current affairs

☆ Want You To Know: Crowdfunding Rich White Guys

Crowdfunding Grows Up

It’s been an interesting few weeks for crowdfunding. Octopus Raft gave some enraged backers a salutary lesson in what exactly crowdfunding was. Perhaps more importantly it showed what crowdfunding wasn’t, or at least not yet. Funding using this model does not equal investment. Don’t expect a return proportional to the amount you put in when your darling pet project is acquired by some industry behemoth. Expect to get exactly what you were told you would receive when you funded the project.

Still, some investing maxims can be applied to crowdfunded projects. If it looks to good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. The ongoing fuss over GoBe from HealthBe proves this.

Over to David Ahn, writing on imedicalapps.com –

Therein lies the problem with crowd-funding platforms such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter. There is little or no accountability when it comes to these projects.

More troubling, Indiegogo allows for flexible funding campaigns, which delivers your money to the project owners at the time of initial pledge, even if the campaign does not meet its goal. While the GoBe project far surpassed its goal, all initial investors would have been out of their money even if the project did not reach resolution.

As such, all $630k that has been contributed to GoBe is non-refundable at this time, and users are not able to re-gather their money unless the project owner permits.

Always read the small print, although in this brave new world that may not be enough. Indiegogo’s response to Pando showing evidence of what might well be fraud seems to have been to delete their anti-fraud guarantee.

Rich White Guys Update

‘one used to be a dude, one’s super small, one’s hyper-smart’

This is how Rich White Guy Elon Musk described his information security team in some sort of weird attack on satire / defence of humourlessness.

At around the same time one of the Koch brothers took to the editorial pages in the Wall Street Journal to explain what a hard time Rich White Guys were having right now.

Steve Jobs, one of the greatest Rich White Guys ever displayed a rather poor choice of words in a 2010 email which featured a bullet point “2011: Holy War with Google”. Them’s fightin’ words alright.

Winning

Read Before You Write

NPR pulled a rather magnificent April Fools’ prank on the stream-twits. These are the people who don’t actually read anything that appears in their Facebook stream apart from the headline, but immediately crack their knuckles and get stuck into posting comments. On the article they haven’t read.

Games

‘The Guilt Of The Video-Game Millionaires‘

But for many of these young game-maker millionaires, who created their work out of a passion for play rather than prospecting, the wealth and attention can be jarring. In February, Dong Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, a recent iOS game that had inexplicably risen to the top of the App Store charts, stopped selling his game even though it earned him an estimated fifty thousand dollars a day.

The Internet Of Slang

Gawker has banned it. “We want to sound like regular adult human beings, not Buzzfeed writers or Reddit commenters.” Zing! Take that, Buzzfeed writers.

Meanwhile, the-toast.net offers some suggestions for even more Internet slang. Carrie Jewett’s tongue may be slightly in her cheek.

Totally Confused, Weekend Longreads Edition

The Dead Zoo Gang, The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan, The Corporate PR Industry’s Sneaky War On Internet Activism, The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons and an Excerpt from the Winds of Winter.

☆ Want You To Know: Underground Overground

Internets Updates

Lego, Tool of Satan.

Brendan Eich has previous form in giving money to fringe right-wing groups.

Mike Judge's new show about Silicon Valley culture is called, umm, 'Silicon Valley'. Warning: that article is likely to bring back memories of the awfulness that was the Randi Zuckerberg-produced 'Start-Ups: Silicon Valley'.

Bottom half of the Internet highlight of the day #1: 'The Economist' publishes a nice profile remembering Frankie Knuckles. Commenters start to squabble amusingly over the origins of jazz.

Bonus Frankie Knuckles from 1986 [YT].

Bottom half of the Internet highlight of the day #2: How to explain Bitcoin to a visiting alien.

Well, what we do is we take some black rocks or gas and burn it to boil water, or we flood an area and run water through a small spot, this is all so we get these magnets to turn even if they don't want to. Then we bake sand in to very intricate shapes, which also takes a lot of that fresh-squeezed magnet juice we were talking about earlier. So you put all that magnet-juice in to the sand, and you get certain numbers, and these numbers can be exchanged for food because… well as you can see the numbers are really hard to get! So we figure they must be worth a lot of food.

Worth Pondering

Oireland

According to the Irish Sun, the end may be nigh for TV3. Probably hastened by the impending appearance of a better-funded competitor in the shape of UTV Ireland. Of course, TV3 have been quick to deny this.

Irish media and development agencies, please stop cramming 'Silicon Valley' into soundbites and headlines. We've had fifteen years of it and it really hasn't happened yet.

Totally Confused

FiveThirtyEight.com has a look at the Bechdel Test, Bebo has a video messaging app and it is called Blab, The Gish Gallop, Washington D.C. snowy owl flies again after successful wing repair and digital dinosaurs.

Today's recommended version of David Bowie's 'Heroes / Helden' is by Nena [YT]

☆ Want You To Know: It’s Safe To Come Out Now

It’s Safe To Come Back Out Now

April Fool’s day has thankfully passed without any major casualties. Disappointingly The Onion still refuse to publish only actual news stories on April Fool’s day.

To celebrate surviving April Fool’s day, I recommend playing this highly topical and informative clicking game that will tell you everything you need to know about Bitcoin. Then have a giggle at this journo who was caught looking at dogs on the Internet when he should have been looking at footballers.

Many people have been in this meeting [YT], which is doing the rounds at the moment. People who have not been in that meeting may suspect that it’s an April Fool’s prank. It isn’t. It is horrifyingly accurate.

Keep Your Bible Close To Your Crest

Someone went on a crashing spree through whatever it is Trinity has decided to call itself and then proceeded up Dawson Street, with continued crashing all the while. There were inevitable rumours that the perpetrator may have been upset at the university’s decision to remove the bible from its crest as part of the rebranding. This has to be unlikely, but you can’t keep a good rumour down.

What was also notable was the difficulty some media outlets had in even roughly estimating how old the front gates of Trinity actually are. Hint: it’s not 1500 years.

Known Unknowns

A properly long read, ‘The Certainty Of Donald Rumsfeld‘ from the New York Times. Part 1, 2, 3, 4.

For more long reads and different opinions, keep an eye on Buzzfeed Ideas which has only just launched but looks like it could be an interesting part of the Buzzfeed project.

Anniversaries

The Matrix is 15 years old. I actually would have guessed it came out longer ago than that.

Gmail is 10 years old.

Totally Random, Food Edition

Kit-Kats you bake, burgers you smash, ranch dressing you can swim in, pizza for breakfast and general food eye-candy.

Bonus KitKat. (This one’s about Android, not chocolate.)

Today’s recommended version of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes / Helden’ is by Andrea Schroeder [YT].

☆ Want You To Know: Techno-JOY

Techno-JOY

From the latest Snowden revelations relating to Huawei it would seem the NSA has expanded fully into corporate espionage. Bruce Schneier thinks IBM may be telling porkies about what they did and didn’t hand over to the NSA. Although the US government is at least making a belated attempt to do a smidgen of face-saving.

If all that gets you down a bit, have a look at Eddie Izzard explaining techno-JOY [YT]. Hacking and back doors covered.

Happiness

If true happiness it is you seek, you’ll find it in the clergy, apparently. Whatever you do, don’t have anything to do with Silicon Valley, unless you fancy being over the hill and miserable at 35.

Often the discrimination comes veiled in that vaguest of tech-world concepts: culture. One recent trend in Silicon Valley recruiting is for job candidates to interview with a programmer at their level or below after they’ve cleared every other bar in the hiring process. Ostensibly, the point is to make sure a candidate meshes with the whole team, a perfectly noble impulse. In practice, it’s frequently a tool for weeding out older applicants.

When the VC money dries up again, the bursting bubble certainly isn’t going to be pretty.

economies that embrace the Silicon Valley model writ large—throwing massive amounts of money at highly speculative investments—are suspiciously bubble-prone.

Stunningly Unsurprising Stats Of The Day

Twitter has a slight spam problem, and an overall difficulty in getting users to, em, use the damn service.

about half of the accounts registered in 2014 have been suspended by Twitter likely because the accounts were spam, compared to 28% in 2012.
…
In all, roughly 500 million registered accounts have been suspended since Twitter was born.

Twitter have also quietly killed off Twitter Music. Nobody will really notice because nobody was really using it. Pretty much.

Incidental History Lesson

On this day in 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village, New York City caught fire. Over one hundred and forty workers lost their lives. The death toll was so high because at least one exit had been locked, as was common practice at the time.

The fire was instrumental in launching the modern labour movement in the US.

For the last ten years, on the anniversary of the fire, volunteers have installed ‘Chalk’ across the city. They inscribe the names and ages of the victims of the fire outside their former homes.
There’s lots more information on the fire in this PBS centenary piece and at Wikipedia.

It’s also 25 years since the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Definitely Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Donetsk to become part of the UK, magic for dogs, Los Angeles Police Department is investigating ALL the cars, water buffalo run free and silence may be golden.

So Today This Happened

Tony Benn passed away. The Twitter hive-mind reacts by repeatedly posting his “Five questions” quote. How many of these people actually intend to ask awkward questions of power? In addition, most media outlets lauded Benn for sticking to his principles and beliefs, as if this was surprisingly unusually.

It was simultaneously genuinely interesting to see the outpouring of fond memories that peoplke posted. The highs and lows of Twitter right there.

This also brought to my attention a story about Tony Benn I hadn’t heard before. The image below says all you need to know.

Meanwhile Enda Kenny is giving it loads in the US for St. Patrick’s Day. He encouraged all members of Congress to call him at any time, as Ireland is still The Best Small Country In The World To Do Business In.

Enda apparently added that he lets ‘his people’ (whoever they might be) ring him all the time. Unless they might be whistleblowers, someone on the radio cheekily points out.

Still in the US, a man was arrested in Los Angelese for offering to shoot someone in exchange for 100 retweets.

Back in Ireland, the Irish Times had an article by Morgan Kelly, which should have been titled ‘I warned yiz before and now I’m warnin’ yiz again’. To my surprise a few rueful commenters on Facebook expressed sentiments along the lines of ‘maybe we should listen to him this time’. How far we’ve fallen from those heady days of 2006, whilst still turning corners at a dizzying rate.