Dan Duray
This far out from the Watson Jeopardy! game, the bar is pretty high for news related the match, but Ken Jennings stepped onto the Conde Nast-owned Reddit today for their "Ask Me Anything" feature and offered an unprecedented amount of frankness and wit in his answers. There are plenty of revelations about his pop culture absorption as well. The Mormon phenom started things early with his username, WatsonsBitch. "Lots of people think it's a Jeopardy... MORE >
Denise Oswald, former editorial director for indie publisher Soft Skull Press, has landed a new job as a senior editor at HarperCollins imprint It Books. The Observer broke the news that Soft Skull would close its two-person New York office late last year, leaving its operations in the hands of the Berkeley-based publisher Counterpoint, which acquired Soft Skull in... MORE >
At a small-business forum in Cleveland today, President Obama announced that AOL founder, LivingSocial venture capitalist and philanthropist Steve Case will join the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Mr. Case, who orchestrated his company's catastrophic merger with Time Warner, is already the president's "start-up czar" and chair of the Startup America entrepreneurial program. On the jobs panel, he joins Jeffrey Immelt and Paul Otellini, CEO of... MORE >
Readability, the subscription web service that allows readers to strip content down to its bare bones Instapaper-style, recently had its iOS app rejected from the Apple Store for infringing the new subscription rules. Or, as Gizmodo put it, "Readability App Becomes Victim of Apple's Dumb Subscription... MORE >
Faced with a host of online competition, restaurant reviews Bible Zagat relaunched its website today with a host of features to make it more accessible to those without a premium subscription. The upgrades include revamped member profiles complete with badges, new entry points to reviews through updated editors' blogs and lists and an overhauled search function that allows users to search by neighborhood or... MORE >
The Foursquare Hack Day at General Assembly on Saturday resulted in a more than a dozen playful programs built on top of the location-based service. One of the more creative efforts is called, 4 Square & 7 Years Ago, which sends users an email every morning reminding them of where they were one year ago to the... MORE >
IBM's Watson technology has nabbed a post-Jeopardy! gig with software company Nuance... MORE >
New York journalists take note! Google has digitized all copies of Spy magazine and lovingly placed them in a searchable archive, available for your perusal starting... MORE >
The minds behind The Social Network have taken a novel approach in their online "For Your Consideration" Oscar ads. They're giving away the script, right there in the... MORE >
The city's chief digital officer Rachel Sterne unveiled a Tumblr today that tracks the D.O.T.'s progress in filling potholes in the five boroughs. "The Daily Pothole" reports at the top of the page that 179,218 potholes have been repaired since July 1... MORE >
While publishers were still reeling over the details of Apple's new app store subscription service, Google this morning announced its long-expected competitor... MORE >
Just trust me. It's Kenneth Lerer's favorite line, and the 58-year-old general partner at Lerer Ventures and co-founder of the Huffington Post--"Kenny," as he's known to friends--employs it convincingly. Huffington Post senior editor Katharine Zaleski, one of the site's first employees and the home page editor until May of 2009, recalls the early days of the site, when it wouldn't be unusual to receive 20 phone calls a day from Mr. Lerer regarding the... MORE >
Cedric Howe is unsentimental about the free meals offered by his former employer, Google. "For all the talk of the wonderful food that they have, which is really wonderful, it almost becomes this dependent thing," Mr. Howe, now a senior engineer for Kickstarter, told The Observer. "The idea of fending for yourself and remembering how to feed yourself is just this bizarre... MORE >
"I don't really see a blog business," said Nick Denton over gchat. He still wasn't sold on the idea of an interview regarding his sites' redesign, scheduled to debut tomorrow, and seemed to be attempting an escape. "I should find you that old post in which I compare blog ad revenues to McDonald's franchises, i.e. piffling." Ah! But! Surely they aren't so McDonald's-sized now? "Well, the McDonald's reference was from five years ago--when I was downplaying... MORE >
So what if MySpace has fallen on hard times? Its kitsch value is through the roof. "My No. 1 form of music is listening to vinyl records," Rachel Coleman said at an album release party at Death by Audio in Williamsburg on Friday. "Even though I'm a blogger, I like my antiquated technology. I'm used to it, and I'm comfortable with it, and I want to use MySpace in the same way that I use... MORE >
