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The Supreme Court recently issued its long-awaited opinion in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l, known more affectionately in many circles as the Supreme Court case deciding whether software is patentable. Although the Supreme Court did not tackle that broader question in its June 19 opinion, it did address whether CLS Corp. should be allowed to patent the concept of mitigating settlement… Read More
Friends and family gathered to witness Sosh’s CTO Rod Begbie marry his sweetheart of three years this afternoon. Only this was no ordinary wedding. Begbie and his bride-to-be, Lacey Shaw, sent a GroupMe message and a tweet earlier today, asking all their friends to meet them in Alamo Square Park to see them get hitched on Uber’s dime. Begbie and Shaw had lightly discussed… Read More 
Health care delivery has always been among the top targets for founders seeking to dramatically improve our lives while building great businesses. Yet, with very few exceptions, most founders find it difficult to build scalable software-defined businesses for providing high quality care. Read More 
GoPro
It was an action-packed week for GoPro. The action camera company priced its shares at the peak of their range for its Nasdaq IPO and saw them spike 38 percent on their first day of trading Thursday. GoPro’s shares rose another 14 percent on Friday, pushing the company’s valuation past $4 billion.
That IPO performance provoked all manner of skepticism among market watchers who wonder whether GoPro is being improperly valued as a media company, rather than a gadget seller.
Which is a reasonable observation to make. Few would dispute that the typical GoPro user shoots hours of boring bunny slope ski runs and unremarkable bike rides that nobody, including themselves, ever wants to watch. But every so often someone shoots something fantastic and uploads it to YouTube. Almost nothing makes GoPro users happier than their videos going viral or getting featured in a GoPro ad.
Here are some Re/code staff favorites.
“GoPro Stolen by a Seagull” by Nathalie Rolladin. Watch till the end — it’s almost too perfect.
“Fireman Saves Kitten” by Cory Kalanick. This is the second-most popular video on the GoPro YouTube channel (the first is a compilation of sponsored athletes), with 22 million views. Just because the action was spoiled by the video title doesn’t mean it won’t tug your heartstrings.
“My GoPro Array” by Marc Donahue. A guy recreates Matrix-style photography by using a whole bunch of GoPros at once.
“A Grizzly almost ate my GoPro,” by Brad Josephs. Turns out Alaskan wildlife does’t have particularly good dental hygiene.
“Reason the GoPro Camera Was Invented,” by Belinda Ortiz. Thrilling trombone action cam.
“Swimming with Dolphins,” by Mark Peters. You know it’s really cool when none of the commenters believe it’s real.
“Grinding the Crack” by Jeb Corliss. You can’t do a GoPro compilation without including somebody jumping off of something. The close call on this wingsuit glide in Switzerland is insane.
It’s summer! That means you have every excuse to miss big headlines, because you should be at the beach, or drinking iced tea while watching the sunset and reading a fun, trashy novel. If you need a recap of what’s been happening over the last week, don’t worry — here’s the news that dominated Re/code this week:
The most powerful way to make sense out of a senseless death may well be to make an evocative documentary. “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” depicts the life of 26-year-old Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last year after being threatened with the possibility of a 35-year prison sentence for downloading millions of academic papers from MIT, with no specific motive other than possibly releasing them into the public domain.
After showings at Sundance and SXSW, the film is now in limited theatrical release and also available for purchase and rental online (no, it’s not free; those cost $9.99 and $6.99, respectively).
Swartz was a self-taught programmer and activist who helped create the RSS feed format, Creative Commons copyright licensing, the community news site Reddit, and a successful Internet campaign against the proposed copyright law known as SOPA in 2012. His death in 2013 was a big shock to the tech community, making him a martyr for the cause of Internet freedom.
Those close to Swartz have placed some of the blame for his death on overzealous prosecutors and MIT’s handling of the affair. Documentary maker Brian Knappenberger brings that point of view to the film via interviews with Swartz’s family, friends and allies. But he fails to balance it by talking to the prosecutors involved, or representatives from MIT or academic archive JSTOR. He also depends a little too much on scenes of pouring rain and music cues to dictate emotion.
Still, this is an emotional story, and one worth watching. It’s a compelling look at Swartz’s evolution from a bright kid to a driven activist with prescient concerns about government surveillance and corruption.
The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz – Trailer from FilmBuff on Vimeo.
Verizon Wireless restored its online billing system shortly after midnight Saturday morning following a service disruption. The company said Friday’s outage — which affected customers mostly in the Northeast, Midwest and some southern states — was an “unintended consequence” of a software update performed two days ago.
My thanks to Campaign Monitor for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Canvas. Canvas is a brand-new design tool that makes it drop dead easy for anyone to create a beautiful — and completely responsive — email that looks great on any device. Responsive design for the web can be tricky; responsive design for email is really hard. Canvas makes it simple.
Gorgeous typography, retina images, and a flexible layout system all wrapped in a simple, drag-and-drop interface. Take one minute and watch their video to see for yourself.
The emoji standard has been extended with over 200 new characters. One of them is: “Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended”. On this week’s episode of The Talk Show, Paul Kafasis raised an interesting question: Will Apple support this character?
I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I’m going to say yes, they will. But it’s a damn good question.
William Hughes, writing for the AV Club:
Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks," was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users' news feeds — specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It's less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.
This is hugely controversial, but I’m only surprised that anyone is surprised. Yes, this is creepy as hell, and indicates a complete and utter lack of respect for their users’ privacy or the integrity of their feed content. Guess what: that’s Facebook.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” the saying goes. Fool me two dozen times — there’s no adage for that.
Photo backup and storage: still hard. i will detail my set-up in a future post.
The something-like-a-phenomenon app of the moment, Yo, held a hackathon today in San Francisco in an attempt to prove that there can be more to Yo than just the Yo, yo. One hack that’s already climbed the charts to the number one spot on Product Hunt is YoServerIsDown — created by programmers Jarryd Lee and Hayden Lee. The app, which will send a yo to notify a subscriber when a… Read More 
Looks like IAC is adding Brooklyn-based HowAboutWe as another notch in its dating site acquisition belt. It already owns Match.com, OkCupid and a majority stake in Tinder. According to a letter obtained by Business Insider, founder Brian Schechter addressed employees about the acquisition, confirming that many HowAboutWe employees would be losing their jobs: Indeed, we are still finalizing… Read More 
Back in the mid-2000s, many espoused a theory that there would emerge social networks for different types of people. It sounds a little preposterous now in the age of Facebook dominance, but at the time you had smart people like Marc Andreessen founding companies like Ning that followed this thesis. I was the co-founder of a now-defunct social network called Zaadz that you could think of as… Read More 
