Maxwell's demon goes quantum, can do work, write and erase data

19th century thought experiment meets 21st century physics.

Fondu Is Foursquare For Foodies

Last May at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Gauri Manglik and her two cofounders launched SpotOn, a mobile recommendation app for bars and restaurants based on where your friends have checked in on Foursquare. The people who ended up using the app used it more as a social network than as a recommendation tool. So Manglik and her team took what they learned and built an entirely new product called Fondu, which they are launching today as an iPhone app.

"We are building a social network for writing bite-sized reviews," says Manglik. You can search for places nearby or pull up a list of your recent Foursquare check-ins, and review each place with a short comment and give it a one-to-four petal rating with a swipe of your thumb. The app gives you a feed to follow your friends' ratings and mini-reviews, or you can see what is popular on a map near you.

Dennis Crowley Of Foursquare On Social Search, Platforms And Rivals

TechCrunch interviewed Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley a couple of weeks ago during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (referenced here). It was his third time visiting and speaking at the event, and perhaps Foursquare's most engaged visit of all in terms of going there: Crowley says that, all told, he met with 33 different companies this time around. It's a sign of how the company is looking for new business and new partnerships, and trying to extend itself as more than an app: as it gears up for whatever comes in its future, Foursquare is positioning itself as a location platform.

Facebook and Foursquare data powers ‘Girls Around Me’ app

The developers behind the location data-reliant iPhone application “Girls Around Me” has fallen under fire this week for their usage of Facebook and Foursquare without permission. What this developer, i-Free, maintains is that their usage of Foursquare and Facebook data to locate females surrounding the GPS location of the user was a “serious misunderstanding.” Facebook Read The Full Story

“Girls Around Me” Creeper App Just Might Get People To Pay Attention To Privacy Settings

Cult of Mac has a great write-up of an app for iOS called Girls Around Me, which essentially displays check-ins and public profiles of girls around you. With a little shift in context it could easily be confused for a hot new startup (discoverability meets speed dating!), but no, it really is just a way for guys to creep on nearby girls who have failed to lock down their info.

It's sad, but maybe something like this is what people need to shock them into understanding just how much information they put online.

Half A Million Downloads Later, Social Discovery App Banjo Hits The Web

Banjo, the creepy/awesome cyber-stalking app (I mean social discovery service) that shows you who's nearby based on their Facebook and Foursquare check-ins, geotagged tweets, TwitPic and Instagram uploads, is now a web app, too. In case you haven't yet download the iOS or Android application to your mobile device (or are some kind of Windows Phone-using rebel), you can check out the service via the recently updated Banjo website instead.

500px Returns To The iOS App Store, With Mature Content Warning And Photo Reporting Button

Toronto's 500px got its popular photo sharing iPhone app back on the iTunes App Store today, following a takedown that Apple said stemmed from multiple user complaints about pornographic material. The app returns with an age-gate warning, advising that the content in the app is for 17+ audiences, and also adds a new "Report Photo" button to help users quickly tag things they find offensive for potential removal from the network.

That’s A First: NASA’s Curiosity Rover Successfully Checks Into Foursquare From Mars

I love foursquare, I check in from pretty much everywhere I go. However, I would say that the Curiosity Rover on Mars is seeing cooler scenery than I ever have. Today, foursquare reported that the craft has checked in on foursquare for the first time.

Twitter API Changes Are Already Posing Challenges To Tweetbot Developers

Tapbots has announced on their blog that the alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac will no longer be available. Now that Twitter limits an app's user base to only 100,000 users, Tweetbot is one of the victims of Twitter's new API rules. The third-party app currently offers a better user experience than Twitter's own official app. It is therefore a controversial outcome.

Tapbots contacted Twitter to see if they could implement a workaround to prevent wasting user tokens during the free alpha test, but Twitter was intransigent.

The Foundations Of A Startup Community

For the past few months, my wife and I have been traveling and meeting startups around the world. We've met entrepreneurs in Tokyo, Thailand, India, Israel, and Istanbul. In the next week we'll be meeting with a community leader in South Africa. It's been fascinating.

In addition to meeting with the teams, we have been leading Q&A sessions with larger groups. The discussion always includes the group asking "how do we make our startup community as strong as Silicon Valley?"

It's an important question, as a lot of the startups' success in Silicon Valley can be attributed to the strong community. However, that community has been growing and maturing for over 40 years. So when people ask about how to replicate it, I try to direct the conversation back to the foundation of the community.

These are the elements I think are important to seed a startup community.