Posts tagged ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, December 18, 2011
Dec 18th
We’re always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Want to get your event included in the calendar? Let us know in the comments below or email us.
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2011 ReadWriteWeb Trivia Challenge, Final Day
Dec 16th
As a thank you to our loyal readers and community, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with ThinkGeek to give away a few fun and geeky prizes. Today is the final day of our holiday trivia challenge, so put on your thinking caps!
The way this extremely complex game works is that we’ll give you a few cool trivia tidbits to wow you with our vast knowledge of the cool but unimportant and then we’ll close with a trivia question that we do hope will stump you. You can dig deep into the recesses of your brain (or Google) and answer via the comments on the post. The best answer, according to the RWW staff, will win the prize of the day, kindly donated for your geeky pleasure from ThinkGeek.
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We here at ReadWriteWeb understand that everything Retro, especially when it pertains to childhood fun, is new again. You remember your Atari fondly, despite it’s crude attempts to make one game of ball and stick, into another, simply by changing the title. You conveniently forget the fact that despite the lack of a save system, right in the middle of the 8th castle on Super Mario Bros., your little brother would barrel into your room and the vibrations would pop the cartridge up in your Nintendo. Sure, you could possibly push it back down and it might keep you right where you left off, but in the end, you made sure little brother regretted his heavy feet, didn’t you?
Forgetting the torture of early gaming, we yearn for a return of the simple games, sans the aforementioned catastrophes. Luckily, the folks at ThinkGeek feel the same way. They wanted to play those old games, but on newer hardware.
The iCade is today’s trivia prize. Yes, you’re welcome fellow geeks.
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
History was my major in college, so when asked to come up with trivia, I always try to go with what I know. While I’d love to wow you with my advanced knowledge of tech, if it’s not a video game, I’m the last person on the ReadWriteWeb staff you should ask. That said, I think I can hold my own when it comes to Medieval European studies, and have a fairly extensive knowledge of useless trivia from 1500-1950 as well.
Good luck!
Comfortably Numb
There’s a great debate regarding the first use of anesthesia. Some claim its first use was by a dentist, either Horace Wells or William T.G. Morton. Others claim it was a surgeon who first administered an anesthetic, either Charles T. Jackson or Crawford Long. The 1800s was actually fraught with this debate. The story of Horace Wells, who threw acid on a prostitute while high, testing an anesthetic, and ended up taking his own life in prison, is particularly tragic. But in the end, most people agree that Sir James Young Simpson, a free thinker and incredibly bright man, seems to have made the first happy dose. Simpson, an Obstetrician, introduced anesthesia in childbirth in 1799.
Wash Your Hands!
Another medical pioneer, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, discovered that women who birthed at home were far less likely to die in childbirth than those who delivered in a hospital. Apparently, it’s quite dangerous to remove your hands from the dissection of a cadaver and then use them in the delivery of a baby without a good scrub. It seems obvious to us today that the germs on a dead body should not be applied liberally to a woman in childbirth. But, remember this was a few decades before Pastuer and Lister (and Snow and Redi) furthered the evidence of the germ theory. Unfortunately, while the incidence of death dropped from 18% to 2% after Semmelweis instituted handwashing, the time was not yet right to end the widespread deaths from Puerperal Fever (childbed fever). Rejected and mocked, Semmelweis died in an insane asylum at the ripe old age of 47.
Famous women who died of puerperal fever: Mary Wollstonecraft (one of the earliest feminists and the mother of Mary Shelley), two wives of Henry VII, Katherine Parr (the final wife) and Jane Seymour (the one who gave him a son), and his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Considering all the difficulties with royal miscarriages in the Tudor era, one might wonder about the efficacy of their physicians.
Royal childbirth did eventually improve. By the time Queen Victoria was birthing, a few hundred years later, she was able to birth in relative safety and ease due to her physician’s excellent sanitary attention and anesthetic use (the Snow mentioned above).
Your Question
An Unlikely Romance
And here’s the question that I hope will give you pause before you’re able to answer it. There once was a lady, fair of face, tiny in stature and haughty in nature. It’s rumored she was in love with an English ambassador. Alas, her bastard cousin proposed. This lady, full of affront at having to consider his offer, declined due to the unfortunate circumstance of his birth.
Her Knight cousin, full of his own affront, marched over to her and pulled her off her horse by her braids. She then accepted his proposal. She bore him 11 children and many say they were quite happy.
Students of medieval history will know that her husband was one of the most powerful conquerors ever. Who was this famous lady?
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2011 ReadWriteWeb Trivia Challenge: Mobile Edition
Dec 15th
It has been a good year here at ReadWriteWeb. We have had some great stories, breaking news, thoughtful diatribes and a ton of brilliant news about innovation. Mobile leads the way. We want to thank our readers this week with a series of trivia contests with fun (and sometimes goofy) prizes. So, we partnered with ThinkGeek and conjured some trivia to put our readers’ brains through the wringer.
Care to challenge yourself? Answer today’s trivia question in the comments and the RWW staff will pick a winner tomorrow morning. Prizes kindly donated by ThinkGeek.
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Today’s Prize
In homage to all the mobile game developers out there, the ReadWriteMobile trivia prize is a mobile game. Or, games really. Say hello to the a320 Pocket Retro Game Emulator:
How awesome is this thing? All the old school Nintendo games you would ever want, in your pocket, anywhere you go. Super Nintendo and Sega too. What better prize for mobile developers than a handheld gaming system with all the geeky goodness of the games they played when they were kids?
Martin Cooper & The Brick
The inventor of the modern cellular phone was Martin Cooper. Cooper, who went on to found ArrayComm later in his career, was the general manager of Motorola’s Communications Systems Division when he created the 30-ounce monstrosity in 1973. Cooper was once almost run over crossing a street in New York talking on the phone to a radio reporter. He was later involved in creating the 16-ounce DynaTac, one of the first commercially viable cellular phones in 1983. It cost $3,500 and was a status symbol to the wealthy of the world through most of the 1980′s.
Imagine it, a one-pound phone! Good thing Moore’s Law kicked in. Now we have four-inch touch screens that weigh three ounces and allow us to watch videos of cats playing with dolphins wherever we go.
The iPad Is Alive … In 1994!
People have been dreaming of effective tablet computers for decades. Tablets have been featured as interfaces in science fiction long before the iPad ever came along. Steve Jobs may have brought us the first commercially successful tablet but the idea was by no means original.
Check out the video below. It is a concept for a news reading device that looks suspiciously tablet like. Who dreamt this creature up? It was the good folks at Knight-Ridder as the future of the newspaper. Imagine if it was a media organization that created the first commercially viable tablet and not Apple and its crack team in Cupertino. The world would be a much different place.
Developing the First iPhone
Before we had the touch screen wonder that became the original iPhone, the team at Apple had several prototypes that Steve Jobs threw out. One of them was an iPod-like contraption that featured a scrolling wheel as opposed to a capacitive touch screen. If that product had been released to the public, the Era Of Mobile as we know it may have never taken place.
In honor of the road not taken, we ask today’s trivia question: Whose names are on the Apple patent for text input via click wheel of the pre-iPhone?
Answer in the comments. We will pick a winner tomorrow morning with the most accurate answer. Bonus points if you get the patent number.
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2011 ReadWriteWeb Trivia Challenge: Enterprise Edition
Dec 14th
We’d like to extend a big thank you to our loyal readers and community at ReadWriteWeb. As part of that, we’ve partnered with ThinkGeek to give away a few geeky and fun prizes. Here’s how it works, we’ll give you a few trivia tidbits of interest on a topic, and then close with a trivia question that we hope will be a stumper.
So read on, dig deep into your brain (or Google), and give us your answer in the comments. The best answer, according to the ReadWriteWeb staff crack team of trivia experts, wins the prize of the day.
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The Prize: Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter
The prize today? A coveted Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter from our friends at ThinkGeek. You can be the hit of the office parties with your officially licensed Star Trek weapon of pizza destruction. Pepperoni with mushrooms never tasted quite so good as when it’s been sliced through with a replica of the original Enterprise. No pizza can stand up to Federation technology.
Seriously, we’re not sure that we’d actually use the Enterprise for cutting a slice, but you’d have to admit it looks good. Naturally, this prize demands that we throw a little Sci-Fi trivia your way.
The First Science Fiction Film
Trek may be the first big franchise in science fiction, but it’s far from the first Sci-Fi to grace the small or large screen. That honor goes to a film that’s now more than 100 years old: A Georges Melies film titled A Trip to the Moon. The film is a hair shorter than 2001, clocking in at only 14 minutes long.
The film was based (very loosely) on “From the Earth to the Moon,” by Jules Verne and “The First Men in the Moon,” by H.G. Wells.
Though the special effects leave something to be desired by today’s standards, it wasn’t exactly cheap. According to Lang Thompson, it cost 10,000 francs and required four months to make. “Melies used machinery and techniques from theater but also experimented with clay models and costumes of paper-based board.”
Surprisingly, Hollywood hasn’t remade A Trip to the Moon yet.
Go Go Godzilla!
Well, if Trek isn’t the oldest, maybe it’s the longest-running franchise? Nope. How about the venerable British classic, Doctor Who? Again, no. That honor goes to everybody’s favorite lizard, Godzilla.
The first Godzilla film was released in 1954, originally titled Gojira. What could have been a film about a giant octopus (if Eiji Tsuburaya had gotten his way), has become a long-lived franchise with more feature films than you can shake a stick at. Did you know, the name came from the Japanese words for gorilla (“gorira”) and whale (“kujira”)? Now there’s a concept I’d like to see someone run with.
A lot of fun has been poked at the Godzilla suit over the years, but you should have tons of respect for Haruo Nakajima, who donned the more than 200lbs suit. According to IMDB “it was not uncommon for a cup of Nakajima’s sweat to be drained from the Gojira suit.”
Or Maybe Superman
Science fiction is open to interpretation, though. If you lump in comic book superheroes, then Godzilla actually came in a bit late to the big screen. The first Superman cartoon short was released in 1941. Superman and his mild-mannered alter ego Clark Kent were voiced by radio actor Bod Collyer.
The live-action films also beat our sore tempered lizard friend to the theaters. The Superman serials appeared in 1948, with Kirk Alyn as Supes, and Noel Neill as Lois Lane.
If Neill’s name rings a bell, it’s because she had a part in the most recent film installment Superman Returns. Don’t look too hard for Lex Luthor in the early serials or the later Superman film with George Reeves. Luthor didn’t turn up until the 1978 Superman film starring Christopher Reeve.
Your Trek Trivia
Bringing it back to Star Trek, let’s see how many RWW readers can get this one. Yesterday we touched on women in computing. Did you know several of the original writers for the Star Trek television series were women? One of the writers was told by Gene Roddenberry to change her name, in order to be hired by the network. Who did Roddenberry tell to change their name, and what women wrote for the series during its original run?
Submit your answer in the comments to this post, and we’ll announce the winner tomorrow. Good luck!
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2011 ReadWriteWeb Trivia Challenge: Cloud Edition
Dec 14th
We want to extend a big thank you to our loyal readers and community at ReadWriteWeb. To do so, we’ve partnered with ThinkGeek to give away a few fun, geeky prizes. Here’s how it works: We’ll give you a few trivia tidbits of interest, and then close with a trivia question that we hope is a brain-teaser.
Dig deep into the recesses of your brain (or your favorite search engine), and answer via the comments on this post. The best answer, according to RWW staff, wins the prize of the day, kindly donated by ThinkGeek.
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The Prize: Everything is Better with Bacon
What better way to celebrate the Internet than with a talking bacon plush toy. For the bacon enthusiast that has everything… we bet you don’t have one of these, at least not yet. You can give it your child, or display it proudly at your workplace to let your co-workers bask in the glow of your love of bacon.
Yes, it’s extremely silly. What better way to reward a command of trivia? The theme today? Women in computing.
ENIAC
IT is heavily skewed towards men, but it hasn’t always been that way. In fact, the first all-electronic, digital computer was the ENIAC, a monster of a machine that was designed to calculate ballistics trajectories.
Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum were the six “computers” chosen to work with the ENIAC by the Army. Prior to ENIAC, the team were working on calculating trajectories by hand. Today we tell people to Read The Fine Manual (RTFM) but that wasn’t an option for the first team (Meltzer and Teitelbaum). The ENIAC may have been a marvel of modern (at the time) engineering, but all the ENIAC team had to work with were diagrams to figure out how to make the thing work.
Grace Hopper
On the Navy side, we can thank Admiral Grace Murray Hopper for several contributions to the field of computer science, not least of which coining the term “bug.”
Hopper earned a degree in mathematics from Vassar in 1928, and earned a Ph.D. from Yale in 1934. She taught mathematics at Vassar until 1943, when she resigned to enlist in the Navy. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, and worked with the Mark I “electromechanical computing machine.” She continued her work through the end of the war, and then joined Harvard as a research fellow. 
Hopper joined Eckert-Mauchly Corporation in 1949, which was a company founded by people who built the ENIAC. In 1953, Hopper invented the first compiler in the hopes that “the programmer may return to being a mathematician.” We’re not quite sure how well that worked out, but Hopper’s invention was a major leap forward. According to Wikipedia, Hopper also had a hand in the development of COBOL.
Mary Allen Wilkes
Mary Allen Wilkes, who worked in MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory from 1959 through 1963, is notable for a few achievements. First, Wilkes is known for developing the “assembler-linker” model that is used by modern compilers. She’s also the inventor of the first operating system (LAP) for the LINC computer.
But where Wilkes did her computing is almost as noteworthy as her other contributions: She’s arguably one of the first people to use a home computer, which she built.
Alas, computing was not her final destination – Wilkes went on to become an attorney in Cambridge, Mass.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace, or Augusta Ada King the Countess of Lovelace, is widely acknowledged as the world’s first computer programmer. She was born in 1815, long before computers were a household items.
Many people can thank their parents for instilling them with an interest in computers, but Lovelace’s father was not a computer jockey. In fact, he’s notable for a different reason altogether. So here’s your trivia challenge: who was Lovelace’s father, and what was he famous for?
Submit your answer in the comments to this post, and we’ll announce the winner tomorrow. Good luck!
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Google’s Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO – ReadWriteWeb
Dec 13th
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Google's Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO
ReadWriteWeb This is a message that can't possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don't believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google's webspam team? … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
2011 ReadWriteWeb Trivia Challenge, All Week
Dec 13th
As a thank you to our loyal readers and community, ReadWriteWeb is partnering with ThinkGeek to give away a few fun and geeky prizes. The way this extremely complex game works is that we’ll give you a few cool trivia tidbits to wow you with our vast knowledge of the cool but unimportant and then we’ll close with a trivia question that we do hope will stump you. You can dig deep into the recesses of your brain (or Google) and answer via the comments on the post. The best answer, according to the RWW staff, will win the prize of the day, kindly donated for your geeky pleasure from ThinkGeek.
Sponsor
Today’s installment of trivia is general in nature, but will offer you a chance to win a companion worthy of your love. The companion cube from Portal, that many of you have already met and incinerated dozens of times, is today’s prize. Warning, she is not really safe up to 4000 degrees Kelvin.
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Companion Cube cannot speak. In the event that the Companion Cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice. — GLaDOS, Portal
The Driest Continent
Ever wonder which continent is most likely to dehydrate? Antarctica wins the prize for the most parched of the 7. Take heart though, if her ice sheets melted, the oceans of the world would be 200 feet higher. Source: Uncle John’s Triumphant 20th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, page 340, photo from Mike White on McMurdodo Dry Valleys
Green Potatoes Are Deadly
Potatoes are a member of the nightshade family (yes, the same family that offers up the Nightshade flowers that are so very useful in your Elder Scrolls plant collecting), and as such, do have a deadly component, Solanine. While small quantities of solanine are found throughout the plant, green areas on the tuber have higher concentrations. This is because green indicates the potato has been exposed to the sun, causing increased production of solanine (and harmless chlorophyll). Unless you actively attempt to poison yourself though, you’re probably safe. You’d have to eat several pounds of green potatoes to see symptoms. Source: Wikipedia, Snopes and photo from Ask Julie
The Lydians Invented Money
As we all purchase our holiday gifts this year with money rather than chickens and goats, we should thank the Lydians, who are the first to coin money. That’s, of course, as far as historians know, and certainly depends on the definition of the word ‘coin’, but remember, if the Lydians weren’t the first, they were certainly the first to spread their coin around. Source: Exeter and photo from Numismatics
Which 3 Technological Advances Made the Age of Skyscrapers Possible?
Do you think you know all three? If so, submit your answer in the comments on this post. We’ll announce the winner of the mute but cuddly Companion Cube tomorrow.
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ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, December 10, 2011
Dec 10th
We’re always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Want to get your event included in the calendar? Let us know in the comments below or email us.
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ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, December 3, 2011
Dec 3rd
We’re always on the lookout for upcoming Web tech events from around world. Know of something taking place that should appear here? Want to get your event included in the calendar? Let us know in the comments below or email us.
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Discuss
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ReadWriteWeb Meetup: Seoul [Recap]
Nov 29th
On November 15, many of us and many of you took part in a worldwide ReadWriteWeb meetup. I was overwhelmed with the outpouring of support from this blog’s community. Of all of these, including the fabulous ones that were put on in St. Louis and Boston, the ReadWriteWeb Seoul meetup was one of the most intricately planned meetups I learned about, and while I’m typically a non-planner, I was very, very impressed with the happenings at this meetup.
I asked the meetup planner, David Lee, Founder & CEO of Shakr Media, a Seoul-based startup, to recap the meetup so that the rest of us could live vicariously through his notes (and video!).
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From David:
Seoul’s startup scene is going global in a big way, and earlier this month a group of ReadWriteWeb fans and Korean entrepreneurs gathered at Shakr Media HQ to talk about their startups at the first ReadWriteWeb Seoul meetup.
Seoul ReadWriteWeb Meetup from David Lee on Vimeo.
I kicked off the event with a post-Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing update from Shakr Media. We substantially increased the number of private beta users for Sha.kr, where you can watch automatically assembled video news based on written articles from across the web. But more importantly, we announced that towards the end of this month we are opening Sha.kr Create so anyone can create their own WebGL shows by uploading a few photos and video clips.
Xmon Games talked briefly about ZZOMS and Yummy Yummy, two iPhone games they launched from their game studio in Seoul. Kyoungho Kim, Co-CEO of Xmon Games gave his first ever presentation about his company in English. Co-CEOs Kim and Park are one of a number of startups in Korea benefiting from generous government R&D grants, which Kim describes briefly in his presentation. (R&D grants which I have very strong mixed feelings about, because of the bureaucracy partly, but more so because of the not-so-implicit expectation to commit fraud in some cases.)
Ahiku’s product launch demo for Recood was next. Co-founder Is Koo ran through a quick demo, which boils down to a very simple take on Instagram for video. The story behind Ahiku is an interesting one… They started a few years ago with Terebe, a social video annotation site that had many of YouTube’s current feature set, only that was 2 years earlier. They had trouble getting traction beyond Korea, and after deciding that they want to be a global company, made the tough decision to shutdown the service to focus on a simpler product. TwitOnAir, their next product, got scooped up by Korea’s second largest telecom, KT. It is now Olleh OnAir. I’m looking forward to seeing Recood do well in the market next!
To wrap-up the event, Yohan Kim from Paprika Lab shared some of the numbers and methods behind their climb to success as the creator of Hero City, one of only two Facebook social games in Korea to have over 1 million users. What’s especially interesting to note is that, despite a huge difference in the number of users on Cyworld vs. Facebook overall, Paprika Lab’s Cyworld revenue is comparable to what they earn on Facebook.
Peter Kim from Uhuru unfortunately couldn’t make it to the event, but he’ll be around next time to share the story of Uhuru in more detail. It would have been nice to have him around, because his take on social video has a strong business model that goes far beyond ad impressions. Uhuru is a site where anyone can create video advertisements for brands, and brands can pick them up for commercial use. Peter is also the CEO of a seed fund & incubator in Korea, Applemint Holdings.
These entrepreneurs, investors and startup enthusiasts had a great time coming together. Thank you ReadWriteWeb for giving us one more excuse to gather and talk about what we love doing!
If you held a ReadWriteWeb meetup in your area that you’d like to recap or if you need help starting a ReadWriteWeb meetup in your area, please reach out to our Community Manager, Robyn Tippins for assistance.
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