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Posts Tagged ‘nyc’

8bitnyc is a fully interactive map of New York City that lets you drag, search and zoom in and out just like Google Maps. Except it is displayed as an 80’s style 8-bit video game map. The map was created using map data from OpenStreetMap.

Why? Who cares. I love it.

Creator Brett Camper says “I created 8-Bit NYC, mixing the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games with the kind of geographical data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation. It’s interactive (like Google Maps), letting you zoom from a view of the whole city, down to an individual street — any address, anywhere in the city. Here are a few highlights: Central Park, Greenwich Village, World Trade Center.”

And he’s not done. Camper is asking for donation to help him build out fifteen more 8-bit city maps. The funds will be used for web hosting and the Amazon EC2 computing time needed for drawing the maps. Eight of the cities he has already selected, the other seven will be selected by donors. More information is here.

SeatGeek was definitely one of the finalists of the most recent TechCrunch50 conference that I thought were most interesting from a business model perspective. Apparently, I’m not the only one, as the New York-based startup has just closed a Series A round of funding led by a group of four entrepreneurs/angel investors.

The fledgling company, which bills itself as a ‘Farecast for sports and concert tickets’, had earlier raised $20k in seed financing from DreamIt Ventures, and has now secured in between $500k-$1 million more (no exact amount could be given due to some contingencies built into the financing).

SeatGeek aims to predict pricing evolution of sports and event tickets sold on the secondary market, much like Farecast (now Bing Travel) forecasts the price of airline tickets. It attempts to do so using a bot that crawls hundreds of secondary market websites on a daily basis in combination with automated algorithms that take into account a very broad set of relevant factors, like for instance the predicted weather of a Saturday baseball game.

This morning, SeatGeek launched a completely new version of its website, featuring interactive seating charts for ticket listings of some 5,000 events. These charts, built in partnership with SeatQuest, allow for ticket listings to be overlayed on the seating chart as dots, so that the user can see where they’d be sitting instantly. For sports events, SeatGeek goes beyond just indicating that with heat maps, coloring dots to represent how good a deal each ticket is based on its algorithms (example).

In addition to the seating charts, the startup is launching an e-mail alert system that lets users sign up for notifications when SeatGeek’s forecast recommendation changes to a “Buy” and when tickets below a certain price become available.

When SeatGeek launched at TC50, it boasted price forecasts for about 1,200 events, and thanks to an expansion into listings for the NFL, NBA and just about every major concert (NHL is up next), the startup now has forecasts for about 5,000 events. SeatGeek claims to have maintained a 82% forecast accuracy rate for all new events, which uses a database of historical ticket prices that has grown to over 11 million sales in the past few months.

SeatGeek says the extra capital will primarily used for hiring – the team had already doubled in size since TechCrunch50, from four to eight. As mentioned above, the money comes from four NYC angel investors, namely Sunil Hirani (founder of Creditex, an online derivatives market that was acquired for $625M in 2008), Mark Wachen (founder of Optimost, an enterprise multivariate testing app acquired for $52M three years ago), Arie Abecassis (former President of MindFire) and Allen Levinson (former MD of Moody’s KMV).

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“Vibration is Life,” read a print commercial from 1910 advertising a vibrator.

More here:
NSFW: The Evolution of the Vibrator

Hybrid commercial vehicles are the answer to the environmental crisis, not passenger vehicles.

Excerpt from:
Hybrid garbage truck picking up trash in NYC

Look at this.

Original post: 
CrunchDeals: Blockbuster Express 2-for-1 $1 rentals

It’s been a long time we heard about JVC updating their Everio brand of camcorders ( back in July to be more exact). But the company today announced a total of three new models for the Japanese market. Expect all of these to go on sale outside this country sooner or later

Original post:
Victor JVC Japan announces new Everio camcorders

Call of Duty Classic , the hip and groovy new name for the ol’ standby that is (was?

Read the original:
Call of Duty Classic now on Xbox Live for 1,200 Microsoft Points

Look out, NYC. Blockbuster is getting ready to roll out 200 Blockbuster Express DVD rental kiosks in New York City. Why you ask?

See original here: 
Blockbuster Express DVD rental kiosks to invade NYC

It’s not every day I get excited about a Bluetooth headset but the Jabra Stone is an exception. The headset, in short, looks like a smooth stone.

See more here: 
An interview with Johan Birger, part of the Jabra Stone design team

Cloudera has seen some pretty amazing growth for a year-old startup. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, Cloudera commercially distributes and services Hadoop. It’s similar in theory to Red Hat’s distribution of Linux. At tomorrow’s Hadoop World: NYC, Cloudera is announcing “Cloudera Desktop” a unified graphical user interface for Hadoop applications that includes tools for job and cluster management. This is significant because Cloudera is transitioning from providing a service to distributing an actual software.

Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology. Cloudera’s newest Desktop software lets developers, analysts and administrators submit jobs, to monitor cluster health and to browse the data stored on a Hadoop cluster. Basically, helps business teams manage and monitor applications that store data using Hadoop.

Cloudera Desktop runs inside a Web browser, and works on Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems. Applications within Desktop include a file browser, for copying and browsing the data files stored on a cluster; a job designer, for creating, running and saving jobs for later reuse or customization; the job browser, for keeping track of job status and progress; and a cluster health dashboard, for monitoring the health of a Hadoop cluster and alerting operators in case of problems.

Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including, Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. To date, Cloudera has raised $11 million in funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

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