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By Drew Grant 12/10/12 5:16pm

Tech

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The new not normal (CBS)

Paging Margaret Sullivan: David Pogue’s Creepy Christmas Involves Underage Girls, Unintelligible Accents, and Brain-Controlled Cat Ears [Video]

So we already knew that David Pogue was a little bit…off. The New York Times reporter has a reputation for being both the most famous tech writer in the country as well as the most controversial. He’s been accused of shilling for Apple and FoxConn, which produces Apple products, and possibly dating one of their publicists. These are all pretty sketchy things.

But nothing explains this Christmas video he made for CBS Sunday Morning, where he appears as a weekend tech consultant correspondent in a strange, non-conflict of interest arrangement. In the video he plays Techno Claus who for some reason sounds a lot like Mike Myers’s Linda Richman in “Coffee Talk.” And that’s just the beginning. Read More

By Dan Duray 1/12/11 1:21am

Tech

You Want Some Facebook Shares? We Know a Guy

“I think that at some point in the future there will not be a distinction between a public or a private company,” Barry Silbert told The Observer last Friday. Between how quickly the SecondMarket CEO and founder talks and the slight Georgia accent that softens his vowels, you can almost miss the grandiose nature of Read More

By Dan Duray 1/05/11 7:44pm

Tech

NPR Offers Crash Course in Gawker

Two days ago NPR offered a story ostensibly about Nick Denton’s dramatic new one-story redesign planned for this year and the piece offers a fairly comprehensive, tote-bag-size overview of the Gawker empire.

All the major players make an appearance: Nick Denton, Jessica Coen, Gaby Darbyshire and the big board Mr. Denton Read More

By Dan Duray 1/05/11 3:48am

Tech

In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb! Gilt Groupe Rings in 2011

“Here’s where my daughter is right now,” said a nearly bald man from Connecticut, showing the white-jacketed bartender something on his iPhone. It was New Year’s Eve at the Lambs Club restaurant, just off Times Square. “The Phish concert at Madison Square Garden. I’m going to tell her to come here after this.” The bartender Read More

By Thomas Golianopoulos 12/08/10 3:53am

Tech

The Original WikiLeaker

“I don’t drink water,” said John Young. The 74-year-old architect was an early associate of WikiLeaks and has run his own document-publishing Web site, Cryptome.org since 1996. “Why drink water when there is alcohol?”

Last Friday, at the Five Napkin Burger on the Upper West Side, Mr. Young sipped coffee and looked surprised as I Read More

By Dan Duray 11/23/10 9:16pm

Tech

Why Start-Ups Are Hesitant About Corporate VCs

In this week’s Observer, Leon Neyfakh wrote about AOL Ventures, the venture capital arm of the former dial-up monolith that’s working to reinvigorate their image and get their hands dirty with investments in the New York tech scene.

But You’ve Got Mail associations aside, another set of challenges facing Mr. Brown is general Read More

By Leon Neyfakh 11/23/10 3:33am

Tech

Bringing Some Sizzle to the Dial-Up King

After work on Thursday, Nov. 18, about 100 software engineers walked through the front doors of 770 Broadway near Astor Place and made their way up to the sixth-floor offices of AOL. The group, mostly young men, were specialists in machine learning, a discipline related to artificial intelligence that involves writing algorithms that improve over Read More

By Dan Duray 11/17/10 3:58pm

Tech

Karl Lagerfeld Possibly Praises Facebook

Karl Lagerfeld may have praised Facebook in a recent video for something called The Luxury Channel. The interviewer asked Lagerfeld to detail what sort of modern technology he “find[s] amazing.”

Mr. Lagerfeld generally discouraged the use of Facebook, saying that’s a task for his assistant, but complimented the site’s “very beautiful” design. “Facebook is a Read More