Every day I try and do the media rounds to see what’s happening. The Journal, the Times, the Techcrunch, and the Twitter. Twitter is consumed via a number of aggregators that I rotate, mostly settling for News.Me and the Media something newsletter that the guy from MySpace produces. Techmeme gets my votes about once a [...]

Startups love to point to big growth numbers, and the press loves to publish them. We are as guilty as anyone else in this regard: one million downloads, 10 million registered users, 200 million tweets per day. These growth metrics can often be signs of traction (which is why we report them), but just as [...]

Windows/Linux: Papercrop is free, simple utility that automatically restructures PDF files to fit more comfortably on small smartphone and eBook reader screens. Many PDFs strain our eyes with oversized margins and multiple columns that turn reading them on small screens into a a silly-looking dance of finger tapping and screen pinching. Papercrop attempts to rectify [...]

Many simpler forms of life on this planet, including some of our earliest ancestors, don’t have proper brains. Instead they have networks of neurons that fire in response to stimuli, triggering reactions. Scientists from Caltech have actually figured out how to create such a primitive pre-brain using strands of DNA. Researchers, led by Lulu Qian, [...]

A committee of 25 Icelanders submitted the first draft of a rewritten constitution to the country’s parliamentary speaker Friday, and despite our recommendations, Rebecca Black was conspicuously absent from the proceedings. The democratic experiment bravely asked citizens to log on to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter to engage with the committee in a discussion about [...]

In this episode of Founder Stories, Chris Dixon sits down with Thrillist Co-founder and CEO, Ben Lerer (who is also a partner with his father Ken Lerer in Lerer Ventures).  Targeted towards young men, Thrillist is a “platform for guys” that offers “both local and national content and commerce smooshed into one place” says Lerer. [...]

Whether you’re using them for business or pleasure, school or vacation, a good ereader can help you take your favorite books, classic lit, or new releases anywhere you go. Here’s a look at five of the best ereaders, based on your votes. A few weeks ago, we asked you which ebook store you used to [...]

Flush with $100 million in new funding, Square is continuing to grow like a weed in the mobile payments space. After passing the $3 million mark at the end of May, Square is now processing $4 million in mobile payments daily, and is on track to reach over $100 million in transactions in July. And [...]

Whether you want to test out a new ROM for daily use or just keep an eye on one that’s being developed, you can run multiple ROMs on your rooted Android phone with BootManager, and pick which one to use when you start it up. Having multiple ROMs to choose from is great, but flashing [...]

A solar energy system that doesn’t require sunlight is almost as bizarre as a tidal power system that doesn’t use water – however that’s exactly what researchers at MIT have cooked up. The team just unveiled a new photovoltaic energy conversion system that can be powered by heat, the sun’s rays, a hydrocarbon fuel, or [...]