Google Nexus Prime On The Way

Which phone will be my first smartphone? Nexus Prime has as good a shot as any if it shows up fast enough. My first tablet will also be an Android, but only if it compares to the iPad in feel, and is super cheap. I am not paying 500 for a tablet. I paid 330 for my current laptop. And that is why the Chromebook is a fail for me right now: it is not cheap enough for me. Hello Michael, as in Michael Dell.



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CNet: Is this buttonless phone the next Nexus handset?

FoodSpotting API

Image via CrunchBaseFoodSpotting's Dish As Starting Point
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting

I was just reading this and it occurred to me that the solution to my number one gripe about FoodSpotting lies in the app releasing an API: social is for other independent developers to do.

Inc.: 30 Under 30: Alexa Andrzejewksi, Soraya Darabi, and Ted Grubb, Founders of Foodspotting: To learn about bootstrapping her book project, she joined Women 2.0 and started aggressively networking, talking about her plan to catalog restaurant dishes. Tech start-up veteran programmer Ted Grubb met her at a happy hour at Adaptive Path, where Andrzejewski was a consultant, and advised she steer her 20th-Century project into the smartphone era...... When he couldn’t find Andrzejewski a qualified technical co-founder, Grubb decided to learn iPhone programming himself, and he created a prototype Foodspotting app while in a decidedly un-2.0 setting: a tent in the wilderness. ...... New York media darling Soraya Darabi .... scored $3 million in angel funding. ...... "I know that I'm working more than—or as much as—I have in other jobs, but it doesn't feel like work, and that's the huge emotional difference for me" ....... on the forefront of the local, mobile, social app space ...... an international hit, with global "super spotters" staging "eat-ups" in hundreds of cities globally. ...... When it debuted in the iTunes app store, Foodspotting was one of just six apps in the location-based category. "The space has heated up a ton since last July—today it's a crowded space, actually—but back when we were raising money it was new to everybody," Andrzejewski says...... Despite initial investor skepticism, and nine months of bootstrapping, the trio was able to raise $3 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures. That's allowed the company to expand to ten employees: two in New York City, and eight in an open-air-café-inspired office in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. To stay connected bi-coastally, Skype and SocialCast are open constantly on everyone's computers...... "And just as many funny things happen on Skype as in the office."

The API might also be the solution to the aspect that might most excite me about FoodSpotting personally: SMS enabled spotting of dishes around the world. Food is like music: you could discover endlessly. It is not possible to spot all the dishes that got made around the world just today, no matter how much crowdsourcing you do, and dishes morph. Recipes are alive, just like language stays alive. Good cooks improvise like jazz musicians.

Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg
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Dropbox, FoodSpotting, GroupMe, Hipmunk, inDinero, Instagram, and Quora are some of the names on the list that stand out.

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A Big City, The Biggest City In The World

New York is a big city. If you take the metro region into account, it perhaps is the biggest city in the world.

The first big American city I lived in for a few months was Philadelphia. I would walk to work every morning. It was a 40 minute walk from UPenn near where I was staying to downtown. Half way through the walk you started seeing the tall buildings. And I would be like wow. That wow factor never left me those few months.

I was in Philly for a few hours in January. I went downtown. It felt like a small town.

That is how big New York is.

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