Cover Story: Daft Punk

Great article on Pitchfork about Daft Punk and their new album.

After 20 years, the world has finally caught up with Daft Punk, so the helmet-clad retro-futurists are embarking on a new mission: to make music breathe again

AOL is still the weirdest successful tech company in America

You probably know AOL as a conglomeration of websites that presumably make money by selling advertising next to their articles. But in fact, AOL as a media company is a constant money-loser. It lost $17 million in advertising on its fleet of sites—AOL.com, Huffington Post, Moviefone—in the first quarter of 2012 and another $5 million in the first three months of this year.

So, as a business proposition, AOL is a media company—an ad company—with diminishing losses. But as a profit-making business, AOL isn’t a media company, or an advertising company, at all. It’s a vestigial subscriptions business gleaning cash from people who haven’t graduated from the era of pshhhkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchch*ding*ding*ding”.

Earnings filed under “membership,” which includes $168 million in subscriptions plus revenue associated with services like AIM, accounts for more than 100 percent of the company’s profit, just as it has for years. As Peter Kafka notes, this is both mind-boggling and not even close to being news.

How to Pronounce gif

Laying to rest the age-old argument of how “gif” is pronounced.

How to Pronounce GIF, the Graphics Interchange Format. This is THE authoritative website on the correct pronunciation of GIF.

How to Mine Bitcoins

Simple article on how to mine bitcoins.

Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – are the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua.

But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. At $188 per coin, the direction of the bitcoin is anyone’s guess right now and, unlike equities, these things don’t split. In short, you should probably mine. But what is bitcoin mining?

Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. You can read a lot more about it here but just understand that for every block mined you get 25 coins or, at current rates, $4,722.25. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price.

Experiment to Test if We're Living in a Simulation: Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation

Scientists have devised a way to test the simulation argument that states there is a strong likelihood we are living in a simulation.

Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

Source

Timehop is great lilly: Timehop has become one of my very favorite things about digital life lately. We’re not investors, but I love what their team has built, because it’s so essentially human. As I described to Jonathan, what happens about every other day, sometime in the morning, is that my wife or I sees a note/picture/tweet from a few years ago — when our son was 2 or 3 or 4 — and we send it to the other. In that way, Timehop is helping us connect with each other to remember some of our fondest memories together.  It’s emblematic of why I love this wave of mobile technology, too — because we have our devices with us all the time, and they can capture images and feelings so quickly and thoughtlessly, they’re becoming more human, and helping us connect.  I do worry some about how technology yanks us out of our present contexts, and I think it’s important to be intentional about issues like that, but these moments of connection, as more and more of our artifacts are digital — and therefore ubiquitous, retrievable, searchable & shareable — well, that’s a pretty special thing for sure. Thanks so much to Jonathan & folks at Timehop — you’ve helped us to remember and talk about and laugh about and cry about many of the most important moments over the last few years. 

Timehop is great

lilly:

Timehop has become one of my very favorite things about digital life lately. We’re not investors, but I love what their team has built, because it’s so essentially human.

As I described to Jonathan, what happens about every other day, sometime in the morning, is that my wife or I sees a note/picture/tweet from a few years ago — when our son was 2 or 3 or 4 — and we send it to the other. In that way, Timehop is helping us connect with each other to remember some of our fondest memories together. 

It’s emblematic of why I love this wave of mobile technology, too — because we have our devices with us all the time, and they can capture images and feelings so quickly and thoughtlessly, they’re becoming more human, and helping us connect. 

I do worry some about how technology yanks us out of our present contexts, and I think it’s important to be intentional about issues like that, but these moments of connection, as more and more of our artifacts are digital — and therefore ubiquitous, retrievable, searchable & shareable — well, that’s a pretty special thing for sure.

Thanks so much to Jonathan & folks at Timehop — you’ve helped us to remember and talk about and laugh about and cry about many of the most important moments over the last few years. 

Google Affiliate Network is Shutting Down

Google is shutting down Google Affiliate Network (formerly DoubleClick) for the second time, effective in July 2013. Supposedly it’s so they can focus on other products.

Read the full blog post from Google below:

Our goal with Google Affiliate Network has been to help advertisers and publishers improve their performance across the affiliate ecosystem. Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing has rapidly evolved in the last few years, and we’ve invested significantly in CPA tools like Product Listing Ads, remarketing and Conversion Optimizer. We’re constantly evaluating our products to ensure that we’re focused on the services that will have the biggest impact for our advertisers and publishers.

To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.

We’ll continue to support our customers as we wind down the product over the next few months. And there are other products that can help you achieve your goals. Affiliate publishers can continue to earn AdSense revenue through the AdSense network. And marketers can take advantage of other CPA-oriented Google tools like Product Listing Ads, remarketing and Conversion Optimizer to drive valuable online sales and conversions. These areas are growing rapidly and we’re continuing to invest heavily in them.

A wonkish look at bitcoin economics

Great post by Robert David Graham explaining the recent surge in bitcoin popularity.

Bitcoin is an increasingly popular electronic currency, used both for legitimate and illegal transactions. Economists haven’t taken a serious look at bitcoin yet, so I thought I’d take a stab at it. In particular, I’m going to look at the “intrinsic value” of bitcoin, answering the question whether the recent rapid rise in price (to $240 at the time of writing this) is justified.

Bitcoin vs. Money

There have been many un-serious looks at BitCoin. Take, for example, this 2011 blogpost by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman, where he compares bitcoin to the gold standard. He’s completely wrong.

The mistake economists make is assuming that bitcoin works like real money. It doesn’t. While bitcoin is designed as a “medium of exchange”, it doesn’t serve the other traditional functions of money, such as a “store of value”, “unit of account”, or “measure of value”.

In recent months, the price of bitcoins has skyrocketed. In classic economics, this means that the bitcoin economy has experienced massive “deflation”. Likewise, when the bitcoin bubble bursts and the price goes down, the bitcoin economy will experience hyper “inflation”.

But this inflation/deflation has no effect. Prices aren’t denominated in bitcoins, but in some hard currency like dollars or euros. Buyers exchange their dollars for bitcoins, give the bitcoins to the seller, who then immediately changes them back to euros. The entire process takes about 30 minutes. The only requirement is that the exchange rate for bitcoins not fluctuate wildly during this half-hour window. When analyzing bitcoin, we have to toss out this idea that it is a “measure of value” and the related ideas of inflation/deflation.

Full post

iPhone 5 Total Cost of Ownership Across the 4 Major US Carriers [INFOGRAPHIC]

Credit Card Comparison Tool

A few days ago we launched phase 1 of Creditnet’s new credit card search tool and it’s now live here: http://www.creditnet.com/credit-cards/search

It was a lot of work, but I think it’s the best credit card search tool on the web. If you’re looking for a new credit card check out the tool. It’ll show you how much you’ll earn in rewards or save per year by using different credit cards, and you can apply right from the site.