Rexfeng

Dave Winer:

It’s true some patents hold, and some lock-in gets built on. Look at PDF for example. But there’s a reason HTML took us places PDF never could.

 Simple is no longer “simple.” Nearly two months after an upgrade to its systems and infrastructure, online banking service Simple is still recovering from a series of glitches that have affected every aspect of money management from bill payments to being able to see a correct available balance to refund delays, credits appearing as debits, and much more. Read More

 A robotic bartender named Monsieur and his human partners have raised $2 million in seed investment from BIP Capital with Base Ventures, Paul Judge, TechSquare Labs, NFL star Derrick Morgan, and NBA star Glen Davis. The funding will go towards building more Monsieur drink robots for bars, restaurants, and my bedroom. Read More

Axel Taferner

Shawn Hoke

Gigi Altarejos

Gigi Altarejos

Gigi Altarejos

DUMBO Arts Festival

DUMBO Arts Festival

DUMBO Arts Festival

As part of this year’s DUMBO Arts Festival, sculptor Tom Fruin installed his famous plexiglass house, Kolonihavehus, in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The multi-colored house was lit from inside and temporarily inhabited by performance duo CoreAct who engaged in a collaborative physical performance that is described here by DUMBO:

The colorful glass house is inhabited by two performers, who portray everyday dilemmas and lifestyle paradoxes in a subtle manner. They have lost the ability to meaningfully discriminate, and are trapped in a long chain of procrastination, mirroring our current social patterns.

You might also recognize Fruin’s other renowned sculpture in DUMBO, Watertower. (via My Modern Met)

The days of undisciplined breadstick service have ended.

Olive Garden executives knew this day was coming, and while maybe they didn't do a particularly hot job running the struggling chain, they liked having jobs and fought for it valiantly. This morning, however, investor Starboard Value prevailed and appropriated all 12 seats on the Darden Restaurants Inc. board. Thus the countdown has begun on that 294-slide offensive about the epic-length menu, unsalted pasta water, the use of "the Cadillac" of to-go bags, and, as everyone's now acutely aware, breadstick waste in the form of 700 million freebies a year. Executives tried explaining that the handouts "convey Italian generosity," but it was just futile.

Once the new board is finalized, Starboard can get cracking on those things the original attack in September called for, like selling the properties where some Olive Gardens are located and divesting five smaller Darden chains — Yard House, Bahama Breeze, Season's 52, and Eddie V's. — thereby "unlocking billions of dollars" for investors. The old guard may be sad, but Starboard CEO and newest Darden board member Jeff Smith at least had a sense of humor about the takeover. He apparently strode onstage and said, by way of an icebreaker, "I love Olive Garden's unlimited breadsticks."

Earlier: Activist Olive Garden Investors Want to Kill Unlimited Breadsticks
Related: Corporate Executives Defend Olive Garden's Unlimited Breadsticks

[AP, Orlando Sentinel]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the chain gang, darden restaurants, news, olive garden, unlimited breadsticks

Elon Musk teased his D car last week and finally unveiled it as a new dual-motor, all-wheel-drive version of the Tesla Model S sedan last night. The top of the line D model includes a 0 to 60 time of just 3.2 seconds. That’s faster than a Ferrari 458 Italia and the same as a Porsche 911 Turbo, making the D a supercar that’s capable of laps of terror. If you missed Tesla’s launch you can catch up in less than 15 minutes and hear why Musk thinks the D is "like having your own personal roller coaster."

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In an official press release, Universal has announced its partnership with Lego to create a line of toys to support the release of the Jurassic World movie in the summer of 2015. Which, you know, YAY LEGO DINOSAURS EVERYONE!

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President Obama found a place in the heart of many techies during his first campaign thanks to his staunch support of net neutrality. Six years later the debate still rages on, but Obama's position hasn't changed. During a Q&A in California on...

What's the deal with egg custard tarts and Chinese sponge cakes? And just what exactly is a pineapple bun? Here's your essential guide to the great wide world of Chinese bakeries. Read More

A comedy club in Barcelona is charging patrons per laugh. This is real, according to the BBC.

The Teatreneu club, in partnership with ad agency The Cyranos McCann, has installed tablets on the back of each seat equipped with facial recognition software that can apparently detect when you laugh. The going rate is 0.30 Euros ($0.38) per laugh, up to a maximum of 24 Euros ($30.45). In other words, buy 80 laughs and the rest are free.

The system was reportedly intended to be used as an experiment / case study and then successfully raised the average ticket price. It is now, again according to BBC, being "copied in other theaters around Spain." (I repeat out of incredulity, not mistrust: Europa Press covered the debut in April.)

This is...

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The "something else" at tonight's Tesla even is Auto Pilot, a new system that combines a forward facing camera and 12 sensors that see 16 feet in every direction and provide a 360-degree view the surroundings. The camera does everything from seeing other cars to reading speed limit signs. Normal fare for luxury cars. Except it will also do a lane change for you just by pressing the turn signal stalk.

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The Apple Watch — particularly the undoubtedly very expensive 18-karat gold edition — sees Apple attempt to move closer into the world of fashion and luxury than it's ever been before. But that's a world that might take some convincing, which seems to be why, following a collaboration with Colette during Paris Fashion Week, CEO Tim Cook and design chief Jony Ive have arranged for supermodel Liu Wen to wear the watch on the cover of the next Vogue China.

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The Laurens, GA County Sheriff's Dept broke down David and Teresa Hooks' door and fatally shot David Hooks on a tip from Randall Garrett, a burglar with multiple felony convictions, who said he saw meth while robbing their house. Read the rest

The Costa Mesa doughnut shop will be serving their insanely fresh offerings in Santa Monica early next year. Gear up for carb overload.

Originally reported here that Costa Mesa's Sidecar Doughnuts would be opening in Santa Monica, today Unemployed Eater reports that it'll be located right on the corner of 7th Street and Wilshire, not too many blocks away from Third Street Promenade, some time in February 2015. Known for super fresh doughnuts that rarely sit around for more than an hour or so, Sidecar has built up a steady following in Costa Mesa.

Yes, Santa Monica got pretty excited for Dunkin' Donuts, but Sidecar is truly on another level. Are you ready to wait in line for some great doughnuts instead of some mediocre East Coast transplant ones?

One morning late last year, not long after Guillaume, a developer at Ubisoft Montreal, had finished working on his newest game, he was told he'd be moving offices. This was not particularly unusual for Ubisoft Montreal, a company that employs close to 3,000 people and works on upwards of ten new video games at a time, moving developers around constantly. What was unusual was where he was going.

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Bruce Schneier:

This is why the FBI’s scare stories tend to wither after public scrutiny. A former FBI assistant director wrote about a kidnapped man who would never have been found without the ability of the FBI to decrypt an iPhone, only to retract the point hours later because it wasn’t true.

We’ve seen this game before. During the crypto wars of the 1990s, FBI Director Louis Freeh and others would repeatedly use the example of mobster John Gotti to illustrate why the ability to tap telephones was so vital. But the Gotti evidence was collected using a room bug, not a telephone tap. And those same scary criminal tropes were trotted out then, too. Back then we called them the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: pedophiles, kidnappers, drug dealers, and terrorists. Nothing has changed.

The uproar from law enforcement officials brings to mind a line from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Charlton Heston’s character, Mexican drug enforcement agent Miguel Vargas, says, “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

(A masterpiece of a film, by the way. If you’ve never seen it, watch it.)

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The radio news business ain't what it used to be. So after three years as a 24-hour news channel, a Houston radio station, News92 FM, announced this week that it will from now on play nothing but Beyoncé songs, Beyoncé songs, and more Beyoncé songs. There won't even be commercials, unless you count when she talks about watermelons and Vogue. Queen Bey has five albums to her credit, totaling 63 songs and a little over four hours — those long Texas drives are going to get a little repetitive. Luckily, if you count Destiny's Child there's really a lot of music to be had. (One has to imagine that "Single Ladies" and "Flawless" are going to be played a lot, and that exactly no one will mind.) There won't be as many people involved, as parent...

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So that's where all the pink ones went.

Taco Bell, which has been doing some of its best work to date with PepsiCo's back catalogue, has taken a temporary break from its Mountain Dew–ifed menu suite by concocting Starburst Freeze. Some of the fast-food chain's customers spotted it in select markets last month during testing, but per an official Facebook announcement, it's available to the frappéed-gelatin-loving masses starting today.

"You can freak out now," the company told Facebook fans. So far, freaked-out comments have ranged from "I just got one today it tasted exactly like a pink starburst the best thin ever !!!" to "Please bring back pina colada. Dr Pepper and Mt Dew are yuck!" to, well, things that should not be reprinted. In any case, the flavor is allegedly strawberry, and to be fair, it does sound like it'd be okay if you put some tequila in it.

Related: The Mountain Dewification of Taco Bell Begins With Three Brand-New Sodas

[Taco Bell/Facebook]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the chain gang, starburst, starburst strawberry freeze, taco bell, yum! brands

Fans of Halal Guys and NYC-style street meat will have another place to congregate in front of Downtown's Hero Shop.

Though Eric Park has "53rd and 6th Halal Lamb & Rice" as a dish at ROOTS by Black Hogg, his Downtown 'wich spot Hero Shop is hawking an homage to the New York City street meet starting this week. Though soft open last night, hundreds of people lined up to get a taste of some lamb & rice and chicken & rice, seasoned just like they do in Midtown.

Hero Shop's Instagram shows a bit of what the aluminum foil box will look like, with a similar white sauce and super spicy harissa, along with pita bread, lettuce, and that terrible terrific orange rice. At the moment, the street meat is offered from 7 to 10 p.m., Wednesday to Saturday, though late night hours are in the works. In the meantime, Hero Shop will maintain its concept and reduce hours to 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Downtown.

Hero Shop
130 E. 6th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90014

Large size here. (more…)

Checking in should have always been automatic — a feature every phone shipped with that lets you keep up with friends and track where you've been. Even Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, who popularized the check in, would say so. But until the last year or two, the technology required to track your location without eating up your battery hasn't existed. So we had Foursquare, which let you check in by opening the app and tapping a few buttons. A few years later we got Swarm, Foursquare's dedicated check-in app, which made the process even faster. But neither app felt effortless.

Today, that's all changing with Foursquare's new Swarm widget for iOS 8. If you enable the widget, swiping down to your iPhone's notification center now lets you...

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Julian Niccolini is already planning a blowout bash for what may or may not be the Four Season last day in business, in 2016.

Word trickled out last week that Four Seasons owner Julian Niccolini might already be planning some kind of all-out celebration for July 30, 2016, the last night before his current lease with landlord Aby Rosen comes to an end. Now he confirms: Yes, there's going to be a big blowout that night. But no, he still doesn't know whether that night will be the restaurant's last. He tells Eater, "We are going to celebrate whether our lease is renewed or not.''

For the party, Niccolini plans to serve 1959 vintage wines, in honor of the year the restaurant, and has already begun to tap into the private wine collections of his well-heeled clientele to get his hands on those bottles. "It was a great vintage,'' he notes. "We are gathering chateau wines from France and have contacted people in Italy.

The ticket price is also inspired by the restaurant's opening year: it's a steep $1959 per person, which will go to a charity. But Niccolini says that isn't deterring his flock: "Some people are already asking if they can book a table for ten.'' The evening's menu will feature retro dishes like lobster thermidor, coulibiac, and beef Wellington. "We are planning the cocktail reception outside, and then we will go into the pool room for dinner,'' he reveals. As for that "rock 'n roll royalty" he's supposedly booked? "We are hoping that Clive Davis will help us with the entertainment.''

While the legendary restaurant's fate is uncertain, Rosen has quietly opened an intimate private club on the 11th floor of the Seagrams Building. It has an outdoor terrace and murals featuring scenes from the Four Seasons, which will be providing food.

Amazon has warehouses — hundreds of them, miles of them. It has lockers and pop-up shipping containers. But it's never had a true, physical retail store, at least not until now. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon plans to open its first physical store, and that it will be located in midtown Manhattan, right in the heart of New York City. It'll be located on 34th Street, right between the flagship Macy's store and the Empire State Building.

In a way, the store will reportedly be just an extension of what Amazon already does in its physical spaces. Amazon will accept returns at the location, and will use it as a mini-warehouse particularly tuned for same-day delivery of products in New York. You'll also be able to pick up...

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Rotterdam's just-completed Markthal, or Market Hall, is an innovative, sustainably designed building charged with delivering local, healthy food to the city center. But there's one particular element of the structure that's getting all the attention: An arching, technicolor tossed salad of a ceiling.

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Despite our constant mourning over the city's dying service industry staples, New York City's restaurant and bar scene has actually been steadily expanding for the past decade. The Wall Street Journal has crunched some numbers and determined that from the fiscal year 2006 to the start of the fiscal year 2015, the "number of permits for restaurants, bars and cafes rose more than 27%." Take that, Danny Meyer! [ more › ]

With a location in Brentwood and another in Torrance, it was due time an opening in Koreatown.

Japanese-style curry never quite became a fad, but places like Wako have had a steady following for years in Koreatown. A new competitor is now open in the large City Center plaza on the corner of 6th and Alexandria, just a few steps from one of Wako's smaller outlets called CoCo Ichibanya, which has a location tucked away in Brentwood. The curry donkatsu specialist is known for its ultra spicy options, though combos offer everything from beef and chicken to a slew of vegetables. No word on whether delivery will be available like it is at the Brentwood spot, but with all the offices nearby it makes sense.  Coco Ichibanya grand opened on October 9.

Once a security researcher discovers a new strain of malicious software -- running a virtual machine on a test-bench -- and adds its signature to anti-virus and network monitor blacklists, it's game over. So today's malware devotes enormous energy to figuring out if it's running on a real computer, or inside one of its enemies' virtual worlds. Read the rest

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