San Francisco,California,United States

The Spark of Genius Series high­lights a unique fea­ture of star­tups and is made pos­si­ble by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your star­tup con­sid­ered for in­clu­sion, please see the de­tails here. Name: Urban Interns Quick Pitch: Urban Interns is a na­tion­al mar­ket­place that con­nects grow­ing com­pa­nies with peo­ple look­ing for part-time jobs, in­tern­ships and free­lance po­si­tions. Genius Idea: Online job sites date back to the ear­ly days of the web, but most fo­cus on help­ing com­pa­nies (...)

San Francisco star­tup Skyara launched last mon­th with a cool con­cept — it’s a mar­ket­place where peo­ple can buy and sell new ex­pe­ri­ences. Now co-founder Jonathan Wu said the team has dis­cov­ered a sur­pris­ing side ef­fect: Most of the money earned in the mar­ket­place is go­ing to char­i­ty. The sto­ry seems like a good il­lus­tra­tion of how a rel­a­tive­ly mi­nor fea­ture can turn out to be a big selling point for your star­tup. Users look­ing to do some­thing cool and dif­fer­ent can go to Skyara to pur­chase (...)

At GigaOM’s Net:Work con­fer­ence on Thursday in San Francisco, Salesforce.com chair­man and CEO Marc Benioff said the com­pa­ny has an an­a­lyt­i­cal tool that tracks ac­tiv­i­ty on Chatter, its in­ter­nal Twitter-style cor­po­rate so­cial net­work (which the soft­ware provider al­so sells to other com­pa­nies), and that Salesforce is giv­ing em­ploy­ees who provide valu­able in­for­ma­tion or con­tri­bu­tions to the cor­po­ra­tion via the net­work ex­tra com­pen­sa­tion, in the same way ex­ec­u­tives are given bonus­es for ex­ceed­ing (...)

Samantha Spiegel, 19, is a San Francisco art stu­dent and pen­pal to fa­mous se­ri­al killers and mur­der­ers. According to Spiegel, she was former­ly en­gaged to John Mark Karr, who false­ly con­fessed to killing JonBenét Ramsey. But they've split. Now she's in­to Richard Allen Davis who mur­dered Polly Klaas. Of course, Spiegel wouldn't be a re­al killer groupie if she didn't have a let­ter from Manson. She wrote him but is still wait­ing on a re­ply. SF Weekly has Spiegel's sad sto­ry. From SF Weekly (...)

Startup Subutai con­tin­ues to charge ahead with its dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing ex­per­i­ment The Mongoliad. The writ­ing team, which in­cludes pop­u­lar science fic­tion au­thors Neal Stephenson (who is the com­pa­ny’s chair­man) and Greg Bear (its se­nior cre­ative ad­vi­sor), has now pub­lished around 15 chap­ters, and the com­pa­ny has al­so re­leased ap­pli­ca­tions for the iPhone and iPad. The app and web­site use a tech­nol­o­gy for elec­tron­ic nov­els that Subutai calls the Personal Ubiquitous Literature Platform (PULP). (...)

Currently on tour in the US, Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook and his band The Light are per­form­ing Joy Division's clas­sic 1979 de­but al­bum "Unknown Pleasures" in its en­tire­ty. Unfortunately, tonight's show in San Francisco is sold out or I'd be there. Instead, I will dance, dance, dance to the YouTube.

By Drake Martinet, Associate Editor, All Things Digital Does tea with Silicon Valley ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Ron Conway and 1990s rap le­gend MC Hammer sound too le­git? What about spend­ing the day har­vest­ing crabs un­der the Golden Gate Bridge? Or may­be a hands-on cof­fee-craft­ing ses­sion with an ex­pert baris­ta? Skyara, a buzzy lit­tle start-up has cre­at­ed a mar­ket­place for peo­ple to sell ex­pe­ri­ences to folks who are look­ing to do some­thing other than the same old thing. “It’s sort of like (...)

This week at GigaOM's NetWork 2010 con­fer­ence in San Francisco, we briefly min­gled with our robot over­lords and sur­vived to tell the tale. Anybots was let­ting its $15,000 QB telep­res­ence robot dec­i­mate roam the crowd, and we were in­vit­ed to in­ter­act with one and then take an­oth­er for a spin by way of re­mote con­trol. The ex­pe­ri­ence was en­ter­tain­ing but still rather im­per­son­al, most­ly due to the lack of two-way video, some­thing that's billed as "com­ing soon." There's no word on whether the (...)

Live video stream­ing site Justin.tv to­day an­nounced an up­date that in­cludes what it has dubbed “Frame Reinsertion,” which will al­low users to upload the full res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of a video in the back­ground, even as the video is be­ing broad­cast live. Justin.tv lets users stream con­tent live to the in­ter­net, whether it is from their we­b­cams, mo­bile phones or wired in from a TV. Its com­peti­tors in­clude Ustream.TV, blogTV and Flixwagon. It is cur­rent­ly avail­able on iPhone and Android (...)

If you are like most Americans, you live in a ci­ty or re­gion with a choice of two home land­line Internet ser­vice providers, if that. Over here in my corner of the Ars Orbiting HQ—San Francisco, California—I often won­der whether to switch from my AT&T DSL "up to 3 Mbps" plan to Comcast. I get the itch to do this dur­ing pe­ri­ods when my AT&T con­nec­tion in­ex­pli­ca­bly needs to be restart­ed ev­ery day for about a week, then goes back to per­form­ing smooth­ly for no iden­ti­fi­able rea­son. This (...)

I’ve al­ways been a big fan of Starwood ho­tels (that’s Westin, W, Aloft, etc.) — main­ly be­cause their points sys­tem is the best for earn­ing points. Because of the points, I get to stay at nice ho­tels a cou­ple of times a year on points (like the trip this week in San Francisco). Today I learned via an email from Starwood and in­side the hotel it­self that you can now use Apple Facetime on your iPhone or iPod Touch to speak with their cus­tomer ser­vice hot­line. Gadling re­port­ed that the pro­gram (...)

If you’ve used a smart­phone — like an iPhone or an Android, or one of the new­er BlackBerry de­vices — for a long time, here’s a chal­lenge: go for a day or two with­out it, and see how it feels. I don’t mean hik­ing the Appalachian Trail; try to go with­out it dur­ing a reg­u­lar day in a ci­ty, or bet­ter still, do it when you’re on a busi­ness trip to an un­fa­mil­iar ci­ty. I did that on a re­cent day in San Francisco after my iPhone locked me out for no rea­son, and it was a painful ex­pe­ri­ence. It was (...)

Last mon­th, we gave you a sneak peek of the new Yahoo! Search Restaurant Comparison Quick App in be­ta test­ing. Today we are of­fi­cial­ly rolling it out for all our users. The Restaurant Comparison Quick App con­sol­i­dates key com­par­ison points like price, dis­tance, cuisine type, at­mo­sphere, and rat­ings in a sin­gle side-by-side view. When you search for a restau­rant, the App al­so dis­plays sim­i­lar restau­rants near­by. This way, you can find the restau­rant you want in a sin­gle, easy-to-use app. (...)

The TechAmerica Foundation’s an­nu­al Cybercities re­port cov­er­ing the state of America’s lo­cal tech­nol­o­gy job mar­kets for 2009 (the most re­cent data avail­able) paints–as you might ex­pect–a de­press­ing pic­ture in all but a few of the mar­kets sur­veyed. One big sur­prise: The job mar­ket with the strongest growth in tech jobs–with a net gain of 900–was Oklahoma City. Don’t pack up the U-Haul just yet. Yes, it added the most tech­nol­o­gy jobs of the 60 ci­ties in the sur­vey, but it al­so had one of the (...)

Despite its fast growth and me­dia clout, Twitter re­mains a niche ser­vice in the U.S., used by just 8 per­cent of American Internet users, ac­cord­ing to a new sur­vey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The fig­ures paint a pic­ture of a dy­nam­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form that’s still a ways off from be­ing a com­mon tool for most users. When fac­tor­ing in that 74 per­cent of Americans cur­rent­ly use the Internet, Pew said Twitter is ac­tu­al­ly in use by 6 per­cent of all (...)

It seems Google wants to get in­to mar­kets quick and the com­pa­ny is will­ing to pay for a com­pa­ny and its ex­pe­ri­enced peo­ple, rather than build a pro­duct and team from scratch, SVP of Product Development for Advertising Susan Wojcicki ex­plained at the D: Dive Into Mobile event at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in San Francisco. Click to read the rest of this post...

Yahoo to­day launched a be­ta ver­sion of Yahoo Local, a ser­vice that pro­vides neigh­bor­hood-speci­fic news and other lo­cal con­tent. Limited in this ini­tial launch, Yahoo Local sup­ports 30 neigh­bor­hoods and ci­ties in the U.S., in­clud­ing San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale, Calif.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Royal Oak, Mich. In­stead of build­ing an app for this rich, high­ly fo­cused con­tent, Yahoo opt­ed to cre­ate it as a web app for both Apple iOS and Google Android de­vices as well as (...)

During my time in San Francisco this week for the Dreamforce con­fer­ence, I had the chance to meet with TaskForceApp founder Niccolo Pantucci. If you read CN reg­u­lar­ly, you know I like pro­duc­tiv­i­ty apps – those apps that save time or save money or both. What I liked about my con­ver­sa­tion with Niccolo was our fo­cus on util­i­ty and not on the next Twitter fart app. TaskForce pro­vides a util­i­ty to take emails and con­vert them to tasks with one click. The ser­vice cur­rent­ly works with Gmail but (...)

Writing pre­dic­tions is al­ways fun be­cause if you get one right it makes you look like you have ex­traor­di­nary psy­chic skills. And if you get it wrong, well, so what? How could you re­al­ly know? On a more se­ri­ous note, pub­lish­ing pre­dic­tions can be valu­able con­tent if they are formed by us­ing unique in­sights to ag­gre­gate qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive ob­ser­va­tions, such as in­ter­views with in­dus­try lead­ers or an­a­lyz­ing trend data. In January 2010, I pub­lished a list of my tech­nol­o­gy (...)