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This 22-Year-Old Just Landed $25 Million for a Secret App

This 22-Year-Old Just Landed $25 Million for a Secret App

Lucas Duplan dropped out of Stanford, brought a bunch of his buddies with him, and got to work on something daunting: creating an app that lets you pay for things with your phone. This is daunting because so many other things let you do it. Despite this, and the fact that his app is a total mystery, powerful VCs just handed him $25 million.

Duplan’s company—which isn’t available for anyone to actually use—is called Clinkle, and all we know about it is that it looks like this:

This 22-Year-Old Just Landed $25 Million for a Secret App

Which is a mix of a lot of apps that already exist. Details are scant: you can use it to send money to other people or businesses, sort of like Square, PayPal, Google Wallet, Venmo, and many, many more. TechCrunch has an anonymous source saying the “uses high frequency sound to communicate between devices,” which would be something unique, and Business Insider says Duplan has “secured a number of patents for his technology,” but there’s no listing for any relevant patents awarded to Duplan, Clinkle, or his attorneys.

None of this stopped Intel, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Intuit, Peter Thiel, Marc Benioff and Diane Greene from partying down on a $25 million joint investment in Clinkle, which its PR reps say is the “largest seed round in Silicon Valley history.” This is trumpeted as a categorically great thing for the mystery startup, with zero self-awareness over how similar grandstanding has embarrassingly exploded in everyone’s face before. Biggest means best in these parts, and it’s in Clinkle’s interest to focus on the mega money, rather than telling anyone outside of a venture capitalist cabal why the app is worth more than five dollars.

Clinkle’s website shows it’s already ready to put that cash to use:

This 22-Year-Old Just Landed $25 Million for a Secret App

Laser tag first, products later.

via Gawker http://valleywag.gawker.com/this-22-year-old-just-landed-25-million-for-a-secret-a-597986864

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Alex Jones Is a Tornado Truther Because, Obviously

Yesterday, we explored the wild reality of Tornado Truthers, who believe that massive storms are created by the HAARP antenna farm in Alaska (HAARP is actually a research station to communicate with aliens living underground — only fools think otherwise). Still, the whole affair was missing the input of King Nut himself, Alex Jones. Well, guess what? He’s down.

“Of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on — we had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force,” Jones said on The Alex Jones Show yesterday.

Jones elaborated that while he’s not sure that this week’s tornado outbreak was caused by the government, he’s absolutely sure that the government “can create and steer groups of tornadoes” (powers usually reserved not for any branch of the government, but for the X-Men).

Jones said that the smoking gun of government involvement would be if a helicopter or aircraft was spotted “in and around the clouds, spraying and doing things.” He continued, “if you saw that, you better bet your bottom dollar they did this, but who knows if they did. You know, that’s the thing, we don’t know.”

We just don’t know if the tornadoes were caused by small, sentient black helicopters or a variety of atmospheric conditions. We don’t know. WE’LL JUST NEVER KNOW.

[via Salon]

via Gawker http://gawker.com/alex-jones-is-a-tornado-truther-because-obviously-509260911

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The man who injured President Obama during a basketball game nearly 3 years ago finally gave his fir

The man who injured President Obama during a basketball game nearly 3 years ago finally gave his first interview:“I’ve played basketball a million times in my life and I’ve never elbowed anybody. So the first time I do this, it’s to the President of the United States? What is the probability of that? Nil, right?”

via Gawker http://gawker.com/the-man-who-elbowed-president-obama-during-a-basketball-493216984

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Rush Limbaugh Threatens to Leave Network Over Blame for Poor Ad Sales

Penis scientist Rush Limbaugh is reportedly upset with executives at his flagship station WABC and its parent company, Cumulus. He’s so mad, in fact, that’s he’s reportedly threatening to leave the company. Why? Because Lew Dickey, Cumulus’s CEO, is (probably correctly) blaming Limbaugh’s “slut” comments last year for declining ad revenue at the company

Several major advertisers dropped support for Limbaugh after the “slut” incident, but Limbaugh and a source who spoke with the Daily News said the show’s earnings were “very minimally impacted in the short term.”

Politico, however, notes that Dicky, on an August 2012 earnings call, said Cumulus’s top three stations lost $5.5 million. Some of those losses, Dickey said, were because of the boycotts agains Limbaugh. In a March 2013 earnings call, Dickey said the company was still suffering because of the comments, blaming them for roughly a third of the company’s revenue losses.

“There has been residual hangover … in terms of advertisers sitting out,” Dickey said in March. “Clearly that’s had an impact. … That’s something that we are dealing with on an ongoing basis.”

But a source told the New York Daily News, “Lew needs someone to blame, (so) he’s pointing fingers instead of fixing his own sales problem.”

Another source spoke to the Politico:

“It’s a very serious discussion, because Dickey keeps blaming Rush for his own revenue problems,” the source close to the show told POLITICO. “Dickey’s talk stations underperform talk stations owned by other operators in generating revenue by a substantial margin. It’s not a single show issue… it’s a failure of the entire station. And trying to blame Rush for that is not much of a business partnership.”

So, would the top-rated radio host in the country actually leave the stations that broadcast him in his largest markets? Maybe. Less Rush would certainly be a good thing, though that seems very unlikely to happen.

Regardless, this will make for a boring section in John Cusack’s movie about Limbaugh.

[Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com

via Gawker http://gawker.com/rush-limbaugh-threatens-to-leave-network-over-blame-for-493007045

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Hotel executive and Obama donor Penny Pritzker will nominated for Commerce secretary today.

Hotel executive and Obama donor Penny Pritzker will nominated for Commerce secretary today. Pritzker, the Tribune notes, “has had rocky relations with labor unions,” which is one way of putting it. Another way: “Penny Pritzker has a long and storied history as an anti-labor and anti-worker kind of boss.”

via Gawker http://gawker.com/hotel-executive-and-obama-donor-penny-pritzker-will-nom-486932856

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Cowboy Hat-Wearing Hero of Boston Bombings Is Famed Peace Activist

Cowboy Hat-Wearing Hero of Boston Bombings Is Famed Peace Activist

There were hundreds of heroes in the aftermath of Monday’s tragic bombing attacks in Boston. Doctors, police officers and even former NFL players responded with tremendous courage and saved lives. Carlos Arredondo — easily recognizable in photos and videos because of his cowboy hat — was one of those heroes and is prominently featured in two of the more memorable and traumatic images from Monday’s attack.

In the above photo, Arredondo can be seen apparently holding together the femoral artery or tourniquet of a victim who had lost both his legs in the attack. “I kept talking to him. I kept saying, ‘Stay with me, stay with me,’ ” Arredondo told the Press Herald.

And at the 1:45 mark of the video below, you can see Arredondo rushing to help victims just seconds after the first explosion.

But who is Arredondo? As several tipsters and and publications have noted, the 52-year-old has quite the past.

Arredondo was watching the race to support a runner who was running the marathon in honor of Arredondo’s son, Lance Cpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. When Arredondo was told (on his 44th birthday, no less) about his son’s death by a group of Marines, he didn’t believe them. From a 2007 New York Times article:

“I just screamed,” he said. “I said ‘No, no! It can’t be my son.’ “

Mr. Arredondo said he “lost it.” He ran to his garage and grabbed a gallon of gasoline and a propane torch.

He took a sledgehammer and smashed the government van’s windshield and hopped inside. As the officers tried to calm him, Mr. Arredondo doused himself and the van with gasoline and lit the torch.

There was an explosion, and the officers dragged Mr. Arredondo to safety. He suffered second- and third-degree burns over 20 percent of his body.

“I went to my son’s funeral on a stretcher,” he said.

The incident – and the 10 months he spent in the hospital recovering – spurred Arredondo to a life of activism protesting the war in Iraq. He drove around the country in his son’s truck, which was carrying a coffin and was decorated with pictures of his dead son at his funeral. “As long as there are marines fighting and dying in Iraq, I’m going to share my mourning with the American people…Every day we have G.I.’s being killed, and people don’t really care enough or do enough to protest about how the war is going,” he told the Times. “Some people say I’m dishonoring my son by doing this, but this is my pain, my loss.”

That loss grew exponentially four years later, when Arredondo’s surviving son killed himself at age 24, partly out of grief from losing his older brother. Now, Arredondo has again found himself in the midst of tragedy and again responded with resiliency and courage. Below is an interview with Arredondo taken after the bombings.

[Image via AP]

via Gawker http://gawker.com/5994736/cowboy-hat+wearing-hero-of-boston-bombings-is-famed-peace-activist

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If Tumblr ‘Couldn’t Be Happier’ With its Journalists, Why’d it Just Fire Them All?

If Tumblr 'Couldn't Be Happier' With its Journalists, Why'd it Just Fire Them All? In a move that’s sure to inspire thousands of sad-face GIF reposts, social-blogging site Tumblr declared Storyboard, its ambitious year-old editorial initiative, an unqualified success Tuesday night and immediately celebrated by shutting it down and canning its entire crew.

“After hundreds of stories and videos, features by publishers ranging from Time to MTV to WNYC—not to mention a nomination for a James Beard Award and entries into this year’s NY Press Club Awards—we couldn’t be happier with our team’s effort,” Tumblr creator David Karp wrote on the site’s staff blog around 10 p.m., adding: “What we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.”

Why do you shutter a project in the dead of night if you “couldn’t be happier” about it?

Storyboard was a splashy high-profile blog (within the Tumblr community, at least) that showcased the social media property’s top-shelf original content, as well as the users who produced it. Its triumphs regularly garnered thousands of “likes” and reblogs; these included a profile of a barista who makes intricate portraits in coffee and steamed milk; a gallery of hip-hop quotes posted on the New York streets that they name-check; the insanest hand-drawn maze ever; and Donkey Kong in 17th-century Japanese prints.

This didn’t seem like a term-limited experiment, certainly not to the talent Karp had poached to run it: editor-in-chief (and Gawker vet) Chris Mohney from BlackBook, along with executive editor Jessica Bennett, a Newsweek refugee. (A third editorial worker, Sky Dylan-Robbins, was also cut loose.) Bennett offered no hints to the bloodletting in her own goodbye post:

RIP TUMBLR EDITORIAL. WE PRODUCED SOME AWESOME MOTHERFUCKING SHIT / REDEFINED JOURNALISM / WON SOME AWARDS / OBSESSED OVER ONE DIRECTION / ALL THAT. IT WAS A GREAT RIDE> NOW: ANYONE WANT TO HIRE ME?

So why did Storyboard die? The conventional explanation would be that it experimented with doing wonderful things that don’t generate profit, and it succeeded on both counts. Yet with a crew of three, it didn’t exactly demand a massive subsidy. And if Tumblr’s own sunshiney sales reports are to be believed, the company was already headed toward profitability this year.

Which suggests that Karp—a 26-year-old high school dropout who’s theoretically worth $200 million—could, indeed, have been happier with his editorial experiment. Tumblr’s users and freshly unemployed journalists could surely be happier with him, even as they’re committed to the platform he built. Late Tuesday, a user asked Mohney on the fired editor’s blog: “Was it always the plan for Storyboard to only run for a year?” Mohney replied: “amusing noncontextual animated image dot gif.”

via Gawker http://gawker.com/5994232/if-tumblr-couldnt-be-happier-with-its-journalists-whyd-it-just-fire-them-all

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Just What is Going on at Lake Vostok?

Just What is Going on at Lake Vostok?Earlier this week, Russian scientist Sergei Bulat, a researcher at the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, announced that a new life form had been found in an ice sample from the gigantic Lake Vostok, which lies deep beneath Antarctica. The Russians had to drill over 12,000 feet to get to the frozen lake, which is underneath a place that had the lowest recorded temperature in history. Needless to say, the sample from Lake Vostok was extremely hard to obtain, and the Russians were rewarded for their hard effort with some spectacular scientific findings.

Bulat described the discovery on Thursday:

After excluding all known contaminants…we discovered bacterial DNA that does not match any known species listed in global databanks. We call it unidentified and ‘unclassified’ life.”

“Unidentified” and “Unclassified,” very cool! Unfortunately for Bulat however, the next day Russia backed away from their claims, saying that what they found had in fact been contaminants.

So why would an incredibly well-respected scientist like Dr. Bulat jump the gun on the new bacteria? Because we’re in the middle of a multinational underground lake race, that’s why!

Bulat was under enormous pressure to provide results, coming weeks after American scientists found their own bacterial life in Lake Whillans, another giant underground Antarctic lake. British scientists have also tried to get in on the underground lake game, failing to reach Lake Ellsworth this December.

Nations want to get to these lakes to study microorganisms that have not been tampered with for thousands of years. As the Russians found out, contamination is a major obstacle to the study. However, the financial windfall, in grants and private funding, that will come to whatever group cracks the DNA of the new organisms first is more than enough to rekindle some cold, cold war-style competition.

via Gawker http://gawker.com/5989807/just-what-is-going-on-at-lake-vostok

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‘Rifleman’s Journal’ Host Shot and Killed by Apparently Jealous Husband in Murder-Suicide

'Rifleman's Journal' Host Shot and Killed by Apparently Jealous Husband in Murder-Suicide

Gregory Rodriguez, the host of the Sportsman Channel show The Rifleman’s Journey, was killed Friday night, the victim of a murder-suicide by an apparently jealous husband, according to Montana police. Rodriguez, who is also an editor at Shooting Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Petersen’s Hunting, Guns & Ammo, was visiting a woman at the woman’s mother’s home in Whitefish, Montana when Wayne Bengston, the woman’s husband, showed up. It remains unclear what Rodriguez and the woman were doing at the time, but whatever it was, it sent the 41-year-old Bengston into a rage; shortly after entering the home, he shot and killed Rodriguez and severely beat his wife.

Police say Bengston then drove his two-year-old son to a relative’s home before returning to his own home, where he fatally shot himself. Bengston’s wife was treated at a nearby hospital and released.

According to Whitefish Police Chief Bill Dial, Rodriguez met the woman, who works for a firearms manufacturer, at a gun show. Dial said the relationship appeared to be casual, not romantic.

The Sportsman Channel released a statement saying it will miss Rodriguez’s “thoughtfulness, candor and dedication to encourage a safe and enjoyable outdoor experience for all.”

Rodriguez was 43 and leaves behind a wife and two kids.

[CBS, NY Daily News/Image via AP]

via Gawker http://gawker.com/5989819/riflemans-journal-host-shot-and-killed-by-jealous-husband-in-murder+suicide

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Chicago Teenager Shot and Killed Hours After Her Sister Sat Behind Obama at Speech About Gun Control

Chicago Teenager Shot and Killed Hours After Her Sister Sat Behind Obama at Speech About Gun Control

Hours after her sister sat behind President Obama during his speech in Chicago on Friday, 18-year-old Janay McFarlane was killed by a gunshot wound to the head. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is; not three weeks ago, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was killed by stray gunfire in Chicago, just days after performing at Obama’s second inauguration. MacFarlane’s 14-year old sister Destiny is a student at Hyde Park Career Academy, the school Obama visited on Friday to speak about Chicago’s gun violence.

In addition to being a new mother (her son Jayden is just three months old), MacFarlene was supposed to graduate from high school this spring. After graduating, her mother, Angela Blakely, said she’d shown interest in becoming a chef.

“I’m just really, truly just trying to process it, knowing that I’m not taking my baby home any more,” Blakely said.

Obama’s speech emphasized the need for tighter gun controls while highlighting Chicago’s epidemic of gun violence.

“Last year, there were 443 murders with a firearm in this city, and 65 of them were 18 and under. That’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months.

“That’s precisely why the overwhelming majority of Americans are asking for some common sense proposals to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun,” he said.

The president also mentioned Pendleton, the 15-year-old gunned down days after performing at his inauguration, during his speech. Blakely, McFarlane’s mother, said her daughter often spoke about Pendleton as well.

“She said ‘Mom, that’s so sad. I feel so bad for that little girl,’ ” Angela Blakely told CBS Chicago. “Every time she saw kids on TV she said, ‘Momma, I feel so bad for these people that gotta leave their kids.’

[Image via AP]

via Gawker http://gawker.com/5984920/chicago-teenager-shot-and-killed-hours-after-her-sister-sat-behind-obama-at-speech-about-gun-control