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Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History, holds a human coprolite (dried feces) taken from Oregon's Paisley Caves. The sample dates to about 13,000 years ago.Jim Barlow

Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday. 

The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.

"Coprolites are as good as a human skeleton," Dr. Thomas Stafford, Jr....
Commentary:

Archaeologists have carbon dated the arrival of hipsters to Oregon to between 13,000 and 13,500 years ago.

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Dropbox today issued an update to its iOS app amidst reports that the cloud storage service is dropping support for public folders.
The iOS update lets Dropbox users manually or automatically upload photos and video from the phone directly to the cloud using Wi-Fi or cell connection, according to the iTunes Store. Once your content is uploaded, you can skim through thumbnails in the gallery view.
...
In an email to registered developers, Dropbox announced that as of Aug. 1, new user accounts will be built without the Public folder, which apparently became repetitive after Dropbox added the ability to...
Commentary:

Dropbox has a number of updates rolling out this summer following even more updates that came out earlier this year.  Bottom line is that the online file storage is again leap frogging ahead of bigger services from Microsoft and Apple and other services earlier in the online file storage market to offer up a simple to use service on a freemium business model.

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The goal is to have about 1,000 entrepreneurs on board, and Dascalescu said each startup will have an average of three people on its team. Residents typically will stay aboard the incubator for about one year, he said. Blueseed will help foreign-born companies make the transition to opening up shop in the U.S. legally, he said."We don't want them to stay too long on the ship," he said. "The idea is once they incubate, they should move back to shore to start their company there."
Commentary:

Well here’s a novel idea. Can’t get a visa from some country to travel to California and kick start a silicon valley company? Well how about travelling to a boat 12 miles off shore and living there with 1k other people, 3 of which would be your fellow startup team members.

This isn’t supposed to be your typical anarchist come radio free Europe Sealand adventure with crypto cyber dreams gone bad, its just supposed to be a vehicle to let people come together from anywhere and build a startup.

Ironically, even though this is not a Cryptonomicon wannabe...

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What Does This Mean For Creators/Advertisers On YouTube?
Viewers will stay with you if you provide good content, even if it’s longer than normal. For creators this means they don’t have to worry about length as long as the content is sound, and for advertisers, it means they need to get on the ball with unique content that someone on YouTube will want to watch. I’ve always preached go the Red Bull/Go Pro route and create stories, not ads. Sell your product in more of a product-placement way rather than splashing the logo everywhere and going with...
Commentary:

ReelSEO.com put out a very interesting article as they analyzed some findings from an AdAge article on YouTube’s views and engagement levels thus far during the year in 2012.

Someone (not sure if it is ReelSEO or AdAge as the level of curation sometimes obfuscates the source of the analysis) points out that even though total video views on YouTube decreased, Engagement on those videos increased.  This means people are watching videos longer and getting more engaged, but not increasing the total number of videos they watch.

ReelSEO does hypothesize on the potential for those very long anti-Kony videos that picked up...

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He later sent the footage and pictures to surfing expert Sean Collins, who guessed the wave was 85-90ft tall. Collins died in December.

Last week, McNamara was awarded $15,000 (11,600 euros) for the ride at the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards in California.

Judges for the awards examined the footage and pictures from different angles.

They also compared McNamara's height in a crouch and the length of his shin bone with the wave's top and bottom before reaching a verdict, event director Bill Sharp told the Associated Press.
Commentary:

It’s a huge wave no matter how you measure it, but the geek in you will probably ask, ‘Just How Do they measure it?’

With viral videos popping up around the globe with lots of faked footage, we have all grown more and more skeptical, but it was cool to see the different techniques they quickly deployed to calculate the wave height.  It wasn’t really rocket science after all…

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By Brett Bumeter curated from cnet.com - Image courtesy of cnet.com
Google announced today a new iOS app called YouTube Capture that lets users film and upload a video in as few as three clicks. Users can post their videos simultaneously to YouTube, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, or upload them privately. Advanced features let users perform color correction and stabilization, edit the video length, and even add music.
Commentary:

Perspective on the split between Apple and Google and the resulting break down in work flow within iOS

Google is building more apps directly for the iPhone now that Apple is starting to remove integration with various Google products, one social network step at a time.  Having switched from a Palm Pre a while back to an iPhone, I find this ironic.  Yes there is an app for everything, but apps are by their nature on IOS a very silo like affair.

The Palm Pre had a lot of flaws, mostly on the electronic side.  However, it...

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By Brett Bumeter curated from cnet.com
Apple today quietly released a standalone app for podcasts (iTunes), specialty software designed for listening and subscribing to audio and video podcasts.

Podcasts are pre-recorded audio shows of varying genres that users can subscribe to, and download for offling listening. Apple jumped on the podcast bandwagon in mid-2005, promising to take the medium "mainstream by building everything users need to discover, subscribe, manage and listen" into what was then version 4.9 of iTunes.
Commentary:

Apple finally created a Podcast app.  While they were early in enabling podcasters and planned on doing more sooner, they never really followed through until this year.  Of course, there was already an ‘app for that’ when it came to finding Podcasts and managing them.  It’s called Stitcher!

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By Brett Bumeter curated from cnn.com
Verizon Wireless on Tuesday announced its new "Share Everything" plan, allowing customers to share data allotments across multiple devices. Starting June 28, individuals and families will be able to buy one data plan encompassing all of their smartphones, feature phones, tablets, netbooks, USB modems and Mi-Fi devices.

That means some customers -- particularly those on low-priced plans who don't have multiple devices -- are going to have to pay more.
As part of its revised pricing structure, Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) gave tiered voice and texting plans the boot. All smartphone plans now have unlimited voice and texts. That...
Commentary:

It seems like just yesterday that Verizon ended unlimited minutes and now they are making minutes and sms messages unlimited again and pushing data prices up. (hiccup skype calls, facetime calls, video calls)

There is a whole lot of bellyaching going on about this move especially from people who do not own or have multiple smart devices on their plan and the Wall Street Analysts that worry Verizon is going to pull a Netflix.

You can see from this image why these data rates look CRAZY.  I currently pay $29.99 and their...

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Starting today with English language users who are signed in to the site, and expanding soon to all English-language queries, Google will serve up a concise summary box on the right side of the results page with key information on many queries.The company says there are already 500 million people, places and things that will trigger a Knowledge Graph-based summary box; Google expects the boxes to show up in roughly the same number of queries that now trigger Google Maps in search results.
Commentary:

While reading this article by Forbes, I couldn’t help but envision who on the web would suffer the consequences.

Content Farms, all those websites that hoped to provide the answer a click past a google search, the About.com’s, the Wikipedias, the Yahoo! Answers and many millions of blogs.

How are content owners at risk?

Well Google’s Knowledge Graph is simply going to provide the answer in the search window before anyone every visits a primary source.

Google has just farmed content from sites all around the world and claimed ownership as the primary source!

Sure it took them over a...

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Blubrry PowerPress 4.0 brings the latest essential features for media creation to WordPress, including the hottest updates to the new iTunes specifications.

iTunes upgrades include:
An updated iTunes image requirement -- RGB 1400x1400 -- throughout the plugin for better cover image quality throughout.

“Feature Episode” that allow podcasters to designate a primary episode, which can be used to introduce the podcast or lead in to a new series.

An iTunes Order feature that allows a podcaster doing a series of episodes to have each listed in the desired order.
Other PowerPress 4.0 offerings include:
Commentary:

My good friends at RawVoice and Blubrry have just kicked out version 4.0 of PowerPress, the podcasting plugin system for WordPress.  For any podcaster this plugin is essential and the new features in 4.0 are going to be huge as they allow people to Feature a podcast and identify the order of multiple episodes among other things.

Hat’s off to Todd and the development team at Blubrry and Raw Voice!

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