It's still early w unconfirmed scanner reports but if Redit was right with the Sunil Tripathi theory, it's changed the game 4ever

—
Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) April 19, 2013

.@LukeRussert No it hasn't.

—
Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) April 19, 2013

Reporters have a nasty addiction to a particularly potent drug: the attention that comes from getting a scoop. Last night, during the live manhunt of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, we saw a lot of respected writers completely tweaking out on it. For lack of evidence, speculation began to swirl from the least reliable of sources: Internet conspiracy theorists. In the morning, when it became completely obvious that amateur sleuths on Reddit had falsely identified a missing Brown University student as the marathon terrorist, many pointed fingers at Reddit as “vigilantes.”

Crowdsourcing detective work isn’t to blame; it’s the reporters and media outlets that gave unreliable sources a voice. The poor high school track student whose face was splashed on the front page of the New York Post is reportedly now holed up in his home, afraid to go outside. “It’s the worst feeling that I can possibly feel. . . . I’m only 17,” he told ABC.

The name of another “suspect,” a missing Brown University student, was haphazardly tossed around by the likes of NBC news reporter Luke Russert on Twitter. Even though Russert was explicitly skeptical, that doesn’t stop moderately informed citizens from misinterpreting the whole ordeal:

Who is Sunil Tripathi? What the eff is going on?

—
VIP (@VIPMag_HerbertH) April 19, 2013

The unexpected infamy has caused the family of the missing student untold grief. “A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our Beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours,” wrote a family member on a Facebook page dedicated to searching for the missing boy.

Indeed, one of the top posts on Reddit yesterday was “Media Outlets, please stop making the images of potential suspects go viral, then blaming this small subreddit for it. And read the rules we’ve imposed before calling us ‘vigilantes’.” Continuing:

“Until the media got involved, none of the images were going anywhere but to the FBI.
Every single article on this subreddit so far reads like the writer took a glance at the front page then wrote an article about it, we explicitly have a list of rules to stop “witch hunts” …

Edit: News outlets have spread images on TV & in papers of two male ‘suspects’ that they say the FBI is looking for, these have now gone viral. That media, is what a witch hunt is.”

The FBI and Boston authorities made a nationwide plea to send tips, pictures and smartphone video into their hot line. It turned out to be a lucrative call: a bystander had discovered a high-resolution shot of the suspect that was serendipitously taken after the explosion, giving the authorities a (literally) much clearer picture than grainy security camera footage.

Online conservations can help bystanders become aware of latent content hidden in their phones. As the subreddit community hosting the conversation stated: “The harsh reality is that discussion requires looking at all possibilities. But to equate discussion with an unambiguous implication of guilt is presumptive and hyperbolic.” Adding, “We do not strive, nor pretend, to release journalist-quality content for the sake of informing the public.”

In other words, for the love of everything that is holy, these names are not for news stories, or even for social media updates, as viewers do not rightly distinguish between a story published on an official website or one tweeted out by a reporter’s account.

Overzealous redditors are conspiracy theorists — nothing more. One Reddit community had the good sense to apologize to Tripathi’s family. But, there will always be this kind of drivel on the web; it’s the cost of a free Internet.

However, we hold reporters to a higher standard, and they should start acting like they deserve it.

[Feature Image Credit: Flickr user Numinosity]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

MapMyFitness, the health and fitness startup that powers a community of fitness-oriented websites like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, has today announced that it has closed $9 million in Series B financing, which brings its total investment to $15.5 million. The round was led by Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners, with new, strategic partners joining the round, including Competitor Group, The Running Company, and its parent company, The Finish Line.

CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that the company’s initial plan had been to raise a smaller round with participation solely from financial investors in an effort to minimize dilution, but the company has ambitions to capitalize on the online-to-offline movement and its strategic investors offered an opportunity to help move it in that direction (without impeding eventual liquidity options down the road).

Competitor Group, for those unfamiliar, is one of the largest race event companies (owning and operating the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon Series and Muddy Buddy) and endurance sports publisher, owning publications like Competitor, Velo News, Triathlete and Triathalon magazines, for example, which collectively have circulations over 800K. In turn, The Running Company, which is owned by retailer and eCommerce company The Finish Line, is among the biggest sport footwear retailers in the U.S., operating over 700 stores nationwide.

These offline business partnerships could be a useful leg up for MapMyFitness, which is primarily an online and mobile platform, giving the startup further inroads with established retailers and publishers. This comes on top of some strong recent growth for MapMyFitness, which recently passed 9 million registered users and has over 30 million downloads across its fitness apps.

MapMyFitness, for a little background, allows users to track and store their running, cycling, walking, and hiking activity, as well as accessing a sizable database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events, listings, etc. Since its founding back in 2005, MapMyFitness has grown into one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space.

But, rather than rest on its laurels, MapMyFitness has been eager to continue pressing forward to expand offline and into international markets. Along with its new round, the startup last month completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, updating its routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the latter making its the only fitness service to integrate with Google Maps API v3.9.

This meant that, on top of being able to plan, track, and share their running, hiking, and walking routes, users can take advantage of realtime info on traffic, weather, safer routes, directions, realtime elevation, custom markers, etc — across its apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and iPad. It also boosted the platform’s integration with game dynamics, providing athletes with the ability to view leaderboards and to check-in during their work outs, in order to better track speed, distance, and intensity of workouts, while comparing themselves to specific groups, whether it be local clubs, friends, or running rivals.

For more on MapMyFitness, see our recent coverage here, or check them out at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When social network Bebo went down on Monday, what seemed like a flood of distraught users concluded that the site must be shutting down, and they took to Twitter to commemorate it. Instead, the downtime turned out to be the result of technical problems.

The site was down for about 20 hours, and now the company is about to post an apology, advertised site-wide through the banner ad above. We’ve obtained a copy — CEO Adam Levin explains that the team was working on some new features and accidentally crashed the site. He also assures users, “We’re not going anywhere.”

Here’s the full post:

Dear Bebo’ers,

As you probably noticed we were out of commission for a while starting on Tuesday. We have been fortunate that in the nearly seven years that Bebo has been in operation, these glitches have been few and far between. Still, we work hard every day to keep the site constantly working and we heard from many of you — loud and clear — how much your lives were affected by the outage. We are both profoundly sorry and profoundly moved by the outpouring of comments on blogs, Twitter and elsewhere.

Once we had everything back up in perfect order, we realized we needed to explain what happened so Nigel from Marketing went back into storage and pulled out the Big Book of Website Excuses (2012 Edition). Among the options considered:

1. “Occupy” protesters took over Bebo.
2. Another internet company was protesting against SOPA/PIPA.
3. Time to get a new server… That Amiga 500 has gone as far as it can go.
4. Huge spike in traffic exceeded our server capacity and brought the site down.
5. Time off for the staff to watch a Harry Potter Marathon on Blu-Ray.
6. Just a publicity stunt to get more attention.
7. Government-mandated program to get users to spend more time outdoors.
8. Too many cute cat photos causes our servers to run out of disk space.
9. New policy: turn the site off one day per week to reduce greenhouse emissions.
10. It was all just a dream.

But in the end, we thought it best to just be honest and tell you the truth: we were working on some new features (pretty cool ones, I might add) and in the process we crashed the site. Embarrassing, but true. And we worked as hard as possible to restore everything as fast as we could. Unfortunately, on a site as complex as Bebo, with as many users, these things take time.

We’re not going anywhere. (And even if we were, we wouldn’t just disappear into the night without even saying thanks, right?) The fact is: Bebo has a fantastic future ahead and we’ve been working on some new things that we’re truly excited about. We can’t wait to share them with you, but of course we’ll be a bit more careful as we roll these things out.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, check out these comments. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are frankly kind of mean. But that’s Bebo users in a nutshell, isn’t it?

Lots of luv!

Adam (CEO)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fusible, always keeping a close eye on domain name registrations and ownership changes, has noticed that Google has taken over the domain name Schemer.com. Interestingly, that URL already leads to a Google service login page, although you’ll hit a dead end when you log on.

There’s more to the story. According to Fusible, the former owner of the domain name was Meevine, a developer of mobile applications (which still owns getschemer.com by the way).

Update: I’m not seeing this in the WHOIS history. Instead, it shows the previous owner of the domain name as E Bour from the company Marathon Oil for me. Either way, it was taken over by Google a few months ago.

I hope they checked Urban Dictionary first.

Meevine, based in Seattle, is the company behind Gatherball, an Android app that basically makes it easier for friends to plan activities (more info here). They own the U.S. trademark for ‘SCHEMER’.

Meevine was co-founded by CEO Paul Watts (formerly at Microsoft, AOL, HTC and some other companies), Ben Demboski and Jonathan Nelson (bother formerly at AOL and RealNetworks).

I’ve asked both Meevine and Google for comment but haven’t heard back yet.

Update: Watts says: “I know about as much as you know at this point.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you want to feel lazy, spend about ten minutes with Travis Kiefer.

He’ll start out by telling you how he spent every waking moment of his teenage years in low-income South Dakota, studying and scheming over how he could be the first one in his family to go to college, and the first kid in his highschool’s history to go to an Ivy League school. His dream school: Stanford. As a kid from a low-income family, he knew the biggest way to change his family’s economic reality was a Silicon Valley startup.

Ok, so he’s an impressive kid. But that sounds like a lot of Silicon Valley rags-to-riches stories, right?

Then, he’ll tell you about how he spent much of his first year building a non-profit called Gumball Capital. It aims to spread entrepreneurship and philanthropy to college kids by challenging them to take $27, 27 gumballs and one week, and turn it into a project that raises money. Schemes range from midnight Pizza sales to tiny carnival games substituting the gumballs for regular balls. (You can see videos of what they’ve done here. Most people, he admits, just eat the gumballs.) Last year 12 schools had 47 teams competing and raised just under $2,000, which was donated to micro-lending organizations like Kiva with the goal of eradicating hunger in the world.

Ok, so he’s spending what should be his most selfish years trying to help others. He’s just young and idealistic.

Then, he’ll tell you that he took a year off at Stanford to run the organization fulltime, taking no salary, sleeping on his friend’s dorm floor and borrowing other student’s guest-meal passes to eat.

Wait. This kid killed himself to get into Stanford, find a way to afford it…and then he just took a year off for this cause? Ok, that’s a little impressive.

He wants to expand Gumball Capital to fifty schools this year all over the world. Next week, one in India has organized 100 teams of three-to-five students to raise money for the poor.

Well, that’s ambitious…

But the organization needs money for the materials, shipping and the administrative stuff entailed with organizing all of these teams. So he’s trying to raise $125,000 this year that will fund the program for a while, given the $27 given to each team is always paid back out of the proceeds. He’s already raised $75,000 and has pulled in some well-known Valley people like venture capitalist David Hornik as advisors and mentors.

Wow. This kid is actually building a pretty impressive little company…

How’d he raise all that money? By pledging to run a marathon on every continent. He’s done one in Ireland, Argentina, San Francisco, Zimbabwe, Australia and Japan. In a few days, he’s headed to Antarctica. He’s been jogging for three hours at a time in the cafeteria meat locker at Stanford to train. Oh, and he just started running last March. ”My biggest fear was getting injured before this marathon, because I didn’t have a contingency plan. So now I can relax a little,” he says, grinning and looking as wholesome and idealistic as Kenneth from 30Rock. “I mean, even if i get injured during it, I can at least walk the rest of it.”

I just look at him.

“Yeah, I’m a little crazy,” he says with his Kenneth-like-toothy grin.

So, I’ve met a lot of impressive people in fifteen years in the Valley, but talking to this kid for an hour yesterday just blew me away. He is everything the best entrepreneurs are: He’s smart. Hardworking. Has insanely huge visions and goals that only get more outsized the more he achieves. He’s a tenacious networker and pitchman– by the time he left my office, I’d committed to writing this and doing a follow-up video once he gets back and, of course, donate to the cause myself. I even sent him home with a few Diet Cokes since he was planning to stay up all night building this site. And yes, he’s a little bit crazy. This won’t be last we’ve heard of Travis Kiefer.

But back to the cause: Kiefer is hoping this final marathon will put them over the top for their fundraising goals and support the organization through the spring semester. He has a ten day trip to get $27 out of 2,000 people. So, if you go here (NOW!) and donate $27, in exchange Kiefer will do something for you in Antarctica. He’s open to suggestion, but you only have two days to do it. He’ll claim a plot of land in your name with a little flag. He’ll sing a song for your girlfriend via YouTube. He’ll call and wish your mom happy birthday. He’d probably even take your garden gnome and take a picture of it in Antarctica.

His dream is to be on the Colbert Report– so he’s starting a Twitter campaign to get Colbert’s attention. If you are too stingy to give $27 to Gumball Capital, at least RT this. He’s running seven marathons to help end poverty when he should be doing keg stands. The least you could do is hit the RT button, right?

Foursquare just announced that it is partnering with RunKeeper, an application that helps users track fitness routines, to allow members of the location-based social network to earn badges without actually having to check-in.

So users of RunKeeper will earn exclusive badges on Foursquare by hitting different milestones within the app. For example, you an unlock a Marathon badge by using RunKeeper to track long distance running without having to check-in to a gym or park. The badge will show up in your RunKeeper profile as well as with your badges on Foursquare.

The interesting part of this announcement is that it is further evidence of Foursquare’s intention to move beyond check-ins. As stated in the post: “We’re also aware that some of those behaviors don’t necessarily involve a check-in, which is why today we’re excited to introduce the first badge you unlock by doing something, not just checking in.”

Foursquare goes on to say that it is going to develop similar partnerships to allow users to unclock badges via “real-world experiences” with “carefully selected partners.” We know that Foursquare is looking to move beyond the check-in; the new version of their iPhone app includes an emphasis on both Tips and To-Dos. It’s a smart strategy. And this latest emphasis on badges doesn’t deviate from Foursquare’s brand and experience. And the possibilities for partnerships with other applications seems endless (although Foursquare wants to be selective with its partners).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch