For a tech company founder in San Francisco, I’m a terribly late adopter of new technology.

For the past few years, we’ve been told over and over again that NFC will eventually replace the common wallet. And yes, NFC is a great technology. Parts of Europe and China are using it for public transport transactions, and the sharing of content between devices is incredibly cool ( just check out this commercial )

“There’s an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up” Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker tells me. So he’s building #waywire , a news site that features original and syndicated video content, but that also lets viewers record and share their responses. “Traditional news sources aren’t in any way talking to millennials” Booker says, so #waywire is designed to deliver them content from their perspective

If you’re a startup aficionado, you may be getting tired of the same old launch pages. You know, the ones with a big, splashy image, a message about how something awesome is coming soon, and a box where you can enter your email address. If that’s the case, then you’ll probably get a kick out of the sign-up process at HackerRank

When we heard about  Instagram (and other sites) going down  when Amazon Web Services’ North Virginia hub was hit by a storm — not the first time AWS has gone down ( April 2011 was another notable outage ) we couldn’t help but wonder: could  it have been avoided? Mike Krieger, one of the founders of Instagram, once presented a  great slideshow  describing how Instagram was able to scale up so well.

Oh yes, the social media food humor is rolling in — eat it up, people. According to Twitter’s real-time search , Instagram being down, as a result of an Amazon Web Services storm-related incident , is unleashing a cornucopia of Instagram-related food jokes, at a rate of about one every couple of seconds

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement and not a little fear as Mike Arrington baited @Scobleizer from the Friendfeed chatroom . What started as a Mr. Greenjeans-like pulling of various Google I/O tablets and weird music balls from out of his pants suddenly went south in a hurry when @jtaschek noticed Arrington in the chat.

Editor’s note :  Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of  Sharethrough , the native video advertising company.

Last week I wrote about television ; this week I’ve been thinking about Hollywood.

Are you out at a Friday night dinner somewhere, trying to take a filtered picture of some fancypants dessert and post it to Instagram with no avail? Are you currently making futile efforts to pin said desset it to your “Fancy Dessert” board on Pinterest but failing?