Board of Supervisors gives preliminary approval to a payroll tax package designed to keep Twitter and other companies in the city. Opponents consider it an unnecessary corporate giveaway.
The Vote Is in and Twitter Gets its Tax Breaks. Now, What about Everyone Else?TechCrunch 04/05/11 04:12 PMWe just got word that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to approve the Market incentive plan that would give Twitter-- and other companies-- a six year payroll tax deferral for net new jobs if they move their headquarters into the city's most blighted area. The plan will require a second and final vote next Tuesday to be implemented. The area in question includes three million square feet of commercial space, most of which has been empty since the 1950s.
No official word yet from Twitter on whether this satisfies its issues with the city's tax laws. It doesn't come close to solving the der issues with San Francisco's payroll tax, but it is certainly a big step in the right direction to keep tech jobs in San Francisco. Said Supervisor Scott Wiener as he voted yes: "We in City Hall do a lot of talking about keeping jobs in San Francisco. Now we have an opportunity to actually take action."
Expect the pressure to continue on supervisors to solve the problem broadly, which would inate the need for these company-by-company negotiations with the city in the future.
Sparsh touches cloud for mobile copy and pasteCNET 04/05/11 03:56 PMIntriguing cloud-based copy-and-paste tool out of MIT could find home in smartphones of the future, making information sharing between devices that much easier.
Baydin Closes Its $375,000 Funding Round (In An UberCab, Per Our Suggestion)TechCrunch 04/05/11 03:31 PMBack in October we wrote about in, a startup that managed to land some of its seed funding with some very unusual tactics: by ng Dave McClure a ride to his mechanic and pitching him along the way.
McClure committed to invest by the end of the ride — and the startup has been working to close other investors (though more traditional means, presumably) since then. Today, it's announcing that it's closed its $375,000 seed funding round, with investors including Manu Kumar (K9 Ventures), David Cohen (TechStars), Peter Weck (Keepsy, SimplyHired), Meng Wong (Pobox), McClure, and Mike Simonoff.
As a nod to our earlier post, in which Michael Arrington suggested McClure take an UberCab next time, Baydin asked Manu Kumar to sign their closing documents in... an UberCab.
Hacker Poll: Is OSX Still Developer Friendly?ReadWriteWeb 04/05/11 03:00 PM"Apple had about 2.06 percent of the US desktop market in 2003. By 2010, OS X had about 10.9% of the market," writes Github developer Holman. "There's a slew of reasons for this growth, but I think a large part of it is the migration of software developers from Windows to OS X starting in the early 2000's. Attracted by the reasonable UNIX toolchain and the straightforward usability approach, more and more geeks adopted OS X as their primary machines."
But there's always been a blight in developing on OSX under languages other than Cocoa, and that's compiler support. In order to get /a>, developers have had to download Xcode. According to to Holman, this wasn't a big deal back when X-Code was less than 500MB. But now Xcode costs $5 from the Apple App Store, and it's a 4.5GB download that takes up 15GB once installed.
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Holman writes:
If I want to release a great new Ruby gem that uses a C extension or library, I need to ask prospective users of that gem to:
Spend $4.99 in the App Store
Download a large 4.5GB file
Spend a decent amount of time installing XCode
Sacrifice 15GB of disk space to an app they likely won't use
Install my gem
What do you think? Is it really a cumbersome process? After all, as pointed out by several commenters on Hacker News, it's a process that only needs to be completed once for each machine you work on (unless you reload the OS). And $5 doesn't seem like much compared to the overall cost of a machine (and Xcode 3 is still free). But Holman isn't asking for much: just a stand-alone gcc package, either from Apple or a third-party. If you want gcc for Windows, you can download W for free and it's only 576.1MB. It seems to come down to the principle of the thing, more than the actual inconvenience.
Is OSX becoming less developer friendly?
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Sprint MiFi 3G/4G hot spot selling for $79.99CNET 04/05/11 02:38 PM
Sprint's latest mobile hot spot will become available in stores on April 17, but you can start ordering it online now.
Your Next Computer May Be Made of...Blood!ReadWriteWeb 04/05/11 02:00 PMWe're stumbling through a science fiction wonderland of not just high-flying communications software and tools but of the basic building blocks for the devices we use to do that communicating. The latest contender for radically-improved memory in a computer? Blood.
archers in Gujarat, India have created a "memristor" -- a portmanteau of memory and resistor -- made of human blood. A resistor is the part of a computer chip that regulates the flow of electricity. Unlike most resistors, a memristor remembers previous levels of voltage and allows for a repeat of that flow.
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According to /a>'s Esther Inglis-Arkell, the memristors "can be used in logic circuits and signal processing" to improve efficiency and processing time.
abs created the first functioning memristor in 2008. What was it lacking? Human blood. It was plasma-deficient in the extreme, and that was a situation that the Education Campus Changa team could not abide.
But why? WHY?! Well, according to /a>, in addition to improving speed, such an advance brings us a step closer to being able to merge the computer with the human body, and thereby to repair nervous system damage, blindness and other effects of injuries and illness.
It might also assist in the development of computer interfaces that leverage the unique capabilities of human brains. As we've reported where, the brain beats the stuffings out of any computer when it comes to pattern recognition, especially in quickly identifying exceptions.
The team, which consists of S.P. Kosta, Y.P. Kosta, Mukta Bhatele, Y.M. Dubey, Avinash Gaur, Shakti Kosta, Jyoti Gupta, Amit Patel and Bhavin Pat aren't stopping with bloody resistors either. Oh, no. According to Inglis-Arkell, they are working on other projects that combine human bodily fluids with electronics. Of course that's just the sort of thing that someone with a clearly Transylvanian surname would say, isn't it?
Nosferatu photo by co Lee | Castle photo byio Venni
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Honeywell's Enhanced Vision System, combined with its existing Synthetic Vision System, could make it possible for pilots to land safely even when clouds come down as low as 100 feet off the ground. If approved, it could drastically improve weather-related delays, the company says.
What the app privacy investigation means to you (FAQ)CNET 04/05/11 04:05 PMThe government is looking into what data companies are gathering from mobile applications and whether they are violating laws that protect consumers' privacy. But what's it mean for you?
LevelUp Your Startup with a New Offer from SCVNGRReadWriteWeb 04/05/11 04:01 PMGamification meets Daily Deals. Considering the popularity of these two trends right now, it was bound to happen, right? GR's new lUp platform does just that, bringing the idea of location-based gaming to the deals space. LevelUp, as the name suggests, allows users to receive better deals the more they use the system, unlocking a new "level" with a particular merchant as you go.
LevelUp ched about a month ago in Boston and Philadelphia, and today's deal is aimed squarely at the startups there. Unlike the other LevelUp deals, this package involves 3 different merchants (rather than 3 deals with a single merchant).
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Level 1: Get Incorporated. For $250, you'll receive legal services to help you incorporate your company, including help preparing stock option plans.
Level 2: Get Your Books in Shape. For $150, you'll get your accounting set up.
Level 3: Get Funded. For $1, you'll get a VC to buy you lunch. Google Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Common Angels are the investors participating in the Boston deal, and NextStage Capital, Robin Hood Ventures, and Dreamit Ventures are those participating in Philadelphia.
The Boston deal is already sold out, and Philly startups should act now while supplies last (wow, I've never actually typed that phrase in a blog post before).
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In-Game Ad Startup Kiip Raises $4 Million From Hummer Winblad, OthersTechCrunch 04/05/11 03:06 PM
, the in-game ads startup founded by teen entrepreneur Brian Wong has just unced a $4 million Series A round. The round was lead by Omniture investor Hummer Windblad and rounded out by True Ventures and Crosslink Capital, who also invested in Pandora. Hummer's Lars Leckie will be joining the Kiip board.
Wong tells me he will use the funds for hiring and for building out the platform and product. Kiip is in stealth, but will be revealing what it actually does at AdTech next week.
Stealthy Bottlenose Hopes To Fulfill The Unkept Promise Of Twitter Annotations (And More)TechCrunch 04/05/11 02:53 PMYesterday, at the Data 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Twitter took the stage with DataSift to unce a new partnership to sell curated tweet data. But there's another company that's been working on some of the same stuff in stealth mode for over a year, and their option will be consumer facing: lenose.
While the service isn't quite ready to open its doors just yet, Bottlenose is essentially a real-time data interpretation layer on top of tweets. Well, right now it's tweets, but eventually the plan is to open this data analysis to all types of social information — things like Facebook, Foursquare, etc. The Bottlenose team built an entirely new architecture with from scratch (an extension of the work co-founder Dominiek ter Heide had been doing for a couple years prior) to handle this data coming in. And it matters for consumers because it "totally changes the game in personalization," co-founder Spivack says.
SpaceX building low-cost heavy-lift boosterCNET 04/05/11 02:53 PMChallenging the status quo, SpaceX unveils plans today for new heavy-lift rocket that will outperform competitors at a lower cost, delivering almost 120,000 pounds of cargo to low-Earth orbit.
Coulomb Tweaks Electric Vehicle Chargers For Europe, Ready For Nissan LEAFTechCrunch 04/05/11 02:39 PMomb Technologies — a Campbell, Calif. company that makes electric vehicle charging stations, related apps and network technology — today revealed new features and certifications that should help the company grow its business in European markets, and prepare for the Nissan LEAF to hit the streets.
One new feature of the company's ChargePoint network allows Coulomb's charging stations to accept payments via RE transportation cards, a fare collection system used widely by electric vehicle drivers, station owners, municipalities and utilities in Europe.
Additionally, Coulomb's gePoint CT2500 (the model 3, type 2) charging station also obtained European safety certifications that verify its compatibility with the Nissan LEAF. The hotly anticipated electric vehicle is due soon on roads in Portugal, Ireland, the UK and The Netherlands...
Apple Finally Figures Out A Way To Get An iAd In My Face: An iAd AppTechCrunch 04/05/11 01:59 PMI've used hundreds upon hundreds of iPhone applications at this point. But the funny thing is that not once can I recall running into an Apple iAd in any of those apps. Despite a much yhooed ch, if my situation is any indication, things are not going as well as planned. So now Apple is taking a new approach: pp.
Apple has just released the iAd Gallery app into the App Store. The (obviously) free download allows you to see how the elusive ads actually look and work on the iPhone. And while this may seem like a pretty good way for app developers to see what the ads will look like in their apps, the tagline almost makes it seem as if it's for consumers as well: Great ads. On-demand. In your pocket.
Just what we all want, right? No?