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Mt. Gox chief marketing officer Gonzague Gay-Bouchery and CEO Mark Karpeles.

Mt. Gox, which processes around 70 percent of all Bitcoin transactions in the world, just announced it is suspending wire transfer withdrawals denominated in US dollars for the next two weeks. The company claims it has been experiencing unusually high volumes of deposits and withdrawals recently, which "made it difficult for our bank to process the transactions smoothly and within a timely manner" and caused delays for customers.

The suspension will give Mt. Gox time to make changes in the way transactions are processed, the company said. Mt. Gox also promised to debut a "dramatically improved trading engine" very soon.

Mt. Gox, which is based in Japan, has...

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One of the most memorable bits of Google lore is the company's penchant for grilling interviewees with mind-bending or seemingly impossible questions — but as it turns out, those questions aren't at all helpful. "How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time," Laszlo Bock, a senior vice president at Google, told The New York Times. "They don’t predict anything." Bock notes that the company has since found that using a consistent rubric is a more effective way of judging applicants.

Google's notoriously difficult interview questions have been widely reported for years. But Google is apparently now more interested in the behavior of interviewees than their on-the-spot...

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There was a time, just a few years ago, when a movie actor could not take a TV job without it seeming like an admission of failure. Doing so was embarrassing, a sign of desperation—not merely because TV fame was chintzier, and the Hollywood status lower, but also because no one thought that TV acting itself could be much good. There were beloved TV stars, of course, but they were performers, not actors, lacking gravitas. It was a littler screen and a littler art.

James Gandolfini changed all that.

Many other people have revisited the powerful effect that “The Sopranos” had on television. David Chase’s grand, nasty mob opera inverted all sorts of expectations about serial storytelling, about what the audience was willing to tolerate, and about the wingspan of an ambitious television show. It became a monster hit and an obsession for the media, which duly celebrated Chase, the model of the modern showrunner. None of that would have worked, however, had Chase not cast James Gandolfini, a barely known actor, as his anti-hero. At thirty-seven, Gandolfini had appeared in a handful of movies, but he was basically an unknown. On television, he became iconic.

We recently saw the Mico EEG headphone and app that automatically detects wearers’ moods and plays matching music. Now Melon is another example of the technology, tracking user focus to give data on the time of day and activities during which they concentrate best.

The sleekly-designed rubber ring has been developed to feel comfortable worn around the head during activities ranging from exercise, study, work and listening to music. While undergoing these activities, the Melon uses an EEG sensor to monitor brainwaves and detect when the mind is focused. Users initiate a session through the companion smartphone app, entering the type of activity, their location, what music they are listening to, whether they’re with other people or alone, and what emotions they’re feeling at the time. When enough data is collected, the app is able to paint an accurate picture of which environments the user is most comfortable in. Users can view trends based on the data – for example, the app may indicate that listening to classical music is good for focus while working at night, or that exercising with friends is more stressful than when alone. It also offers advice for helping users relax or concentrate when it senses that they need it. The video below shows the device in action:

Having recently raised nearly triple its USD 100,000 target on Kickstarter, Melon aims to ship the headband to its backers in November. Could this kind of EEG technology help improve productivity in the workplace?

Website: www.usemelon.com
Contact: www.twitter.com/usemelon

Spotted by: Tracy Chong

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Americans have been cutting back on their driving ever since the recession. They've logged fewer miles on the road. They've been less likely to get a driver's license. And they've bought fewer vehicles. 

But does all this actually mean the U.S. is getting over car culture? Or is it just the product of a down economy?

That's a question many people, including myself and Derek Thompson, have pondered over the past few years. And in a brief new report today, Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute has added a neat little bit of analysis to the conversation. Its key take-away is that the number of cars per household actually began to decline pre-recession, after 2006. Same goes for cars per licensed driver and cars per person. 

"In other words," Sivak writes, "these rates started to decline not because of economic changes but because of other societal changes that influence the need for vehicles." And that, he argues, means its more likely we're witnessing a permanent shift.

It's an interesting theory. But were Americans really rethinking their gas guzzling ways before the economy went south? I'm not quite sure. 

Remember, before we had a recession, we had a housing bust. Home values peaked in 2006, and families that had bet on infinitely rising prices by taking out second mortgages to finance their lifestyles started getting whacked. That marked the beginning of the end for the over-consuming oughts. And, given that housing values and spending tend to move in tandem, it's no surprise that vehicle registrations went into retreat around then, just as they retreated after the dotcom collapse. 

The decline of car ownership might well turn out to be a long-term trend with cultural and demographic roots. But if so, the housing bust and recession still seem to have been the tipping point.   

To call the Barbarian Group’s “Cinder" project a mere “coding platform," — which, technically, it is — is a huge injustice. It’s more like a massive multi-media animation dashboard for gigantic outdoor spectacles. But it also works in one-off apps on iPads. (See video below.) It can transform the side of an entire building into a shimmering, reactive sheet of light. Or it can rearrange your iTunes collection into a series of animated planets and solar systems. (via Barbarian Group’s Cinder Wins Cannes Lion - Business Insider)

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Facebook can save lives. When the social network announced a new feature last May that allowed users to announce their organ donor status to their followers, it was easy to shrug it off as charitable posturing: Social media is good for either sharing updates about your cat or feckless social activism campaigns that make a lot of noise but go nowhere.

The cynicism, it turned out, was unwarranted. Just look at the numbers revealed in a recent John Hopkins study:13,012 people registered the first day. That's 21.2-fold increase over the average. In Michigan, registrants increased seven-fold. Georgia registrations were 109 times greater than on an average day.

Twelve days later, at the end of the study, daily registrations across the country were still double their normal averages.

It couldn't have come at a better time: More than 118,000 people are waiting for an organ right now, and every day more than 18 people die waiting for an organ.

"The short-term response was incredibly dramatic, unlike anything we had ever seen before in campaigns to increase the organ donation rate," Andrew M. Cameron, the study's leader, said in a press release. "If we can harness that excitement in the long term, then we can really start to move the needle on the big picture."

It would be pretty extraordinary if Facebook could figure out a way to keep that enthusiasm lasting more than 12 days. But perhaps more feasible:  The company should try to drum up enthusiasm for a short surge every year, something comparable to what happened last May. The Internet is very good at short bursts of energy. It is very bad at sustaining interest over long periods of time.

Each of those new registrants last year can potentially save the lives of eight people. It doesn't matter if they registered over months or all at once.

Illustration by Jason Reed

On Monday night, Turkish artist Erdem Gunduz arrived in Istanbul's Taksim Square, the site of weeks of ongoing protests and violent clashes with police, and tried something a little different: he put his hands in his pockets, gazed at a picture of Ataturk, and stood perfectly still. He stood there quietly for five hours, and as the night wore on others joined him:

Gunduz's quiet vigil has spawned a wave of similar shows of defiance all around Turkey, as groups of people paused in government buildings, in front of state-run media, and elsewhere, and essentially planked -- vertically -- for democracy:

"Standing" in front of a newspaper known for not covering the protests. RT @AgenceLeJournal: #duranadam 16:45 Sabah pic.twitter.com/8x9eqOYEzN

-- Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 18, 2013

In the 6th hour of silent protest, Taksim Square is getting crowded by the supporters of #duranadam #standingman pic.twitter.com/SXLYvp3WL0

-- Egemen UNLU (@sobotomy) June 17, 2013

Lawyers "standing" in Caglayan court house (where dozen lawyers were beaten & arrested recently) RT @sfkfeminist pic.twitter.com/ECQFUURWQp

-- Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 18, 2013

She says it's other Kadıköy standing people. MT @FILIZCEMSU: .. #duranadam pic.twitter.com/CRBrmgks0r http://t.co/o6pKDu77w3

-- hakan aygun (@hakan_aygun) June 18, 2013

"@der_arzt: Now people standing in front of TV stations pic.twitter.com/6JFSAZA6QA via@DirenGezi #duranadam #duraninsanlar"

-- Jim Roberts (@nycjim) June 18, 2013

Some of the standers interviewed said they were demonstrating for peace, rather than for a particular side. The unrest has left four people dead and about 7,500 injured, according to the Turkish Medical Association.

This morning, Turkish police dispersed the crowd standing in Taksim, detaining several protesters. Later, others returned and resumed standing, according to the AP.

"I'm standing against all violence," Koray Konuk, one of those arrested, told CNN. "I'm standing there so that the events that we've been witnessing and the events taking place over the last two to three weeks can come to a standstill."

The all new Squarespace site is stunning. Simply stunning. Navigate between the different spaces (case studies) with the arrows on the right and make sure to watch the short videos featuring the respective desk (surface) owners.

Squarespace, consider me impressed.

Today the habit forming app Lift is launching a new Web app that works across desktops and devices like Android and Windows phones. The app is designed to compliment the current version for iOS that launched in late 2012.

The Web edition of the app appears heavily inspired by mobile devices like the iPad, and it scales across multiple platforms with a responsive design. There’s near feature parity between the iOS app and the Web app, though a new statistics section has been added to the web to give you deeper and longer access to personal statistics and visualization.

Lift, if you’re unfamiliar, is an app that allows you to pick from predefined personal goals that you would like to transmute into habits, or create your own specific tasks that you’d like to do more of. It does this by encouraging you to check off each item that you do daily, making sure you begin building a regular rhythm of these checkins. As you go along, you’re rewarded with crisp, beautiful graphs and feedback in the form of streaks and encouragement from other users.

Lift was co-founded by Tony Stubblebine of Crowdvine and Jon Crosby of Path, in partnership with Obvious Co., a project of Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jason Goldman. Lift received Series A funding led by Bijan Sabet at Spark Capital, who also joined their board. Other investors in the round include SV Angel, Adam Ludwin from RRE, as well as GTD author David Allen, speaker Tony Robbins and Emmy winning director Greg Yaitanes. Tim Ferriss, Narendra Rocherolle of Smile and Jeremy LaTrasse of MessageBus participated in the seed round along with Obvious.

I’ve been playing with the Web version a bit and it’s pretty killer. There’s a lot to like here for a Lift user and the design brings not only the features of the iPhone app, but as much of the feel can be possible as well. Actions taken are nice and crisp, there is quick positive feedback in both buttons and page response times. You still get your nice graph and checkin buttons, as well as more expansive sections for commentary.

The social and interaction sections of Lift are now accessible to anyone, on any platform, which means that there should be more cross pollination between groups of users. This includes a few of the ‘formalized’ groups surrounding experts like Tim Ferriss, sites like Foodist and Zenhabits and more, as well as groups of friends and teams going after the same goals. The positive reinforcement gained when people are sharing tips and more in the comments of your goals or checkins is all part of the ‘positive feedback’ loop that Lift is trying to create.

And bringing the app to the Web proper allows people to sit down and write lengthier posts without having to type them out on the iPhone’s keyboard. This could encourage more sharing and socializing in addition to the regular ‘check in’ catchiness of the service.

The addition of mobile web editions also takes care of bringing Lift to every other platform outside of the iPhone in one swoop. Though an Android version of Lift is still in the works, developing for the mobile web hits a bunch of targets at once, so it was likely the best way to go. And the responsive design, I’m happy to report, looks great across a resized web browser or a phone browser.

The design of the Web experience owes a lot to the split pane standard set by the iPad and reflected by designs of other sites like Facebook and Pinterest. But that doesn’t make it any less effective. It’s done well and with restraint, and manages to translate the spirit of the iPhone app better than many other mobile web versions. This is how to do it right.

And there are some ‘bonus’ features for the Web in the form of a deeper tracking of habits across years. This exposes patterns of behavior in a colored graph that could help you to get a deeper understanding of the personal trends you’re seeing.

Going from the iPhone to a Web app is becoming a more frequent trend. Going from the most used mobile platform to the open web seems to be a really viable option for a lot of apps these days, especially ones looking to appeal to groups of people with disparate technologies. It doesn’t make sense for a motivational app like Lift to adhere to an artificial divide between ‘iPhone users’ and ‘not iPhone users’. Though other native clients will come, this particular path is one we’re seeing more and more, and it seems right for Lift, who has proven progressive about other features like push notifications as well.

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Vine is hard to explain. It's an app that lets you make and share six-second videos, which sounds absurd. But it's kind of fun, and especially since being acquired by Twitter, it has grown in popularity, hitting 13 million users earlier this month, especially among the kids, a technical term meaning "anyone younger than me."

So what are people doing on Vine? John Muellerleile wanted to find out, and he crawled Twitter looking for links to Vines, and then pulled four million of them into a database he calls vinecrawler. (Vine user post 12 million videos a day to Twitter, so this is just a small sample.)

Now you can search through this selection of vines for everything from parents to Snapchat, cooking to drinking. There's also a considerable amount of porn in 6-second increments. 

Muellerleile sifted through all these vines in building his tool, and he discovered (to his apparent surprise) that lots of people outside Silicon Valley are using the tool. 

A lot of people use Vine. I'm not talking about us dopes here in Silicon Valley, I mean actual people. All different walks of life, geographies, incomes; all genders, ages, races, backgrounds. They use it in all kinds of ways, sometimes hilarious, ridiculous, or strange, but all decidedly human. There is also some kind of fixation with Jay-Z, and I approve...

What I really found was humanity; all shapes, sizes, colors, and places, all things. When I find that, in the way I've found it through Vine, in one place, using one simple thing, I'm reminded that when we get the technology right, top to bottom -- like pointing at something, in the moment, that you want to remember and share-- it spreads everywhere, it's natural, fundamentally intuitive to use, possibly magical in operation, like magnets, or gravity, or maybe even a little bit like life.

The thing that stands out to me, both in my earlier investigations and looking at vinecrawler, is the age of Viners. From what I have seen, Vine's got a higher teenage-to-adult ratio than the mall food court on a summer afternoon. I don't know quite what to make of it yet, but I have a feeling that Vine might be the first form of social media that makes late 20s/early 30s "digital natives" feel like they emigrated.

And while it might feel like Vine is some weird, porny, dadaist mistake of a media form, woe be unto the media analyst who ignores what the kids are into. While not every teenage/college craze goes mainstream, I'll give you three good examples of things that propagated from the kids outwards: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Keep Vine on your radar, that's all I'm saying. Just look at this Vine of a pug doing the "Thriller" dance. Can you deny this genius?

FourSquare makes keeping track of where your friends are effortless, but what if you're not feeling particularly social on a given day? Hell is Other People is "an experiment in anti-social media" according to its developer Scott Garner. Using data from your FourSquare account, the web app will monitor recent check-ins of your "friends" and calculate a position where you're almost guaranteed to avoid them entirely.

These "optimally distanced safe zones" should make unwanted run-ins highly unlikely — so long as you're willing to let a website decide where you'll be spending the day. Garner, who admits he has struggled with social anxiety, says the project is "partially a satire" and "partially a commentary" derived from his disdain for...

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Do you like surprises? Architect Raffaello Rosselli probably does, as is evidenced by this surprising piece of architecture. The project, a house in the suburbs of Sydney, has an unique facade which references the neighborhood’s industrial history. A lowly tin shed used to stand where Tinshed (the name of the home) stands now, but it was razed and rebuilt using sturdy materials and amenities like insulation.

What’s great about the project is how unexpected the clean, white interior is after eyeing the rustic and multicolored exterior finish. Inside the Tinshed, you’ll find a studio, an office space, and a couple of toilets. It’s a small project, but well done and interesting in a way that most folks walking by the project may not even realize.

Found through Ignant

Dr. Joshua Landy is envisioning a new way for doctors to learn from one another. A Toronto-based intensive care physician by trade, Landy is the co-founder of Figure 1, a "crowdsourced photo sharing app for health care professionals." Launched just two weeks ago, the iPhone app is already populated with images both clinically significant and arguably beautiful -- without even the benefit of a filter.

"There is a culture among physicians of sharing interesting findings, whether they're classic ones that we learn in medical school but rarely see, or they're just picture-textbook-perfect versions of things that we see day-to-day," Landry explained when I asked about the inspiration behind his idea. His vision is to take these things that are already being passed around via email or photo message -- and then subsequently lost -- and make them available to the wider medical community.

Once uploaded to the app, the images become public content (stringent privacy guidelines ensure that any potential patient identifiers are edited out). Landry envisions a sort of Wikipedia of medical images, "a curated free-access almanac of features of medicine" that anyone can contribute to, edit, or learn from. While the company isn't disclosing any numbers yet, Landry said usership is already "well into the thousands."

What Instagram does for daily life, Figure 1 does for medicine, allowing professionals to see through one another's eyes. Of course, what doctors, nurses, and surgeons see (and choose to share) often approaches what a layperson might think of instead as "horrifically gruesome." This may be in part due to selection bias: there's a lot of gore to be found just by scrolling through the images, from the leg of a pedestrian who had been struck by a car to the hand of someone whose diabetes went untreated. 

*A note of warning: while nothing gratuitous is shown here, the images that follow (and in some cases, their backstories) get very graphic, very quickly.

Medical professionals can't always keep themselves from expressing their excitement over the things they come across. As Landry pointed out, "there's no professional way of saying 'I find this fascinating.'" The phrase users seem to be turning to so far is: "wow." 

While the line might be hard to identify, images that seem to be posted merely for shock value are deleted. But a fascination with things that other people might find gross or funny is, arguably, what most separates those who go into medicine from the rest of us. 

This is how everyone learns.

Earlier this week I stood in line outside a food bank in downtown Los Angeles. People chattered in my ears, but those in front of me didn’t move. I walked several steps down the line, leaning into the face of a stoic woman.

Behind me I heard the sound of commotion. A large man had fallen down, in the throes of a seizure. He was diabetic, and his blood sugar had dropped past a critical threshold.

I wanted to reach out to help. But I couldn’t do anything to comfort him.

That’s because none of it was really happening.

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Recently, hardware companies have been popping up in all kinds of places. Nest is building the next thermostat. Sonos sells seamless and beautiful soun systems. Thalmic Labs and Leap Motion are innovating in alternate forms of computing control. Electric Imp is building the platform-as-a-service to connect devices to the web via Wifi and so on.

Hardware investments are blossoming because software is reinvigorating the market. Hardware companies face deeper logistical challenges, greater likelihood of margin erosion, and more complex go-to-market strategies than their software cousins. But subscription revenue streams like streaming music services or device remote control breathe life into hardware companies, driving ultimately higher margins and more sustainable revenue streams.

In response to these trends, the hardware hacker community is flourishing. Winners at many Bay Area hackathons focus explicitly on hardware hacks using Arduino to commandeer electric devices. Others are building applications atop Raspberry Pi. These often teams comprise both hardware engineers and web engineer. Hardware represents new, exciting challenges to conquer.

It’s precisely this union of hardware actively communicating with software in novel ways that is electrifying venture capitalists. Hardware companies may always face additional complexity but the reward has never been larger: new markets, subscription revenue streams and phenomenal teams make for great investments.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg think the film industry is heading towards a cliff. The pair behind some of the most successful franchises in movie history think that conservative programming choices and rapidly evolving distribution schemes have set the stage for a massive upheaval — and internet-based services may become the dominant medium when moviegoing as we know it crashes and burns.

The duo were joined during a panel at the University of Southern California by Microsoft's president of interactive entertainment Don Mattrick, who played backup with the occasional Xbox reference as Lucas and Spielberg took center stage. While the focus was ostensibly on the future of the entertainment medium — USC just opened a new building...

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If Dmitry Itskov has his way, the human lifespan will soon no longer depend on the limitations of the human body. Itskov, a Russian tycoon and former media mogul, is the founder of the 2045 Project — a venture that seeks to replace flesh-and-blood bodies with robotic avatars, each one uploaded with the contents of a human brain. The goal: to extend human lives by hundreds or thousands of years, if not indefinitely.

Itskov’s wild ambitions have already attracted the attention of scientists at Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley, among other institutions, but he sees the venture as much more than a scientific one. Itskov’s overarching idea is to create something of a global utopia, one in which people, freed from the shackles of their...

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Move over, The Great Gatsby. Delinquent U.S. readers are rushing to order another novel whose timeliness has waxed and waned over the years: George Orwell’s dystopian 1984. Doing even better, at least on Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” page, is a copy that pairs it with the political allegory Animal Farm. 

All in the same week a former CIA worker leaked evidence of a secret government program that spied on users of major social networks and search engines. Coincidence?

Reports of a 7,000 percent increase in sales for 1984 in a 24-hour period are a bit overblown. The spike was a bit smaller than that, and only for one edition—the Centennial. Still, with Amazon not openly involved in PRISM, customers can rest easy knowing their samizdat purchase was not reported to the intelligence community.

The publishing world reasoned that the unfolding NSA story has people in a paranoid mood, contemplating government surveillance and dysfunction. Not everybody is charmed by this trend, however.

Some writers tweeted that readers ought to take a look at Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, or Arthur Koestler instead, all of whom had darker ideas about the apparatus of state. In particular, Huxley’s prescient Brave New World versus Orwell’s less predictive fiction has been a popular meme, as exemplified in a comic that often makes the digital rounds on Tumblr and elsewhere.

Others on Twitter merely sniffed in contempt for those who never read Orwell in high school. SparkNotes for 1984 don’t seem to be enjoying a similar bump in sales, at least—and prep school scandals haven’t done much for The Catcher in the Rye in the past.

For those who still want to read 1984, the recommended edition is the newest Penguin Classic paperback, with the partially redacted cover. “Completely Unabridged,” or so it claims.

H/T Gawker | Photo by César Pérez Miguel/Flickr