’re clicking on a plot of land or a musical note that is an accomplishment” says Social Gaming Network’s Shervin Pishevar. Social gaming gives you the opportunity to share these goals with your social graph so that many people see them, as well as the chance to work on these accomplishments collaboratively.
At Friday’s Social Currency CrunchUp, leaders from the Social Gaming space including Pis
“Evite sucks” is not a revolutionary opinion. The online invitation company has been the subject of substantial vitriol for how much their site design feels like it’s from 1998, when they launched. It would be impossible not to respond to this overwhelming criticism, and the newly re-launched Evite attempts to address many of its user experience problems.
“It should feel snappier than it has in the past,” says Evite CEO Hans Wooley. Yes it should, with hipper clones
The sharing and tracking of torrents through Twitter just got a little easier with today’s release of BitTorrent’s Torrent Tweet, an app that you can add to torrent client uTorrent in order to organize the discussions surrounding individual torrents on Twitter. Through Torrent Tweet, tweets are published with an automatically generated hashtag unique to each torrent file, like this one.
From BitTorrent VP Simon Morris:
“The point of Torrent Tweet is to adapt the powerful refer
Former Digg biz dev head Bob Buch will as of Monday take on a new role as AOL‘s VP of Business Development. Buch will be joining Digg’s former Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser, former Marketing Manager Aubrey Sabala, and former Head of Communications Kiersten Hollars, who have all made the switch over to AOL.
Buch will be part of a team helmed by former Google Managing Counsel and current AOL Senior Vice President of Business Development Jared Grusd.
From Buch:
“In addition
As we wrote earlier this morning, Twitter seems to be aggressively hiring. Perhaps it’s this awesome Rushmore-inspired “Meet The Class Of Twitter HQ” recruitment video compelling people to join the flock?
Highlights: The “sudo make me a website” command, the footage of actual Twitter employees cutting and pasting tweets representing “Research” as well as the people just staring into their phones for “Mobile.”
Noticeably absent is the Twitter
“Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office (33 Photos)” is indeed a hoax, say its creators John and Leo Resig.
I’d love to pull out some well-worn meta-media analysis about how memes are increasingly where we get our culture and we need to be more circumspect when filtering information yada yada, but I’ll leave that to my betters.Elyse Porterfield or “Jenny DryErase,” who went straight from our inboxes to the “1,000,000 Strong for Jenn
