Author: Rocco Penn

Lady Gaga joins Beyonce, Chris Brown, and Michael Jackson as artists whose YouTube channels had artificially inflated views struck from the video site’s coveted counts. It’s as if 156 million voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. As NME notes, it’s likely not her fault. Fans and hackers will often inflate the counts using automated video viewing techniques to either support or attempt to get the artists in trouble. There are other factors taken into account during these sweeps, including auto-play views that YouTube doesn’t like to count. If someone didn’t specifically…

In 2011, we wrote about how Groupon must fail to save the internet. At the time, there were already some fishy things happening in the Daily Deals segment of eCommerce and more fishiness continues to pop up even today. What happened to the promising future of Groupon and its biggest competitor, LivingSocial? With Amazon revealing that LivingSocial lost $650 million in 2012, it’s clear that both of the daily deals juggernauts are slipping. It seems like yesterday that Google was getting their $6 billion offer rejected by Groupon. What has changed? Why is the industry failing? To answer that, we…

The bad news is that it’s $52,000. The good news is that if you have time to lay in bed all day, you might just have the lifestyle cash available to buy this puppy. That is, unless you’re able to do so because you’re still living with your parents, in which case you now have an incentive to get out of bed, go to college, and get the type of job that can help you afford to leave mom’s and get the  Hi Can gaming bed. Need more to drool over than just the new age design? How about an HD projector, a top notch built in computer, state-of-the-art sound system, reading light (in case you don’t have a Kindle handy), and…

It may be too early to start firing up your DNA thumb drive, but that’s not out of the question in the near future. A British scientist has imprinted 739kb of data onto a strand of synthetic DNA that includes 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a photo, a PDF of a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech, according to the South China Morning Post. The technology opens many doors for data storage. DNA has been shown to be extremely durable over time and requires no energy to maintain. Data storage devices have been getting smaller…

Today, the fastest standard flight from Paris to Sydney requires one quick stop and takes about 22 hours. The SpaceLiner project by the German Aerospace Center hopes to cut that time considerably by launching a rocket with up to 50 passengers into the upper atmosphere and gliding down to the destination at 24 times the speed of sound. If successful, the total travel time would be 90 minutes. If it sounds ambitious, it is. The target launch for commercial use of the concept is 2050. That doesn’t diminish the potential that such technology could bring to a world that is still desperately separated…

A thespian from the time he was 8, Leonard Nimoy would go on to become one of the most iconic characters in science fiction both on television and the big screen. He spent his high school years at Boston’s English High School and acted throughout before attending Boston College. Before becoming the ever-logical Spock, his friends apparently called him Lenny. Click the image to enlarge. …

Every month we cover the UFO activity for the previous month using some excellent footage that is compiled by AnonymousFO. December’s activity definitely didn’t disappoint. One thing to note is that several of the segnebts were of bright lights that appeared during the day. If you watch the previous videos, you’ll see that there were fewer in recent months that were seen in the daytime. Night has always been the best time for “them” to come out, but that changed in December. Is there a shift happening, or is it just a fluke flurry of daytime sightings? We’ll find out next month. Until then, here are…

The greatest threat to startups is lack of momentum. For companies that make it over the startup hump, it’s competition. Once a tech company is big, innovation is often the biggest challenge. Once you get to be the size of Facebook, Google, and Apple, the biggest roadblocks to continued prosperity can be Washington DC and other governments. For this reason, many of the largest tech firms in the world spend hefty amounts of money on lobbyists to make sure that the actions of the US government do not deter them from heading down the paths they choose. Facebook is the latest to hit the lobbying trail hard…

The popular television show “Sons of Anarchy” on FX may be one of the grittiest on air today, but can it get any grittier than the story of a boy who was abandoned by a father who overthrew the galaxy’s government, only to be defeated and even reunited in war with his son years later? Star Wars is a pretty harrowing tale if you really think about it, which is why the two were destined to meet at some point. Here’s the original emblem for the show: Now, here’s the Tatooine treatment: * * * “Sons of Anakin” via Society6.  …

Don’t be fooled. 14-year old Santiago Gonzalez may seem like your average mild-mannered young teen who is probably owning you on Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, but his skills go well beyond your standard American youth. He programs. He builds apps. Cool apps. Is thnkrtv correct in speculating that he might be the next Steve Jobs? Keep in mind, he’s fluent in a dozen program language, he is on pace to earn his master’s degree at the Colorado School of Mines before turning 18, and he dreams in code. At this rate, he’ll be taking over the world before he reaches legal drinking age. …