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The 404 202: Where it's hot as hell and Jeff is hungry

Several times throughout today's show, The 404 almost causes the universe to implode. Our Earth-shaking collection of topics today include a story about Viagra missiles, iPhone flaws and young love, divinely drunk intervention, and more Ryan Gosling/Ryan Reynolds confusion...which witch is which?!

One of the more ridiculous stories on today's show is about a man that somehow managed to smuggle a fake, but extremely realistic looking missile into New York with a sticker on the side that proudly read "VIVA VIAGRA." After driving around New York, making stops at Times Square and the Trump Tower, the man ended up in front of the Pfizer corporate building where the company promptly slapped a restraining order and a cease and desist warning on his man-made missile. The craziest part about this story is the fact that one man somehow drove through the Midtown tunnel and several New York police officers with a missile attached to his truck.

Is that all it takes? The man claims that ""New York City cops are smart. They know the difference between a mock-up and the real thing," and that's all well and good, but what about scaring the sh*t out of thousands of New Yorkers? Mass chaos isn't so fun. Do you think The 404 should pull a stunt like this? Clearly it'd be pretty easy to set in motion, and you know we need the publicity! Any suggestions? Leave us a comment and and let us know!

EPISODE 202 Download today's podcast … Read more

Idealism for New York tech, from VC Fred Wilson

NEW YORK--"We are not an alley."

So said venture capitalist Fred Wilson of at the Web 2.0 Expo here in his keynote entitled "New York's Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent." A longtime leader in Gotham's culture of digital innovation, Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, gave a short "history lesson" to the hordes of conference attendees, many of whom had come from hundreds of miles away.

And the term "Silicon Alley," he said, is one that the city should shake off. "We are one of the largest cities in the world," Wilson said. "We are one of the largest Internet development communities in the world. Let's bury the name Silicon Alley."

New York's technology community is still considered an afterthought in comparison to the Bay Area, and Wilson, though he has invested in companies like Delicious and Twitter over the years and runs one of the Web's most influential venture capital blogs, isn't yet in the league of true Valley legends like John Doerr.

But the numbers, Wilson said, show a very different trend. In 1995, 230 early-stage companies in the Bay Area received venture backing, and only 30 did in New York. By the end of the year, 2008's numbers should be 360 in the Bay Area and nearly 120 in New York. "We have grown here in New York by four times in 14 to 15 years, and Silicon Valley has grown by 1.5 times," Wilson said. "We've gone from being one-eighth of the activity of Silicon Valley to one-third. In my mind that's very significant."

The keynote took the audience back, in fact, to 1979, when New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program was first formed. "It started in an art school, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU," Wilson said. "I think that still to this day defines a distinguishing characteristic of the New York Internet community."

The timeline went on: the rise of interactive ad agencies in 1995, along with the debut of The New York Times Web site, which first launched in conjunction with the visit of Pope John Paul II to New York; the debut in the mid-1990s of digital businesses like iVillage, The Knot, and Star Media; the sale of Total New York to AOL, and the IPO of DoubleClick in 1997--New York's first tech company to go public.… Read more

Multiverse touts extensible virtual-world effort

The Multiverse Network, a developer of virtual world platform software, announced Wednesday that it was unveiling what it calls Places, two related social elements that tie Multiverse users together.

Essentially connective tissue for users of the Multiverse platform, Places has two separate components.

The first is a social networks application that automatically connects people using Multiverse virtual worlds together with others who are also friends in social networks like Facebook.

The second part of Places is a new virtual world centered around a digital representation of Manhattan's Times Square. Now anyone who installs Multiverse's World Browser--the basic Multiverse … Read more

Square Enix releases role-playing game for iPod

Yes, you read it right. The new game called Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes is for the iPod, not the iPhone. In this role-playing game, you are the protagonist Ziggy who goes on a quest to save his brother from the evil Mechanical Militia. Along the way, warriors created from the songs in your iPod can be summoned to fight your battles.

According to Square Enix's press release, the game is controlled by the click wheel (what else is there, anyway?) and is said to be as easy as selecting music. It's slated for release today at the … Read more

Microsoft creating TownSquare, an enterprise social network

Microsoft on Thursday will reveal TownSquare, a social network for its business customers, according to Computerworld.

The service is reportedly similar to Facebook, in which Microsoft has a $240 million stake. Users can see others' feeds of what they are doing, upload and view photos, and connect with each other in teams. The site has been in use at Microsoft since Janurary, the story said.

TownSquare also reads in news feeds from the Web and workflow information from the SharePoint groupware platform, Computerworld said.

Another Microsoft social network experiement, Wallop, spun out of the company in 2006 and more recently … Read more

Free Chronotebooks at the Muji Times Square store this Friday!

To celebrate the opening of their newest Times Square flagship location, Japanese retail store MUJI will give away 500 "Chronotebooks," their unique take on the classic (read: boring) paper planner.

MUJI's second store in New York, located at 620 Eighth Avenue, will offer exactly 2,170 items at the time of the opening, and all products will share the same strict MUJI rule: no branding. The name "MUJI" comes from the Japanese word "Mujirushi Ryohin" that essentially means quality without a name. Some people call MUJI the Japanese IKEA, but I'm not … Read more

Multiverse shows off its virtual Times Square

I spent part of Friday afternoon in New York's Times Square, but something wasn't quite right.

On the one hand, things looked very realistic, with the many digital video screens blaring high-fidelity but inane content out at me. On the other, there was only one person in evidence.

So, OK, this wasn't really Times Square. Rather, it was a new technology demo from Multiverse Network, a leading virtual-world platform developer.

In general, Multiverse just makes its platform available to any development team that wants to use it to create a new virtual world. But in this case, … Read more

Reddit party boasts good karma

SOMERVILLE, Mass.--Reddit, the social news site, hosted one of its meet-ups Wednesday night at the famous local Irish pub, The Burren, in Davis Square here.

Reddit users can post links to news stories of interest that readers then vote up or down. The site also maintains a section for niche communities interested in special topics called "Subreddit."

Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder, came as...what else...the Reddit alien.

Also in attendance were many of Reddit's all-time leading users (posters get "karma" points for well-read articles), as well as several other entrepreneurs from small … Read more

Gotham Geek Guidebook: AOL's new downtown digs

It'll be interesting to see how AOL chooses to classify its new corporate headquarters on 770 Broadway in downtown Manhattan. The historic building, formerly home to the Wanamaker's department store, spans an entire city block and now holds offices of one variety or another for companies as varied as J. Crew, Viacom and Billboard. And there's famously a K-Mart (one of Manhattan's few-and-far-between big-box discount retailers) on the ground floor. It's touted by owner Vornado Realty Trust as being "in the heart of the Village." Well, kind of.

Because so many of New … Read more

Is there an antimalware Holy Grail?

Excluding Firefox and its 400 million downloads and 120 million regular users, the days of a killer free application dominating hearts and minds are deader than Pets.com. Yet a single malware destroyer is what we're all hoping for, especially since malware and virus threats are as chameleonic as their intentions are devious.

Three antimalware applications have made it to the top of my list: Avira Antivir, AVG Anti-Spyware, and A-Squared Free.